United Kingdom - The Believer Self Flees the Illusion, Escaping the Cloister as the Ultimate Failure of Ideological Security

Event Baseline: Catherine Coldstream entered a Carmelite monastery at age 24 and lived a cloistered life of prayer and obedience for 12 years before leaving. Her memoir details the experience.

The cloister is the ultimate expression of the search for psychological security in an ideal. By renouncing the world, the self hopes to find absolute peace in a system of rigid belief and obedience. But this suppression is a form of violence against the living psyche. The twelve years of silence and prayer become a pressure cooker, and the escape is an explosion of the authentic self that cannot be contained by dogma. The memoir reveals the failure of the 'way of life' as an escape from the self; the conflict is not between the world and the spirit but within the mind that seeks to escape its own complexity through renunciation. The ideal of holiness is a phantom that leads only to deeper contradiction. Until the human being understands that no system of belief can resolve psychological fear, the cloister remains a prison.