The abysmal morass that is gripping my country today is just a matter of “thinking.” I sometimes tease my friends on this subject with, “Hey, why don’t God just stop us from thinking. All the problems would then go away.” But, of course, the problem is actually deeper than our thinking as our thinking flows from our heart and as Woody Allen once noted, justifying his marriage to his step-daughter, “The heart wants what it wants.” We think what fits our heart’s intents and it is easier to just go with where our thinking takes us than dare to look into these intents. Looking into these intents is to risk opening Pandora’s box and our identity in a sense is predicated on not venturing there. But not “venturing there” leaves us with an impoverished identity, a rigid ego structure that can make us very successful, even give us a very “good” life, but one that is missing the riches that could be had by that “venture.” The poet Ranier Rilke noted, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.”
William Butler Yeats, the famous Irish poet, addressed this mind-body disconnect with the powerful prayer, “Oh God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone. They who sing a lasting song must think in the marrow bone.” Thinking is intrinsically a dissociative developmental accomplishment but in maturity…if things go right…we can acquire the ability to let our thinking be influenced by our emotions, i.e. “our body.” We will then be able to ‘feel” and “think” together, no longer being captive to our preconceptions and premises, described by W. H. Auden as the thinking of “a logical lunatic.”
The issue here is “the heart.” My heart is still tainted by my literal-thinking past in which I somehow imagined it existing in my depths in some concrete form. This concretism allowed me to think that I “knew” my heart, that I could grasp with my intellect its machinations, as well as treasures. My culture taught me that this was possible. For decades I’ve been learning that the heart is a mysterious dimension of my experience that cannot ever be fathomed by “thinking.” But here, I am tackling “with words” to put into words a dimension of human experience that cannot be put into words. That dimension is the “Divine Spark” which is the Ineffable and therefore a mystery, known only by “that still small voice” in the depths of our hearts which is “heard” only in silence. There are parts of me to which this makes “no sense” at all for those “parts” are the hyper-rationality that I escaped into in my youth with the nudging of my culture. Well, “nudging” is putting it mildly. Cultural dictates are overwhelming to a child which is why they are so difficult to become aware of at any age. They are intrinsically subtle and the egoic mind is not designed for subtlety.
We are now witnessing in my country what can happen when reason is in subjection to unacknowledged depths of the soul. The acknowledgement of these depths evokes the feeling of being out of control, an illusory sense of control which reason has given us. The religious dimension of this catastrophe was prophesied by Paul Tillich in the mid-20th century when he wrote, “A religion within the bounds of religion is a mutilated religion.” Tillich knew that the resulting faithlessness of religion would facilitate the spiritual darkness in which we are now living; for, religion locked in the “logical lunacy” of reason does not require any faith though it does facilitate the seduction of certainty.
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