I continue to explore the work of Hannah Arendt from which I shared in in recent posts.  And, from this blog-o-sphere that I participate in I have received nice feedback as well from friends I know in real-time.  Arendt’s work details how the absence of critical thinking will leave one mired down in the unacknowledged recesses of the mind and heart.  This venture into the heart’s machinations is disillusioning and frightening. Arendt offers us a powerful exploration of totalitarianism and its impact, individually and collectively on critical thinking. Without it a mind-set emerges and marches on, grim faced and determined to cling to preconceptions and biases that harm themselves and others, lacking any “interior dialogue” or self-talk.

In my morning sojourn through the cyber world today, I discovered related wisdom that I would like to share.  The first is from Gene W. Marshall in his book “Jacob’s Dream,” in which he writes from what I would describe as a post-modern view of Holy Writ:

Spirit freedom is not the same thing as the so-called free will that is often written about. The ego (as I have defined it) has free will but the ego’s definition of free will is limited by the ego’s definition of itself.  The ego is a construction of the human mind.  This construction may allow for the presence of some elements of our essential Freedom.  But because it is a human construction, the ego also restricts the full expression of our Spirit Freedom. (As I noted in last week’s blog, “We want only what we want.” and cannot see beyond our narcissistic view of the world. “The world is my oyster”!)

Here, Mr. Marshall’s thought leads us directly into the abyss that I shared from Arendt’s observations about Hitler and totalitarianism.  My vein of thought was very convoluted and even involuted as I tried to put into words that which cannot be put into words. This effort can take us into a murky world which is very “Zen like,” a state of being which I used to formulate in terms of “the working of the Holy Spirit.” And this biblical formulation still has merit for me.  The Apostle Paul described this process as the “Spirit” furrowing into the depths of our heart where we can “discern the thoughts and intents” of our heart, individually and collectively. (I recall a note by Rumi pointing this truth out in 13^th century Iran, “Out beyond the distinctions of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”)

In the on-line journal, “The Mind Matters” I also discovered this morning a paragraph from Andre Gorz that is relevant:

For society is no longer to be found where it institutionally proclaims its existence…Society now only exists in the interstices of the system, where new relations and new solidarities are being worked out and are creating, in their turn, new public spaces in the struggle against the mega-machine and its ravages; it exists only where individuals assume the autonomy to which the disintegration of traditional bonds and the bankruptcy of received interpretations condemn them and where they take upon themselves the task of inventing, starting out from their own selves, the values, goals and social relations which can become the seeds of a future society.”

Gorz, who was a Marxist philosopher, captured the dynamic dimension of a social body and described bringing it to life, paralleling the process of a“human body”…an individual… self-reflect ing itself into “coming to life.” His term, the “interstices of the system” in sociological thought parallels our own individual heart in which components are roiling about in an effort to come to grips with our interior life, aka those “thoughts and intents of the heart’ that the Apostle Paul wrote about. This process can produce “life”, aka “Life” that is beyond the pale of the perfunctory life that our world offered us as a child. This makes me want to scrutinize further the bromide from my youth, “being born again.””

I know that my thoughts here are again convoluted and involuted.  I am trying to summarize that life is more than we know it to be.  I am more than I “think” that I am and I live in a world which is more than it “thinks” it is.  I am exploring a dimension of life that is mysterious and incomprehensible.  I can never “figger it out,” I can only pay attention to what is going on in my heart and what is “going on” out there as I “chop wood and carry water” for another day. Presently, I can only “pay attention” to the glory of a beautiful doggie lying here beside me, the cup of coffee I’m sipping, and the crackling of the fire in the wood stove. Shortly, the morning will begin to dawn and I will saunter outside into the cool of the morning air, pay homage to the plants and flowers that are thriving, and bow before the majestic tapestry of morning stars that linger before disappearing for another day. One poet described this as the mystery before which we can only, “glory, bow, and tremble.”