In this message I want to explore some more of the mind's complexities, as well as developing further thoughts on the subject of Creative Delusion that we covered last week. Any pursuit towards the divine is going to involve some changes of thought - changes which will involve making preparations for greater wisdom, and equally significant, changes in thought that will cause us to view the world in an almost entirely different way to the atheists' viewpoint.
Wisdom, well and good within the confines of sensible parameters, has itself two outmost dimensions; one is the accumulative mass of unknowns - the other is the endmost point at which the whole gamut of knowledge and analysis has led a man to realise that all these things led him straight back to where he was initially. The first one is forever intangible, just as you can never know any of the undiscovered species in the deepest ocean - but you can infer from what you have discovered what they might be expected to look like. The second one is most often seen in atheistic philosophies (some might say atheistic tautologies) - that is, whichever point is reached on your cognitive journey it is still existent under the umbrella of falsehood. It constantly manifests itself in the form of denial, and is forever tormenting young men and women through human relationships and, in particular, through time spent alone.
It is denial which knows itself to be spurious, just as a man with homos exual inclinations knows that however hard he tries to make his relationship with his girlfriend work, his heart and his body tell him that he should be with a man. Or even better in cases when an injured party tries very hard to keep up hateful feelings while all the time knowing that he will have to open up his heart to forgiveness in order to find closure. About the rights and wrongs of both the above feelings, I have nothing to say in this message; but both are examples of living in the type of denial that we are discussing.
The two outmost domains of human wisdom that we talked about have a degree of ignorance attached to them; that is, one cannot know about all that lies between them if one is stuck at either extreme. God calls us to gravitate towards the middle - for those 'wise men' who are deluded about their own wisdom are, in fact, no closer to divine wisdom than those who know very little. Those who are truly wise are the ones who know about the gifts that God has given them and, indeed, how to use them in accordance with His word - but know also about their own limitations; for knowledge of what is missing is knowledge of what we are called upon to work towards. The most plighted souls are those who see nothing to work towards; theirs is truly the state of the unwise - they are saddled by temporal thinking and instinctive frustrations.
It is always good for men and women to have tangible goals - something that we can progressively work towards, knowing all the time that when those goals have been achieved there will be fresh goals for us ahead on our journey. This positive activity is the kind which keeps us on the right tack.
These hints and visions of new beginnings tell us something else about ourselves - they help us in pointing out the bad intrusions along the way - the intrusions in life that distract us from Christ but give the illusion of sustenance in other areas of life. We cannot seem to reject these visions as false intrusions unless we make them abstract. We presume that they belong in something else altogether; in an incomprehensible subdivision of the world that if it could be explored would have wholly different rules of justice, validity, proof, verification and contentment. We say to ourselves that these abstract visions are not of this world, so 'why bother to explore them further?'. It is no different to a hermit suppressing the feelings he has when those brief hints of mind-contact with sensations ordinarily received for those who are in love come across his path - it is square pegs in round holes; it is like trying to mend a broken bone with paracetamol.
There are, of course, stronger hints of new beginnings, but if they are seen as slight modifications on our already existent abstractions, they will never get past the first stages of awareness - they will never enter into the domain of sound analysis. I could at this point venture to say that we all know the truth because it is indelible in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11), but dormant knowledge of something does not always produce favourable results.
We spend our lives both acknowledging and ignoring our instincts if things do not suit at the time - but we know most of the time when we are wrong to ignore something. Those who have come to know God have no doubt that every single one of us has the same capacity to know Him, but they also know that rational enquiry has its own limitations. And we see this most conspicuously in debates between Christians and atheists. Give an atheist the floor for long enough and he will argue to the point of self-contradiction. The Christian can expose his errors of thinking, he can provide veritable contentions based upon his own experiences and his reasoning power, while all the time the Christ that lives inside him is helping him out of difficult arguments if the limits of his cranial capacity do not permit him to propound an adequate response - but he cannot, however good he is, change an atheist's heart - only God can do that.
Of course, a large part of good Christian apologetics involves helping a man towards the realisation that he needs a change of heart, but rational enquiry itself will never take care of the whole business. Rational enquiry itself depends upon the existence of ultimate truths from which we can recede or to which we can move closer. There is one significant reason why reason alone will not direct a man to follow his heart in those times when it tells him about new beginnings. Reason - reliable enough when it insists upon verification in other types of analysis - will not make such demands of the heart, for it knows that the heart itself is a closed system - that is, the heart makes no direct demands upon rational enquiry; in fact, it is sometimes in direct conflict with it.
The feelings from our heart are not perceived by us to have come from analysis of two disparate and distinguishable things; thus, we do not feel quite so compelled to listen to our heart over our reason when it is hinting at new beginnings. It is true that we should be in obedience to reason, but it does make us overlook the times when our reason and our heart are, in fact, confluent. All good lovers know that feelings and strong emotional convictions have gone on to betray us, either by their falsity or by their lack of durability - that is why we must always exalt reason far above feelings and emotions. But we are in error if we think that the two operate in non-overlapping magisteria, for all the wisest men and women in the world know that both have to be conflated together to produce inside us one cumulative force. Reason will sometimes do the work of the heart and the heart will sometimes do the work of reason, but the heart has nothing say to us in the absence of reason, for even the strongest heart-felt convictions are themselves directed by a rather more subdued form of reasoning.
Through Christ, the dialectical relationship between reason and emotion is one of striking harmony; it is not in rational enquiry that one finds God; it is in those parts of the inner-self which call for rational enquiry to verify our convictions. That is why our Lord tells us not to store up treasures on earth but store up treasures in Heaven (Matthew 6:19-21) - He refers both to material things and philosophical things. It does us no good to keep things in our head that are telling us to disregard rational enquiry in place of strong impulses and heartfelt convictions, for the real treasure of conviction comes not from instincts but from reason.
Everything about us that is worth having and worth saving comes from Christ and that includes our knowledge of the need for salvation. One of the central parts of the incarnation was to inform us of our real situation; in fact, both reason and knowledge are conferred upon us for the purposes of grace, so that we might understand that the rumours of new beginnings are true. Our reasoning was given to us so that we could grow towards perfection, so that we could be united with our Creator - it was specially conferred upon us - after all, a rosebush receives no hints of the divine, nor does a cat, nor a concrete statue, nor an oak tree, nor the wind and rain - the divine is exclusively given to us, we are the only part of the corporeal world capable of receiving Christ; we are truly blessed, first by creation and secondly by the reunion which is offered to us by Christ and His dying for us.
This is when we are truly wise and truly blessed, when we know that we are dependent beings - for greatness can only come to those who start their journey to greatness on their knees. Look for it anywhere else and you will experience perpetual misery, discontentment, unfulfilment and every other facet of human frustration which belongs in Satan's province. Our need for salvation and our wisdom can be concluded from one another; thus a wise man knows he needs to surrender himself, and a man ready to surrender knows he needs to be wiser and closer to God. The fine balance of inner-wisdom is reached when we realise that we are great in the sense that God created us specially but not great in the sense that we are dependent beings, to whom wisdom only comes in the moments when our dependency is realised. All arguments used to support a theory that a man is wise can be used to support a theory that a man is a dependent being, if and only if, the argument presupposes that everything a man has is given to him from God.
True wisdom comes with self-realisation and self-realisation only occurs when a man knows that what he has is not really his, for all men know, even in their very best moments, that that which seems to be theirs on first appearance is, with careful analysis, intimated further in those hints and visions of new beginnings with the divine. We feel a hunger which when translated gives us the true visions of new beginnings - but we cannot yet fully translate it, so we do our best to become more like the One through whom we can begin to translate it.
Even those who are wholly opposed to organised religion know what I am talking about; they know the true extent of their condition - they know of truth not through external things but through the innermost parts of the self which are in fact the parts that acknowledge this hunger. We cannot have 'no wisdom' but we cannot have 'complete wisdom' either, yet all the time, as we work towards greater wisdom, we find out that wisdom itself increases not because it is indiscriminate, but because it is with purpose; that is, a point of presently unattainable wisdom is intimated in every other part of wisdom about which we know. One might suggest that it is a hint of man's state before he became a fallen being, for we all know that without a strong belief in what is to come, man would remain in a cognitive vacuum.
Everything has hints of transcendence, everything appears to be moving towards something bigger - we are, all the time, desiring something to which our present souls really belong. This hunger we all share is not simply a bigger thing; it is so stupendous that all human realities which we share - all creaturely commonalties seem quite incomprehensible to us; that is, our whole existence is part of one big mystery, not in scientific terms or in philosophical terms, but in the face of our own thinking, in every moment of every quiet personal thought. That is why it is the truest fact that God is most reachable from within our own hearts, through our personal reasoning which reveals to us the true nature of the self.
Why, you might ask, did God create us with an in-built mechanism which requires a substantial amount of introspection before we can know Him? But to ask this is to be guilty of misunderstanding the concept of divine knowing. The analysis (if it is required - it is not required in every instance of salvation) is not analysis of Him; it is analysis of the self. In one sense our coming to Him is the easy part; the hardest part is knowing ourselves well enough to realise that coming to Him is not just our only option it is our whole purpose of creation. Look at the majority of lost souls in the world and you will see that such a profound and humbling discovery is far from their grasp. And how could things be any different? How are they expected to understand their real creaturely position when they are so distracted by the media of escapism, by the multitude of sublimating activities, and by the tissue of muddled perceptions that penetrate their minds? The answer to the riddle is found in one very obvious commonality - the search for something beyond the self. Some call it a search for happiness, some a search for fulfilment, some a search for contentment, some a search for true metaphysical realities, some a search for God - but each instance of searching is an escape from the self - it is tangible because it is an escape to the Christ that is in the self; and whether it is earthly happiness or providence depends largely on the individual.
I have always thought fondly of times in solitude; I feel they are essential for all of us. Those who are able to use time alone to find some lucidity would, in my view, find more opportunities for solitary thought and appreciate them when serendipity saw fit to provide them. And I think that many of these distracting things which occupy so much of the modern mind would be consigned to history if one could learn the true value of self-understanding. Of course, it is true that too much time alone is a bad thing - a good balance is required.
We have seen that activities serve a purpose in stopping us thinking too much about who we are; but this thought needs to be taken further. Our real earthly situation is that we are fallen, and that God through His Son removed the barrier of sin so that we could be free. Thus it is hardly surprising that if one wishes to escape such a concept, stay in the comfort zone of atheism with Creative Delusion, and in doing so put off what needs to be done, one must stop thinking about the real nature of the self. This Creative Delusion that we were discussing last week is working for the purposes of the bad parts of the self - it exists to create illusory comforts, which exist to stroke our ego.
Let me remind you of the power of Creative Delusion. Place a man, even one of substantial intellect, in a position of power in, say, local authority (I know plenty) and if it were possible, ask him to examine his own situation without the aiding force of Creative Delusion and he will soon come to realise that his position - along with the true nature of the self with no means of illusory deviation - would not sustain him for very long. He will, at once, start to come across the true realities of the self and its dependency upon Creative Delusion, for who can expect to be content if their combined nature is made up of a need for salvation and a continual denial of this need? There is no more tortuous position.
And that is the true power of Creative Delusion - it allows a man to cast aside true realisations of his creaturely position; all the time offering him ego-stroking diversions and spurious alternative realities. And here we see why analysis alone won't be enough; it was a form of analysis which led to the appearance of Creative Delusion in the first place. No, something must come in and direct the analysis - and that something is made up of two things. In the first place, as we have seen, one must learn about his real creaturely position, and in the process, learn how to harmonise his conviction and his reasoning to form valuable rational enquiries. In the second place, this enquiry must allow time to get in all the facts, both the inner emotional facts and the outer realities. The second is much harder than the first, but we can see quite clearly that there are many everyday occurrences which show the true nature of this thing at work.
Suppose we have four women, A, B, C and D. Let us suppose that A's opinions about D consist of mostly positive feelings but of one or two negative feelings too. If we imagine two different situations occurring. 1) A had spoken alone to B about her feelings for D on three separate occasions and each time she had spoken negatively about D. 2) A had also spoken alone to C about her feelings for D on thirty different occasions and each time said very nice things about her. We can see from this very simple example that both B's and C's perception of A would be quite different, unless both B and C knew all the facts of A's conversations with each of the other. Now of course, we could add many more permutations and go on to discover many more examples of how not knowing all the facts causes major differences in perceptions of things, but it is not necessary. The point remains - we must know all the facts (or as many as it is possible to know) in order to reach veritable conclusions about a situation. This applies to internal things regarding the self and also to external things.
Is the second largely dependent on the first - in other words do we have to understand the self before we can fully understand external things? In one sense, yes. When I watch a boxing match or a romantic film or a protest march, what I am taking in is not the events themselves; I am taking in the effects that these events are having on my inner-self. Now understanding internal things and external things does not happen in a sequential sense; it is not like learning to read before we can enjoy literature - the first is not dependent on the second in quite the same way. We can understand more of the self as we understand more about external things, and vice versa - just as we can learn to read complex things by reading other complex things.
Life will provide us with many opportunities and also many decisions to make. Thus it is imperative that we go about our business with a good understanding of the self, for then we shall be in the best position to satisfy the deep inner needs of the self. The best conclusion we can come to here is that it is going to be essential to understand the self if we are to understand certain facets of externalism, just as it is going to be essential to understand certain facets of externalism if we are to understand ourselves (as in love, and in coming to know Christ). With greater wisdom comes greater understanding of the two.
James is on holiday for a week, so more in two weeks.
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