More often than not, we have picked up the habits of thinking of those around us. These thought-habits are not yours; they can damage the way you see the world and make you doubt your own instinct and sense of life. When you become aware that your thinking has a life of its own, you will never make a prison of your own perception. Your vision is your home. A closed vision always wants to make a small room out of whatever it sees. Thinking that limits you denies you life. In order to deconstruct the inner prison, the first step is learning to see that it is a prison. You can move in the direction of this discovery by reflecting on the places where your life feels limited and tight. To recognize the crippling feeling of being limited is already to have begun moving beyond it. Heidegger said, “To recognize a frontier is already to have gone beyond it.” Life continues to remain faithful to us. If we move even the smallest step out of our limitation, life comes to embrace us and lead us out into the pastures of possibility.
The German philosopher Ernst Bloch has the following epitaph on his gravestone in Tübingen: “Denken heisst überschreiten,” i.e., To think is to go beyond. Thinking that deserves the name never attempts to make a cage for mystery. Reverential thought breaks down the thought-cages that domesticate mystery. This thinking is disturbing but liberating. This is the kind of thinking at the heart of prayer, namely, the liberation of the Divine from the small prisons of our fear and control. To liberate the Divine is to liberate oneself. Each person is so vulnerable in the way he or she sees things. You are so close to your own way of thinking that you are probably unaware of its power and control over how you experience everything, including yourself. This is the importance of drama as a literary form; it provides you with the opportunity to know yourself at one remove, so to speak, without threatening you with self-annihilation. Your thinking can be damaged. You may sense this but put it down to how life is. You remain unaware of your freedom to change how you think. When your thinking is locked in false certainty or negativity, it puts so many interesting and vital areas of life out of your reach. You live impoverished and hungry in the midst of your own abundance.
The Haunted Room in the Mind
In Ireland there are many stories of haunted houses. There may be a room in which one senses a presence or hears footsteps or a strange voice. Such haunted places remain uninhabited. People are afraid to go there. The place is forsaken and left to deepen ever further into the shadow of itself. The way you think about your life can turn your soul into a haunted room. You are afraid to risk going in there anymore. Your fantasy peoples this room of the heart with sad presences which ultimately become disturbing and sinister. The haunted room in the mind installs a lonesomeness at the heart of your life. It would be devastating in the autumn of your life to look back and recognize that you had created a series of haunted rooms in your heart. Fear and negativity are immense forces which constantly tussle with us. They long to turn the mansions of the soul into a totally haunted house. These are the living conditions for which fear and negativity long, and in which they thrive. We were sent here to live life to the full. When you manage to be generous in your passion and vulnerability, life always comes to bless you. Had you but the courage to acknowledge the haunted inner room, turn the key, and enter, you would encounter nothing strange or sinister there. You would meet some vital self of yours that you had banished during a time of pain or difficulty. Sometimes, when life squeezes you into lonely crevices, you may have to decide between survival or breaking apart. At such times, you can be harsh with yourself and settle to be someone other than who you really long to be. At such a time, you can do nothing else; you have to survive. But your soul always remains faithful to your longing to become who you really are. The banished self from an earlier time of life remains within you waiting to be released and integrated. The soul has its own logic of loyalty and concealment. Ironically, it is usually in its most awkward rooms that the special blessings and healing are locked away. Your thinking can also freeze and falsify the flow of your life’s continuity to make you a prisoner of routine and judgement.
The Shelter of Continuity
Continuity is one of the great mysteries of life; it is essential to identity. When you look at the waves on the shore, one after the other, they unfold in perfect pleated sequence. From the break of dawn, the day arises until the height of noon and then gradually falls to gather in the coloured shadow-basket of twilight. The seasons, too, follow the melody of forward unfolding. One of the most beautiful images of continuity and sequence is the river. Always in motion towards the ocean, it continues to look the same. As Heraclitus said, “You cannot step twice into the same river.” In a matter of seconds, both you and the river are different. The river is the ideal of continuity. It preserves the fluency of continual change and yet holds the one form. The river is so interesting because it offers a creative metaphor of the way the mind flows in and through experience. Your life is made up of a sequence of days. Each day brings something new and different. The secret of time’s intention and generosity depends on how your days follow each other. Every yesterday prepares you for today. What today brings could not have reached you yesterday or a hundred days ago. Time is more careful in its sequence than we often notice. Time ripens according to its hidden rhythm. In its heart, time is eternal longing.
Regardless of how you look back on your life, you cannot force it out of the order in which it has unfolded. You cannot de-sequence your life. The structure of your life holds together. That is the unnoticed miracle of memory; it is the intimate mirror of the continuity of your experience and presence. While you sleep, your memory continues to gather and store up every moment. If your memory had forsaken you moments before you awoke this morning, you would not recognize your family. And when you looked in the mirror, the face of a stranger would look back at you. If your memory were wiped, your world would evaporate. Continuity is difficult to grasp, because it is hidden and subtle. In a sense, we are powerless ever to break continuity. Even the severest and most shocking change insists on its belonging to the moments that preceded it. Then, even that shocking change in its turn builds the next bridge to the future. We try to understand and control continuity by calling it causality. We claim that every event has a cause. We attempt to understand the parts of the sequence in a clear and linear way. The difficulty here is our tendency to jump to conclusions about how one time or thing grows out of another in our lives. When we make the connections too easy for ourselves, we let the mystery, like sand, slip through the openings.
Certainty Freezes the Mind
I love the radical novelty of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who proclaimed on looking inside his own mind that he could see no sign of a self anywhere. Neither could he see any such thing as a cause. Hume’s theory is bold and provocative; like all the most interesting philosophical theories, it brings great difficulties. It is refreshing that he torpedoed the notion of causality. We do have a deadening desire to reduce the mystery of continuity to a chain of causality. We bind our lives up in solid chains of forced connections that block and fixate us. This silences the voices within us that are always urging us to change and become free. Our sense of uncertainty and our need for security nail our world down. We pretend that we live in a ready-made house of belonging. We walk through its halls, open its doors, and shelter inside its walls as if it were a fixed house and not the invention and creation of our own thinking and imagination, a flimsy nest of belonging swinging on a light branch that tempts the unknown storms. Each one of us, like the birds, is an artist of the invisible. Like them, we leave no traces on the invisible air.