Heart versus Mind

Every morning, I lie in Peggy’s bed while she massages my shoulders. I look through her window into a canopy of green and, if I squint, I see faces in the canopy. Today, I saw a buck-toothed cocker spaniel without a lower jaw. His green ears blew in the breeze, and his eyes were as intense as those of a space alien from a scary movie. Last winter, the leaves being gone, I saw the same poker-faced gray cat everyday for months. These canopy denizens stare at me as I stare at them, and they seem more real to me than the 23 children who died in India last week. 

A great many atheists are literalists who think poorly of the impreciseness of metaphor, the emotionalism of symbols, and regard mythology as the inadequate expression of ideas that aren’t worth expressing.

Thirty-five years ago, I worked as a paid carpenter at a farming commune near Natchez, Mississippi. I never talked to any of the residents about religion or spirituality, but noted that they lived literalistically if not mechanically. I say this partially because of the scorn they felt for holidays. They avowed to make everyday as special as every other day, but the result was that they made no day special. Or so it seemed to me.

I’m a rationalist in that I don’t believe in the supernatural, and I do believe that everything, everywhere, every time, has a natural explanation. Yet, in my heart, I’m not a very good rationalist because, whether it’s true or not, my image of a good rationalist is of someone who is calmly analytical, whereas I’m intense and unable to defend much of what I experience. Faces in greenery would mean nothing to a good rationalist. Feeling intimately connected to a cedar-clad Clayoquot berry picker (photo by Edward Curtis, 1915) would never happen in the life of a good rationalist. Almost believing, as I sometimes do, that I have stepped out of time would be viewed by a good rationalist as delusional. Fearing death even while being unable to believe that I will ever really not exist would be considered pathetic by a good rationalist . To a good rationalist, a thing is either real or not real, but I can never satisfy myself on this point because so much of what I feel strikes me as neither.

I went camping in the Coast Range last week and came back with a fifty pound sandstone boulder from the North Fork of Smith River. When I saw this rock, I remembered how much Bonnie loved camping and particularly how much she loved to retrieve sticks from the water, and I decided to bring it home and put it on her grave. Forevermore, I will think of her when I see it, and will picture her standing beside me when I found it because her presence was so strong within me. How, I asked myself, can such a joyous creature ever really die, but if it can, what is the good of life? I had no answers, and this made me want with all my heart to believe that she lives, but if not her, then at least the elements of which she consisted. A good rationalist would put the dead in their place and move on with life, but I carry the dead within me, and I can never entirely convince myself that they’re gone.

Long before Bonnie died, I saw her in the backyard one day. She was walking in one direction, and I was walking in the other, and we passed so closely that I could have touched her. “Hello Bonnie,” I said as I wondered why a dog with no place to go would be going there so resolutely. A few moments later, I saw her asleep in the front yard, but she couldn’t have gotten there from the backyard because they were separated by four gates (two on each side of the house) that were all closed. My rational mind knew that Bonnie couldn’t have been in both places, and I agreed with my rational mind, yet I had seen her in both places. Such occurrences put me in the crazy-making position of disavowing that which I want to believe in favor of that which I want not to believe because the former seems so improbable and the latter so rational.

Do I consider it even remotely possible that Bonnie (or, at least, Bonnie's image) might have been in two places, or that there is consciousness apart from what we call life? Yes, very remotely, for four reasons. One is that I can imagine all manner of extraordinary things that are unknown to science (which, after all, is only a few hundred years old and the province of a primitive species). The second is that people in all times and all places have had all manner of amazing experiences similar to some that I have had from childhood onward. Thirdly, such occurrences don’t contain internal contradictions as do, for example, descriptions of "loving" deities that behave viciously. Finally, it would be irrational for me to deny any possibility of an underlying reality behind my experiences simply because people who believe such things strike me as credulous or because it pleases me to consider myself a rationalist.

I wouldn’t attempt to give odds for having really seen Bonnie in two places because I don’t know enough to give odds for that in the same way I could give odds for it raining in western Oregon tomorrow (0-10%, the same as everyday in July), but any odds greater than none would mean that it was possible. Even if they were only one in a trillion, pretty much everything in the universe would seem to qualify. For instance, if you were able to list all the things that had to happen exactly as they did from the dawning of creation just for you to exist, it would surely take many lifetimes.

It is for such reasons that I remain, to a minute degree, open to the acceptance of things I can't clearly define, things that most rationalists would flatly deny. All I have to offer in this regard are feelings, questions, and a few unexplained experiences, but they are sufficient to make me unwelcome among rationalists, and insufficient to make me welcome among people who consider themselves psychic or spiritual. I simply don't know enough to belong to either camp, so I stand alone where the light filters through the trees and makes ever-changing patterns and shadows that both delight and torment. I just wish I could  settle my mind on what is true. A good rationalist, or a good believer, would say that he already knew.

What am I? What are you?

I am a rationalist in that I consider reason and evidence to be the only means by which objective truth can be determined. Even when authority, intuition, tradition, or supposed mystical insight, makes a claim to truth, the soundness of that claim must be rationally validated before it can be accepted by an impartial examiner. If widespread acceptance occurs without such validation, the result is often oppression. While people rarely feel the need to coerce others into believing that which they can prove, they commonly consider it necessary to coerce others into believing that which they can’t prove. 

Some people view rationalists as being devoid of emotion, but I, for one, am intensely emotional. While I don’t believe that rationality can supplant emotion, I do believe that a reliance upon rationality can make one’s emotional outlook more positive. Some claim that rationalism doesn’t go deeply enough to enable a person to understand himself or to change things about himself that he doesn’t like, but my experience—and the experience of psychologists—is just the opposite. While I believe it would be harmful to stifle my emotions, I haven’t found that purposefully going “deeper” into them has provided me with insights that enabled me to handle them better. If anything, feeling the same painful emotions over and over causes destructive thoughts and behaviors to become ingrained. 

Years ago, I went to a psychologist because I was crippled by stage fright. I expected her to delve into my past, uncover my early experiences with stage fright, and thereby furnish me with insights that would allow me to overcome it. Instead, she showed no interest in my past, but told me to join Toastmasters and to take every other opportunity to expose myself to my fear. I had thought that, with all her training (and for what she charged), she would know an easy way to overcome my problem, but I did as she suggested and it worked. The same is true with depression. It doesn’t matter where the self-talk that characterizes depression came from, the only way to overcome it (aside from medication) is to replace it with different self-talk. This isn’t a glamorous process characterized by tears, insights, and breakthroughs, but hard work that requires perseverance.

Emotion, art, literature, ritual, and other feelings-oriented pursuits are important, but none are the equal of rationality when it comes to gaining knowledge or deciding issues. I would even argue that nearly all of the world’s problems are caused by too little rationality. Take war, for instance. Everyone says they’re against it, yet millions of people are supporting one or more wars at any given moment. Why? Because our species’ rational side is insufficiently evolved, which means that we are still enamored of the same tribalism and violence that we took with us when we left the trees. Otherwise, we could end war, today.

Some people argue that rationalism is another form of faith, saying that just as some people have faith in God, rationalists have faith in science. This is true to some extent, but it’s also true that not all faith is well-founded. For instance, if I said that my faith was in Zeus, people would challenge me to prove that my faith was sound, yet those who put their faith in modern gods can no more validate their faith than I could validate faith in Zeus. The power of science can be validated. While it’s a leap to say that the same approach that has worked so well for us up until now might someday allow us uncover the secrets of the entire universe, such a belief is based upon the fact that everything we have discovered thus far suggests that the furtherest reaches of the universe operate on the same principals as our little corner. Whether our species can survive long enough, or accumulate enough data, to understand the universe is another matter, yet belief in our theoretical ability to do so hardly seems incredible given that we have come so far in the 350 years since the start of the Enlightenment, with knowledge now doubling every seven years.

The portrait is of Benedict Spinoza (1632-77), a Dutch Jew who was expelled from his synagogue because of his rationalistic beliefs. The following is but a sample of the curses in his order of expulsion: “Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in… We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof…or read anything composed or written by him.” 

Spinoza was known for his centeredness, integrity, courtesy, and scorn for money and fame, but his vague, impersonal, and intellectualized view of God made him an atheist in the eyes of the public, if not in the eyes of atheists. Philosophy was his passion, and he is widely revered today because of the joy and fullness with which he devoted himself to its pursuit.