readoldthings

The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 7, Verses 3-5 reads:

This is another one of my favorite verses. It's also one that has gotten an enormous amount of attention over the years and the centuries, and I don't want to repeat things that you can hear anywhere else. 

So what can we say on this subject that is new?

The Eye of the Soul

As we've discussed here before, the highest part or faculty of the soul is called the nous or mind. Nous is akin to an eye which opens onto the spiritual world, directly beholding God and the spiritual reality. Part of our dilemma here on Earth is that our nous is more or less closed, and the work of spiritual practice is the work of opening it and teaching it to see clearly.

In his commentaries on Plato's Timaeus, Proclus discusses the various faculties of the nous. Nous proper is the direct apprehension of divine realities we've just discussed. Below this is dianoia, or discursive reasoning, and below this, doxa or opinion. 

Now it follows that lower things flow from higher things. If, therefore, our nous at its highest is dark or clouded, our reasoning will be flawed, and our opinions will be false. If we then attempt to help others, seeing that their own reasoning and opinions are false, we will do nothing but substitute our own false judgments and misapprehensions for theirs. Hypocrites indeed. 

The Mind Is In The Heart

In the West, a proper understanding of the nous disappeared some time after the Renaissance, when even Western religion sank into rationalism-- or, to say it another way, "dianoia-ism," the elevation of a lower faculty and forgetting or refusal of the higher. 



More recently, of course, many of us have collapsed into mere "doxa-ism," opinion-ism, which is what a vapid slogan like "Follow the Science" means and why people are so brutishly aggressive in the defense of their opinions.

The Christian East preserved the older understanding of the nous. And you will find that, when Orthodox thinkers talk about the nous, they don't locate it in the brain, even though it is mind. The brain is where dianoia takes place. They locate it, rather, in the heart. And so we see that it isn't our heads that we must clear, but our hearts; it is our hearts, rather than our minds, that we change in order to attain the kingdom of heaven that is within us. Everything flows from there.

The Conditioned Response

Let's take a brief trip East.

In Chinese Taoism the central principle of existence is the duality between Yin and Yang. Yin and Yang are sometimes misunderstood in the West, where earlier Christian translators took them for good and evil and assumed that Taoism was a kind of pantheism in which God was both good and bad at once. This is not correct. Yang is hard, masculine, mobile, hot, light, and active; Yin is flexible, feminine, fixed, cold, dark, and passive.  Yin and Yang are both "good," in that both are necessary for existence: lacking yang, you would be stuck to the floor,; lacking yin, your molecules would fly apart! "evil," which is the same as disease or imbalance, arises when either one goes to excess. Thus a person, a house, a family, or a society may suffer from either yang excess, which leads to chaos, conflict, and instability, or yin excess, which leads to weakness, sluggishness and stagnation.

Now, one of the most common representations of yin and yang is the pair of Earth and Heaven.

As in the system of thought we are discussing, Heaven and Earth don't refer-- or don't exclusively refer-- to the actual physical Heaven and Earth.

Rather, "Earth" in this case means ordinary, everyday experience; "Heaven" means the higher consciousness of the spiritual realm, sometimes called the Mind of Tao. In the Quanzhen (Complete Reality) school of Taoism, the work of spiritual practice begins with "repelling yin and fostering yang." Not because yin or Earth is seen as evil, but, rather, that it must be that the higher consciousness must rule over the lower. To put it in more familiar terms, the higher mind must be awakened, and the lower faculties, from dianoia on down to epithymia, must act in obedience to it. 

Thomas Cleary comments: 
 

The mind of Tao and the human mind are also associated with 'real knowledge" and "conscious knowledge." Real knowledge is held to be nondiscursive, immediate knowing, originally inherent in the human being and not the product of learning. Conscious knowledge is the everyday awareness of ordinary life, formed by training and experience. The Taoist aim is to open consciousness and thereby allow greater access to reality, bypassing mental habits, stabilizing conscious knowing by real knowledge so that it is not subject to distorting influences. This is also expressed in terms of making real knowledge conscious and conscious knowledge real.

This is from Cleary's introduction to his translation of Understanding Reality, a 19th century Taoist meditation manual which is itself a commentary on an earlier medieval document. 

Many Paths

The more I explore, the more convinced I am that there is a single spiritual truth toward which many religious and philosophical systems point. The quest for the individual soul is to find the path that is right for them, through learning and experience. Having attained what Jesus calls the Kingdom of Heaven and what the Quanzhen school calls the Mind of Tao, the divinized soul can then return to Earth to guide the rest of us along their path.