I don’t know what happened on the mountain but something deep has changed. Cause who I was is not who I’m becoming, I’m not the man who came.
I found love like I never thought I would. I found love like I never thought I could.
But it didn’t happen the way I was always taught. Like my religion ran away with every other thought. Cause how on earth could you resist Him or struggle to believe when you have met with Heaven’s maker and you’ve seen what I have seen.
Who am I that you would so abandon the pleasure of your throne. Cause if its just the doors I keep I wanna be your hands and feet, I want to say I’m hopelessly in love.
Cause I found love like I never thought I would. I found love like I never thought I could.
I have a hunger I’ve never had before. Like every moment I’m only wanting more. There’s no remedy to set it all at ease when you have met the one who moved you to your knees.
- Seen What I Have Seen, Seth Carpenter
I had been ruminating on a line from one of George MacDonald’s Christmas stories.
“A man may have light in the brain and darkness in the heart.”
In an unexpected turn, while I started the year in the water, exploring the theme of rivers and oceans and lakes, I found the later part of my year in 2025 turning towards the subject of the brain. I’m honestly not sure how I got there, but I ended up working through the likes of Iain McGilchrist’s The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Ervin Laszio’s ‘The Immortal Mind: Science and the Continuity of Consciosness Beyond the Brain, Andrew Newberg’s How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings From a Leading Neuroscientist, Hawkin’s A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. All of these building off of Spencer Klavan’s Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith. Or perhaps on a larger level one of the more defining books I read this year, David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of God’s: The Mysteries of Mind and Life
At the heart of all these discussions is the same essential question: what is the mind and what is the spirit. Can we even distinguish between such things? Can we locate something beyond the materialism that holds so much of our explanations in a coherent and logical box which we can then control? And if not, what is this thing precisely that appears to transcend the material brain? Are we merely moving into the realm of physics as another expression of the same fundamental appeal to materialism? Are we making leaps in our reason to justify our values and our appeals to meaning by appealing to this commonly called complexity? As though moving in the other direction away from the reductionism that grounds our assumptions can somehow hand us something other? Do we appeal to the common scientific premise of “energy” to try and deny our fundmental appeal to materialism? Ways of partioning out mind and matter using the same terms.
To borrow from author/philsopher Paul Kingsnorth, I know what it is to feel like a right brained person stuck in a left brained world, something he evokes to describe the experience of living in the West and its scientific worldview. And to be clear, while the scientific concern has long critiqued this reductionist approach to the brain, recent work in the field (See Mcgilchrist) has been recovering a revitalized and reconstituted version of this same observation. Not in the sense that we reduce the conversation to two competing sides of a brain, but in the sense that we, as humans, are responding to something that is also intuitively aware in our biology, relating specifically to how it is we percieve the world. We live and breathe this tension because we live and breathe this apparent cognitiive disonnance- this world is matter, and yet it matters because it is also more.
When I came across that quote from MacDonald it sparked something in me that started to bring some of these observations and wrestlings together with a percieved clarity. If this notion of the heart as an allegory for the human experience has morphed and changed over time and with different cultures, the ancient conception of the heart as the seat of the spirit has nevertheless persisted within the tendencies of the modern west to take this cognitive disonnnace and cloak it with our own conceptions of meaning. One of the problems with applying this in the modern world however is that while the metaphor makes sense of the way the world actually works in terms of our experience of it (or in terms of all things existing in relationship), it struggles to reconcile this with the truth of its foundation. To borrow from Hart, it’s not rational to say all things are full of gods if what we are describing is a world measured in terms of the material, be it through mechanics of physics. Metaphors only hold power in so far as they are rooted in something true, and thus it is the truth behind the metaphor, the thing to which it is pointing, that reveals its strength or its efficacy.
Thus we are brought back to that essential tension. What do our metaphors point to? In MacDonald’s quote, and indeed in each of the book’s that I cited above, one could argue that the metaphors are the very thing that bring us back to that necessary tension. This becomes the grounds for our necessary embrace of what we might call the mystery. But here’s the thing. An appeal to mystery doesn’t mean an appeal to something we don’t yet know. Mystery requires an active trust that this Truth we are seeking after exists. Mystery is not reduced to information, to the science that is yet to be discovered. Science itself requires msytery in order to justify its practice. It is not filling in the gaps between the information we know and that which we don’t yet know. Rather, it is, as all things are, the embodied practice of participating in a world we hold to be true. That simple question is- what is that world. Or what is the qualitative nature of that world.
A world measured by its complexity is a world we experience based on our prior convictions of what this world is. It is that foundation that frees us to participate in it. To contextualize it. To justify it according to the way we actually live in it as embodied creatures.
And here is where I think things come back to the essential revelation of that tension. I think we all intuitively understand this wrestling between mind and heart to be true. For me I find this to be most aware in my need to ask the why questions. I live in a world that is constantly telling me that it is about the what questions. This is the necessary foundation of modernism. The why then occupies a seperate metaphysical concern in this view. And yet this same modern conception reveals the simple truth that we can never make sense of the what (utility and function) apart from the why. Or more to the point, we don’t. This might get buried, it might be disguised, it might be represented by a willful ignorance or honest neglect or forgottenness. And yet it would be near impossibly to make the logical statement that it is not in fact true to how humans work. To how knowledge works.
It is the why that fuels the what.
Or perhaps more relevant would be statement that modernism has hollowed out the what by diluting and neutering our access and awareness of the why.
We cannot approach any honest discussion about this world without these coexisting and interdependent facets. The why is informed by that fundamnetal and underlying belief that we trust enough to allow us to move out into the world as participants. The what is a part of the embodied space we occupy as a result. As these two things function together they bring us towards proper knowledge, something that can equally be said to be always incomplete but similtaneously coherent, precisely because it is rooted in the place we begin from: the beating heart of it all.
And here’s someting I’ve been thinking a lot about over the course of this year. If materialism, however complex it inherently is as an experession of reality’s constanty emergent properties, informs our foundation, if this is the location of our inherent trust, the heart of it all, we are left with this truth that for all of the ways we participate in this world according to that complexity the mystery remains bound to and is contained by that which clarifies it. Thus the tension that is revealed by of our participation in this world cannot tell us otherwise- this is the true shape of the world. Apart from this our observations can only hand us something we can control in technological terms. Hence why what we end up with in this point of perspective is the western myth of progress. Hence also why I think Hawkin’s is right in suggesting that such a worldview essentially commits us to an old brain/new brain view, where the new brain wrapping around the old becomes our primary metaphor for this modern myth. It represents a truer form of knowledge, that which enables us to control technological progress. It supersedes the old emotions, that which was once needed for our survial but now impedes us.
But of course, to borrow the sentiment from Midgley in “The Myths We Live By,” this understanding has an awfully hard time making sense of the rest of life. Meaning, if Hawkin’s theory is true what we are handed is a human experience we cannot reconcile, given that it actively fights against it, whether we are aware of this or not.
Which brings me to the lyrics of the song I started this post with, a song I happened across in the still darkness of this mornings awaiting dawn. The line that rang out for me and that captured my attention was “it didn’t happen the way I as always taught.” This not only brought me to consider the the unexpectedness of the Christmas story, but the shape of my own lifes story. What my mind seeks is humbled by the beating heart of it all precisely because of the ways my assumed foundation keeps breaking in and justifying itself. This, I find, is how any given foundation gains its explanatory power. And part of this journey for me is constantly asking myself the question, how does my foundation accord with the world I observe and experience. Or from the other vantage point, how does the world I observe and experience reveal the truth of my foundation (and in what ways).
I think back to my once storied journey out of Christianity. I think as well of my journey out of atheism and towards an exploration of compartiive religions. I think about my journey back into a reimagined Christianity. In some respect all three of these points in my story were attempting to engage the same thing- the existing tension of mind and matter, spirit and brain.
If I was to point to why I find myself situated where I am in the present, the rest of the echos in Carpenters song also ring true for me.
I don’t know what happened, but something changed.
It invaded my certainty.
Invaded my assumptions.
Caught me off guard.
I would not stop at my own story however. One of the most compelling things to me about the world I observe and experience is that this same quality marks the stories of the vast majority of people that I encounter from around the world within different tradtions and different experiences. This is, to put it in simple terms, the quality of such foundations that hold the transcendent to be reflective of a union of body and spirit rather than something that emerges from this material reality. As the lyrics of the song suggest, this is the shared and coexisting idea that we don’t know and yet we know. Such foundations are never certain, and yet they are rooted in that which we observe and experience, in that which is tangible and demonstrable.
The simple fact of this world is that it seems to have these qualities. So much so that it transforms its inhabitants by way of this inherent trust or faith that allows us to participate as though it is true. Like the atheist who says “I can’t force myself to know what I know,” so goes the sentiment of the one who holds to this transcendent nature as being qualitatively true. As the song goes, I can’t force myself to resist when I have met it. This is something I feel, something that resonates. Something that explains the world I experience and observe.
The Stories of my Life 