An average Westerner lives in his head. From kindergarten until university he is indoctrinated with the idea that there is an answer to every question and a solution to every problem. In this way his need to understand and control keeps the illusion alive that we have a grip on our reality and have everything under control.
But nothing is further from the truth.
In his book ‘De Schaduw van de Verlichting” Eddy Van Tilt speaks about ‘the over-drive of rationality‘.Because we give our ratio absolute status , we have become estranged of that part of reality that is not rational and with which we have lost touch.
The psychologist Van Tilt asks :
” What happened that caused the heads of Westerners to become so hard and their hearts so weak?”
Because he is confronted with the pathological results of too much ego, the delusion of manipulability and rationalising.
The psychiatrist Mark Epstein reacts to this as follows :
‘our thinking mind is compulsive, because it does not want to forget or be forgotten and therefore always has something to do’.
That is why it will not be easy to ” let go of everything” on holiday.
Because as hungry and restless as our mind is preoccupied with the past and the future, it will need other kinds of stimuli, in order not to forget or be forgotten.
We can put our mind at rest.
In the first place by keeping our heart open, by simply observing what happens inside ourselves and by reconnecting with our body, our surroundings, and by accepting …to be moved. When we enter silence, we will experience “now” and not so much hearing it, but rather feeling it or even better …. experiencing it.
To obtain this , it is not necessary to leave your ego or anything else behind, but to look past its borders.
‘By standing still we do not see new things, but we look at things in a different way’,
is what C.G. Jung concluded once.
Or how going on holiday is mainly… silence in your head and heart.
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Preceding:
Summerholiday season time to read the Bible
Home-stayers and their to do list
Written by inspiration of God for our admonition, to whom it shall be imputed if they believe
Dutch version / Nederlandstalige versie: Vakantie is… stilte in je hoofd
Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, C.G. Jung, A.A. Brill, Ernest Jones, and Sándor Ferenczi posed at Clark University, Worcester, Mass. Photograph first published in September 1909. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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Additional reading:
- Be still and listen
- Control and change
- Control your destiny or somebody else will
- Malefactors becoming your master
- Patience is the ability to count down before blasting off
- He who smiles rather than rages is always the stronger
- Know Who goes with us and don’t try to control life
- A Living Faith #7 Prayer
- Praying is surrendering in all circumstances
- Giving cogent reasons to young people why Christian faith is relevant to them
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Further reading:
- Rationalisation
- I’m proud of me
- Day 300: Rationalising Not Buying Anything
- Day 552 (or 1 Year, 6 Months, and 7 Days of Continuous Sobriety)
- When We Shouldn’t – And Should – Argue from Authority
- Hofstadterisms
- Why imagination is great (and why many evangelicals don’t like it)
- People focus on what they can see
- An Artifact of Our Time
- Are biases deviations from the mean?
- Do we really live in the Age of Empathy?
- Excellent. With musings on religion and mass extinctions.
- Rationality as a Social Process
- Illogical Rationality
- Sam Harris’s War on Rationality
- The Image of Objectivity
- Looking at the world through the eyes of others
- Relapse
- Working toward a new paradigm
- Does your brain know what’s best for you?
- Effective Altruism: the global movement that combines your heart and your head
- Animal rationality
- Do irrational idiots exist?
- The Grasshopper and the Ant – a story of economic rationality
- Maybe Everyone Is Actually Super Rational!
- Note: Misconceptions on Understanding
- Too many decisions can be exhausting.
- How to make the best decisions you can
- Rationality over the long term
- Desperate for a “Pause”
- “Time to take out the trash”
- It doesn’t always stand to reason
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