Is This How Your Heart and Mind Make You Whole?
The Crossroads of the “Primordial Sapien” and the “Modern Human”
How do we know when we’re at our best?
How do we know when we’re being all that we could be?
How do we know that the character we’re playing is truly us?
Among all of the suffering, how could we recognize the goodness of anything?
It’s here. Right here.
Or…there. I guess. In you.
In your thoughts and emotions.
Congratulations! You found it.
…
What else do you want from me??
Fine. I’ll tell you what I think, but it’s your job to go forth and do the thing.
Your thing.
Deal?
Okay, good.
My theory
…
There’s a crossroads of sorts that happens sporadically in the human condition, it seems.
It’s where the heart and mind find one another.
It’s fleeting yet intoxicating.
It’s where the joy you seek comes into touch with the work you’ve done to get it.
It’s those moments when you understand what life is. And it’s that space where your environment, your energy, and your relationship with the world sync, and you find clarity in your existence.
Then it's gone.
But, not because you don’t deserve it.
It’s because the modern world itself causes you to reflexively turn attention to life’s possibilities and necessary preparations.
You get anxious and guarded again. You step back into the demands of social infrastructure and global chaos…
It sucks.
But, what I’ve found is a way back toward those moments.
And when we truly work on who we are, I think we can find ourselves there more often.
I think…
The Dissolving Animal
There’s a theory that I have about the modern human.
But, it’s the modern human that isn’t entirely healthy. Something has been lost, taken from us…by us.
At some point, we became something else. We grew beyond the natural life cycle.
Even before the homo sapien became the last and most advanced version of humanoid, there’s evidence of intelligence that goes beyond the animals that are still following Mother Nature’s ‘procreate, survive, and die’ cycle:
The humanoids that existed with and before us:
Homo erectus, homo neanderthalensis, the denisovans, homo floresiensis, and the homo naledi
All of them seemed to have, by origin research, shown signs of things like tools, arts, religion/mythology, and even burial rituals. It’s proof of progress, innovation, and superiority.
Whatever happened, I wouldn’t be typing these words and you wouldn’t be reading them, if not for it.
At some point hundreds of thousands of years ago, we started to separate ourselves from the animal kingdom. And in doing so, slowly dissolved our natural connection with Mother Nature.
But, here’s my contention with that:
We’ve lost one form of intelligence for the sake of another.
That intelligence shows up with our struggles and our tendencies. It’s there when our emotions take over. It’s there when our primal instincts tell us to flee or fight. It’s there when we protect what is ours and risk our lives for our tribes. It’s there when lust and love make us irrational and euphoric.
The primitive sides of us and the expansion of feelings and spirituality and intense social and intimate connections grew. Our obsession to understand the world made us inquisitive and emotional and very close to each other.
These connections still exist…but where it doesn’t, people suffer.
And what do we struggle the most with today?
Isolation, bonding, understanding, compassion, unity…
Those things that we used to relish so much and now seem to have by majority forgotten.
We haven’t yet and may never evolve out of the animal within us.
So, what do we do?
It only makes sense to me that we consider our histories, not delete or ignore them.
I think we have to have a respect for everything that came before us — including terror, tyranny, and maliciousness — to be capable of being completely ourselves.
We need to consider rituals, spirituality, intimate social ties, and what emotional connection meant for us as we came to be what we are.
We need to understand war, strategy, hierarchy, and the beginnings of intelligence built in order to give us what we are now.
Even more importantly, I think it’s impossible to believe that intelligence, progress, and productivity are all the human species can be.
It’s too cold.
Too…shallow.
We have to include and expand both the heart and the mind. And maybe it’s not that we’ve lost our “hearts”, but no longer deem them important.
I honestly believe that the best of us is yet to come. And that coming is a collaboration of our more primal, connected, spiritual selves and the modern intelligent ones that we have become.
The heart and the mind
When I look at the human condition, I see the “heart” as the everlasting, primal, fundamental side of us. It’s the “god” of sorts that speaks to us and sways us toward joy and power and intimate satiety.
And when I see the “mind”, I see the ever-shifting, ambitious, life-designing side of us. It was the psychological superiority that separated (detrimental at an extreme) us from the animal itself.
The best of us lies in some sort of unique complex middle only found by each individual willing to find out what that means.
It’s there, at that intersection, where we find out who we truly are.
It’s where the mind helps us understand the abstract emotions of the heart, and where the heart helps us understand the power and projections of the mind.
Conclusion
I think our peace is where our hearts and minds meet. It’s when they work together, fight together, bleed together.
It’s when the heart and mind understand one another and join together their strengths to dissolve their weaknesses…
It’s where you find who you are as an individual, free from the restraints of expectations and bold enough to follow your own wisdom.
It’s the beautiful disaster of life itself that deems it so.
But we were never meant to stay there. Because the loss of it is what drives us to find it again…and what propels us through existence.
The world has demands, and our hearts and minds don’t always agree. It’s life itself that pulls us away from that intersect, and the soul within us that seeks to find it again.
And when it does, life becomes not just tolerable, but blissful.
Even for just a moment.
Truth and Love, Reader…
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