Anam Cara

The Eros of Thought

Your mind is the double mirror of the outer world and of your inner world. It is always actively making pictures of things. If you lost your mind, you would lose your world as well. Your mind is so precious and vulnerable precisely because it holds your world. Thoughts are the furniture of the mind. They are the echoes and pictures that hold your world together. This is the fascinating adventure of perception. When you become aware of your thoughts and your particular style of thinking, you begin to see why your world is shaped the way it is. It is an exciting and frightening moment to realize your responsibility for your own thoughts. Then you know that you also have the freedom to think differently. Rather than having to travel always along a predetermined track of thought, you now begin to realize the excitement of thinking in new directions and in different rhythms. You see that thinking has something eternal in it. In the Western tradition, thought has been understood as the place within the human person where we are most intimately connected with divinity. Thought is the place of revelation. The dance of thoughts is endless. In his essay on John Donne, T. S. Eliot suggests that a thought to him was an experience as immediate as the scent of a flower.

Thought is a profound form of longing. Much of the thought that cripples us is dried out, dead thought. There is no warmth of longing alive in it. Thought that loses touch with feeling is lethal. This separation is the fracture from which fascism and holocaust emerge. Knowledge is intimacy. This is most evident in the activity of friendship. When the longing awakens between you and a stranger, you want to know that person—to come close. Closeness without knowing can be either a fascination and reverence for mystery or the prostitution of longing. Spiritual longing is what first draws you close to a friend. This desire refines and deepens itself in coming to know him or her. Friendship is one of the most beautiful places in which longing reaches initial fulfilment and is then further deepened, refined, and transfigured. You can also see the longing of thought in the fascination of ideas. When you find yourself in a cul-de-sac in your life and you feel lost and trapped, a new insight or awareness can come to you, enabling you to free yourself.