In college, I took a literature class on utopias and dystopias. Obviously, one of the texts was Orwell's classic 1984. Another lesser known work was Zamyatin's We. Both, you could say, had similar premises: the people did not have appropriate language to help them understand their plight and work towards freedom and liberty. Orwell's novel is in many ways more terrifying because Big Brother is everywhere but hidden, watching you but without your knowing when or how, and controlling information and language but you don't know how. Zamyatin's novel, on the other hand, is more overt: there's a tower in the middle of the city from which the government watches you and all the walls are clear, so you can never escape, and most pertinent to this essay, the city was enclosed inside of a wall. Those inside had no concept of what was outside nor did they have language for speaking about the wall or how to get around or through it or what was on the other side. For Zamyatin, the Russian, everyone knew they were trapped inside a wall but couldn't actually think about it because they didn't have the language.
The class read We after reading 1984, and I distinctly remember having a question about this language-thought-control well up inside me while reading Orwell and finally understanding it while reading Zamyatin: but why couldn't the people think about the wall and what was outside just because they didn't have the words for it? I was immediately shot down by the rest of the class and the professor. They asked me when the last time was that I had a thought without words. I had no answer, that settled the question. Except that the question wasn't settled for me. For years I wrestled with the idea and eventually I realized that my question might have conjured a different response if ventured to and with non-English majors. Of course English majors, and the English professor, would advocate the primacy of language and words for thought. Living with my wife, who is far more spiritual than I, and having kids, which requires a lot of silent communication and engenders plenty of anxiety, has taught me that indeed my question was valid. Ironically, I now have the words to understand why and how.
First of all, we should note the significance of Daniel Goleman's seminal book, Emotional Intelligence. I remember having my mind-blown the first time I read it. In the work and reading I do as a pastor, it seems Goleman's ideas penetrate everywhere. More and more we as a society are recognizing that a person who is not book smart is not necessarily 'dumb' or 'worthless' (especially not worthless, don't ever say that). Rather, they may simply have an empathetic intelligence, an interpersonal or intrapersonal intelligence that can also benefit the community around them if that intelligence is recognized and nurtured. Our current cultural climate could, in fact, probably use some more of those forms of intelligences. What I'm about to say here is closely aligned with Goleman's work and the work of others that has expanded the concept of multiple intelligences. Indeed, what I'm about to say probably fits better with the many books on education and teaching to the various intelligences.
Okay, so, let's return to the case of living enclosed inside a wall. The English major and the intellectual, best represented in this case by Descartes, have no way of thinking about the wall or what is outside because they rely on words, on language. But what about the category of people I'll generously call 'athlete'--athletes may never again be praised the way I will praise them here--how would they think about the wall and what is outside? Would the athlete be equally dumbfounded by the wall to the point of having a blind spot? No! Think about taking a drink of water. When you are thirsty, do you always say to yourself, with words, "Hmm, I need to get up, walk over to the faucet, grab a glass, turn on the faucet by twisting or lifting up the knob, and then pour water into the glass which I will hold underneath the faucet, then turn off the faucet by twisting it again or pushing it down before the water overflows the glass"? No! Don't be silly. Possibly you think to yourself, every time, "I need a drink of water," but the rest of the thought would either be blank routine or a series of pictures--you see yourself in the future doing the motions required to get yourself a drink of water, and by seeing yourself in the future you have thought. Or, a better example for why I call this category athlete, think of going on a hike. If you came to a tricky part of the path where there once was a bridge over a chasm but isn't there any longer, and you can't simply take a walking step over it, what would you do? I imagine that if you are an athlete, you simply picture yourself taking a running start, jumping on a rock, and leaping over the chasm--or leaping into the abyss to your death, whichever.
An athlete thinks not via words and language but through pictures, through kinetic imagination. What is the human body, what is my human body, capable of doing? What does my human body need to do at this moment and how will it do what it needs? Athletic thought often happens so quickly that it has no time for words and language. You could say that athletic thought is based in instinct and I wouldn't disagree, but there's more to athletic thought than merely instinct. Typically we mean an instantaneous action or reaction talking about instinct, but athletic thought is clearly more than that. I do not think through the process of leaping over a chasm merely instantaneously or instinctively. Certainly athletic thought plays a large role, if not the only role, in instinctive reactions, but also plays a large role in any kinetic activity.
Looking back at Zamyatin's case, the athlete, or anyone capable of athletic thought, can think using pictures of themselves climbing or punching through the wall. Describing how such a thought process would work is, obviously, impossible in this case without using words. Using words, the thought process, in pictures, might consist of viewing oneself with a rope, throwing it as high as possible, then climbing furiously hoping no one is watching, and then wondering what might be at the top of the wall. It is more than possible to think that thought without words or language. Some people might not be capable of athletic thought but, I imagine, that when our preferred mode of thinking is removed, as in the case with the wall, that most of us would be capable of using another mode of thought. If you are blind, you depend on your other senses more; if you are can't think about something intellectually, you depend on your other modes of thought.
While all of us are probably capable of athletic thought, and the other modes of thinking I'm about to suggest, I wager that athletes, meaning those who prefer this mode of thinking, are best at communicating silently with their hands. My wife, sorry to say, is horrible at talking with her hands or understanding others who try. I suspect it is because she is much more an emotive or spiritual thinker. I bring it up, though, because we have all, I'm sure, been in situations in which we needed or wanted to speak with our hands. Perhaps it was a game, perhaps we were in another country, or perhaps our kids were sleeping and we didn't want to wake them up (guilty). And I bet that you have noticed that some people are better at this than others. I can tell you that my wife and I will not be winning any Cranium contests any time soon. It is absolutely critical that we acknowledge that some are better athletic thinkers than others because some are better intellectual thinkers than others. Intellectual thinking is defined in this case as the mode of thought that uses words and languages in order to build a complex, mental structure of thought and communicate that thought to others. Such a definition sounds impressive, and we humans should be impressed at our ability to think intellectually, but is intellectual thought necessarily better or more important than athletic thought? Should we praise our intellectuals more than our athletes and athletic thinkers? If I had to guess, I'd say I'm 60% an intellectual thinker and 40% an athletic thinker, so I'd like to make the case that intellectual thought is the most important mode to humanity because I partially fit into the category of intellectual, but I can't and won't make that argument. Athletic thought, and therefore athletic ability, should be considered as an equal or near equal to intellectual thought.
All modes of thought except, perhaps, the last that I'll get to, should be considered as equals or near equals. Essentially, each mode of thought represents an expression of what it is to be human. Whether you believe we have been created by God or not, we are an incredible breed. We are capable of a great deal that is awe-inspiring, amazing, and wondrous. Each mode of thought expresses that potential in some way. More than that, each mode of thought can also optimize the experience of life if used well. So when we encounter greatness in a mode of thought that we struggle to use, we should not despise or tear down that greatness but be thankful we are human.
Now, athletic thought, emotive thought, and spiritual thought, as I'll get to, could all be considered inferior to intellectual thought. The intellectuals out there, like Orwell and Zamyatin, have made that case. But athletic, emotive, and spiritual thought could also be considered superior to intellectual thought. The reason is simple: intellectual thought is clearly secondary. Descartes was, essentially, wrong. We do not know our existence because we think intellectually. We know we exist, as Sartre might say, simply because we exist--and Kierkegaard before him would have said, perhaps, that we know we exist because here we are living before God. Human history did not begin when we developed the ability to communicate with ourselves or with others through language-thought.
At the beginning of human history, perhaps dating back to the beginning of Neanderthals, who were not as stupid as we have made them out to be, thinking surely happened. Who we are as humans has not fundamentally changed. Our technology, including language, as changed and improved, so our thinking (intellectual) has developed technological layers, but the ability to think has existed as long as we have existed. Which means, if we take a moment to reflect commonsensically, that intellectual thought is derivative and athletic, emotive, and spiritual thought are fundamental. Our ancestor humans had to be able to think through the process of creating fire, hunting animals, and even communicating knowledge. For instance, if our ancestors learned that a certain berry is good to eat but another berry is poisonous, they had to be able to tell others which one to eat and which one to avoid. Before we invented language and intellectual thought, a form of athletic thought would have been necessary. Otherwise, we would not have survived. No species anywhere, probably, would survive without some form of athletic thought. The fundamental modes of thought were all we needed to survive. Intellectual thought is only needed to thrive, or at least to try to.
William Golding has a great novel entitled, The Inheritors. It's about a troop or family of Neanderthals around the time our own species started roaming the planet an destroying non-humans, and everything else. I highly recommend it. For now, I point to it as a fictional example of what I'm arguing: it must have been possible for our ancestors to think and communicate prior to language and intellectual thought.
One of the more prominent themes of Golding's novel is that the Neanderthals must have been capable of emotive thought. By this I more than emotional intelligence or multiple intelligences and here, if I haven't already, is where I think I am definitively positing a new and unique idea. Theories of emotional intelligence and multiple intelligences focus almost solely, as far as I am aware, on education, learning, self-improvement, and community organization. The intelligences are ways people learn and organize thoughts that are then translated into intellectual thought. A person with interpersonal intelligence, for instance, would be able to think through the appropriate and best means of handling community conflict. Those 'means,' however, are always attained and then communicated through intellectual thought. Even kinetic intelligence, in my research, tends to focus on a person's learning or processing intellectually through movement. For instance, kinetic intelligence is that intelligence that might help someone learn physics by playing baseball, rather than just by reading a book; or learning the hideousness of the Middle Passage by actually cramping into a slave ship, rather than hearing a presentation. It should be clear that while athletic thought, by my definition, and kinetic intelligence are related, they are by no means the same. Kinetic intelligence is a subsidiary of intellectual thought and athletic thought is a subsidiary of, well, nothing. The same is true of emotive thought.
Emotive thought is also, therefore, more than simply compassion or empathy or the ability to feel. Emotive thought is, fundamentally, the process by which we attribute value via our emotions. An easy example is that we value members of our family, as Golding's troop does, because we have an emotional connection. We could describe that connection without emotive thought, yes, and we could feel that connection without emotive thought. As such, please excuse a necessary tangent.
Another strike against Orwell and Zamyatin is that we can certainly feel love without having a word for it. The feeling is the same with or without the word because we are still human. English has one word for love and yet, when we use the word, we know the difference between the variety of loves. Orwell and Zamyatin are right, however, in line with Derrida and the deconstructionists, in that we humans have a compulsion to understand the world around us intellectually and so we must ascribe meaning, words, to objects and feelings. Those words, those meanings, only have meaning because we have invented the technology for them to have meaning, namely language, which itself is based on the idea that words have meaning only because they are not other words that have meaning. So knowing the word love does not pre-date the ability to feel love, since the word has no real meaning anyway, and yet the world love, at the same time, controls our understanding of it. While English speakers can differentiate the various meanings of love when the word is used, we have grown wary of using the word in certain legitimate instances because we've forgotten all the meanings. For instance, I love my friend Rob. I feel that love, but unlike the Greeks we do not have a word for brotherly/sisterly love, and so I struggle to say that I love him. To say that I love him would mean that I am gay. "Am I gay? Well now I'm starting to question, but I don't think I am, so I can't love him." See how that goes. Frodo and Sam are often accused of being gay (though, even if they are suppose to be, being gay shouldn't be an accusation) simply because we do not have a word for brotherly love and have failed to maintain its residence in the catch-all 'love.' Our desire to understand thus leads to inventing word-meanings that then indeed control how we live. Another example is that if we only meant 'love' to mean 'lust,' as is now the case for many, then to love someone would only mean that we wanted to bed that person. Our genuine feeling of love, as it should be understood, would then be mistranslated as compassion or adoration, which bring with it entirely different actions and behaviors. We do not bed or marry those we adore or sympathize with. Here, then, is the chain: we can feel emotions and act on them, like love, without knowing the word; we humans have been gifted, and perhaps cursed, with the gift of intellectual thought, so we want to put words to our feelings; we give words certain meanings; those words then have those meanings, sometimes changing over time; we feel emotions; we match our emotion with a word that we have assigned a meaning; we then act according to those intellectually assigned meanings. The end result is that, while we can feel emotions without words, eventually our words, our intellectual thought of layering invented meanings in order to communicate complex thoughts to ourselves and others, then control our behaviors. If this is all we mean by emotive thinking, then I have failed miserably because we end up in the same place.
Instead, emotive thinking is the ability not only to feel emotions without words, not only to act on those feelings and do so still without words, but to process a range of values as well as future behaviors according to our emotions that we feel now and might feel in the future without using any other meaning symbols. Emotive thinking isn't, then, merely having emotions pre-language. Feeling and acting on our emotions pre-language, or without the benefit of language, reduces us to instinct. Yet we are more than instinctive beings. So emotive thinking is, by comparison, the same as intellectual thinking but without the need or desire to put words to our emotions now or in the future. Emotive thinking actively does not use intellectual thought that is controlled by language, and is a step above instinctive feeling.
Return again to the chasm in the woods while hiking. If only that bridge had stayed aloft I wouldn't have any examples and you wouldn't have to read this. When we get to the chasm, prior to our using athletic thought, we probably would take a moment to think emotively. Does crossing the chasm, and possibly falling to certain death, create in us anxiety? fear? exhilaration? pride? We may use intellectual, language-thought at that moment, "If I do this and fail, I may fall, and I may die, which is bad. If I do this and make it, though, I'll live and be awesome." We may. But we can and would have those thoughts with or without such intellectual thinking. We could and would think emotively, to weigh the options and decide which option to take. Is it worth risking fear for the sake of pride?
Some people, that I would jokingly call maniacs, might get to the chasm and not think emotively. These folk may jump immediately to athletic thought, of how to cross the chasm in the safest or, for the real maniac, the most dangerous way possible. We all know these people that don't seem capable of feeling fear or anxiety. I argue that there is a large difference between not feeling an emotion versus not thinking through our emotions. If one of those athletic-only thinkers jumped, didn't make it, and started falling to certain death, I bet a million dollars that he or she would feel fear; she or he just didn't think about that fear ahead of time. Obviously, if a person truly can't feel emotions--and I know there are people for whom emotions are literally and always will be foreign--then that person won't think emotively, either, but generally thinking emotively is a choice and feeling emotions is an instinctive reaction. Put in that way, we start to see we can choose which modes of thought we prefer to develop and use--though, to be clear, this does not mean that we are particularly gifted in all or any of our chosen modes of thought, even if we develop and use them as much as possible. It is more by habit that a person would approach a chasm in the woods without thinking emotively and only thinking athletically than because they are incapable of feeling.
The last positive mode of thought that we can choose to develop and use is spiritual. My wife is one of those people that you may be familiar with. You ask her how she knows God exists and she'll say, "Uhh, I just know." As an intellectual-athletic thinker, that isn't good enough for me. I build layers of logic to come to the conclusion of God's existence or see that He exists, both of which are methods that inevitably leave some doubt. But my wife knows. It's annoying. And admirable and representative of spiritual thinkers. Forget those people who say they are spiritual but not religious as an excuse for not being either. I'm talking here about the people who seem to jump to conclusions without any rational steps and are then, not surprisingly, unable to tell you how or why they think or believe what they do. The reason they are unable to communicate their thoughts and beliefs is that we often demand that intellectual thought be the medium, rather than the spiritual thought by which they did their thinking. Again, forget those people who can't back up thoughts and beliefs with rational, factual, and logical thinking or statements because they choose not to reflect on themselves or their beliefs, perhaps even choosing to live in a false reality of their own making--an ever too common personality these days. Let's think only of those people who are genuinely able to and often do think spiritually.
Stick with my wife for a moment here and she can further show us what genuine spiritual thinking looks like. My wife, her name is Danielle, by the way, is a Master Reiki practitioner. To her, Reiki is absolutely the practice originating in the East but it is also, to her, a channel for the ancient practice and gift of healing through the Holy Spirit. Reiki is simply a spiritual language through which Danielle understands her own Christian faith and spiritual gift. According to Reiki practitioners, there are seven chakras related to various goings-on in our lives, bodies, minds, and souls. According to Danielle, she can actually feel those chakras, if not also see them, especially when there's something off-balance in a person's life or body. Indeed, after one session, Danielle told a client of hers that she felt a particular chakra out of whack and what that might mean, and the client then reeled off a bunch of life events and attitudes exactly related to what Danielle just told her. While I often give my wife grief, seriously joking that Reiki and essential oils are not the solution to all of life's ills, there comes a time when we have to admit that she and others are truly capable of thinking in a different, spiritual way.
Again I want to point out that though we can choose which modes of thought we develop and use, we aren't necessarily going to be gifted in all or any. Take my mother as an example. She is a level 1 practitioner of Reiki. Maybe one day she'll become a Master, too, but whether she does or not doesn't matter. My perception of my mother is that she won't be able to think spiritually as well as my wife can. I know my mother wants to live and think spiritually but I don't know that she can, at least not well. This isn't a slight. My mother is certainly capable of thinking emotively. It's simply a truth that choosing to develop and use a mode of thought doesn't necessarily mean much will come of it. The reverse is also true: we might not choose to develop or use a mode of thought with which we are or could be gifted. For fun I once told Danielle to think of a number between 1 and 20 because I wanted to impress her with my spiritual capability. I told her that I would think real hard for a few moments about what number she had on her mind. So as not to embarrass myself or let her cheat, I had her tell me the number and, honestly, I would tell her if it was the same number that came to me. And, honestly, I got it right about fifteen consecutive times. Then I got cocky, failed a few times, and gave up. The really funny part is that Danielle couldn't do the same with me at all. So while Danielle is clearly able to think spiritually, I can hold it over her for the rest of our lives that I am more capable of thinking spiritually, I just choose not to.
Spiritual thinking is perhaps the most primitive form of thought. By 'primitive' we shouldn't understand simple or outdated. Rather, we should understand it as a foundational part of what constitutes human living. Rudolf Otto, in the book The Idea of the Holy, an essentially comparative religion work, describes how all religions developed out of a sense that all humans have of what he calls the 'numinous.' Further, the sense and experience of the numinous in every case leads to a description of the numinous as a 'mysterium tremendum.' The Latin shouldn't be too hard to decipher. While Otto, as I said, was writing a work in a field we call comparative religions, trying to boil down the source and origin of religion, ultimately what is most crucial to his work, I believe, is the necessary implication of spiritual thinking. At some point in human history spiritual thinking turned into religious thinking, which, according to Nietzsche, was and is the process by which the powerful consolidate and justify power over the common people in institutionalizing a priesthood. But before that transition occurred--if it occurred, because of course we may disagree with Nietzsche's analysis--Otto's thesis requires that humans were thinking about the spiritual senses and experiences they had in a uniquely human way. Other mammals, we know now, are capable of complex communication and self-awareness, but are they capable of reflecting on the possibility of an unseen, not seeable being or sense? Not only did humans reflect on the sense and being but we determined that the being is mysteriously great and terrible. More than mere reflection on a possibility, more than mere faith in the possibility, we thought about and analyzed our senses and experiences and then made conclusions. Otto takes his thesis yet further and argues that it is because of the conclusions based in our spiritual thought that we organized and structured our societies and our living the way we did and have. I would wager that because our organizations and structures are well-defined and have been for quite a few centuries, we have somewhat lost the concept of spiritual thinking. We have had no need for spiritual thought because it has been done for us. It is thus hard to describe more than I have what spiritual thinking is or may be.
Before I talk about why any of this matters, I want to say that I think there is another mode of thought. Those who think primarily intellectually find those who primarily think in this way particularly annoying. It is possible to think blankly. Our mode of thought is completely blank. Not only a clean slate but no slate at all. To some extent all of us have thought, and probably continue to think, in each mode, and there's no exception here.
Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, makes a case for how and why. I admit that I do not find much of Dawkins's work convincing--not because I'm a Christian and he's anti-religion--but the idea at the end of the book is at least a start to understanding the blank mode of thought. Dawkins argues that not only are our genes selfish, but ideas are selfish, too. Somehow, ideas work themselves out in the ether of conceptualization and in the re-telling and re-sharing so that they will spread. You can think of a meme here if you're familiar with what those are. Memes seem to be designed simply to spread far and wide with no actual attached value. And if the meme does not spread far and wide, then the originator of the meme, or some other interested party, might tweak the meme--perhaps by adding more cute cats--so that more people will like and share the meme on social media. Since the meme has no actual attached value, we like and share for no reason at all except that the meme is, somehow, likeable and shareable. So, too, goes Dawkins's argument, with ideas: we spread ideas not because they are good or bad, or have any value whatsoever, but because they are, somehow, spreadable. And if an idea isn't spreadable, then somehow the idea modifies itself so that it will be spreadable.
A self-controlling, selfish idea is not my idea of convincing. With that said, however, Dawkins may have been on to something. I have certainly experienced, and you may have, too, people who seem easily persuaded. One man in particular I think of. In conversation he would support one idea. Then, after a few minutes of polite debate, he will have seamlessly switched to another viewpoint that someone else shared without ever admitting that other person was right or that he had changed opinions. His mind apparently simply accepted this new idea without any transition. There are other people I know who have changed their entirely personalities based on who they were dating or hanging out with and they never realized they were making a change. This is not the same as keeping an open mind. Keeping an open mind means that you hold one viewpoint but are willing to hear and consider other viewpoints as valid, and if some other viewpoint were seen as more true or convincing, then you'd make a concerted mental effort to re-work your thoughts. But blank thinking is quietly and, without any thought whatsoever, being possessed by a new idea. One should beware this type of thinking and instead keep an open mind.
We've reached the end of detailing the modes of thinking, at least the ones I've discovered thus far in my life. Two questions deserve answers. First, to again distinguish between multiple intelligences and these different modes of thought and, then, how or why any of this matters.
To answer the first question, I admit to being inferior to the task. I am confident nonetheless that what I'm arguing here is not old business. Instead, what I'm arguing here proposes a sort of disunity to forms of human thought, while the multiple intelligences and forms of learning suggest a unity to forms of human thought. There is a limit to the use and meaning of words here because, ultimately, you are either an emotive thinker and understand or you're not. But when it comes to multiple intelligences and various ways of learning, we are all able to grasp the same idea, just in our particular way.
If I were to run for elected office with a platform of love and hope, spiritually and financially, for the least and lost, then, based on the work of Goleman and many others studied and expounded upon to date, I would spread my message in different ways and utilize staffers who can operate in the different intelligences. My staff would have to act and behave lovingly toward one another, and thus prove my message interpersonally; I would be honest about my own life and the ways I've experienced love and hope, thus proving my message intrapersonally; I would travel my district with a tour bus that doubled as a soup kitchen, thus proving my message kinetically; I would write eloquent and convincing position papers, thus proving my message aurally; I would have one-on-one town halls to listen, and have empathetic staffers with me, to thus prove my message emotionally; et cetera. The message, the thought, is the same. We are intelligent in different ways and therefore receiving the message, the thought, in different ways, but it is the same thought. My staff and I may have different skills and intelligences in spreading the message, but it is the same thought. Intellectually, the thought remains static. Intellectually, we think the same way.
Picture a diagram. I would draw the diagram for you except that I do not know how to do that here. The diagram is this: one circle in the middle with a variety of outer circles all with arrows pointing to the middle circle. That middle circle is our intellectual thought, or message. The outer circles are the ways that we receive or apply that thought.
Now what I am saying is that, actually, we should picture five different circles, each with their own outer circles. One of those five, central circles is the same as above, the intellectual circle. But the other four are the athletic, emotive, spiritual, and blank modes of thought. Each of them will have the outer circles of the multiple intelligences because we will still receive and apply each mode of thought according to our given intelligences. Most likely, our intelligences partly determine which modes of thought we prefer, so we might imagine that the outer circles connected to each central circle are not all the same size for each of the five modes of thought. The kinetic intelligence circle may be largest for athletic thinking, for example. To be sure, though, the evolution of our societal thinking, and what our society approves as proper thought, has tilted towards emphasizing intellectual thought to the exclusion of the others. It's therefore hard for us to imagine that, in truth, not only are we receiving and applying ideas differently, but we are having different ideas and, based on which mode of thinking we're using, are capable of different ideas. I'm not saying that we simply have one idea when using one mode of thought and another, different idea when using another mode of thought, but rather something more radical: the very nature of the ideas arrived at using one mode of thought are entirely unrecognizable to the ideas arrived at using another mode of thought. Each mode of thought can and will produce a variety of different thoughts, so people thinking emotively can still disagree passionately but at least they understand one another, whereas an athletic thinker wouldn't even understand the disagreement. The intellectual mode of thought in Zamyatin's hell-hole wouldn't recognize the athletic thoughts. Or the emotive or spiritual thoughts which, in that example, may be more perceptive about how living inside of a wall determines our personality and understanding of God and humanity, generally, than the other modes of thought. Through the different modes of thought, we have different thoughts, yes; but more than that, through the different modes of thought, we process and conclude about life in ways unrecognizable to all other modes of thought. Therein is the difference between what has been studied and written about before and what I am putting forth.
And therein is the reason why it is important to venture into this territory. Surely you have had the experience in which you are conversing with someone and they say or do something that, to you, makes no sense. No sense whatsoever. Or perhaps someone else said that you were making no sense to them. No sense whatsoever. Then even after explaining for a minute, or five, or ten, or for a lifetime, confusion continues to abound. You may even throw out the word 'illogical.' Indeed what you're railing against may be illogical. But no matter how well you explain what would be logical through words, diagrams, presentations, movies, role playing, or anything else, the other person insists that what you are saying makes no sense. By no means should we ignore the possibility that some people are not smart and not logical no matter what intelligence or mode of thought we're inhabiting. At the same time, we should recognize that choosing different modes of thought may actually make it impossible to communicate with and understand one another.
I remember hiking with my father in woods around the White Mountains one spring when the river water levels were rather high. On one trail, the path ran straight through the river. Whether there was supposed to be a bridge there or not, I do not know, but there should have been a bridge. Without a bridge, there was no way to cross. My father suggested that we perhaps had gone off the trail, which was not well-marked, and that we should turn around and confirm our location. I was confident we were still on the trail, though, and, partially being an athletic thinker, I swiftly envisioned a plan to cross by jumping onto a rock from which we could climb up a fallen tree and shift our way along to where there was another big rock near the other shore high enough that we could then jump to dry land. My father, to whom athletic thinking is probably foreign (again, not an insult, because his intellectual thinking is the definition of excellence), said to me, "John, we can't do that. What are you talking about? That's not a plan. I don't see it." And so on. My father literally could not understand what I was talking about until I went ahead and did it. He followed my every move across and, still, didn't quite understand how we made it or how I thought up the plan. That experience was a clear exhibition of the incoherence of one mode of thought to another.
Another example comes from seminary. A girl I was interested in, but too afraid to say anything to, came to visit me once. As a tangent, you'd think that her coming to visit is a sign she's waiting for me to say something, but alas. During the visit my friend, for that's all she'd ever be, said that she believed each of the religions are actually true. I responded with near vehemence. Only one religion could possibly be true. Maybe Christianity is wrong, fine, but it doesn't make any logical sense for all of them to be true all at once, especially when a few of the religions explicitly exclude any others. She told me, patiently, that it does make sense from a certain perspective. She said no more and I was too chicken to tour around Boston with her, so I knew any possible relationship was over before it started and there was no point in arguing. Since then, I have begun to wonder if she's right. Perhaps my intellectual/athletic modes of thinking, which are both focused on singular, universal truths that we can either know or see, were and are incapable of sharing her spiritual perspective and mode of thinking, regardless of what intelligences I possessed.
The crux to my interaction with that charming woman is that I simply do not know how she made sense of her statement. Or how she processed her thoughts to make the statement. I do not know because, as I've said, I choose not to think spiritually. Why I make that choice, I also do not know, but I know at least that I do. With this theory in tow, however, we can start to make sense of what seems to us like nonsense. Take, for instance, the many devout Trump supporters who are hurt by his policies and/or his rhetoric. It seems like nonsense that they would still support him. Of course, we still cannot ignore legitimate stupidity or nonsense, but perhaps it is not a nonsense position. Maybe, instead, these Trump supporters are blank or emotive thinkers at work. Unless we are blank or emotive thinkers, it's impossible to say if they are indeed nonsensical. Our exclusive emphasis on intellectual thought blinds many of us to the possibility that, indeed, they make sense after all, and perhaps many of them are rebelling against the very concept of being pushed out of conceptions of authentic thought.
A clear consequence of this theory, and my point in arguing for it, is that we must engage with ourselves and with one another in a more spiritual way. We must come to this conclusion for two reasons. In detailing those reasons we'll understand what I mean by engaging in a more spiritual way.
First, there's a real danger that we accept alternative truths that are not true at all. It is entirely possible that what makes logical, clear sense, that what is true in one mode of thought is not sensible, and thereby apparently not true, in another mode of thought. As I argued to my lady friend, that sounds like the definition of relative truth--what is true for me may not be true for you, and that's okay, we don't need to work it out. If you and I witness a murder, and I saw person a did it, and you say person b did it, we can't both be right. One of our testimonies will be absolutely and resolutely false. Relative truth really doesn't make sense in a world of facts. There is no such thing as alternative truth or alternative facts. Whatever mode of thought we use, truth is still truth. We cannot make up our truth out of falsehood, out of mere desire, control, power, or evil, and claim it's true and that no one can tell us otherwise. Truth doesn't work that way and we need to avoid that danger.
Perhaps, however, we can understand the relationship between relative and universal truth in a more holistic, primitive way. Perhaps universal truth is the only way of expressing facts of our existence, the world around us and how we came to be. But perhaps deeper truths about what human life is about, why we came to be here, and to what ends and how we are supposed to strive, are only understood through our own persons. Since we have and use different modes of thought, we come to unrecognizably different conclusions. That does not mean that the truth has changed for each of us but, as long as we think within a particular mode, we cannot express to one another what the truth is we've arrived at.
Most importantly, since all but the now emphasized intellectual mode of thought are primitive, as in original to our being and existing as human, and the intellectual mode of thought has been layered on top of the others, if we are going to understand one another then we must do so by primitive means. We cannot argue with one another and force agreement. Indeed, intellectual thought itself is, in a way, fabricated, so any explicit agreement we come to must be confirmed by other modes of thought in the first place. Since all but the intellectual mode of thought are primitive, original to who we are, then to come to true, sympathetic agreements and understanding, we must dig deep inside of ourselves and learn, again, how to think in the ways primitively and spiritually human. Language will be of little help to us. If we are going to understand one another, and God, and ourselves, then we must first connect, spiritually--distinct from thinking spiritually--with our natural, created state. In so doing we will deepen our ability to think well in the different modes and thereby come to understand how truth is expressed in those modes.
After understanding one another better, we will still have the ultimate decision to make: which mode of thought best expresses truth, including the truth about who we are and why we are. We will also have to decide which mode of thought best enables good living for ourselves. At least, though, we will have found that what we perceive as relative truth is not, in all cases, exactly relative; at least we will have found that not only do people not all act the same but also that not all even think the same; at least, and crucially, we will have found how to engage with one another on a deeper, spiritual, and primitive way that encourages inter and self-connectedness in a original, free way not controlled by structured language and intellectual thought.
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