The Knife and the Light

When I was a child we would eat fish on Fridays, scrambled eggs and bacon at Sunday brunch, charcoal-grilled eight-and-a-half-minute hamburgers on weekends, and in the scrum that was an Irish Catholic family dinner, cross talk by everyone at once, the push-pull of ideas, food passed with the caveat “Don’t spill the milk!”  From her end of the table my mother would speak up, raising the mystery of duality in humans, “we are souls in animal bodies.”

In her college days, my mother had read Teilhard de Chardin; he was the pioneering but controversial French Jesuit scientist and priest, while she, wearing a beret and smoking cigarettes in the greenhouse, had been a young radical artist.  By the time I entered the story, she was married with children but still encouraged us to ponder the great mystery.  The dinner conversation would rapid fire move on – my extrovert father quick with puns and one liners – while my mother was quieter, introspective.

We are endowed with spirit within a mortal physical body.  A very long time ago Aristotle explored the material world in his Physics before turning to first principles in his Metaphysics.  The task of reconciling the two still is left to us.  

We live at the crossroads of duality: mind and body, male and female, good and evil, past and future, animal and divine.  The divine cannot be superior nor the animal lesser.  Wholeness depends upon their balance, the fuel required to build consciousness. That is a most challenging place to be, in a culture obsessed with the rational, material and physical – the quantitative – much less so with awe, stillness, and the intuitive mythopoetic – the qualitative.  

We have perfected the machinery of output, efficiency, optimization, and hyper-rational self-interest.  Jacob Needleman, the philosopher and religious scholar, observed, “we have come to know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”  We increasingly live in a culture of Mammon.  We deify money.  Human life is cheap. 

How do we find our way out of this rabbit hole?  The challenge is to remember, always, that we live in the present through consciousness, which is experiential awareness.  The rational cognitive mind excels at analysis, but on its own, it tends to zero-sum binaries: us versus them, profit versus loss, winner versus loser.  This is the outward focus.  But consciousness is personal and internal, functioning in the present moment, receiving meaning and feeling.  Consciousness is a light; the rational mind is a knife.  We need the knife but cannot live by cutting alone.  Consciousness, like a fulcrum, can balance the duality, and feeling is key.  

In Money and the Meaning of Life, Needleman wrote: “It is far better to understand a central truth with the whole of oneself than it is to know many things only with the mind.  When one knows only with the mind and the feelings are not integrated into the knowing, then the knowledge one has becomes harmful.  Technology without ethics is the result of having knowledge without developing the instrument of ethical perception, the feelings.  As it was said long ago, ‘The mind is for seeing what is true; the feelings are for understanding what is good.’ ”

What is needed is to restore the qualitative.  When we say the purpose of life is healing, this is the qualitative path.  When we value the relational over the transactional, this is the qualitative path.  When we resist the dopamine of doomscrolled outrage, and replace it with a silent presence to the friction between our animal selves and our spiritual longing, this is the path to a simple, grounded sanity.  

If the quantitative goal is accumulation, the qualitative goal is wholeness. Healing is not about erasing our animal limits or eliminating the tension between sacred and profane; it is about bringing them into harmony, a peaceful coexistence. It is learning to stand at the fulcrum without demanding that one side destroy the other.

Facts easily divide people, while cultural stories can unite.  When we rely only on the rational knife, myth becomes its necessary counterpoint.  I was fortunate, at college, to study Classical Languages, reading the Iliad and the Odyssey, but also, to meet and hear Joseph Campbell speak.  His work on comparative mythology showed that cultures across time share common narrative forms of consciousness – the hero’s journey to transformation and truth.  

From Gilgamesh to Odysseus, from Arjuna to King Arthur: stories of departure, initiation, and return bearing newfound wisdom.  The renewed fascination with The Odyssey seems culturally telling.  As dissent and argument build to a crescendo, I can’t help but wonder if we the people are simply yearning for any path forward.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”  This saying attributed to Teilhard de Chardin captures the supreme adventure of creation.  I was awakened to this mystery at my childhood dinner table, and it challenges my mind still.  Now raising my own children, we begin the story by breaking bread together.  

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Lead photo by Elena