The true you

It’s obvious now that you can’t think your way to God, and shouldn’t try. But that doesn’t mean thinking isn’t important. There’s plenty of good you can and should do with your mind, but spiritually, your mind’s always secondary. At some point your ideas, even feelings, must give way to a direct experience of God that is beyond both of them. What a gift of grace this is! If knowing God depended on the quality of your thoughts, then you’d have to be brilliant to taste what you long to taste. If knowing God depended on your emotions, you can see immediately what kind of trouble you’d be in. When it comes right down to it, thoughts and emotions can carry you a good distance along the path (they can also send you on one wild goose chase after another), but they cannot carry you the whole way. Only love can carry you into the dark, mind-numbing cloud of God’s presence (Mark 10.7). Your thinking, even at its best and brightest, is eclipsed by the dazzling mystery of God who can ultimately only be known through your heart.

Your heart is the true you, the deeper you, the you undivided from God by sin.

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Hold them a safe distance from your heart

Your thoughts may still screech and chatter like monkeys in a cage, and they’ll be quite annoying. But you don’t have to mind them. In fact, you’re on the path to freedom; you’re learning how to hold them a safe distance from your heart. This won’t happen over night. But with practice you’ll be amazed at how different life is when you no longer let your thought-monkeys take hold of you and pull you into their little cage. To advance much farther in this, you’ll need to learn what’s called “the prayer of the heart,” interior or contemplative prayer, and I’ve promised to teach this to you . . . but later. All that’s important at this point is for you to know that you are not your thoughts, that you needn’t be a victim to them or the emotions wrapped up in them, and that you can learn to hold them a safe distance from your heart.

Over time you’ll learn to drawn them down into your heart where Christ is. In prayer, your thoughts and emotions will be both healed and heeled. The monkeys in the cage of your mind will actually learn to sit down and rest peacefully.

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Why thinking's over-rated

Thinking is over-rated. Frankly, thinking’s much of the reason you’re so eager for spiritual help. You want to taste something of God that thinking’s not been able to cook up. But you don’t know how to find that something except by thinking. You’re not alone. Hundreds of years ago, a French philosopher named Descartes said, “I think therefore I am.” Most of us since him have pretty much lived that way—our thoughts defining who we think we are. But Descartes made a grave error in his thinking and messed us all up as a result. And if you can follow what I tell you here, you’ll have the key to unlock what poet William Blake so memorably called the “mind-forg’d manacles” that hold so many of us prisoner. Here’s what Descartes missed: the fact that you can think a thought means that you are therefore not that thought. You are someone higher, deeper, truer than the thought you’ve thought. So we can correct Descartes and say, “I think, therefore I am not my thoughts.” The I who I really am is not the thoughts I think. Your thoughts—and emotions too, the anxiety or fear that hounds you—are merely expressions of yourself, they’re not yourself itself. And if they’re expressions, then you don’t need to follow them wherever they try to lead you, you don’t need to do whatever they want you to do, you don’t have to believe whatever they tell you to believe. Instead, you can watch them, examine them, and then decide what the true you will do with them.

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Toward a simple practice for dealing with thoughts

Here’s a handy little image to help you deal with thoughts and the emotions that are wrapped up in them: Treat them like leaves floating along a gentle brook. You may watch them pass, and on occasion, lift one out of the flowing stream and examine it intently. But always put it back again. This little practice puts the you who thinks the thoughts and feels the feelings, back in charge.

You may be driving your car, and you notice you’re driving faster than you should. You’re in a hurry for some reason. Or maybe you’ve been so wrapped in your thoughts for the past ten minutes that you hardly know how you’ve gotten where you are. Your emotions and thoughts have gotten the best of you.

Don’t criticize yourself. Criticizing or judging yourself for being captive to your thoughts and emotions only leads to more thoughts and emotions that aren’t helpful. Instead, congratulate yourself on waking up to the fact that you’ve fallen into the river instead of sitting on its banks and have been floating along, going who-knows-where. Simply take charge of yourself, climb back onto the bank, sit down, and watch the stream of thoughts and emotions pass by. Identify one thought or feeling that stands out to you—the argument you had with your spouse, or the project your boss just asked you to do—and study it for a bit. Then set it back down again in the stream again and let it go until it’s appropriate to pick it up again and give it the focused attention it requires.

Soon, you’ll find yourself dripping wet again, sloshing around in the river, overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and emotions. When you do, smile at yourself and pull yourself back up on the bank and start watching all over again.

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Stop following where they wish to lead you

To bring your mind into a right relationship with your heart you’ll have to stop following your thoughts and emotions wherever they want to lead you. The point is not to be passive about your thoughts and emotions, but rather to learn to examine them—gently though, for I’ve seen people become so serious about them that they just deal with their thoughts with more and more thoughts. You need to remember that your thoughts and emotions too (especially the ones that you obsess over the most) have ruled you for a long time and won’t willingly play second fiddle to anything else, even God. In fact, they want you to treat them as God, and you probably do so without realizing it. Think about how much time certain thoughts spend in your consciousness, how long particular emotions hold power over how you feel. The attention you give them really robs you of a lot of living. Obsessing over them siphons off the spiritual energy you could use to transform your life into a living prayer.

Down the road, I’ll help you learn to exchange this habitual obsessing over thoughts and emotions for the experience of unceasing, interior prayer. That will bring you a freedom you never thought possible.

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