The idea for today is obviously the reason why your seeing does not affect you alone. You will notice that at times the ideas related to thinking precede those related to perceiving, while at other times the order is reversed. The reason is that the order does not matter. Thinking and its results are really simultaneous, for cause and effect are never separate.
Thinking and its results are really simultaneous, for cause and effect are never separate. (Needed to repeat that to myself.)
Today we are again emphasizing the fact that minds are joined. This is rarely a wholly welcome idea at first, since it seems to carry with it an enormous sense of responsibility, and may even be regarded as an “invasion of privacy.” Yet it is a fact that there are no private thoughts. Despite your initial resistance to this idea, you will yet understand that it must be true if salvation is possible at all. And salvation must be possible because it is the Will of God.
When you begin to realize that your thoughts are not truly private, it does make you feel far more responsible for what is going on in your head.
I read a book called Mirroring People by Marco Iacoboni not too long ago. It’s about something called mirror neurons. Iacoboni is a neurologist and calls his research on mirror neurons existential neurology. Iacoboni claims that there is scientific evidence of our interdependence and that the reason we have so much difficulty accepting this is based upon faulty philosophies that have been handed down to us for hundreds of years. He says the most dominant view in Western culture in thinking about the mind originates from a position that goes back to Descarte: that the starting point of the mind is the private, individual, solitary act of thinking. But according to Merleau-Ponty, “I live in the facial expression of the other, as I feel him living in mine.” And Wittgenstein: “We see emotion… We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe the face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features.” According to Iacoboni, mirror neurons explain how the existential phenomenologists got it right and Descartes got it wrong.
I’m not so sure how Iacoboni’s research would fit the idea that thinking and its results are simultaneous. But I suppose it would still make sense. Iacoboni says that scientists and philosophers have long believed that we recognize an emotion before we feel it. But Iacoboni’s research shows that it is actually the other way around. We feel the emotion before we recognize it. The feeling of the emotion shows up on our face and others mirror our facial reaction which makes them feel what it is we are feeling and so it goes. This often goes completely unnoticed by us. Obviously, how we choose to perceive things is going to create an emotional reaction within us that others will read and so it goes. We think the cause and effect are separate, but they are simultaneous.
- We are not alone in experiencing the effects of our thoughts.
- I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts about studying biology.
- I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts about the sirens that are blaring.
- I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts about feeling each other’s energy.
- I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts about my dog needing to go to the restroom.
Especially since a dog doesn’t “go to the restroom”! (It’s raining outside and she has to go out but won’t.)
It’s strange to think that other people are experiencing these sorts of thoughts!
I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts.