Thinking in a New Way

Statue of the virgin

Royaumont Abbey

Feb. 24. A dinner conversation with Neal. 

If I wish to be in a new way, I need to think in a new way.

This means thinking in a way that’s unfamiliar; it does not look like thinking or feel like thinking. It is true perception, intelligent perception; yet I don’t recognize it. It comes from somewhere else. It has to be so new to me that when I encounter it I don’t initially realize that it’s a kind of thought.

One has to begin to understand what thought and intelligence mean in a new way. The books aren’t going to help; the terms aren’t going to help. One has to start to discover a new language; one’s own language within one’s self that comes from a native intelligence within Being—rather than intellect.

What is this native intelligence within Being? 

Being is a whole thing that has the capacity to be intelligent in the way that our individual parts don’t. What does it mean, then, to have a new intelligence? I need to encounter that concept and use it to explore how I am inside. I can’t go on with the same old thing: I have to have something new born within me.

It comes from within me; and so I discover there is somewhere else  within me, a place—places— I did not know. They are a new landscape, a different landscape, which perceives intelligently but differently and thinks intelligently but differently.

I need to become more sensitive to the new faculty of thinking. It consists of new organs— the awakened intelligence of sensation, the awakened intelligence of feeling. I can develop an intimate relationship with this new way of thinking.

I try to bring words to this afterwards to allow a potential for an encounter. The encounter is with sensation and with feeling; it isn’t with intellect. Unfortunately, if we point directly to that, then we think we know what it means. This is a difficulty, because the point about this capacity is that it’s just that that we don’t know what it means that leads us in the right direction. An inhabitation takes place in which it’s not the same—the energy that animates Being is not the same.

A new intelligence has to come from something more whole. But it’s not a thing we’re looking for. The information comes from the whole, not from one part. One needs to look at all the information one is getting from one’s sensation and one’s mind and one’s feeling.

We come together in the hope of discovering a new intelligence within ourselves. That’s why we work together; we’re not coming together to remember ourselves or do movements or meditate, we’re coming together to try to discover this new intelligence within ourselves and between us.  

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.