I think neuroscience is going to play a huge part in reshaping our understanding of what it means to be human.
One of the central arguments I make in Discovering the God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity is where we locate the problem. Historically we’ve cast the problem outward onto Satan or God. I make the argument that the problem is located in the mind. I use the story of Scripture to show that the problem arises when humanity “realizes” a perspective of reality that is different from God’s. This dissonance creates the distinction of “sin” which is a disorientation of reality, a lie if you will.
But recently I was reading a very important book that seems to provide further evidence supporting this idea. Its called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Human Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I’ve mentioned it before in regards to how we see community. Mihaly (his first name, because you can even say his last name) explores the idea that the brain operates in a state of chaos.
“Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of the mind is chaos. Without training, and without an object in the external world that demands our attention, people are unable to focus their thoughts for more than a few minutes.
The social roles culture prescribes then take care of shaping our minds for us, and we generally place ourselves on automatic pilot till the end of the day, when it is time again to lose consciousness in sleep. But when we are left alone the basic disorder of the mind reveals itself.”
The mind begins in a state of chaos. I argue that this disorder of the mind does two things. One it locates the problem for us. It gives us a constant physical experience of where the problem actually is. Its not in God. It is in us. Two, it invites us into the God imagination, a way of seeing reality, and to mimic God by bringing order to the chaos. This act of bringing order to the chaos is only possible through love, which is the judgment of good. It begins when we align our logic system to how God sees us.
Mihaly then suggests something startling, which I also touch on in my book. The problem is designed to hide by our own distraction. We in essence participate in our own oppression by avoiding the problem because it is located in the self.
“To avoid this condition, people are naturally eager to fill their minds with whatever information is readily available, as long as it distracts attention from turning inward and dwelling on negative feelings.”
Unless we listen to the problem we can’t solve it.
