LEAVE TO REASON AND REASON TO LIVE
edition March 2009
Common thread weaving through all of humanity is our pursuit of a better life. We all aim at improving the quality of our lives, we want to earn more money, we want to feel more loved, we want to love others more, we want our work to be more satisfying and enjoyable, to live in more grander surroundings; as matter of fact approximately 80% of the things we desire are most certainly a state of mind, an emotion and only 20% are physiological needs – food, clothing, shelter, sleep and sex; judging from Maslows hierarchy of needs – the others are safety needs, belonging/love needs, esteem needs, knowing/understanding, aesthetic needs, self-actualisation, transcendentory needs in that order. Just think about it; isn't even the pursuit of money aimed at guaranteeing you happiness or any other of those needs? All of our experiences make us discover that what makes us MEN is the desire for wholeness and infinity, and that this truly opens life's drama when we begin to give an answer to this question, then a life begins; a life that meets our life. We begin to discover ourselves. It goes without saying – since what we are really looking for is a state of mind – that by implication, most of the answers we are looking for are hidden in our minds: from ideas, experiences to confidence and inner peace. That's why it's so important to explore how your mind works, to know it intimately in order to gain the ability to create the information we need to realize our goals and also the ability to apply this information in productive and meaningful ways. The key to improving the quality of our lives lies in learning how to think and see things in new ways leading to fresh discoveries and inventions, becoming more original in our thinking and using our creativity more effectively. We have to start thinking of something in a way that no one ever has before; we have to think like geniuses. Geniuses are able to see what many miss. They see possibilities in the impossible; they pose questions to themselves and make mental connections to seemingly unrelated issues. It is necessary that we all get engaged in the struggle to take nothing for granted, to take nothing as obvious, to become aware for everything so that what is heard and seen is judged and evaluated, and to even create something new by going beyond the conventional, by rising above tradition, the environment or what we now call the dominant opinion. I once heard an eight year old boy narrate to us how he thought a classmate of his was scatter brained. "Every time we tell him to choose between a five and a ten shilling coin, he chooses the bigger coin." Of course the bigger coin is that of a lesser value. All the boys laugh at his inability to see through the prank. The next day, they tease him again in the same way, and they laugh themselves to the ground, and they do it again day after day. Now, I am quite certain that if most of us were teachers in that school and happened to catch whim of the mischief, we would admonish the boys and put an immediate end to it. Isn't that what you would do? After all, were they not inflicting some long-term psychological damage on the boy for a fault that wasn't really his? Now that's what we would term as the dominant opinion. Now imagine that this young man adhered to his decision with a conscious awareness. What would have happened had he picked the smaller coin the first instance? Would the other boys have laughed? Would they have repeated the silly prank the following day, and the day after that, and the day after that, for a whole week, or for the entire duration that they did? Assuming that they were at it for two weeks, isn't the boy better off with the seventy shillings than the ten shillings he would have gotten had he chosen the smaller coin? Who should really be laughing? That's a classical example of what is now referred to as 'thinking out of the box'; the ability to see the 'bigger picture', to see the simplicity in the complex, and the complexity in the simple. This is the school of thought that this column intends to lay a foundation for; together, we are going to open our minds to remove all prejudices or mental barriers. Some of the debates that we shall tackle will border on the very fringes of ethics, morality and secularism, no doubt that they will be controversial. The important thing here is that unlike numerous motivational books you might have read, I don't have any magical change your life answers, nor will I pretend to have uncovered some insights that may assist you; mine will just be to flip the coin; to present to you the alternative scenario; the unconventional view you may not have considered. At the end of the day, the decision on which route to take is solely yours. Take the illustration of the boy for example; whichever coin he chooses, there are pros and cons. I fronted the scenario in which the boy chooses the larger coin in order to tap into the long run monetary benefit, but remember that the ridicule is bound to affect him in one way or the other. In choosing the larger coin, an individual should weigh out the cons of the effects of the ridicule against the pros of the monetary gains – believe you me, the decision is not so rosy to some once they realize that they have to put up with being labeled as stupid, or being called names. So this column is intended not as a directive, or a pointer to the direction that everyone should embark on, but as a calling to a commitment that should get anybody mobilized and make him decide to consider everything – as a working hypothesis, you have to set yourself to judge – and not just theoretically; how you organize a trip, how you listen to music, sports, your relationship with a girlfriend or a boyfriend, the problems you tackle at work, at school, at home or the urgent needs you see for society, the social sensitivity that comes more and more out in the open, the problems of social justice. It's a commitment to become a new MAN – not a new MAN because you have a new ethic – ethics, morals, traditions should be beside the point here – but precisely a new conception of MAN, a new conception of self and your way of living, of your own existence. This is the true revolution; the only revolution in history, a revolution in the very concept of the 'I' of the self, a revolution of the very conception of 'one', a revolution in the very concept of 'being' of 'existence'. This revolution is the first factor in the new experience of humanity, this desire that we find ourselves with, a deep need for fullness in our hearts, a desire for truth, for beauty, a desire to build something, a desire we cannot escape from; without which we cannot be content. We try to be content but we can't. It would be easy to reduce the breadth of the desire, like we turn down the volume on a radio, we have often tried, but it's not possible in the end, because its inscribed in our nature, its there before any movement of our freedom, we find ourselves with it, and it gnaws away inside us in so many ways; in the needs we have, like something that springs up from the depths of our hearts; they are needs that have many forms; sadness, loneliness, desire for fullness, the need to be loved or boredom, there are so many forms, but they are all forms of this desire that we have inside us, like a vibration, its what we have learned to identify with the word 'heart', a word that sums up this series of needs we feel inside us and which, if we take seriously, becomes truly the criterion of judgment with which we approach reality time and again, every morning. This heart is the greatest affirmation we can make of man's dignity. It constitutes us and no one can change his heart, it thrusts us into reality so as to discover, in everything that we come across, whether or not it corresponds to this desire of our heart. This column is going to assist us first, to take note of what our heart is; once we have done that, we cannot set aside the question of our desires, for no one can change that, not even those that have tried. Secondly, this column will assist us, once we have realized the implications of the heart, to finally be able to make a human journey in life. What we shall discover together is a road, a way to follow, in which our hearts will be the criterion, not decided by me, but a criterion we shall all recognize within ourselves, in our own individual experiences, and thus it will push us continually to verify in experience what corresponds to us. And when we begin to do this, everything that happens, even when wrong, even when things do not go as we expect, everything comes to form part of our journey, part of a construction, like bricks with which little by little we build our own lives. We begin to glimpse the bigger picture; where everything is useful, even when you go wrong, and this is really spectacular – that everything can serve for building life. So we learn what truth is, because even when someone says 'this is not it', it means that something is there, that something true is affirming itself, something beautiful, even though he has not yet met it; it means that something does not correspond, but there is something that corresponds, and so when we meet it, when we have the grace to find that unique, exceptional presence, in which we begin to see, to glimpse that correspondence, then our 'I' is exalted. And we begin to experience freedom, and to understand its nature, so much so that we carry its adjective – 'free' – stamped in our gaze and our heart, the truth of our heart will have set us free. 'Freedom is the energy to adhere to the real, to being. It is adhering to something other within yourself that completes you, makes you grow, builds and fulfills your person' – Fr. Giussani. This freedom, which follows the true, the beautiful, and the good that it recognizes as present, is the answer to those who chase the 'conscience' of a nation that doesn't exist, basically scorning the people in the concreteness of its hope for a new human experience. Understanding this more fully is a good reason to pick up your Sunday edition every end month – to journey with me; to live to reason and to reason to live. Share 
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