I’m new to this blogging thing and thought I would use these first three posts to talk about the mind, body, and spirit. I find most Traditions tend to have an emphasis on one of these. To me all three have to be treated with respect and held in equal value. This first post is about my process for the mind and why I use it.
Throughout all of my transitions, I've had relationships that I deeply value with people from different worlds. The martial arts world has been one of the most important to me, and where I have many friends. It was in that world that I really experienced the influence of philosophy on people's daily lives and people's spiritual lives.
In my portion of the martial arts world, most of the influences came from a secular or even atheist perspective. In order to be authentic and maintain those relationships, I listened for the language of the philosophy around me. I learned how philosophy helped to hone and guide people who didn’t have an overt spiritual life. This was interesting to me so I continued to explore what philosophy had to offer. Interestingly I’ve found that philosophy gave me something totally different then it seemed to give the people around me.
Most importantly, I found a language in philosophy for the ‘mind’ portion of the mind-body-spirit trinity. This allowed me to speak with people in their language and allowed me access to a whole new set of wisdom that I never would have had if I hadn't explored what philosophy had to offer. These sources of wisdom have transformed how I interact with my mind, my body, and my spirit. Having this language gave me words and processes to talk about some of the wounds and traps of the mind that come up when untangling the mess of a spiritual transition.
The practice and application of philosophy is a messy and painful thing. It involves standing your ground in argument even when you’re not going to win. It means examining and re-examining the essential moral and spiritual questions of the world from the lens purely of the mind. This process didn't end with me getting answers the way I thought it would. Rather it taught me that every philosophy or way of living has its own set of problematic and down right wrong answers.
This isn't the lesson that most fear, the one that breeds contempt, arbitrary behavior or nihilism. Instead it taught me that when I heard talk of the indescribable or the incomprehensible, the great mysteries of life, these are actually questions the mind cannot answer. They are questions for the body and the spirit. I’ve argued till the sun came up about the nature of will or the existence of good and evil. None of these conversations came to any sort of meaningful conclusion that didn’t involve a great deal of faith and assumption. It's these relationships that have helped me figure out that the philosophy I’ve built for myself is just one lens through which I interpret and interact with the world. When I recognized that this way would never answer my questions alone, I was able to put it into my tool kit instead of making it my life. After all the time arguing, I had learned where my mind goes and how it likes to interact with the rest of my being.
More importantly, it helped me to know where my mind and logic can be applied to my life and where that simply won’t be enough to feed me. This shift has given me a consistent and reliable voice to the mind in my life. This has given me a place to check in, a lens to look at the things I’m doing and experiencing. This view will tell me if things are way out of whack. As long as I don't mistake that voice for the end-all be-all of my decision making and experience, then it can serve to free me up in moments of absolute chaos. I have a deeply held and explored “logical” voice for any situation, a voice that I can trust as an honest expression of one of the parts of my being, and this allows me to focus on how whatever is happening is affecting my body and spirit. This voice of the mind is part of a larger picture. Philosophy can be one of the rocks to building a fulfilling life alongside the physical and the spiritual beings in all of us.
Ian Pirkey