Beyond Thought and Reason
Increasingly I find the name of a person on the tip of my tongue but try as I might am unable to remember the name. Asking someone else doesn't always help as they too have exactly the same problem. As much as we pool our thoughts and make useful associations regarding the person the name still evades us. In the end we just stop trying. Then some time later, having given up all hopes of remembering the name, suddenly it pops into our heads, pristine and fresh, with no problem at all. Many scientists claim, that following long spells of tussling at their desks working on mathematical equations and giving up hope of a final resolution, they experience a creative leap of imagination whilst in the bath, walking in the wood or getting on a bus. A similar thing happened when I first tried to discern the images buried in the 3D Computer Graphics Magic Eye pictures. All the advice from those who had succeeded was worse than useless and only served to make me more frustrated. Try as I might no image emerged until I stopped trying to work it out and just went blank. It did indeed seem like a magic eye had sprung into action once I stopped trying so hard to search out the image.
An Archbishop was once asked how many hours each day he spent in prayer to which he answered ‘none’. He spent many hours thinking about the prayer and 'waiting on God' but the praying itself was very short. Contemplatives from all faiths and throughout time have known the preparation and concentration that precedes the actual time of prayer or moments of mystic union. They have stressed that those who want to follow this path must not do so lightly but be prepared to commit themselves to a long and often arduous journey.
Percy Bysshe Shelley in 'A Defence of Poetry' wrote: 'Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known: imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole'. Through our reason and intellect we explore our everyday world by examining fragments of that world whereas in prayer and meditation we can experience the wholeness beyond space and time in an eternal now. Like Shelley, modern physicists and contemplatives want both to explain and experience the essence of the universe. Whether it is the imagination of a Shelley, the creative genius of an Einstein or the contemplation of a mystic there comes a time when the reasoning of the thinking mind must be silenced to allow the underlying and fundamental wholeness underpinning the manifested world to be experienced.
Poets, scientists and mystics often pose a challenge to the mainstream of religious thought having their existence on the creative margins of human thought and experience. What they all demonstrate though is that there is a time for concentrated thinking and reasoning but more importantly a time when we must go beyond both.
The Unitarian - June 2005 - "Thought for the Month" by Joan Wilkinson