Transforming Rationality into Brilliant Sanity

There are people rioting in first world countries, presidents dog-fighting each other on public television, vaccers and anti-vaccers all demanding that they are wholly right and the others on the left or right are dead wrong. The only thing that’s dead today is rationality, and we can thank God for that! The process of Transforming Rationality into Brilliant Sanity is happening daily, all you need to do is look out your window to see the process unfolding before our very eyes.

RATIONALITY IS DEAD!

The world is transforming and so are you. Both of these are happening at the same time, despite much resistance from many people who could be described as those who are sleeping. Blissfully unaware that any such transformation is occurring. If we look contemplatively at our world today, and the transformations we and our world have been through it becomes much easier to see.

Contemplative psychotherapy and Buddhist psychology teach us the concept of what they call “brilliant sanity.” In Christianity we call it the Soul or Holy Spirit. It is a much higher form of thinking than any rational or intellectual pursuit in my opinion. Here is the good news about how this Brilliant sanity is changing or should I say transforming the world from the inside out. At the most fundamental and basic level, we are already awake and unconfused.

Mark L Lockwood

As more and more people suffer emotionally in this ordered, constructed and rational era we are living in we can immediately start to see that what we thought was rational is no longer working. Our politicians, our big corporates and even our religious institutions have been acting more and more irrational as the decades have past. Just turn on your television at news hour to see if this is true today. 

Our churches, mosques and temples have endorsed mass killings for centuries even though we were under the impression that love underpinned our beliefs. The problem was that it was love for self and not others which is the opposite of how the world works. Selfishness opposes nature. 

We are emerging out of a rational era. We are awakening to something new and different. Something wonderful, new and necessary. The rational era has given us more technological advancement than ever. When rationalism was born we began to see great advancements in medicines, industry and technology. War, politics, religion and education took drastic new turns to inform and educate. Information today is so freely available and everything that spread around the world with the invention of the printing press, now spreads like wildfire on the internet. We have so much information that there is little you won’t be able to know with the click of a button.

Contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire, by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete. 

Thomas Merton

The great caveat of rationalism

As a Perennial or Universally inclusive Christian today I have to accept the fact as the biggest religion on planet earth is that what we thought was rational action at the time, has become irrational in our understanding today. We butchered thy neighbour if he dressed differently, or even looked, spoke or worshiped the God of his or her understanding differently. Brother has always led brother like a Lamb is and was led to the slaughter and we rationally ignored loving thy neighbour or turning the other check. In fact we ignored most of what Christ taught us and even believed everyone else in the world was irrational, yet this knowledge was nothing short of insane! Today Christianity is also Transforming Rationality into Brilliant Sanity and going alone for the ride. It is really inspiring to see the world humbly transforming itself together, without the ego this time. The meek or egoless really do look like will inherit the world!

What seems rational at first is not always how it ends up in reality and the consequences of our dark and violent history proves this. Without a contemplative psychology we are able to be quite rational, but it does not deliver wisdom, emotion or any form of deep empathy for otherness and is-ness. It was rational to go to war with the world twice. It seemed rational to kill all the prophets and Saviours and teachers of love. At least at the time. What seemed rational once to the wisest minds on the earth seems like such folly and foolishness today. The love and values of humanity have been traded for moral disengagement again and again in the name of rationality. 

The Rational World is dead

If you try an rationalise this life you’re going to end up disappointed. Philosophy has a dark side, bathed in a sense of hopelessness and moral emptiness for the human condition. Philosophers like Descartes himself practiced and advocated vivisection which involved the brutal and continuous torture of animals that were often heard screaming in his rooms. This loveless torture of nature continues today on an even broader scale than the intellectual man who could see that nature and animals had emotions, feeling and deep value. He had little or not ability for a contemplative perspective of himself, nature and the world he lived in. 

Perhaps too much of it is focused on rationality and knowledge and it leaves out entirely, the musical and the abstract parts of life that are as much a part of reality as anything defined as rational. The questions of fact or fiction have opened us up to dichotomous thinking we we see everything existing as polar opposites in a black and white world; something this blue sphere is certainly not. There is too much middle ground for this to be true today. The Hubble telescope for example has left us feeling more lost than we were in a universe that is far to broad and big than we can ever begin to comprehend. Rationally at least. 

Contemplative psychotherapy and Buddhist psychology teach us the concept of what they call “brilliant sanity.” It is a much higher form of thinking than any rational or intellectual pursuit in my opinion. Here is the good news about how this Brilliant sanity is changing or should I say transforming the world from the inside out. At the most fundamental and basic level, we are already awake and unconfused. Brilliant sanity is innate and not something that needs to be created or found or gained, but it is rather an already-present reality in our state of being. Yes it lies dormant until such time as the person or persona is stable and strong enough to contain the brilliant sanity that is changing the self and the world all at the same time. 

Transforming Rationality to Brilliant Sanity

For a time brilliant sanity can be covered over by the ego, our defences and ultimately or confusion but soon enough their is a flowing of consciousness, an awaking to this brilliance in the depths of every man, creature and I guess anything with any consciousness. The days of becoming more and more rational are dead.

“I think that any time of great pain is a time of transformation, a fertile time to plant new seeds.” –  Debbie Ford

As the world embraces this business of Transforming Rationality into Brilliant Sanity we need to become more spiritually eccentric and open if we want to go along for the ride. In Pauls letter to the Romans some 200 decades ago he reminds us to “not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God. This is where your contemplative intelligence together with an open heart and love for God, for self and every kind of otherness is taking us today. You just need to stop and look around long enough to see it unfolding!

For more information on Transforming Rationality into Brilliant Sanity get in touch centerforhealingandlife@gmail.com