On Psychephilia
The mind is beautiful, but sometimes feels like a horror
I’ve been toying with starting a newsletter here for some time. But until it had a name, I couldn’t write. Months without a handle on it until psychephilia was suddenly just there. Just pop, there, psychephilia, from wherever things that pop, pop from. Loving the mind, the soul, the psyche. What a wonder.
It’s clearly a slight play on words with psychedelia, which I will no doubt write about, but the centre of my fascination has never been psychedelics per se, but precisely what they do, right there in that name: manifest the mind. Might as well try something like psychepocalypse while we’re at it, not in the popularized sense of apocalypse as disaster or collapse, but rather in its proper original sense, as unveiling or revealing. The mind, unveiled, revealed, in all its oddness and splendour.
I have not always loved my mind, so this is also a prayer, an invocation. I will love this mind, no matter how much I perceive that it also brings me suffering, no matter how much I’ve manifested a form of psychephobia throughout my life. The mind, turned on itself, is a horrific thing. But a step back, and a wonder that it can do that kind of thing at all.
I mean mind, or psyche, in its broader, more inclusive sense: something more like citta, or bodymind, in Sanskrit. Not divided in the Cartesian sense, where mind and body are dualistic rivals, but rather unified, as in the soul, the unifying factor that weaves together our disparate, unruly parts into some kind of unified whole. Not just the thinking mind, but the feeling mind, the intuiting mind, the vibing mind.
Jesus’ greatest commandment has always struck me:
‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.
– Matthew 22:37-40 (NIV translation)
Heart? Naturally. Soul, of course! But mind? What a record scratch for someone who grew up in a religious tradition that believed the mind to be wicked and wayward. “Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out” was a way to maintain the borders of fundamentalist churches against those slick-talking city folk. The mind must be tamed, it must submit to authority. Never trust a smarty-pants.
But Jesus explicitly names the mind as a way we love God.1 And in obedience to his command, I found the church that bears His name to be less and less hospitable to my sincerest attempts. It was just like being a schoolkid who was too smart, who experienced the agonizing double bind of the school saying that they valued the mind—above all else!—while in the real social setting of my peers, I was excluded because of it.
So psychephelia is already slightly misleading, because it’s not about loving the mind, but loving God2 with the mind. Psychetheophilia. A bit too unwieldy, not that catchy. But that’s what I mean when I speak of loving the mind: loving that I can love God, and love my neighbour, with it. The mind may serve.
But the theophilic properties of the mind notwithstanding, we don’t need such a grandiose justification for mind to be a good, if bewildering, part of this experience of mind-in-body incarnation. When I identified with mind, it felt horrific, because I couldn’t tame it. But it never needed to be tamed, but freed, freed to serve. So I’ll try.
He did not have in mind what we have in mind by mind, but it wasn’t wholly other, either.
By “God,” I simply mean existence itself, the ground of being, capital-c-Consciousness. I like the late James Oroc’s description:
The descriptions given of the nature of God by virtually all mystics throughout history, irrespective of their culture, are in themselves remarkably similar—a void that is actually a plenum, an essential emptiness that is contradictorily a mystical fullness, a conscious cosmic Oneness of energy, information, and potential.
– James Oroc, The New Psychedelic Revolution: The Genesis of the Visionary Age