Logos
or Eros?
“Look
to your heart and soul first, rather than looking to your head first when choosing.
Rather than what you think…consider instead how you feel. Feel your choices and
decisions. It just might change everything.”
Jeffery
R. Anderson (The Nature of Things—Navigating Everyday Life with Grace)
Deepak
Chopra says that when we make a choice, we change the future. Most of us have
no idea that we hold such power. Most of the time, we feel helpless to impact
anything that’s going on around us—at least I do. But according to some of the
best minds (and hearts) in the world, communally we hold all the power. We
change our personal future when we choose, for instance, what our career goals
are, which schools to attend, and whom to marry. We change the community in
which we live by getting involved, by speaking our minds, and by contributing
our gifts and talents. And we change our country by voting, upholding the laws of
the land, and by volunteering for service. Our choices create our world.
For the
most part, we have more confidence in our heads than we have in our hearts.
Logos over Eros. Sometimes, that is not wise. What we end up with when we rely only on our heads is the creation an environment that is lacking heart—lacking
compassion, lacking consideration for others. When our European forebears came
to this landmass that we call America, they considered it the “new world,”
because it was new to them. As we know, there were people already here, but we
decided it was in our best interests to claim the land belonging to them. It
was a head decision with no heart, and the result of that was basically
genocide. Later, we needed more hands to work the fields and create habitable environments,
so we decided that buying humans was necessary to get the job done. Slavery was
a head decision devoid of heart. When heart came calling, in the form of other
people who saw the plight of the humans we had bought to work our fields and
build our houses and said, “We must stop this wrong thing,” we fought a war
that killed almost a million of our own children. That was most certainly a
decision made without an inkling of heart. When the German people made the
decision to follow Hitler, it was a head-minus-heart choice. Head-only choices too
often turn out to be cruel.
Head
decisions tempered by compassion and consideration for others usually turn out
to be good decisions. We may not get the whole pie, but we will get our fair share
of it. When we take the whole pie, and watch other humans go hungry, we are
making a decision that may momentarily gratify us as we gobble down our pie,
but it will come back to haunt us in the future. Taking the whole pie is like
taking the land, and like taking the humans as slaves—it’s the same instinct,
the same mentality.
American-born author and historian, Aberjhani, wrote: “The job facing American voters…in
the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command
those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it,
to heal the wounds of a nation as opposed to aggravate its injuries, and to secure
for the next generation a legacy of choices based on informed awareness rather
than one of reactions based on unknowing fear.” We've made some very bad head decisions. It's time to choose the path of heart.
We have
an opportunity right now to contemplate what sort of decisions we want to make for
our future. We can continue to demand instant gratification, take the whole pie
for ourselves, and leave others to starve, or we can change our future by
making different choices. Heart choices. Choices that equalize the value of all
humans and all of creation. We can change our own future by changing our
choices. How do you feel about that?
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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