When the world acts so crazy, you have to wonder at the definitions of mental health.
I’ve noted in the past I’m somewhat a fan of Dr. Thomas Szasz, whose entire career skewered his own profession of psychiatry. His primary contention is that the disease model for mental health was bogus — not just wrong, but wrong-headed. In some cases, people promoted that model knowing it was an outright lie, but it was better than working for a living. Szasz insisted that the vast majority of internal disturbance was moral in nature. People weren’t sick in the head, just morally obtuse, clinging to a sense of entitlement that the world had damned well better get with the program. But in our Wester passive-aggressive world view, attacking the world is for the few with leverage, so the rest of us have to demand coddling by acting like we can’t handle things.
So it’s not that the world is awash in people who can’t handle reality, but the people simply reject reality. Our culture conditions us to think that way.
In the midst of all this, I’ve stumbled across a significant number of people who seemed nutty because they knew the rest of the world was crazy. Everything in their world denies the very real sensory heart perceptions of these folks, so they have no idea why life is off kilter for them. How many people with a great gift of God are locked away in a cultural prison?
Brothers and sisters, we have to bring this stuff back into our world. There’s no reason for you to ape my religion or play echo chamber. My role in all of this isn’t creator, but more like some discoverer who stumbled across ancient ruins. I might be better at reading what the ruins tell us, but that doesn’t invalidate your reading. Come on out of the broken system and see for yourself what these ancient truths have to say.
Grab hold of this truth for yourselves; make it real to you. Reject the world system and live in the truth: We have an extra “mind” in our chests and another one sort of spread around the bottom of our spines. The heart is for hearing from God and seeing His moral fabric in Creation; it was designed to rule. The “mind” at the bottom of your spine (including your digestive system) was granted by God to help us understand how to ameliorate the physical part of our fallen nature. Get these systems coordinated properly and your life will change radically; you’ll see how God can bless us by obeying His revelation.
Yes, all of this is in the Bible, but it’s been obscured by the damnable mythology of the West. It’s our society that’s psychotic.
Your mentioning of the heart and the mind piqued my interest. Forgive me if you’ve posted about this already (I’m a new reader), but I’d be very interested in hearing your take on Luke 10:27 if you have the time. Particularly, I am interested in understanding what the heart, soul, and mind are … what are these faculties?
The long answer is my book, Heart of Faith (free ebook), which was serialized here. The short answer is that Hebrew culture referred to the heart and belly as having distinct capabilities separate from the intellect. You might recognize the old King’s English referring to “bowels” as the seat of feelings, but it’s more complicated than mere emotions. It’s our flesh nature, but the context of any such reference might vary between our lowest fallen nature up to our best redeemed recovery of what our bodies are supposed to tell us. The heart was the seat of the will, our commitments, our faith. I referenced studies that show the heart has it’s own sensory field and it’s own form of intelligence, which is precisely how the Hebrew folks viewed it. Then there’s the spirit, for which we simply have no words, unless we speak of it in parables. In other words, our Western habit of descriptive language and turning references to the heart into a figure of speech is a major failure.
I teach that the Law of Moses is also not what most Western Christians seem to think, but that’s two more books I wrote. At any rate, the basic idea in Luke 10:27 is a commitment of the whole self, not just ritual obedience. The Lawyer quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. The wording is not exactly the same, but that’s not too important in Hebrew thinking. The verse in Deuteronomy captures the essence of Ancient Near Eastern feudal loyalty (not at all like the Western version): You were committed personally and completely with all your will. Your heart’s intelligence is superior to the mind and is capable of grasping the character of God directly in Creation and from His Word. It’s a living, organic union the defies cerebral explanation. While it might have been in practice rare among the Hebrew people, it was nonetheless the expectation God raised for all Israel. In a somewhat different revelation from the time of Noah at least, it was pretty much what God required of all humanity.