If God doesn’t capture your imagination, He doesn’t have your heart.
I don’t feel competent to propose a psychological profile for people who live a heart-led existence. Jesus used parables because it defied description. At some level I can offer some characterization of what it’s like for me, and I can share some things I’ve learned from others as they attempt to verbalize their own experience. It sounds just like everything our society marginalizes as somehow inferior to their mythical objective reality.
Does a heart-led existence sometimes bleed over into mere imagination? Of course it does. How would you keep them separate? I maintain that common perceptions of reality are broken for the simple reason that “reality” is shadowy and untrustworthy. I believe the record of revelation is replete with incidents where God retooled His own Creation in ways that allowed people to see He could do it. The Hebrew nation departing Egypt was not a gladiator revolt; these folks had been slaves. Yet they managed to humble what was then the most powerful military force in that part of the world without using armed resistance. And while Egypt’s ruler sounded like a maniac, the Egyptian people had seen enough to fear things that were way beyond their control.
Any way you slice it, common perceptions of reality don’t make the grade. The cultural legacy of objective reality cannot account for some very real things that have happened and continue to happen. Anecdotes abound and genuine experts are unable to explain, or even theorize, how these things happen. The ragged edges of reality can’t be cleanly cut off to suit the Western prejudice.
So maybe the real problem is not what we can say we know for certain, or even with some reasonable measure of certainty. Maybe the real problem is claiming that it is possible to know against a very certain truth that human awareness is iffy in the first place. A certain level of agnosticism is far more mature than a childish insistence on things precisely defined as real versus unreal. Once you dismiss the mythology of objective reality, it’s bound to bring out some strangeness, but this is truly the best we can do.
I don’t need to carry around some internal divider between truth and fiction; I carry a divider of what I can use and what I cannot use for myself. That is true moral discernment.
As I push forward through life with an expectation that varies significantly from those around me, I don’t waste that much time to worrying what they’ll think of me. I’m too busy exploring the sense of peace and contentment for which they clamor and can’t seem to find. A very long time before I used the language of heart-mind awareness, when the best I had was the language of spiritual conviction, I decided pursuing conviction was the only answer I needed. If something matched my convictions in some particular context, screw everything else. There was a peace that touched things inside of me that no stimulus or drugs could reach. I found pieces of myself that had been missing my whole life up to then.
The language wasn’t important. The knowledge that science has found the heart to be a sensory organ with it’s own neural network and nodes of concentrated awareness simply provides the factual basis for what I was already doing. Reading how other people experienced that heart-mind awareness didn’t make me like them; it simply showed me that there was a name for what I was supposed to be like. It gave my convictions a more concrete shape, a more powerful reality as a store of ultimate truth that could be shined into more and more dark corners of my soul.
You should hardly be surprised, then, that I have little interest in anything that tends to pull me away from that kind of awareness. My experience is that TV in any shape or manifestation is some kind of evil hypnosis carefully designed to shut down my heart-mind awareness. There is some scientific data to help explain that, but it’s my very powerful reality that entertainment is generally harmful. There aren’t many ways I can structure a context and select what’s on a TV screen that won’t interfere with a heart-mind awareness. The same can be said for a great many other forms of entertainment in our culture. They are frankly painful. It kills off my sense of peace by closing off whatever it is many people think of as my wild imagination.
You like your TV? Fine, but I find it very difficult to fellowship with folks who okay with all those forms of entertainment. The problem is not that I’m some kind of controlling grouch seeking to make you see things my way. You can do to yourself whatever you like; it won’t hurt me as long as I can get away from it myself. But if that’s where you live, you won’t be able to share very much with me. So far, just about every form of entertainment available in our society is alien to the wild imagination of God’s Presence burning in my soul. Not just alien, but downright pedestrian and cheap by comparison. I find that people who belong to that alien world don’t do well me. I’m not going to inflict my inner vision on anyone who can’t use it. Just be aware that we can’t fellowship much if you belong to that. My imagination is too rich and real to fit into your entertained mind.
I don’t care what you call it; I know where I belong and I won’t be pulled away from it.
