The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time by Gregory Bottaro

Author:Gregory Bottaro [Gregory Bottaro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Beacon Publishing
Published: 2018-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

“Bound to the external world, he also transcends it.” We exist with the co-occurrence of two principles within us: spiritual and bodily. This is the reality that can relieve the discomfort of our mindfulness paradox. Freedom exists within the spiritual principle of our existence. It is a faculty of our spiritual principle, not our bodily one. This is good news for people who suffer from disease or disorder based in the body (which also includes the brain and the great effect our bodies can have on our emotions and the thoughts in our mind). As long as we are conscious, we have access to a spiritual dimension of human freedom.

This freedom is active when we think about the goals we want to live for. Patients who suffer from addiction may not have much freedom in the deepest throes of their addiction—the moment when they actually take the drug or the drink—but they have freedom before that. They can choose to get themselves into treatment, to attend meetings, or to avoid people, places, and things that lead to the point of no freedom. The “external world” that a person is bound to in this case includes a brain that is so affected by biochemicals that the reasoning part of it can be turned off at times. The part that transcends the external world, the spiritual principle of the addict, is the part that can choose not to place himself in that situation in which his prefrontal cortex is inoperable. Another way to understand choice is to see it as a kind of judgment. We can make transcendent judgments about how to direct our lives.

In many ways, our thoughts and bodies are determined by the physical, material world. Your thoughts are affected by the chemicals in your brain. You read already that simply moving your head in a certain direction can affect the opinion you have about something. Every second, there are thousands of physical interactions happening at the microscopic level that dictate a lot of what we experience.

Along with the moment-by-moment effect of these determining interactions there is a transcendent capacity to know truth in an abstract way and make choices to move in a certain direction with our actions.

We can call these two levels transcendent and immediate. These words will be helpful to answer our question about mindfulness practice. In order to pick up this book, you made a transcendent choice to learn something new. You may have decided there is something to be gained by reading this book—there was something you wanted to add to or change about your life. At the same time, the thing you decided to read about teaches you to let go in the immediate moment of what needs to change. Holding on to those thoughts through autopilot ruminations and the doing mind works against your goals. In a way, letting go of what needs to change will help you change what needs to change.

This is a very subtle and almost imperceptible distinction. In each moment, you may be aware of your transcendent judgment to let go of immediate judgment.

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