Exploring promises as a tool of growth. Part 1

Exploring promises as a tool of growth

(A theological reflection in 8 parts)

Exploring promises as a tool of growth

Part 1: Face up to reality: this is a severe struggle

One of the greatest difficulties in living a spiritual life is the problem of the divided mind. That is, the inner struggle between your desire to live the life that you approve of, according to your faith, and the life that you feel pulled towards, through your human nature.

Much of this is the problem bequeathed to us by evolution. Evolution is a ruthlessly efficient survival mechanism that is entirely focussed on your self-interest. It stands to reason that pursuing your own self-interest is likely to lead us into selfish behaviour, which is the essence of immorality. Evolution is, of course, an amoral mechanism – that is, it has no interest in morality, it just does whatever works in terms of survival. At one point in our evolutionary development, our brains were not capable of reflecting on our own behaviour, we just did what came instinctively. As our brains developed into the wonderful thing they are today, we did not replace our “old brain” with a new improved “new brain”, we just added the new onto the old. Hence, much of our behaviour comes from the struggle between the older instinctive impulses and our new moral ability to reflect on and judge our own behaviour. Where our judgement falls will depend on whether we are able to overcome our selfish impulses and so do those things that we approve of according to our moral principles, or will those insistent voices of self-interest over-power our best intentions?

This inner battle is one which we all understand – though some individuals will have a very well-developed moral sense while others have barely begun to question their selfish impulses. It raises the question of what is it that we really want to do? Is it that we really do want to indulge in our primeval impulses for sex, power, domination, revenge, popularity etc but will not allow ourselves to do this? Or is it that we really do want to live up to our highest ideals and are unwillingly being dragged down by desires that we really do wish we could leave behind? Understanding this inner struggle is certainly of some help in winning it – if we really do want our high ideals to win. We are often confused and humiliated by our own weaknesses – we really did want to do the right thing, but somehow we ended giving in to behaviour that we really don’t approve of. How could this happen when we were so intent on doing the right thing? Well, it’s because the primeval “old brain” impulses just don’t ever go away, and when our reasoned, moral mind tries to tell the old brain what to do, it’s like telling a toddler in the middle of a tantrum that, no, they can’t have an ice-cream now. This insight doesn’t remove the need to win this argument, but it might give a little more mental space and energy when we are confounded by the sheer persistence of that inner voice to please yourself regardless of the consequences. This also gives us an indication that the way to win this battle is rarely going to be through a one-off telling ourselves that we’re going to do the right thing in future; we are likely going to have to train ourselves through repeated endeavour in order to reach the goals that we ultimately approve of.