As I begin to think around my thesis for a year-long paper on human wholeness, I feel within myself great resistance to addressing the human being as a being, three in one: mind, body, and spirit. In continuing to address these three categories as such, I feel I only perpetuate the language of a divided self even if my intentions are just the opposite. We are quite competent at acknowledging the three, but we fall short in integrating them together into one—the human being (male/female).
In one of my recent classes which happens to revolve around everything food, we found a few words that continued to fall to the forefront of our conversations: desire, practice and reflection.
Or rather more aptly,
Desire {Reflection} Practice
If I could draw arrows going from desire to practice and practice back to desire, I would. In other words, these (desire and practice) I see as symbiotically related through the process of reflection (or lack of reflection). In thinking further about these realities of life, I see potential in these as avenues into which we may nurture and engage human beings towards wholeness and maturity. In lieu of the traditionally platonic categories of mind, body and soul, I wonder how we might engage each other in terms of desire, practice and reflection.
Not that these would become new categories of a human being, but that these might provide a new language through which we consider the human being and a collective humanity. Asking about desire and practices invites the whole being to respond—not just one of the three, but the three in one.
Can this be a way of conceiving human wholeness?
The way of desire, practice and reflection. Becoming human beings with whom our practices align with our desires (our “subtle, inner pleasures”) through our own reflection. And, collectively, can we be a society who is actively participating in an ethos (practices) that aligns with collectively acknowledged desires. The reflection piece is crucial individually and collectively because without reflection we remain in an adolescent or infantile state in which desires are more like cravings and practices are done because our “father” told us to. Without reflection, there is either free reign of cravings and superficial desires and/or there is a robotic, participation in a system that has lost all meaning. What I’m describing here is the infant/adolescent stage in life.
Maturity calls us to something more. It calls us to know (feel, experience, articulate) the deeper desires within us. It also calls us to live (consciously act) in a manner in which we honor these desires. Maturity also recognizes other human beings and creation at large, considering not only one’s own individual desires/practices but engaging the desires/practices of the whole of creation.
More thoughts to come regarding wholeness, and, as always, your thoughts are welcome.
Image {Nicolai Larin, Getty Images}
