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A few days ago, I wrote about how much we are like the toy monkey with the cymbals: our buttons get pushed and we start to clang. It’s as if everything were pre-programmed. Psychologists have found that this isn’t far from the case. My favorite political psychologist Jonathan Haight puts it this way when summarizing the first section of his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided on Politics and Religion; “intuitions come first and moral reasoning (or rationalization) comes second.” This is also the gist of Daniel Khaneman’s magnus opus, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
One of the implications of this finding is that we need to be serious about developing the proper intuitions. We have to make sure that our lives are full of rituals that instinctivize holiness. I’ve talked about this before and hope to share more research on the subject soon.
The second implication is the one spiritual traditions focus the bulk of their attention on, and that is the need to disconnect (or put a rationally-tended switch in) the wire between the button and the cymbal. The Philokalia (and Orthodoxy more broadly) offers a set of disciplines designed to slow down our moral reactions so that we can shed the light
of True Rationality (i.e. the Logos) on the situation. To use Khaneman’s terminology, we learn to move the responsibility for action from System One to System Two. It takes a special kind of paying attention for this to happen. One of the words we use to describe this process of careful watchfulness is nepsis.
When we learn to quiet our reigns (aka passions or instincts) and minds, we can react to the people and events the moment has given us in a way that manifests the love of God. We cannot “redeem the time” without patience. We cannot love without peace. The whole of the Orthodox Way is designed towards this end: that all our motives become holy/rational and holy and that all our actions become effective. How else can we be a blessing to those whom we serve? How else can we be Christ to a suffering world?
In his book; “Help, I’m Bored in Church: Entering Fully into Worship in the Divine Liturgy“, Rev. Dr. David R. Smith gives us the image of the perfect waiter as a metaphor for the kind of neptic attentiveness we are looking to acquire. Don’t think of the waiter at Applebee’s with all their flair or the gossiping waitress at the locakldiner, much less the counter staff at the Mickiedee’s (although all of these have their place); think of the old-school servants from Dowton Abbey (without all the behind the scenes drama). Efficient. Unobtrusive. Able to anticipate your needs and fulfill them. No agenda but serving you. Now imagine that you are that servant; how can you be that good? It’s a hard skill to master. It takes a combination of the ability to ignore distractions (to include your own desires), know all of the options available to the master, and have enough knowledge and sympathy (i.e. co-thought; this is the “One mind” we pray for during the Divine Liturgy) with the master to be able to anticipate and provide what he wants.
It’s hard to imagine. There is part of us that doesn’t even want to imagine it. Concepts like “servant” and “master” are offensive to the modern mind, especially the American mind … and this leads to another necessary attribute for becoming neptic: humility. Our instinct to serve lies dormant and abused; it needs to be resurrected. Which is another way of saying that our instinct to pride has been flattered and puffed up; it needs to be brought down. We cannot serve to masters.
God has called us to love. Love is not a feeling, but an active mission to serve. Service, like love, requires an object. Whom will we serve? If we are patient, if we are humble, if we have sympathy with our neighbor, we can love and serve him. If we have not developed those things (and they do require effort or ascesis), we may well give lip-service to the “Great Commandment”, but our actions will betray us. The only one whom we will end up serving will be ourselves.
