The human mind is ineffable. As I was saying in the forgoing post, there is nothing that can be said about it, nor is there anything that can be known about it. In this way, it is a true image of God, Who is likewise ineffable. No, the only thing we can judge and analyze is the product of the mind, that is, thought, and all of this judgment and analysis is done by means of thought. Modern psychology has no access to the mind itself. All it can do is analyze thoughts and draw inferences from thoughts concerning the health of the mind. It goes without saying, however, that all that has been accomplished in this case is to infer concerning the health of the thoughts and thought patterns (families of thoughts, we might say). The mind remains unknowable. Psychology claims to have access to the "subconscious" through a study of thought, but this, ultimately is a matter of faith. There is no evidence that this claim is actually true. For the most part, therapy is shown to help patients by means of exerting control over patterns of thought. Recovering memories, and uncovering the roots of unconscious motivation reveals nothing about the mind, in the same way that revealing the contents of a very deep hole, and bringing those contents out into the full light of day, reveals nothing about the hole. What relation do the contents of the hole have to the hole? Are the contents of the hole products of the hole? Did the hole produce them?
When we say the "mind" we mean, of course, the soul of man. This is not to suggest that the mind is all that there is to the soul. Actually, far from it. According to traditional Scholastic philosophy, for example, the mind (intellect) is numbered among the three high faculties of the soul along with Will and Memory. This is also not to suggest that if one "loses one's mind" then one has lost one's soul. The expression "to lose one's mind" really has nothing at all to do with the mind. It means that one has lost the ability to think rationally. Again, it is an assessment of thought and the powers of thought, not of the mind.
For all of the aforementioned reasons, some branches of Eastern philosophy, most notably Buddhism, rejects the reality of the self altogether. This does not mean that followers of this way of thinking reject identity or the reality of the individual, but only that they realize that there is nothing essentially that they can point to, which is constitutive of the self. According to their way of thinking, the self is not so a thing, but a process, like a river. We call South America's largest river the Amazon. We give it an identity, even though that which constitutes it is constantly changing, never the same. In the same way, the self is constantly changing and never the same, as can be observed by the "river of thought" of flows through it.
Christianity, though embracing realism as a philosophical basis for practical purposes, recognizes that contingent beings are not real in the sense that Being (God) is real. This is the very reason why St. Dionysius the Areopagite makes the rather shocking statement that it is just as true to say that God is not as it is to say that God is. It is not that the God Being is simply many, many degrees greater than ours. No, it is "Being" in an entirely different sense. The only way that we understand being in this world is through the mechanism of cause and effect. Every being is a cause, and every being is an effect. We cannot conceive of being aside from these relationships, so we use language that suggests these relationships even in reference to God.
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