Clarity is a feeling

When I began writing poetry in earnest, and my efforts were scrutinized by others, one comment stood out from the rest. Robert Berold, editor of New Coin at the time, after reading some of my poems, simply muttered "Cerebral".

Having one foot in the academic world, and the other in business, I realize more fully that cerebral means neither intelligent nor effective. It means that your sixth chakra is working at the expense of the others.

For better or worse I was born with a strong instinct for clarity. This is not an easy instinct to practise. It estranged me form my parents, took me away from my spiritual tribe, journeyed me through other spiritual tribes and has eventually brought me to a place of peace, where I can practise this instinct with conviction and commitment.

The question "What do you mean?" quickly brings a conversation to bafflement unless the participants have put a fair amount of cerebral activity into their homework of self- knowledge and knowledge of the world.

If you want to know anything about anything you have to think at least a little and reflect on your experience. When you reflect on experience, you create patterns of increasingly aware emotions. As humans we're far more emotional than cerebral, and as a species that's our downfall, because we believe that we're more cerebral than emotional. We're quick to protect individualism, integrity and dignity without doing enough personal scrutiny. We're quick to group, without putting enough energy of insight into group awareness.

We feel, spontaneously. We are aware, spontaneously. Thinking is a choice. We can pilot a way through emotions, choosing where to go and where we refuse to go.

Clarity involves congruence, assonance, agreement, co-operation, kindness and courtesy. You can't say that my clarity is better than yours. A clear word is like a two-edged sword. It will divide as well as create recognition, respect and reciprocity.

To reason is not merely to invoke the rules of logic. Reasoning involves the seat of response, the deepest and most resounding emotions a human is capable of, instinctive and enduring.

Reasoning, in its simplest sense, is thinking with all your heart. It's a meeting point between deliberate thoughtfulness and conscious emotion at the junction where decision is made possible by this exciting confluence of energy.

I love the feeling of reasoning, and I have found myself to be quite alone in this. I expected that in the academic sphere I would find similar intentionality in others, but indeed that experience eluded me more than not.

I am no mountaineer, but I would use the metaphor of having reasoned something through to a satisfactory conclusion as being similar to reaching the summit. Enjoy the view, bask if you wish, but you know that there are so many more to attempt.

There is no conquering of the self. There is no end to stirrings that emanate from the actvity of the imagination, the plight of humanity, the story of this planet, the jumbled emotions of the individual soul.

"Are we clear?" the master-sergeant shouts into the face of the recruit. The recruit knows what the answer has to be.

The living God asks the same question, in a different but no less challenging tone.

Responding is one thing, wording your response another. The link between these is another thread of clarity.