Anything could be true. The so-called laws of nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. “If I wished,” O’Brien had said, “I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.” Winston worked it out. “If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.” Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: “It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.” He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a “real” world where “real” things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
This is a passage from George Orwell’s novel 1984, in which a distopian world has evolved from rampant and radical socialism taken to an extreme. The state controls everything, and alters history to bolster the infallibility of its figurehead, Big Brother. A permanent hierarchy has been established, with the proletariats at the bottom and the Inner Party members at the top. Capitalism is non-existent, as is the free exchange of ideas. The central government tells people what to think, what to say, what to feel, what to do. And to ensure this, “Big Brother is Watching.” A pervasive, ubiquitous monitoring of humanity ensures the enslavement of people, as well as the compliance with Party philosophy and mantras. The most essential element of maintaining their iron grip on humans is the practice of doublethink, which means in essence to hold two contradictory statements in one’s mind at the same time, and believe both to be true. It requires the destruction of critical thinking and logic, the denial of objective reality, and the complete relativism that whatever the Party says is true must be true even when it contradicts observable phenomena.
“Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.” In other words, only events identically reproduced in a mind other than one’s own can be defined as “real.” Now, this is an ultimately fallacious viewpoint. True, no person ever experiences events exactly the same as another person, but that does not render the event irrelevant and meaningless. It merely underlines the fact that while there is a fundamental reality, no person can ever experience the absolute truth of it since each person views reality through the lens of their own personality, as educated by experiences, schooling, psychological influences, and beliefs. As hideous as this perspective is, there is a grain of truth in the maelstrom of deceit and despair. In this life, we can never share ourselves with anyone else, and thus never truly experience reality. And this may be a depressing thought, though not to the extent that a nihilist would feel. For there is a remedy. And here again we find the fundamental uniqueness of Christianity.
Christianity holds that in order to be saved one must be united with the Spirit of God; not merely in a metaphorical sense, or moral sense, but in actual fact. The Spirit of God, once invited, comes to abide within the human frame of the convert and, if given free reign, will animate the person’s body and soul to accomplish the will of God through the vehicle of the convert’s humanity. As uncomfortable as that may seem at first blush, this is actually quite a paradigm shift. For humans are no longer “on our own,” in the sense that each individual has a separate perspective on reality. The phrase “to be alone with one’s thoughts” when considered rationally is utterly redundant, for no human being has ever been anything other than alone with one’s thoughts, at least as far as other people are concerned. I can never “get into another man’s head,” “walk a mile in his shoes” as the sayings go. And we have such sayings precisely because it’s a sheer impossibility to express with total accuracy the inner workings of someone’s brain. This, incidentally, is why we revere the writers and poets who, to some extent, bridge the gap between their thoughts and ourselves. We are thrilled to catch a glimpse into the mind of others. “Every man is an island,” and so whenever we can find a bottle floating in the tide that gives insight into another island, it’s a slight lessening of the interminable loneliness that thoughtful people feel.
How does Christianity factor in? Simply by uniting our thoughts, our souls, our emotions, with God. And God, if He exists, created Existence. Therefore, He exists outside of the physical universe in which we find ourselves trapped. And since He created us to be like Him in some way, and He Himself consists of multiple persons which share an unbroken communion of thoughts and will, then several conclusions may be drawn. First, that if there were any way of uniting the thoughts and emotions of two separate persons, God would have the knowledge and ability to do so. Second, that if one person could be united with Him, and another person could be united with Him, than in a way those two people are united with each other. Imperfectly, to be sure; not because God is imperfect, but merely because their union with Him is imperfect. At least, while they exist in the universe. But here we see that we are no longer “alone with our thoughts.” We have company inside our heads and hearts.
Now this can be distressing in one sense because, having lived by ourselves for our whole lives, and having a predisposition to “look out for No. 1,” the idea that we no longer have sole claim to our souls is unsettling and difficult to come to grips with. Herein lays the bedrock struggle of living the Christian life. Because God, when He sends His Spirit, is not interested primarily in entering the house of our lives and settling in to watch us live from inside instead of outside. No, His intentions are to take over, to take the reins, to take the wheel, that He who gave His life for us to give His life to us should now live His life through us. Our thoughts are to be His thoughts, our words, His, our actions, His. We are no longer islands alone in a sea of existence; there’s a bridge built on us that connects our island with innumerable other islands, and communication with other islands is now possible.
Which brings us back to our original topic, the shared experience of life. And here is where the actual practical living out of the ideas we’ve been discussing becomes important. Imagine that all Christians comprise a body. This is not only a helpful metaphor, but a Biblical one. (As always, the Bible is the best commentary on all things Christian. Makes sense, doesn’t it?) The body is communicating with itself as it obeys the directions of the head. I tell my fingers to type, and voila! The fingers move and words appear on the page. So the mind is communicating with the language center which is communicating with the nervous system which is communicating with the muscles in the hand and fingers, which then produce the desired result of typing words. All this cooperation begins as each part of the body is in complete and immediate submission to the head.
Now, suppose one part of the body is malfunctioning; say, the arm is broken. The head may command the arm to move, to type as fluently and speedily as the uninjured one, but no amount of mental impetus will override the damaged body part, the body part that cannot obey. Much the same way, if a Christian is not submitting to the Head orders, the body cannot function properly; most certainly the cooperation between different parts of the body will be thwarted. Now, the analogy breaks down in supposing that the Head of the body Christian can be thwarted by a member of the body. The Head is able to accomplish His goals regardless of the body’s willingness to participate; otherwise, we must begin to question and doubt the omnipotence of God. However, the unwilling or unusable body part will not be participating in the Head’s use of the body, and as a consequence will not be able to cooperate with other body parts, or Christians as the case may be. So the Christian unwilling to let God have His head in the Christian’s life is doubly the loser: they do not experience the activity of God in their own lives, nor do they share the communion and fellowship with other believers in the deepest and truest sense, at the level of God’s Spirit moving among and uniting them.
There is another aspect of this ability to unite separate humans’ minds and hearts which finds its sole opportunity through a relationship and submission to the Spirit of God: marriage. “The two become one” is the famous phrase used to describe the marriage union, and this not only applies to physical and material union, but spiritual as well. Well, if the marriage is based upon both member’s devotion and submission to God, then a union of heart and mind can become a reality and not merely a symbolic aphorism.
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