We so often imagine that our own ideas are elegantly simple, while those of others are hopelessly complex!

This weekend, as I meandered around marshy mountain meadows looking for the last remaining wildflowers of the season, my mind turned to examine a curious human trait. This is the tendency we have to believe that OUR views are elegantly simple, while the beliefs of others are hopelessly complex. For example, during my early fundamentalist days, if a person with an intellectual bent would try to talk to us, we would invariably reply: "I follow Jesus, NOT philosophy!" We'd explain that "The gospel is so simple even a CHILD can understand it!" What we didn't realize was that we held a whole network of supporting beliefs and ideas - many of them unconscious or unexamined - that were every bit as complex and philosophical as those of our "non-Christian" opponents.

Thus, for example, we held to a billiard-ball conception of the self, a substitutionary atonement based in Roman law, the idea that Jesus is an individual rather than a cosmic or archetypal presence, and a dualistic split between Creator and creation. All of these ideas are every bit as complex as the convictions of others. It's just that our own unconscious philosophical beliefs APPEAR simple, while those of someone else who believes differently may seem complex because we are unfamiliar with them, and because those beliefs may require quite a few word-pictures painted from various angles to try to elucidate them. The same is true of we modern contemplatives who may be tempted to believe we trust only in Silence but who actually hold a whole network of complex and unexamined ideas that attempt to articulate the meaning of that Silence. What a curious species we humans are!

Photo: Subalpine Aster (Erigeron) and the cliffs of Medicine Bow Peak, Snowy Range, WY, August 23, 2015