Word: weil
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When he returns to London, Orkney starts going to church. At the British Museum reading room he soaks up religious history, anthropology and Simone Weil. Friends call to see if he is all right. He is. His dreams have revealed the neglected half of his existence-the part that was always larger than his politics or his personal ego. His life jumps into sharp focus. He sees that his son is fated to learn all the old lessons as if they were new. He gets the truth about himself and his old-guard comrades just right. "Once they had forecast...
This power is undermined and untapped because we approach reality in a certain way. Weil calls this approach "straight thinking." Straight thinking is something all of us do, most of the time, during the normal waking state...
...Weil terms the non-materialist, non-intellectual manner of perception "stoned thinking," primarily because the words "stoned" and "straight" are common usage and easily grasped. Stoned thinking is characterized by reliance on intuition--deductive thinking based on direct experience--as well as intellection. As acceptance of intuitive perception encourages an understanding of "the ambivalent nature of things"--paradox, Yin-Yang--and a sense that infinite reality is not a threat but rather an invitation to explore. Stoned thinking in Weil's terms is conductive to that rare sense of being at home in the universe...
...Andrew Weil's application of these ideas to modern social problems is broadly-based and telling. He establishes a firm relationship between the experiences which arise from stoned thinking and the mystical heights which all religions see as the ultimate goal for the believer. He feels that conventional psychiatry's general lack of success is due to its essentially non-experiential, negative approach to mental health. The idea that the simultaneous experience of two opposite feelings--neurosis--is wrong causes psychiatrists to encourage the patient "to resist neurotic conflicts," rather than understand and assimilate them. The analogy to political action...
...Weil is hardly the first thinker to assert the power of the mind to heal and develop itself: Emerson said as much in "Self-Reliance" in 1841. But Weil's quiet indictment of a society ruled by rationalism and psychological materialism is unique, because it comes from a true child of this society. Moreover, he sees evidence that "we have passed the peak of our rational intellecutal period." The Natural Mind, valuable for its optimism alone, is an important examination of the potential of the mind for finding its own strength and security within...