Sublime

ANTHONY PEAKE, AUTHOR OF THE INFINITE MINDFIELD AND OPENING THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION AND COAUTHOR OF THE IMMORTAL MIND

We’re talking about what psychologists today would describe as the “adaptive unconscious.” Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has described this in his important book Strangers to Ourselves (a very Augustinian title!). Over the past twenty years psychology has come to appreciate the overwhelming influence of “nonconscious

called ‘opponent processors’,

the decentering of human life from its cosmic significance, a decline in our sense of purpose, and a sensation of having lost the soul that gave earlier human societies their adaptiveness and vitality. It seems we are left with a feeling of having lost our place in the world along with a sense of who we are and what we ought to do with ourselves.

Each of these movements is responding to a crisis of meaning, a disorienting sense that we have forgotten some essential dimension to reality and lost our relationship to what is good, true, and beautiful.

As C. G. Jung once wrote, one of the perils of having a soul is the risk of losing it.⁠14