Thought Snack: The Inner Life of the Human Being
“The hidden dimension of each human life is not visible to others, nor is it fully graspable even by ourselves. We usually know very little about the things that move in our own soul, the deepest level of our life, or what is driving it. Our ‘within’ is astonishingly complex and subtle-even devious. It takes on a life of its own. Only God knows our depths, who we are, and what we would do… Interestingly, for all our fine advances in scientific knowledge, the proud product of human thought, they tell us nothing about the inner life of the human being. The same is true for all the fields of study that try to base themselves upon such knowledge. At most the sciences can indicate some fascinating and important correlations between our inner life and events in the physical and social world running alongside it. This is because the subject matter of the sciences is, precisely, the outer, physical, measurable, publicly perceptible world: roughly, the world of ‘the five senses,’ as we often say. In its nature the physical is a totally different type of reality from the spiritual side of the human being, which remains ‘hidden’ in a way the physical world never can be. This is by now an old story, but often repressed or forgotten. Science misses the heart.”
– Excerpts from Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ by Dallas Willard.
