Considerations regarding a possible move closer into town, out of my remote mountain location  – a notion that has rather shocked and shaken me since my return from Africa – have me reflecting on the two minds we as humans seem to house. Appreciating the distinction between these two minds has been central to my work and writing for the last many years.

Indigenous mind is the term I prefer to use in describing the aspect of mind that knows without being taught, that senses far beyond the power of reasoning, that exists within the field of intelligence that pervades everything that is. It comprehends the language of universe, stars, rocks, rivers, trees and animals as well as that of humans. It is our unifying capability and original endowment.

Cultivated mind is the aspect that humans develop in order to live within what Rilke calls “our interpreted world.” It matures through logic and reasoning, analyzing, comparing, evaluating.

Carl Jung wrote an essay entitled “Two Kinds of Thinking” in which he describes what he calls “directed thinking”, that which is linear, adapted and functional as opposed to dream thinking which is mythological and symbolic. Heidegger called it “technological thinking.” Jung was concerned with our overuse of directed thinking, as it is producing a readjustment of the human mind away from what the ancients knew; it is immature and could lead to our demise. The one kind of thinking is difficult and exhausting, the other effortless and spontaneous.

Thomas Berry, one of my greatest teachers, worried that we are closing down the major life systems of the planet because of this imbalance in human development. He called our human situation a pathology and felt that if we do not get back to our prerational, instinctive resources, our genetic imperatives as he called them, we may be headed toward ecological destruction that could eliminate our chances of survival as a species. Buckminster Fuller died with these same concerns.

I moved to live in the mountains after some years of immersion in these concerns. In the middle of it all life delivered circumstances that instigated a nervous breakdown in which for the most part I lost powers for directed thinking during a period of time. As frightening as this was, it delivered a kind of illumination that might not have arrived in any other way. Jesus said that we must lose our life to find it. Similarly, I realized, we must lose our mind to find it. As much as I lost one mind, I was also recovering the other. And so I came to live in wilderness to further advance the recovery.

I have heard indigenous people describe the conflict between these minds, saying that the cultivated or domesticated mind eradicates the other. One cannot have them together. I choose to believe that our evolution will find a way to accommodate both, but that this will require a strong commitment to the process; a willingness to allow for the stronghold of our recently acquired mind to loosen and possibly disintegrate to make way for the new possibility.

Now as I consider moving toward town where that other mind dominates, worry rises in me. Could what recovery I have been able to achieve evaporate in the heat of that other mind, like a mist is dissolved by the sun? I have to trust not. This may be the next step in the call.