Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race

Image by Prawny from Pixabay 

A few weeks ago, at a school parent’s evening, the teacher was quoting from author Charles Covacs who drew parallels between human development and the development of humankind. This sparked my curiosity because I believe my personal growth and evolution – and your personal growth and evolution – is what will evolve our society.

Then I came across a recent article by Deepak Chopra that really underlines the need for this kind of evolution. The article begins by talking about the limitations of the current world view – Materialism - based on physical objects as the stuff of creation and yet reality remains inexplicable.

He cites examples and poses excellent questions, it’s a fascinating and – for Chopra – very readable article. One of his juicier questions is “If you don’t know where the universe came from and are equally baffled by where thoughts come from, how reliable is your explanation of reality?”

But, he goes on, “no worldview explains everything, and so humans must prioritise the things that need explaining most urgently”. He cites our most urgent problems as overpopulation, pandemic disease, refugeeism and climate change and says “you may hope and pray that science and technology (which have been the most urgent things in the age of materialism) will come to the rescue, but the chances are tenuous without a huge change in how we think”.

All of this leads him to conclude that the change necessary is a change in self awareness. He says “We have had the luxury of ignoring self awareness for a long time and it has given us the chance to deny responsibility for the problems that no self-aware person would tolerate. A self-aware person wouldn’t go to war, stockpile nuclear weapons, harbour racial prejudice, mistreat and abuse women, and foul the environment”.

So as I ponder this issue of self awareness and link back to Charles Covacs’ thoughts, he adds another dimension, one that explores the development of feelings and logic within each of us.  In his book Botany, Covacs was pointing to the Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) as a turning point in human history because that is the time when scientific enquiry (as we know it) began.

He explains that prior to this, in older civilisations (India, Babylon, Egypt), a myth was as valid an explanation of the world as scientific explanation is for us. He continues “the time of those Greek philosophers is the time when one could say fantasy and logic became separate and independent functions of the human mind. It is also the same time when poetry emerges as a separate art”.

The thrust of his observations are the parallels between that and human development, being that we start our lives in the feeling state and, as we get older, develop logic.

The relevance in that particular book is in coming to how to teach botany. In a child of ten or eleven this separation of fantasy and logic hasn’t yet happened. Children want facts, but they must be linked in a way that satisfies the feeling, the fantasy, the poetry in the child. Given only facts, he says “their fantasy, imagination and original creative ability dies and withers”.

Feelings versus logic, in some ways are quintessential aspects of feminine versus masculine qualities. When I started undertaking psychometric tests earlier in my career, I was always taken down a metaphorical rabbit hole as I tried to place myself in one camp or the other. To me, I always felt human nature – and certainly mine - was more multifaceted than that.

Over the years my understanding of masculine and feminine traits has expanded and deepened. Back in the 1990’s, the era in which I began cohabiting with a significant other, I remember feeling somewhat enlightened by John Gray’s infamous Men Are From Mars, Woman Are From Venus books.

But it wasn’t until I heard Allan and Barbara Pease speak at a conference, and read Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps that I was really more clearly introduced to this idea that human gender is not just a duality in the sense of identifying as male or female. It’s a duality within each male and female, meaning each person is comprised of both masculine and feminine traits.

In their book Allan and Barbara cite the science (of that time) of brain development in the fetus, and estimates that about 15-25% of men have feminised brains and around 10% of women have masculinised brains. However, both are  a composite.

This came up for me personally earlier in the week when getting some therapy to ease pain on the right side of my body. The therapist said, “Your right side simply doesn’t want to work with your left side, it’s holding on tightly”. The idea that the right side of my body is the male side, the left being the female, gives me something to work with.

Note that while the idea of right side/left side of the body relates well to the theory of left/right brain thinking (as the left side of the brain supplies nerves to the right side of the body and vice versa), working with the body as an indicator of our internal conscious and subconscious psyche is not new as I discuss in What is Your Body Telling You?

In terms of my own growth and development, these male and female qualities within me seem to be screaming for more attention and integration. There certainly seems some old patterns at play and it’s something I’m looking forward to delving into more.

Bringing this back to Deepak Chopra’s ideas on how the future of the human race depends on self awareness, there is also an old article of Teal Swan’s where she asserts “the restoration of balance within the human race is not about decreasing masculine power while increasing feminine power...it is about both rising to power simultaneously”.

She takes this further by addressing the elephant in the room (as she is apt to do), also known as the “Wait, men have been in power for thousands of years” thought. Her response? “Far from it. Instead, they’ve been stripping power from women for thousands of years. There is a big difference between gaining power in and of yourself and stripping power from another.”

As with everything, I suspect the extent to which male and female qualities show up within us is a mixture of both nature and our life experiences. I particularly like the short article from psychologist Shari Derkson that explains the aspects of masculine and feminine and what integrating them within ourselves might look like.

She says “There is a movement towards inviting more feminine aspects into our lives, states of being, rather than doing; such as through stillness, meditation and tapping into our intuition and creative processes. Equally, it is important for both male and females to develop the more masculine qualities of rational and logical ability, clear non-attached thought and problem solving etc.”

So as we begin to look within ourselves at how to integrate both our feeling states with our more logical states, this begins the kind of self awareness that is perhaps more suited to addressing our most urgent  problems for the human race today.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Find the Courage to Let Us Hear Your Heart’s Voice, How to Appreciate Our Differences Enough to Admire and Want to Embrace Them,  Kneel at the Doorway of Your Heart to Usher the Dawn of a New Era and Embracing the Feminine within All of Us. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.