The mind or the minding of the spirit is life and peace precisely because it locates us in a world adequate to our nature as ceaselessly creative beings under God. The “mind of the flesh,” on the other hand, is a living death. To it the heavens are closed. It sees only “That inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die.”22 It restricts us to the visible, physical world where what our hearts demand can never be. There, as Tolstoy saw with disgust, we find we constantly must violate our conscience in order to “survive.”
