How Do We Flourish? (S1E6 Encore)

Um, you know, in some respects, uh, this episode is pretty foundational because we're talking about that part of the human experience that people come into my office to ask questions about, like, because they're symptomatic in some way, shape, or form.

You come to see a psychiatrist when you are having problems with your mind, so to speak.

I mean, that's what people are thinking.

Because we are depressed, we're anxious, we have manic depressive illness, we have all kinds of...

We have challenges in our marriage.

In, in many respects, we're really talking about, uh, the part of our experience where we experience our deepest pain, and we experience our deepest joys, and our deepest longings, our deepest griefs.

All that takes place in the context of the mind.

And so this morning, we'd like to talk about the importance of it, and get some sense of what we really mean by that, so that we can, uh, be clear as we, as we talk about a number of different things over the course of our podcast time.

Whether it's interpersonal neurobiology or spiritual formation or whatever, we're really wanting to know what is the mind and how does that have anything to do with the, with the reason that we're meeting together.

Right.

So, you know, obviously, you know, you've got the brain, which is an organ.

The mind is something sort of altogether different.

Uh, can you...

Like, like, just the very basic level, how do you define, um, and separate the mind from the brain, or can you separate the mind from the brain?

Right.

Those are all good questions.

And you know, Pep, uh, over the course of centuries, millennia even, uh, there have been people who've been interested in this question, have been trying to get a definition to get around the idea of the mind.

What is it? The Greeks used to talk about the mind as the soul, the psyche.

The Hebrews would talk about the soul in a different way.

They were talking about the felt inner deep- deepest sense of who we are as human beings.

More modernists, we tend to think, mostly we often tend to think in terms of, uh, the mind is the thing with which we think.

And especially, um, people sometimes can think that we reduce the mind to the brain, that that's really all that it amounts to.

It's just the thing that's in my head, that organ in my head, and that it also, uh, is the thing with which I primarily think.

And, um, you know, the, the, the f- term interpersonal neurobiology that we've talked about on another, uh, episode, you know, it is a, it is a field of science that includes lots of different scientific disciplines, all of which have a stake in the definition of the mind, all of which have a stake in answering the question, what is the mind and how does it operate? And more, more importantly, what is a mind when it's flourishing? Um, and so we have a fairly straightforward working definition of the mind- Uh, in the field of interpersonal neurobiology, and I think that what I'll do is I'll, I'll talk about it.

I'll...