Yeah though I walk through the shadow of doubt I will reach the divine presence within.
Saint Teresa of Avila wrote guide books for her brothers and sisters. In her book, Interior Castle, a soul took a journey through seven mansions, it followed along miles of corridor visited hundreds of rooms on its way to heaven and the book earned Teresa a Doctorate from the Pope of Rome.
Prayer, Teresa had always claimed was both a vocal and mental training encapsulated by the Lord's Prayer. Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum, adveniat regnum tuum........ etc.
And here we are, all these years later still trying to retrain the mind to better accept the interior castle and the big wide world, this time with words like cognition, neuron, axon, dendrite, synapse, gilia, systemic collapse, DNA methyltransferases, methyl globs, gene start buttons...... etc.
In these days, the idle, of whom there are many, squander the rewards of convenience by forgetting the frequency with which our bodies replace our cells. Every cell in your body is regularly replaced except your inner ear hair cells, your eye lens cells and the neurons in your Cerebral Cortex. The same inner ear hair cells, the same eye lens cells and the same neurons in your cerebral cortex last a lifetime.
A cerebral cortex is the Top End, it manages those areas of the mind which are considered "higher functions." A cerebral cortex has four lobes, the highest of the high lobes being the Frontal Lobe, which apparently is the master of thinking, problem-solving, planning, personality, and voluntary movement.
The process of teaching, or training the brain, is essentially a chemical process that revels in the plasticity of the brains capacity to strengthen and polish up new chemical connections. It's a continuous adaption, new connections benefit from being polished, and like the eight times table unless they are polished they may be quickly lost.
And hark the Herald Angels sing, if it's that simple, we can reproduce it, make it obedient, plug it into the electric, put it to work and make money out of it.
When Saint Teresa lay dying her final word were thusly: "O my Lord and my Spouse, the hour that I have longed for has come. It is time to meet one another." Not to be a Debbie Downer but there is a chance that meeting her spouse didn't happen for our most favorite Barefooted Carmelite.
