Mind the heart.

We consider a thing as being genuinely real if the mind can set it apart from the rest. Not only is this true of objects such as celestial bodies, or atoms, or chairs, but also of legal entities such as 'persons', or 'nations', or of concepts such as 'the past', or 'the economy', or 'behaviourism', or 'anthropology'. Bottom Line? Concepts are the mind's premium means to order the world.

But the conceptual mind is a trickster. We cut a century in hundred lengths of a year, which we divide in 12 months consisting of four and a bit weeks, each counting seven days of 24 hours that consist of 60 minutes, each parted in 60 seconds which are neatly torn further apart decimally in ten's, hundred's, thousand's and on and on and on for as far as our measuring devices allow.
But when does winter really become spring? How long does 'a moment' take? At what second changes darkness to daylight? At what moment between conception and birth did you become a person? And is that the same moment for everybody? Does that moment shift in time? And how narrow, exactly, is the 'now'? Is perhaps the Planck length the ultimate time-scale lattice upon which the film reel of reality slows to a set of framed pictures? Or is time something else entirely; something that is not divisible?

The conceptual mind picks apart everything. We think of the psyche as separated in a conscious, and a sub- or unconscious part. And we think of the ego as a slightly sulphuric yolk within this white & black egg.
But only if we restrict our thought processes to the shell of psychology does the former hold: a realist, is a materialist, is a chemist, and finds no such things. It is all but bodily fluids reciprocating with neuronal activity in a richly layered ecosystem of diversely dedicated cells that all blindly sustain the larger, constituting whole.

And what about concepts as 'mine' and 'thine' and 'the commons'? Or 'nations' with 'borders' dividing the land? Or what 'food' is and what 'weed'? Or those legal concepts that determine whether we are alive or dead and which embed our bodies in the spacious yet hard-walled labyrinth of Law?

Do these concepts exist, really?

The overlay our mind veils reality with is remarkable. It has no thickness, seems totally transparent, yet it so blinds us that we build a world on the classifications we invent as we go along. And when later that top-heavy world-construct built on our assumptions collapses, that same veil withholds us for a long time from efficient action. Instead, out of vested interests, we strain to uphold something which has irrevocably past its moment.

How smart, for instance, are attempts to keep foreign species from invading regional nature, when realising that the paperwork, energy consumption, and pollution from the devising, policy-making, rolling out, and implementation of such attempts more harm the environment than any possibly positive effect achieved?

And how smart, to extrapolate the previous, is it to uphold a socio-economic system which further impoverishes and destabilises already poor and inflicted world regions? Global aid directed towards 'underdeveloped' countries is peanuts compared to everything directed away from them.
How undignified would you and I be, and how powerless would we feel, by learning our misery has way less to do with our life's fate than with how Law constructs the world?
Is any refugee to blame for seeking better living conditions elsewhere? What validity has Law – especially a law bound by trade agreements that systemically further inequality – over rumbling stomachs and lives lived in desperation? Would you and I not act the same?

In these latter questions this article finds its conclusion. For empathy towards the suffering of others signals we have sunk to our heart, where connectedness, rather than 'apartheid', rules. The heart does not conceptualise.