https://goo.gl/photos/GVHT7cbBRWokbDSy5

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This is a little clip from the Oprah “Belief” show. What interests me is the filter, the chair the film maker and narrator place the watcher within. This is a story of a young Indian-American woman who is successful in her secular job in the US but feels empty. She goes to India to bath in the Ganges to address her void. What is important to note is that (again as Lewis so poignantly points out in his book the Abolition of Man) that the focus of her concern (via the documentary also made the assumed focus of our concern) is her FEELING of emptiness inside. THAT is the problem. She’s journeys among the holy men asking if they FEEL connected. It is like going into surgery for a life saving procedure and asking “will it hurt?” It isn’t an unreasonable question but the question misses the point of the surgery. This seems the logical result of our secular assumption that she cannot actually connect to anything real. All she needs, and seeks, is the feeling of connection. Connecting to a God or a Dog really matters not, as long as your experience of connection feels satisfactory.

This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself— just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it).

Lewis, C. S. (2009-06-03). The Abolition of Man (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (Kindle Locations 168-177). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.