Teachers are forever finding new ways to categorise, summarise, and compartmentalise the many truths that make up the Christian life. But teachers run a great risk. When they are in the mode of rational analysis, they are not experiencing the things they teach.

Humans seem to be able to experience pleasure, or analyse our own pleasure, but not both at the same time. We can experience something, or we can objectively scrutinise our experience, but we cannot do so simultaneously.

C.S. Lewis said this more than once:

This is our dilemma—either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste—or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do not clearly understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think. You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyse the nature of humour while roaring with laughter.

But to attend to your own love or fear is to cease attending to the loved or dreaded object. In other words, the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself.

The surest means of disarming an anger or a lust was to turn your attention from the girl or the insult and start examining the passion itself. The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction. But if so, it followed that all introspection is in one respect misleading.

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