In the previous post, I made a number of references to freedom. It was necessary to provide a foundation for understanding freedom and I could not do better than the chapter on Freedom that is in my book, “Wounded Hearts, Broken Minds.” I have posted this chapter in its entirety because a solid understanding of freedom is essential to transforming the thought life. (more…)
Value and identity are integral to freedom. In the confusion wrought by defining our worth by what we do, we have bred a society of extremely insecure individuals. “Instead of comforming [themselves] to what is [real] they twist everything around, in [their] words and thoughts, to fit [their] own deformity.”* That is, they consistently measure everybody else by their own mediocrity so they can boast their own value.
Whether we admit it or not, we have all been seared by the shifting sands of comparison and the submission of heart and mind to fallacious concepts of value and identity. The confusion is all around us. It permeates our lives ; holding millions of people captive. The revolution of the thought life must begin here. (more…)
Malcolm Muggeridge, in his book Christ and the Media tells an incredible event he witnessed in the Biafran War.
“A prisoner was to be executed by a firing squad, and the cameras turned up in force to photograph and film the scene. Just as the command to fire was about to be given, one of the cameramen shouted ‘Cut!’ His battery had gone dead and needed to be replaced. Until this was done, the execution lay suspended. Then, with his battery working again, he shouted ‘Action!’ and bang, bang the prisoner fell to the ground, his death duly recorded to be shown in millions of sitting rooms throughout the so-called civilised world.” Muggeridge ends by saying, “Some future historian may speculate as to where lay the greatest barbarism, on the part of the viewers, the executioners, or the cameras. I think myself he would plump for the cameras.”
What reduces the cameras to such baseness? Even better, what induces us to sear our imagination with what David Putnum, producer of ‘Chariots of Fire,’ called the “lowest common denominator of public taste.” Simon Weil wrote that “nothing is so beautiful, nothing is so continually surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy as the good; no desert is so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. But with fantasy it’s the other way around. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied, intriguing, attractive, and full of charm.
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Your mind sets the whole course of your life on fire because your thoughts are incredibly powerful things. Your thoughts attract like things into your life. If you think negatively, you attract negative things. If you think selfishly, you attract self absorption and its byproducts. But if you think positively, you attract positive things in your life.
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