Showing posts with label The Mind. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Mind. Show all posts

Thursday, November 25, 2021

The Mental Scrapbook

“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”, as the famous adage goes. Your raw materials define what is possible with them.

The same is true of your mental life: you cannot make a good life out of bad imaginings.

Your mind is a scrapbook. Like any scrapbook, it collects fragmentary images of whatever you decide to put in there. Over time you fill it up. And eventually, what you have put into it defines the kind of life you’re going to have. That happens because the ‘resources’ you put into your mental scrapbook become the raw materials for your present attitudes, your frame of reference for present experiences, and the repository of images for your present imagination.

Garbage in, garbage out. Good stuff in, good stuff out. It’s that simple.

Saturday, August 19, 2017

The Mental Scrapbook

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Saturday, July 29, 2017

Inbox: Radical Pruning

A reader writes:

“Over the past year I had to do a radical pruning of my social media feeds and the time I spent looking at them … the constant barrage of complaints and call-outs from Christians and non-Christians worked up about some political / social / educational / economic / artistic outrage was exhausting. It was making me feel angry and disgusted with humanity, and not in a good or holy way.”

Hey, that’s honest. And taking practical steps to solve the problem, as this reader did, is an eminently more sensible solution than fuming about the world and being miserable.

Saturday, July 01, 2017

Thought Experiment #3: Consciousness and Memory

I’ve been thinking again about the consciousness of God.

I know: heavy subject, holy ground, tread carefully. I’m on tiptoes.

We recently ran a post from Immanuel Can on the subject of memory. He makes the case that there are certain things Christians need to let go of and move on from in order to stay spiritually healthy. I think he’s right about that. Now, for IC, that moving-on process entails refusing to nurse or justify feelings of grief, bitterness or anger about things we cannot change.

We need God’s help for that, and it’s easier said than done, I know.

Saturday, July 05, 2014

The Mental Scrapbook

The most recent version of this post is available here.