Proclaimer Blog
Your thoughts…
Yesterday, I started reading Richard Winter's Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment (review coming shortly). One of the things that struck me about what he says (and he is a psychiatrist, so I guess he should know), is the remarkable capacity for the human mind to think all manner of things. Quoting Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
Eve Zeisel, the ceramic designer who was imprisoned in Moscow's Lubyanka prison for over a year by Stalin's police, kept her sanity by figuring out how she would make a bra out of materials at hand, playing chess against herself in her head, holding imaginary conversations in French, doing gymnastics and memorising poems she wrote. Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes how one of his fellow prisoners in the Lefortovo jail mapped the world on the floor of his cell and then imagined himself travelling across Asia and Europe to America, covering a few kilometres each day. The same "game" was independently discovered by many prisoners, for example Albert Speer, Hitler's favourite architect, who sustained himself in the Spandau prison for months by pretending he was taking a walking trip from Berlin to Jerusalem in which his imagination provided all the events and sights along the way.
The capacity for the human mind to imagine can be dangerous territory for the believer (I know this is true, as I'm sure you do!). We can't empty our minds of thoughts; it's a question of focus, as my reading in Philippians reminded me this morning:
Whatever is TRUE, whatever is NOBLE, whatever is RIGHT, whatever is PURE, whatever is LOVELY, whatever is ADMIRABLE, if anything is EXCELLENT or PRAISEWORTHY – think about such things.
So, I've been meditating on this today. How I need this!