I am extremely depressed this morning. This may be a “monthly.” I find myself hyper-self-critical; ready to take anything someone may say the wrong way; ready to snap.
I’m dealing with various issues in various places that may help explain it, but as opposed to engaging in excuses or blame, I need to deal with what is.
I was in Dunkin’ Donuts at 9:00 and chose to check the library schedule for this week; to chart out what days I would go to the library and what other days I would go to church.
The scientific reason your world brightens up when you do
This study affirms some common observations about color perceptions and emotional states. When one is enraged, the color red appears more vivid in one’s perceptions; when depressed, the color blue. When one feels elated, all colors appear brighter, and in times of severe depression color perception can all but disappear; the world looks black and white. Or, perhaps, bleak and white.
The study attempts, and IMO fails, to attribute these things to the activity of neurotransmitters such as dopamine. But there is no finding of direct action by such neurotransmitters on the color-perceiving apparatus of the visual cortex.
Continue reading “Seeing red” is real. But how does it happen?
The people in a place make the place.
Psalm 150:6: “Let all things that have breath praise the Lord.”
At the homeless shelter where I stay, we’re required to attend chapel every night. Monday, for the first time in months, Jervis Ray preached. His text was Psalm 23. However, he was soon enough back to his same old same old, haranguing us that we’re not grateful enough for our “blessings.” “God woke you up in your right mind,” with the use of two arms and two legs.
He calls us to praise God that our bootstraps aren’t like others’. “There are lots of people in hospitals who don’t know where they are.”
That stung me, as my oldest brother will be soon enough in just that state.
This story from Ambrose Worrall’s The Gift of Healing[*] illustrates that not all prayer, however well-intentioned, will necessarily bring about the desired results. Some prayer may even interfere with obtaining the desired results.
Ambrose Worrall had been asked to intercede for a six-year old girl named Kay, who had developed encephalitis following measles. At the time he began, she was completely paralysed.
THE WAY OF PEACE
| Home | 2. Meditation → |
Matthew 11:28-30: Jesus said,
Come to me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; …
and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
All my life, I have been concerned for people who seemed to me to have a harder lot than they deserved — who were loaded down with heavy burdens.
In time, I came to see that I likewise carried needless heavy burdens.
Life is difficult enough even without them. Jesus speaks here of a way to live without them. Life’s inherent difficulties cannot be avoided. Needless difficulties can be avoided, and one’s life will be far more pleasant as a result. I humbly believe I have come to understand what Jesus meant, and that is what I seek to set forth here. Continue reading 1. About this book
THE WAY OF PEACE
| ← 1. About this book | Home | 3. Application → |
Meditation is not the whole of the Way, any more than flour is the whole of cookies. If you want cookies, you must also have butter, sugar, and perhaps eggs, in addition to flour. Flour is essential, however. Likewise as to the Way, meditation is so essential, as to move me to say this: if you have any interest in learning the Way, and do not now have a discipline of meditation, you should start one now — right now — before even reading the rest of this book. Continue reading 2. Meditation
THE WAY OF PEACE
| ← 5. Serotonin and society | Home | 7. Mooring oneself in What Is→ |
Friday, November 3, 2017
This message is principally addressed to me, myself. After a couple weeks of doing pretty well at The Way of Peace, I’ve come again to a juncture where I seem to have tired of being happy, and am inclined to let go of this Way and return to, frankly, the way most people live.
Related: Learning curve
I may need to reason with myself, to persuade myself that self-management (1) is really worth the effort and (2) deserves to be a “First Thing” — a concern to be given priority, and to be held more important than other concerns. Continue reading 6. Sales pitch
THE WAY OF PEACE
| ← 8. Heart and soul | Home | 11. Tactics → |
Strategies pertain to long-range goals, or a basic posture one means to maintain over a long period of time. Tactics are plans of what to do from moment to moment. In this chapter and the next I set forth the strategies and tactics known to me, that I personally use. Continue reading 10. Strategies
THE WAY OF PEACE
| ← 11. Tactics | Home | 13. Two (or more) views of the Kingdom → |
In the beginning, I claimed that all Jesus’ teachings have the goal of enabling a person to attain and maintain a state I said he called “the Kingdom,” which I call peace of mind; and that the principal means thereto is the practice of presence, keeping one’s attention on the here and now and on what one, oneself, can do.
The time has come to test that thesis. Continue reading 12. An examination of the Sermon on the Mount
The Homeless Blogger 