What do we want?

When I try to boil down life to its essentials, three things come up. I want to be right with God, live a morally good life and be free from suffering. A lot can be said about these things and what they entail. But that is not the point of this post. The point of it is simply to boil everything down to its essentials.

I also believe that these three things go together and that they can be summarized under “being right with God”, but that this would be too vague. 

Furthermore, I believe that this is what any person truly wishes for, even though I cannot say that I know this, since I only have access to my own experience. But from where I stand, knowing that God exists, that God is personal and having some idea of what I have in common with all other people, it seems like a logical conclusion.

The question then becomes: what is the best way to a life that fulfills these three requirements?

Asking ourselves why we engage in certain thoughts part 2

One way of approaching negative thoughts when they come up, is to ask why I’m thinking these thoughts. What do I really want to get out of them? Most of the time, there is a situation or circumstance that I’m not happy about, that I wish to change. But when I let thoughts about whatever the issue is just pass through my head without me steering them in any particular direction, all it usually does is give me more negative emotions, but no solutions. But when I make a conscious effort to actually define the issue, my thoughts start to move towards an actual solution.

Asking ourselves why we engage in certain thoughts part 1

More and more, I come to realize how many options we have with regards to our inner lives. For most of my life, I’ve just treaded along and let whatever came up in my head come up, letting more or less arbitrary things decide which ones I would or wouldn’t believe in. I also didn’t really separate my thoughts. They were just thoughts, whether they were the result of deliberate thinking, or rumination fueled by negative emotions. 

Thinking about what we read

This blog is partially about stating the obvious, when it comes to things where the obvious have passed me by. And where I therefore believe that it has in many other people’s lives. 

For many of us, part of our journey is to try and understand things as best we can. And when we do, we most of the time read stuff. Or take in information in another way. 

A few years ago, I realized just how much I had been stuffing information inside my head, without contemplating its validity, how I related to it personally, what it could teach me about myself, or really what it said about this world and other worlds beyond this one. And what I’ve come to realize, is that it’s in the processing of the information that we find the really deep lessons. When we make the information real to us on a personal level.

Right and wrong? Part 2

So, there is this idea out there, that whatever we think is true, becomes true. That nothing has any inherent meaning. Is it so? This is not a rhetorical question. I want to seriously explore this idea. Because I’ve come to see how I can convince myself of totally opposite views within the scope of about an hour. This will be a long series with many short parts, because I wish to explore this concept some. I want to gain some clarity. Because I believe that it’s a difficult subject.

Some thoughts about the movie The Unholy Part 1

I watched the movie The Unholy the other day. It was an okay movie, with okay story, okay mood, decent editing and acting, but with crappy CGI and quite a few elements that felt like they didn’t hang together in a meaningful way. 

But this is not a review. It’s the movie’s essential theme that is interesting here. The theme is false prophets and false saviours. Since I felt sort of drawn to see this movie, and since it grabbed my attention in spit of being rather mediocre, maybe there was a point in me seeing it (I have more and more come to believe that nothing in our lives happen by accident. We are just usually not attentive enough to see that God constantly speaks to us). 

Another thing that is a little easier to miss about the movie, but which really is right there in front of us, that would be backed up by many passages in The Bible, is that just because someone is able to perform miracles, it does not mean that the miracles come from God. This, I think, is very significant. Because I think that this is an easy concept to grasp and even take to heart. But how many of us would not be easily swayed by something that we perceive as a genuine miracle, if we would encounter one? I know that for me, in my past it has taken even less. I’ve been close to adopt teachings because they have given me loads of insights as to how things work. And the more I’ve been impressed by their wisdom, the easier it has been for me to disregard the flaws and unsubstantiated claims of these teachings.

In the times we live in, there are many spiritual “truths” out there. I’ve spoken about this in other posts and I will probably keep talking about it till I find some more clarity.

And all truths cannot be true, unless there is no truth. And if there is no truth, at least that much is true. 

A side note that warrants several posts on its own, but that I will just briefly mention here, is that false prophets are part of the endtimes-prophecies of The Bible. And there are other contemporary things that seem to fit in uncomfortably with these prophecies as well. But this is, as I said, too big of a topic to be explored here. And it would call for much more research than I have time for at the moment. 

How can we really know what’s going on inside another person? How can we know if someone is wilfully trying to deceive us? Or if that person has him- or herself been deceived? There are frighteningly many factors that determine what we come to regard as truth, that have nothing to do with whether it’s true or not. For example: how we see ourselves - our identity, how attentive we are at any given moment, which emotional state that we are in and our opinion of the source, just to name a few irrelevant factors with regard to the actual truth, which are all factors that determine what beliefs we choose to adopt or discard.

How wonderful it is to be a sinner

The title of this post is sort of click bait. What I’m talking about here is something akin to the parable quoted in the post-image.

The point is that I’m grateful for my sins, because they make it harder for me to judge others. However, I had to become aware of my sins for this to be the case. In the past, I didn’t see my own sins. Or more specific, I didn’t look at them as sins. As something disgraceful or hurtful, or whichever other label one might give to actions that fit under the label “sin”. So I judged. I still catch myself judging sometimes, I have to admit. In my thoughts, I catch myself doing it quite often, even though I catch myself quicker and quicker and do my best not to believe my judgments. 

Do I judge the pharisee? Let me put it like this: for most of my life I didn’t look properly at myself. So I judged. I could have continued not looking at myself, had it not been for the grace of God. I could have continued being just as bad as the pharisee regarding judgment and I did not get out of this mindset by my own effort. I couldn’t have, since I wasn’t aware of how I was acting. In many other instances, I’m probably still just as “bad”, or “worse” than the pharisee.

Right and wrong? Part 1

Is there such a thing as “right and wrong” in an ultimate sense? I don’t know. It seems as if there is. And if there is, I’d rather try to be right than wrong, rather than to ignore the questions altogether.

Authenticity part 1

 Are YOU there in the things you say and do?

Grandness in smallness

Know that you are infinitely valuable to God. Jesus says that every hair on your head is counted by God. This means that no matter who you are in the world, God cares deeply for you. To God, you are not a small speck of dust. Yet, objectively speaking, no matter who you are, you are small and fragile. No matter who you are, you will grow old. You will die. And there is always someone bigger than you in the world and in the eyes of other people. In comparison to the vastness of the eternity of time and (possible) infinity of the universe, you are basically nothing. Compared to God, you are basically nothing. And yet, you mean everything to God. And the more we recognize this smallness, the more we grow in the eyes of God. The more we humble ourselves in our fragility and weakness, the stronger we become.