What nourishes the human mind, heart, spirit? What builds up a human being personally, mentally, spiritually?
How often is this question even raised? How much more time is spent talking about what builds up the body or promotes health of body? I have seen many ads on television for “body building,” and perhaps none for “soul building.” As a people in history, have we not badly neglected the cultivation of our minds and hearts? Have you and I, dear soul, not neglected the cultivation of our minds?
What nourishes or refreshes the mind? Let’s consider that simple question. It is personal, and answers will and must vary. But we share a common human nature, so there will be a strong similarity among our answers, if we are truly considering what nourishes us, and not just “what we like to do.” For example, some folks clearly “like to shop,” but one would be hard pressed to demonstrate that shopping is life-giving, although at times it may provide a needed and temporary distraction from one’s mental or personal problems. But shopping, just as mindless television watching, can become an attempt to escape from one’s problems, or simply to escape from reality.
What nourishes the mind? First, telling the truth, speaking the truth from one’s heart to the best of one’s ability is perhaps utterly basic and essential. Speaking the truth is to nourishing the mind what walking is to keeping the body healthy. A person who deceives himself or others, and you regularly avoids speaking the truth from the heart, has a badly formed character, and is even now, in the present, failing to nourish his or her life in God. We must breathe air to live, we must eat and drink to live, we must sleep to live, and we must tell the truth to be alive in spirit. A lying or evasive mind is spiritually dead or dying. Again, speaking the truth is perhaps the most basic action to develop one’s spiritual life.
What nourishes the mind? As one must speak the truth to be alive spiritually, so one must listen to truth, seek the truth, discern and decide between untruth and truth, reject errors, flee from lying, weed out of one’s mind false beliefs, lies, errors. Truth nourishes the mind. And what, in short, is truth? Truth arises from communion of the mind with reality. What is real is real, and must be respected and revered, or else one is breaking from truth. No one who hates or dislikes reality can know the truth, or speak the truth. Well has it been said that truth is the conformity of the mind with reality. The mind that knows truth is conforming to what is real, rather than merely to what one happens to want or like or already believe.
Hence, knowing the truth, so essential for a good human life, for spiritual life, requires that one constantly seek to conform to reality, and not to what one already thinks, believes, wants. How does one conform his or her mind to reality?
Some things that keep the mind from conforming to reality are evident: drug and alcohol abuse; living lives of deception, distortion, dishonesty, theft; an habitual preference for what one already believes than for what is true, or real; immersion of the mind in images, stories, beliefs, without doing the hard work of seeking to “test the spirits, to see if they are from God.” From my experience, both mass education and much of “institutional religion” are too often confirming people in their prejudices, wants, and lazy mental habits, and not stirring them up to seek truth. On the contrary: To conform to reality, one must constantly sift through his or her beliefs, opinions, “values,” and thoughts to see which ones are true according to reality, and which are just vague, empty, or distorted opinions about reality. No one can grow spiritually without a constant and sustained effort to seek the truth, to reject falsehoods and beliefs (however long held and dear to one’s heart), and to choose again and again to love the truth that is real, rather than untruths that are mere illusions.
“The search for truth begins with one’s awareness of existence in untruth.” No human being can cultivate a rich spiritual life without becoming painfully aware that much in oneself is not true or real, but a kind of habitual living in unexamined untruth. In the immortal words of Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worthy of a human being.” A demanding, even ruthless examination of one’s own life is for every human being the essential foundation for any genuine spiritual life.
How often is this question even raised? How much more time is spent talking about what builds up the body or promotes health of body? I have seen many ads on television for “body building,” and perhaps none for “soul building.” As a people in history, have we not badly neglected the cultivation of our minds and hearts? Have you and I, dear soul, not neglected the cultivation of our minds?
What nourishes or refreshes the mind? Let’s consider that simple question. It is personal, and answers will and must vary. But we share a common human nature, so there will be a strong similarity among our answers, if we are truly considering what nourishes us, and not just “what we like to do.” For example, some folks clearly “like to shop,” but one would be hard pressed to demonstrate that shopping is life-giving, although at times it may provide a needed and temporary distraction from one’s mental or personal problems. But shopping, just as mindless television watching, can become an attempt to escape from one’s problems, or simply to escape from reality.
What nourishes the mind? First, telling the truth, speaking the truth from one’s heart to the best of one’s ability is perhaps utterly basic and essential. Speaking the truth is to nourishing the mind what walking is to keeping the body healthy. A person who deceives himself or others, and you regularly avoids speaking the truth from the heart, has a badly formed character, and is even now, in the present, failing to nourish his or her life in God. We must breathe air to live, we must eat and drink to live, we must sleep to live, and we must tell the truth to be alive in spirit. A lying or evasive mind is spiritually dead or dying. Again, speaking the truth is perhaps the most basic action to develop one’s spiritual life.
What nourishes the mind? As one must speak the truth to be alive spiritually, so one must listen to truth, seek the truth, discern and decide between untruth and truth, reject errors, flee from lying, weed out of one’s mind false beliefs, lies, errors. Truth nourishes the mind. And what, in short, is truth? Truth arises from communion of the mind with reality. What is real is real, and must be respected and revered, or else one is breaking from truth. No one who hates or dislikes reality can know the truth, or speak the truth. Well has it been said that truth is the conformity of the mind with reality. The mind that knows truth is conforming to what is real, rather than merely to what one happens to want or like or already believe.
Hence, knowing the truth, so essential for a good human life, for spiritual life, requires that one constantly seek to conform to reality, and not to what one already thinks, believes, wants. How does one conform his or her mind to reality?
Some things that keep the mind from conforming to reality are evident: drug and alcohol abuse; living lives of deception, distortion, dishonesty, theft; an habitual preference for what one already believes than for what is true, or real; immersion of the mind in images, stories, beliefs, without doing the hard work of seeking to “test the spirits, to see if they are from God.” From my experience, both mass education and much of “institutional religion” are too often confirming people in their prejudices, wants, and lazy mental habits, and not stirring them up to seek truth. On the contrary: To conform to reality, one must constantly sift through his or her beliefs, opinions, “values,” and thoughts to see which ones are true according to reality, and which are just vague, empty, or distorted opinions about reality. No one can grow spiritually without a constant and sustained effort to seek the truth, to reject falsehoods and beliefs (however long held and dear to one’s heart), and to choose again and again to love the truth that is real, rather than untruths that are mere illusions.
“The search for truth begins with one’s awareness of existence in untruth.” No human being can cultivate a rich spiritual life without becoming painfully aware that much in oneself is not true or real, but a kind of habitual living in unexamined untruth. In the immortal words of Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worthy of a human being.” A demanding, even ruthless examination of one’s own life is for every human being the essential foundation for any genuine spiritual life.
