thought exercise on Illusion

Thomas Merton once said, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self, This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. A...

One of the most dangerous driving situations is when it is raining at night. Not only are the streets slippery and visibility obscured by water on the windshield, but wet streets can reflect light fro...

It’s not that unusual for a painting by a famous artist to go for over a million dollars at Sotheby’s in London. It is very unusual that, as soon as the deal is done, the painting immediately “s...

Jesus warns against greed and seeking wealth, because ultimately, money is fiction. Gold coins? Slips of paper? Ones and zeroes in a computer? They only have value because people think they do....

The Cave One of the most famous passages in Plato's Republic is his "Allegory of the Cave," which is found at the beginning of book seven . Socrates imagines the human condition al...

The simple truth of our being gets lost in the metanarratives we spin. We become the fictions we live. Consequently, our way of being in the world is so false and unnatural that our presence is thorou...

You decide to buy a certain kind of car, and suddenly you see it everywhere. A friend recommends an obscure movie to you, and by the end of the week, three more people have mentioned it. You find out ...

Bestselling business author Simon Sinek gives a motivational speech called “Understand the Game,” where he mentions a study asking people if they would rather have a $400,000 house on a street where a...

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental ...

Communication is something we usually take for granted, it seems simple enough, after all. But one thing I’ve noticed (Stu) over time is that, especially in complex organizations, communication often ...

Our current cultural moment makes rich, life-giving friendships like the one David and Jonathan shared a challenge. We are connected like never before, yet isolated and lonely like never before. MIT p...

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place .” George Bernard Shaw Three-year-old Matthew was chewing on an apple when he asked, “Daddy, why is ...

Cosmic ingratitude is living in the illusion that you are spiritually self-sufficient. It is taking credit for something that was a gift. It is the belief that you know best how to live, that you have...

In this excerpt from Jay Y. Kim’s book, Analog Church , the author shares about an experience at a local restaurant after being convicted of his own smartphone use at home, keeping him from being p...

When we look for larger, broader, more sustainable analyses of evil, we find of course that the major worldviews have all had ways of addressing it. The Buddhist says that the present world is an illu...

The meaning of a name is not discovered through scholarly etymology or through meditative introspection. It is not validated by bureaucratic approval. And it certainly is not worked up through the van...

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the reality of what it means to “take up our cross” in our daily lives: Sometimes we suffer u...

Researchers at the University of London concluded that “a substantial majority of individuals believe themselves to be morally superior to the average person” and that this illusion of ours is “unique...

Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to w...

You may feel as if you are sitting still right now, but it’s an illusion of miraculous proportions. Planet Earth is spinning around its axis at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour. Every 24 hours, planet ...

We all go through desert seasons and have the opportunity to determine how we will respond. The cyclical frustrations I faced in regard to my desire for control, fear, and the longing to feel chosen w...

The Golden Result is a corollary to the Golden Rule, which calls us to do to others as we would have them do to us. The Golden Result says that people will usually treat us as we treat them. If we bla...

Before God can divulge our God-given identities in our desert-of-the soul wilderness experiences, there is something we need to know: he requires that we be brutally honest with ourselves and with him...

Let’s take stock of the challenge once again: the work of spiritual transformation, by which we come to live in God in the midst of our neighborhood, is the most difficult process in the universe. Thi...

Human spectacle making is like sorcery—an enchantment, a spell, the creation of an image that calls for a response from our inner longings. Idolatry is the original tele-vision, the bringing of a far-...

And so, like runaway slaves, we either flee our own reality or manufacture a false self which is mostly admirable, mildly prepossessing, and superficially happy. We hide what we know or feel ourselves...

Self-deception . . . blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse. Whether at work or at home, self-deception ob...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously declared that experiencing a story—any story—requires the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” In Coleridge’s view, a reader reasons thus: “Yes, I know Coleridg...

When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to ...