Day 102: The Elasticity of mortal thought and the fear farmer

196:11-198:22

The Elasticity of mortal thought is a great function. We can bounce around from fear to love to anguish quickly. I do this all the time when I watch a movie. It's a little harder when the situation seems real. I've been thinking a lot about human will lately. Another term for this is free will. People often use this as some sort of great thing. We have free will! Isn't that wonderful. You can choose. I've always ignored the argument because it seems contrived but now I want to take a side.Free will versus God's will.

I've been examining my thoughts closely while reading this book. It's easy to tell myself I can change my mind, ignore error, do the right thing. But free will can swing both ways. I can listen to fear and anger and wear it as though it were clothes.

Mary Baker Eddy said:

We should master fear, instead of cultivating it. 

I know a lot of productive fear farmers. I'm not going to worry about them though. Just me. Am I a fear farmer? Do I bring my crop home? More than I care to admit.

But the elasticity of mortal thought needs to be applied. I will change my crop. I've been watching my actions for human will or willfulness. That's a good step but now I want to actively apply love to my actions. That's easy on the surface. I take care of my obligations, my family, and my house. But what about my thoughts? What am I thinking as I sweep the floor for what feels like the millionth time this week? Am I grateful to even have the floor? And what about when something I want doesn't work out? I say "no big deal" but I stew inside. That needs to change. 

A technical note: I'm going to be making some changes to the previous posts: adding labels/tags, adding a link to the pages, etc. This is clean up. At the end of the year, I plan to export off of Blogger to a Wordpress site. In order to make that export easier, with less cleanup, I'll start now.