30 Day Mental Diet: A Beginning

Joseph Campbell said that the stories we tell ourselves are an attempt to answer the following questions, or versions of them. Who am I? Where am I going? What is my life about? Am I important? Does all of this mean anything?

The stories we tell ourselves are our attempts at explanations and they reveal more about the storyteller and his worldview than adequately answering any of those questions. A story is nothing more than an accumulation of all of our struggles, desires, hopes and successes in a narrative. So the author of the Noah story told us what was scariest in his desert world ... a flood.

Shakespeare caught up in the dramatic social upheavals of the Elizabethan era told us that life is about growth and change. More modern authors like Orwell and Huxley on the verge of yet a new era wrote of the uncertainty, darkness and promise before us.

If our life is about questions and we (or those we empower) are the ones who ultimately supply the answers, then I want to look very carefully to see where those answers are coming from.

Noah's flood reported by CNN would have been a very different affair. Who knows what Fox's coverage of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I with Nancy Grace adding local gossip from Stratford would have made of William Shakespeare.

A Mental Diet might mean tuning out the worst of the sensationalist news reporting than convinces us that life is something that is happening "to" us. It might mean nourishing our life with prayers of gratitude and faith. It would most certainly mean taking responsibility for how lean and mean my spiritual life is or how soft and flabby my consciousness has become.

For the next 30 days I'm going to be watching my Mental Diet; working from the book by Willis Kinnear, The 30 Day Mental Diet. Willis Kinnear was a student of Ernest Holmes, author of the Science of Mind. His book is available at the Centre.