Thursday, January 8, 2009

Meditation in a Tool Shed

Lewis has this way of taking anything and making it incredibly profound. This excerpt "Meditation in a Tool Shed" is no exception. Somehow he took an ordinary experience (a beam of light coming through a crack in a tool shed), that most people would take for granted, and blew my mind. And he writes with simplicity in such a matter of fact way that it's near impossible to disagree.

Lewis says that people look at or along things. When people look "along" things it is their emotional response, which everyone experiences differently. When we look "at" things, we take a scientists point of view and try and make logical sense of something that we may or may not have experienced, which is futile because we can't feel exactly what they are feeling.

And then Lewis totally flips the idea on it's head saying that the person who is looking "at" is actually looking "along" another experience because in order to look "at" you have to use your senses, which another person looking "at" your angle, would explain it away as looking "along".
So in order to be rid of this judgmental approach to things you must look "at" and "along" them.

But what stunned me most when I was done with this reading was how incredible of a thinker Lewis is. He examined a beam of light that he encountered, probably taking the mower out of the shed, and spun an extremely profound four page essay out of it.

Overall I really enjoyed this reading, and look forward to the ones that will follow.

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