Ideas

Ideologies

Idols

Ideas are powerful stuff, like seeds they germinate and grow in the fertile soil of our heart-mind. They grow to create belief systems that shape our perception of the world and determine our future.

Much of these ideas are unconscious, embedded in our mind through childhood experiences and habits long before we even become aware of their existence and their character.

Ideas are the most dangerous things in this world.

Terrorists, politicians, cult leaders and gurus embed ideas into their followers to control and manipulate them. While the media and advertisers plant seeds of ideas with the intention of changing perception and getting us to buy whatever it is they are selling.

As a public relations and communications professional, I understand the power of ideas and words to create, shape and change public perception of a person, organisation or brand.

The offspring of false and destructive ideas are many. Hate, violence, racism, greed, addiction, destruction and wars, just to name a few.

Do you recognise any of these false ideas in yourself?

My race, religion, sex, social status, nationality or whatever <just fill in the blank> makes me superior to you.

These false ideas force us into black and white thinking, “I am right, you are wrong”.

We lose our ability to compromise, agree to disagree or see things from the other side. We eventually stop seeing the other person as fully human and needing our respect and understanding.

The destructive nature of [false ideas/belief systems/idealogies] imprisons the unsuspecting devotee and takes possession of his or her heart-mind operating system. Eventually, they stop thinking and taking responsibility for their actions.

How do we tackle this problem?

This will require each one of us to take responsibility for our own ideas and their consequences. And then initiating a radical transformation of our heart-mind operating system.

Different words have been used to describe this lifelong process:

Awakening
Rebirth
Die before you die
Lose life to find life
Becoming a new creation
Conversion
Baptism (symbolic of the process of death, burial and resurrection to new life)
Born again
etc.

All these concepts describe the radical reboot or overhaul of our internal operating system that will change how we see and treat one another.

See through a new set of eyes

Your eye is like a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is filled with light.
But when your eye is unhealthy, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!
Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew‬ ‭6:22-23‬ ‭NLT‬‬