You know how people disparage television for turning brains to mush?--The images that change so many times a second that your brain can't keep up with it all and kind of glosses over, turning off the deeper thinking because only surface level thought can move that fast?  Maybe this is what I've been reacting to in New York.  So many times a second, even in the quieter part of Manhattan in which I reside, there is something new to react to.  Space is so efficiently used that even walking down the sidewalk the shops pass by at surprising speeds.  Always cars, always people--especially people.  It's not natural to pass another human being and ignore that person completely, being completely ignored in return, but you have to.  There are so many people so constantly that to be "on" for every one would be exhausting in minutes.  You have to turn off to preserve your sanity.  And then you find you've gotten into a habit of doing what you never thought your conscience would allow: you've relegated people to that shallow, faster-moving part of your brain and kept them from the deeper places.  It has helped me refine the skill of small talk.  But I rather dislike small talk.

What this has all added up to is walking around engaging the world from a shallow part of me, and I can't remember the last time I really stopped and focused on something for real, with all of my mind.  I'm not sure people here know what the difference looks like in me.  Maybe most people wouldn't, or maybe nobody would.  But it feels very much like when I used to read out loud in school and not really focus--I could read with cadence and inflection that made sense, but at the end have no idea what I read.  Seriously.  Or I could think about it, and the inflection would be a little different, but I would be contemplating and expressing the real content behind the words, you know?  I feel like the part of the brain that reads with inflection and requires no understanding has been driving for a while here, and there are so many things to be done and to distract me, and my sense has grown enough, that the deeper thinking has not been necessary for what others require of me.

But this is no good.  I remember what it is to have that deeper mind engaged truly all the time, and I want and I need that back.  I suspect prayer is the key, but this infection of the mind has long since spread to my prayer life, enblandening that as well.

The shallow mind gets on fine by itself on worldly terms, can make decisions, lead a life (which makes me suspect this may be epidemic in this city, and most people don't know it).  Is that deeper part of my mind perhaps my soul?

Whatever it wants to be called, how do I get it back?  It's maddening to live half distracted by nothingness all the time.

It would seem that I am rather a slow learner.  Four years I've been to the MasterWorks Festival; you'd think by now I would have gotten the "music = worship" thing, but still, I admit, I find it elusive.  I'd love to appropriate this, and it seems to me that quality, focused practicing could (and should) be no less a worship experience than a really great worship service in a church that isn't boring.  Is it simply a sign of how profoundly I have unwittingly made an idol of this?  It doesn't seem like an idol (heh, I give it up easily enough when opportunity presents itself...).  Maybe it's more like I sacrifice it to the idol of Myself.  If that's the case, this arrangement of things has been well hidden for a long time.  I suppose that could be incorrect too, I don't know.  But four years of having a changed outlook, how slow can I be?!?  It's like when I'm practicing well, there's no room in my head for anything else, practicing takes up the whole concentration.

Well, okay, now that I go back and think about it there is always something else, this underlying thought of what people will think of my playing (by which I think I mean "me"): will they be disgusted or impressed, will they give me the job, will it sound like the great cellists?  How do I change--and keep changed--this subtle bedrock of thought?  That's about as low as it gets, too.  I could think of better, but still human, things, like whether people will be moved (instead of impressed), and whether I'm doing justice to the music.  But I'm not even on that level.  How much harder, then, is the much higher heavenward mindset?

So it occurred to me that the other people who I know are on this thing, and might read it, are separately (but especially together) one magnificent resource for answering this question.  Any ideas folks?  Compared with the prospect of true worship as I practice, practicing is getting boring...

I started thinking a little while ago along the lines of Juliet's famous line, "What's in a name?" But I daresay I was thinking cooler things than she was. Something prompted me to think of the significance of a name, because I had this sneaking suspicion there was a lot of significance there, and if I could dig that out, there would be really cool implications for the new names Revelation talks about giving us, and especially for the name of God, and what it means that a holy God tells us his Name.

But I haven't really sunk my teeth into the problem, and had only begun preliminary thoughts, when lo and behold, I read full-grown thoughts along the same lines, all fleshed out and made sense of! "Hey, I was gonna think that!" And here I thought I was being so original...

It's cool, so here it is, from "George MacDonald: an antholody: 365 readings" by C.S. Lewis.

The White Stone
(Revelation 2:17) <---and I would like to intrude here and point out that the book incorrectly wrote "Revelations"...

The giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of what God thinks about the man to the man. It is the divine judgment, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the "Come, thou blessed" spoken to the individual.... The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the *meaning* of the person who bears it. It is the man's own symbol--his soul's picture, in a word--the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is.... It is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it, for then first can he understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection, the completeness, that determines the name: and God foresees that from the first because He made it so: but the tree of the soul, before its blossom comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear and could not know what the word meant, which, in representing its own unarrived completeness, named itself. Such a name cannot be given until the man *is* the name. God's name for a man must be the expression of His own idea of the man, that being whom He had in His thought when he began to make the child, and whom He kept in His thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success--to say "In the also I am well pleased."