The Inner Life

The Inner Life

Imagination by Johnny Burke

Imagination is funny, it makes a cloudy day sunny
Makes a bee think of honey just as I think of you
Imagination is crazy, your whole perspective gets hazy
Starts you asking a daisy what to do, what to do

Imagination is silly, you go around willy-nilly
For example I go around wanting you
And yet I can’t imagine that you want me too

Albert Einstein, one of the worlds greatest minds made the following statement:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

God’s greatest gift next to the fact that His love extends to us as His own children (1 John 3:1-2) is the FACT that we have an inner life completely isolated from the prying eyes of the worlds voyeurs. The inner life of any human being can be the greatest gift of beauty or a cesspool cauldron of evil manipulated by Satan. The inner life, the inner man, has, within the unlimited mercy and grace of God, the ability to imagine to fellowship, to privatize the thoughts that can not only make you one of our creators greatest achievements, but can inspire to do things outwardly of joy and devotion.

For a totally blind person of over 40 years, I still have the ability to imagine within my inner life the features of those with whom I communicate even though, like me, they have changed. I still can imagine, within the inner life, the beauty of a flower, the stature of a tree, the magnificence of a mountainside. Talking with those that have never seen, those blind from birth, they have a very different inner image of these things. We are told in God’s inherent word that we can walk by “faith not by sight,” and as Helen Keller said in her wonderful book written 1904, “The isolation of blindness does not cheat us from the God given identification of physical things.”

Perhaps, the blind person is more closely associated with the spiritual realm of nature and reality. It is very true, as I have been asked many times, do other senses become much more acute in the inner man with the loss of one sense. William Manchester, historian, marine, biographer of general Douglass MacArthur, 100% disabled veteran, said, “No one can even imagine disability. They think they can and they might be able to endure any type disability for a few hours, but few can live the life of the disabled.” It is much like GK Chesterton English writer and catholic apologist said, “The Christian life has never been lived, it has been found difficult.”

Your emotional health, your mental health, your spiritual health are difficult to separate from your physical health. It is so important to protect and defend the inner man. Exercise your prerogatives of memorizing historic dates, the meaning of certain words, the geography of the world, recite to your inner self holiest scriptures which give you comfort and direction. Splurge in the knowledge that you and you alone are responsible for your inner most ambition. Know that you have within the inner man, the inner life, the God given ability to trust your own intuition, your own responses, to the physical quackery of many with whom you come in contact.

The inner man recognizes the insincerity, the hypocrisy of the flamboyant. The mental thieves with which we all must communicate depend and live. No man is an island, we are constantly conflicted by the id and ego or even super ego of those with whom we must share space. When you are in an enclosed room, you are breathing the air that has left the lungs of some other individual. It may be healthy it may be very unhealthy. When you send your clothes to the dry cleaning establishment they are thrown into a cleaning contraption full of chemicals with the clothing of others. Your cleaning is not handled by itself. Often, in some restaurants, you may be served food that came off someone’s plate uneaten. I once had a waitress, bring me some rolls, that some other patron had already buttered.

Our lives are treated or mistreated at the physical whims of other animals with whom we come in contact in one way or another. It is a miracle, wealth beyond compare, that we have the inner life, the inner man, the vast stratosphere of inner intelligence which is ours and ours alone to bask in knowledge or forgetfulness.