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A beautiful mind
By Ern Sheong | May 27, 2009
I watched “A Beautiful Mind” today for the second time. Interestingly I first watched it at the place where they shot it, i.e. Princeton, while visiting a friend there. It’s a nice movie, and one of the many things you could say about the movie was the story and virtue of persevering in love. However, I also saw another story in the movie. I thought that all of us can relate to the character of John Nash. He frequently saw three imaginary characters, namely the little girl, his prodigal roommate, and the secret agent officer. He subsequently chose to ignore these imaginary characters, no matter how real they seemed to him, as it was beginning to affect his relationship with his family.
I thought about how all of us perhaps have lots of things going on the mind as we carry out our everyday lives. There are lots of temptations which linger at the border of or within our minds all the time and could cause us to become “insane” and distant from reality if we indulge in them. These things or imagined characters are very much present. It comes in the world wide web in the form of excessive computer games and many other inappropriate websites. It comes in the form of alcohol, sex and drugs. It comes when we are tempted to cheat in order to gain the upper hand. It comes when we want to let our ambitions get a hold of us and disregard the rest so that we can appear at the top. (John Nash in the movie did what he did so that he could, in his mind, receive due recognition for his genius mind). Our minds can create characters which reinforce false beliefs and cause us to lose our grip on reality. We cannot see the truth without a mirror, and that mirror should be reality. Christians would say that the mirror is the Word of God (the Bible). As John Nash did, we have to ignore these deadly characters which can ruin our lives, and this can be done by comparing it to what is real in this world. Eventually, we have to feed what is real and starve what is false. Are you feeding something which is untrue and false in your life? You need a mirror.
After consulting the mirror and comparing with reality, one needs to decide whether to keep the old ways or ignore them in favor of a new life. What this involves is the power of choice. Most decisions, I realized, are decisions between two alternatives. John Nash could choose to continue in his self delusion by obeying the characters of his imagination, or he could choose to ignore them and choose what is real. Life consists of a series of decisions, many of which are between two alternatives. (even if you could choose from a list of ten things, you can go through every item and decide whether you want to include it or not, i.e. 2 alternatives per item) It seems very easy but it is actually very hard, from experience. It is easy to make the wrong choice. In fact, it would take great courage to choose the better of the two, as we could also see from the struggle John Nash had to put through in order to overcome his delusional self and get his grips on reality.
But the beauty of it is that we are not expected to succeed all the time. John Nash failed in his attempts again and again, and when he stopped his medications he went back to his old self. But eventually he changed by choosing to ignore what was false.
We have been saved by grace through Christ Jesus and we are forgiven for our shortcomings. It is the love of God that enables us to pick ourselves up and once again be confronted with the choice of 2 alternatives, so that we can bring glory to God in overcoming our delusions. As the saying goes, love conquers all, and the love of God even more so.
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