Lenses In Life Quotes

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . .

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.

Wake up, Caitlin, Mr. Lensing had said. But what he didn't under­stand was that this dreamland was preferable, walking through this life half-sleeping, everything at arm's length or farther away.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in it's focus. To find oneself trapped in any one bead, no matter what it's hue, can be deadly.

I was no longer needing to be special, because I was no longer so caught in my puny separateness that had to keep proving I was something. I was part of the universe, like a tree is, or like grass is, or like water is. Like storms, like roses. I was just part of it all.

pity this busy monster, manunkind' pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness --- electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of made is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence. We doctors know a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go

we cannot see what is “out there” merely by looking around. Everything depends on the lenses through which we view the world. By putting on new lenses, we can see things that would otherwise remain invisible.

But it so happens that everything on this planet is, ultimately, irrational; there is not, and cannot be, any reason for the causal connexion of things, if only because our use of the word "reason" already implies the idea of causal connexion. But, even if we avoid this fundamental difficulty, Hume said that causal connexion was not merely unprovable, but unthinkable; and, in shallower waters still, one cannot assign a true reason why water should flow down hill, or sugar taste sweet in the mouth. Attempts to explain these simple matters always progress into a learned lucidity, and on further analysis retire to a remote stronghold where every thing is irrational and unthinkable. If you cut off a man's head, he dies. Why? Because it kills him. That is really the whole answer. Learned excursions into anatomy and physiology only beg the question; it does not explain why the heart is necessary to life to say that it is a vital organ. Yet that is exactly what is done, the trick that is played on every inquiring mind. Why cannot I see in the dark? Because light is necessary to sight. No confusion of that issue by talk of rods and cones, and optical centres, and foci, and lenses, and vibrations is very different to Edwin Arthwait's treatment of the long-suffering English language. Knowledge is really confined to experience. The laws of Nature are, as Kant said, the laws of our minds, and, as Huxley said, the generalization of observed facts. It is, therefore, no argument against ceremonial magic to say that it is "absurd" to try to raise a thunderstorm by beating a drum; it is not even fair to say that you have tried the experiment, found it would not work, and so perceived it to be "impossible." You might as well claim that, as you had taken paint and canvas, and not produced a Rembrandt, it was evident that the pictures attributed to his painting were really produced in quite a different way. You do not see why the skull of a parricide should help you to raise a dead man, as you do not see why the mercury in a thermometer should rise and fall, though you elaborately pretend that you do; and you could not raise a dead man by the aid of the skull of a parricide, just as you could not play the violin like Kreisler; though in the latter case you might modestly add that you thought you could learn. This is not the special pleading of a professed magician; it boils down to the advice not to judge subjects of which you are perfectly ignorant, and is to be found, stated in clearer and lovelier language, in the Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus,

Thoughts are like lenses through which we look at our world.

Clean the lenses of your heart - world is beautiful.

PLANETARIUM Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) astronomer, sister of William; and others. A woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them a woman ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instruments or measuring the ground with poles’ in her 98 years to discover 8 comets she whom the moon ruled like us levitating into the night sky riding the polished lenses Galaxies of women, there doing penance for impetuousness ribs chilled in those spaces of the mind An eye, ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’ from the mad webs of Uranusborg encountering the NOVA every impulse of light exploding from the core as life flies out of us Tycho whispering at last ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’ What we see, we see and seeing is changing the light that shrivels a mountain and leaves a man alive Heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body The radio impulse pouring in from Taurus I am bombarded yet I stand I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo- luted that a light wave could take 15 years to travel through me And has taken I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

The world is an arena where things represents things. It is a stage where the same thing is seen from different lenses as a different thing.

If paparazzi armed with telephoto lenses have long been the scourge of the rich and famous; civilian drones are fast becoming the new menace to the ordinary man on the street.

You'll never understand me as long as you're looking at me through society's lenses.

When we enter the world as a child, they say we are innocent. When we leave the world as an older adult, we have each experienced a mixture of life's sorrow and joys. The years bring diverse events and mindsets, clouding up our vision, so that we no longer see things as they are, but we view now with lenses of many different shapes, sizes and influential colors depending on life’s encounters. It is then, with this cleansing of your inner lens, that you figure out once again, who you are, resulting in numerous side trips, to rediscover your true self, possibly experiencing a reawakening. This sensational feeling of inner peace is unimaginable.

As Emerson wrote in “Experience,” an essay that confronted the facile positivism of his age: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.” George Berkeley, for whom the campus and town were named, came to a similar conclusion: “The only things we perceive,” he would say, “are our perceptions.

This country life doesn’t look so bad from the window. It melts your heart. It warms your soul.lets you think about the possibility of quiet and how quiet is beautiful when seen through the proper lenses and mind-set.

This is the dream. Sustainable employment. Some semblance of work-life balance. Talk white. Not a lot. Get contact lenses. Smile. They will assume you’re smart. The less you say, the better. Try to project: Responsible, Harmless.

Self-distancing is changing the perspective of life by observing inner feelings and experiences from distance with different angles, filters and lenses.

The only way to avoid costly mistakes per time is to begin to see life out of two lenses at the same time,

Well the Dutch invented the microscope," she said. "They were jewellers, grinders of lenses. The want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something. Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life- a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple- the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last- it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer- there it is.

If I see only my bias, I have surrendered to a single myopic lens through which to view the world. If I dare to surrender my bias, I will spend the rest of my life seeing the world and throwing away lenses.

Something else emerges from this discussion about us as human individuals: we're not fixed, stable intellects riding along peering at the world through the lenses of our eyes like the pilots of people-shaped spacecraft. We are affected constantly by what's going on around us. Whether our flexibility is based in neuroplasticity or in less dramatic aspects of the brain, we have to start acknowledging that we are mutable, persuadable and vulnerable to clever distortions, and that very often what we want to be is a matter of constant effort rather than attaining a given state and then forgetting about it. Being human isn't like hanging your hat on a hook and leaving it there, it's like walking in a high wind: you have to keep paying attention. You have to be engaged with the world.

To clarify Rear Window, I’d suggest this parable: The courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses. And Hitchcock? He is the man we love to be hated by.

Chance held them up to the light. “Pink?” he said as he looked through the lenses. It was not his favorite color. “Rose,” William corrected. “It’s hard to look at mortal life any other way. View it through clear lenses and it breaks your heart.

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without - our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them - the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound - processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them - a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.

The role of biblical counselors is facilitate the discovery of a greater God awareness through spiritual eyes that look at life through scriptural lenses.

He combined two types of lenses to create bifocals and two concepts of representation to foster the nation’s federal compromise.

Reality television makes stars of ordinary people, and the paparazzi’s long lenses make ordinary people out of stars.

Worship is like corrective lenses for our souls, bringing God clearer into view. That’s important for all of us, especially when life goes off the rails.

Lewis helps us to appreciate that apologetics need not take the form of deductive argument. Instead, apologetics can be an invitation to step into the Christian way of seeing things, and explore how things look when seen from its standpoint. Lewis’s approach says, “Try seeing things this way!” If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into sharpest focus?

The lenses and filters that we see the world through are so firmly attached to our faces that it requires great awareness and then courage to pull the lenses off and look at ourselves and the world around us from any other viewpoint.

You lie awake, staring through a small open window at a full blue moon complete with a silly face. This is the dream. Sustainable employment. Some semblance of work-life balance. Talk white. Not a lot. Get contact lenses. Smile. They will assume you’re smart. The less you say the better. Try to project: responsible, harmless. An unthreatening amount of color sprinkled in. That’s the dream. A dream of blending in. A dream of going from “generic Asian man” to just plain “generic man”.

The essence of the adolescent brain changes that are the essence of healthy ways of living throughout the life span spell the word essence itself: ES: Emotional Spark—honoring these important internal sensations that are more intense during adolescence but serve to create meaning and vitality throughout our lives. SE: Social Engagement—the important connections we have with others that support our journeys through life with meaningful, mutually rewarding relationships. N: Novelty—how we seek out and create new experiences that engage us fully, stimulating our senses, emotions, thinking, and bodies in new and challenging ways. CE: Creative Explorations—the conceptual thinking, abstract reasoning, and expanded consciousness that create a gateway to seeing the world through new lenses.

Probably the most wasteful and pointless aspect of The Room’s production was Tommy’s decision to simultaneously shoot his movie with both a 35mm film camera and a high-definition (HD) camera. In 2002, an HD and 35mm film camera cost around $250,000 combined; the lenses ran from $20,000 to $40,000 apiece. And, of course, you had to hire an entirely different crew to operate this stuff. Tommy had a mount constructed that was able to accommodate both the 35mm camera and HD camera at the same time, meaning Tommy needed two different crews and two different lighting systems on set at all times. The film veterans on set had no idea why Tommy was doing this. Tommy was doing this because he wanted to be the first filmmaker to ever do so. He never stopped to ask himself why no one else had tried.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes

- [...] If you try anything, I might well have to exchange this toy pistol for a real one. I bet you wouldn't enjoy going to school with your stomach full of daylight! - If you pumped my stomach full of holes, I'd fit the holes with lenses so people could take a peep for ten yen a time. It'd be a good way of getting pocket money.

Edward Lasco was on the screened porch of his rented house in a comfortable but not elegant older section of the town where he'd lived for the past fifteen years when his wife, Elise, who six months before had left him and moved to a nearby city to work in a psychiatric hospital, came around the side of the house and stood beside the screen looking in. She had on a business outfit—natural linen suit, knee-high boots, dark glasses with at least three distinguishable colors tiered top to bottom in the lenses—and she carried a slick briefcase, thin and shiny. Her hair was shorter than he'd seen it, styled in a peculiar way so that it seemed it spots to jerk away from her head, to say, "I'm hair, boy, and you'd better believe it." Edward had come outside with a one-pint carton of skim milk and a ninety-nine-cookie package of Oreos and a just-received issue of InfoWorld, and he was entirely content with the prospect of eating his cookies and drinking his milk and reading his magazine, but when he saw Elise he was filled with a sudden, very unpleasant sense that he didn't want to see her. It'd been a good two and a half months since he'd talked to her, and there she was looking like an earnest TV art director's version of the modern businesswoman; it made him feel that his life was fucked, and this was before she'd said a word.

What a joke, Simon, life is. “From vanity we buy lenses that see all and so lose everything! “And by giving up some small bit-piece of so-called wisdom, reality, truth, we gain back an entirety of life! Who does not know this? Writers do! Intuited novels are far more ‘true’ than all your scribbled data-fact reportage in the history of the world!

Only way to recapture the reality into our senses, which thrills the Human heart is to look at the face of it as it is without any lenses put to our consciousness; However now in 21st century, many masks of illusionary paradigms, given a great intellectual credibility, have actually wiped away the border which differentiates the Truth and an Error

YOUTH: So when you’re hung up on winning and losing, you lose the ability to make the right choices? PHILOSOPHER: Yes. It clouds your judgment, and all you can see is imminent victory or defeat. Then you turn down the wrong path. It’s only when we take away the lenses of competition and winning and losing that we can begin to correct and change ourselves.

After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I’d experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she’d handed me the previous week. Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.

Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions—between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual space (the Internet). Science, in contrast, is most powerful when it elucidates rules of organization—laws—that act as lenses through which to view and organize the world. Technologists seek to liberate us from the constraints of our current realities through those transitions. Science defines those constraints, drawing the outer limits of the boundaries of possibility. Our greatest technological innovations thus carry names that claim our prowess over the world: the engine (from ingenium, or “ingenuity”) or the computer (from computare, or “reckoning together”). Our deepest scientific laws, in contrast, are often named after the limits of human knowledge: uncertainty, relativity, incompleteness, impossibility. Of all the sciences, biology is the most lawless; there are few rules to begin with, and even fewer rules that are universal. Living beings must, of course, obey the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry, but life often exists on the margins and interstices of these laws, bending them to their near-breaking limit. The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organize chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. “It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe,” James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions, and excuses.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Edgar Allan Poe, Robinson Crusoe, Ivanhoe, Gogol, The Last of the Mohicans, Dickens, Twain, Austen, Billy Budd…By the time I was twelve, I was picking them out myself, and my brother Suman was sending me the books he had read in college: The Prince, Don Quixote, Candide, Le Morte D’Arthur, Beowulf, Thoreau, Sartre, Camus. Some left more of a mark than others. Brave New World founded my nascent moral philosophy and became the subject of my college admissions essay, in which I argued that happiness was not the point of life. Hamlet bore me a thousand times through the usual adolescent crises. “To His Coy Mistress” and other romantic poems led me and my friends on various joyful misadventures throughout high school—we often sneaked out at night to, for example, sing “American Pie” beneath the window of the captain of the cheerleading team. (Her father was a local minister and so, we reasoned, less likely to shoot.) After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I’d experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she’d handed me the previous week. Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.

All the bright people, stopped in the midst of life, looking with forced smile into the lenses, then to be filed away, their colors fading as the years pass, caught there in slide trays, stack loads, view cubes, until one day the camera person dies and the grandchild says, “Mom, I don’t know any of these people. Or where these were taken even. There are jillions of them here in this big box and more in the closet. What will I do with them anyway?” “Throw them out, dear.

Every time we add a lens, it modifies how we experience the world. The difference between that contraption and a world view is that each time a new lens is added to our world view, the lenses remain in place. We must be vigilant about the lenses we admit, because they colour our view of the world, sometimes to our disadvantage. They can limit us, encourage us to seek to confirm evidence and make us hold on to mental models, business models and convictions even when they no longer serve us.

If men create intelligent machines, or fantasize about them, it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exorcize by transferring it to machines, where they can play with it and make fun of it. By entrusting this burdensome intelligence to machines we are released from any responsibility to knowledge, much as entrusting power to politicians allows us to disdain any aspiration of our own to power. If men dream of machines that are unique, that are endowed with genius, it is because they despair of their own uniqueness, or because they prefer to do without it - to enjoy it by proxy, so to speak, thanks to machines. What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself. It is not for nothing that they are described as 'virtual', for they put thought on hold indefinitely, tying its emergence to the achievement of a complete knowledge. The act of thinking itself is thus put off for ever. Indeed, the question of thought can no more be raised than the question of the freedom of future generations, who will pass through life as we travel through the air, strapped into their seats. These Men of Artificial Intelligence will traverse their own mental space bound hand and foot to their computers. Immobile in front of his computer, Virtual Man makes love via the screen and gives lessons by means of the teleconference. He is a physical - and no doubt also a mental cripple. That is the price he pays for being operational. Just as eyeglasses and contact lenses will arguably one day evolve into implanted prostheses for a species that has lost its sight, it is similarly to be feared that artificial intelligence and the hardware that supports it will become a mental prosthesis for a species without the capacity for thought. Artificial intelligence is devoid of intelligence because it is devoid of artifice.

Our eyes will make no progress against the mystery of recovery so long as we look at the addicted person through 12-step lenses. To say that such a person is powerless – and insane, morally deficient, filled with wrongs, a menace to others, disoriented, beyond human assistance, afflicted with a progressive fatal disease, and genetically different from normal humans – is to declare that the person’s inner nature is a vile and empty wasteland. It is to deny that there is a better self inside. If that is true, recovery is inexplicable, a random act of God, an inscrutable mystery.

I wear glasses, and maybe you do, too. Mine probably cost about the same as yours. Would you trade lenses with me just because I asked you to? Of course not! That would be silly because yours fit you and mine fit me. Reading is the same thing. Are you reading what the boss is reading or are you reading what fits you? Are you reading a book because someone sent it to you? how about because it's on the bestseller list? You wouldn't wear someone else's glasses - don't let them pick your books. Understand what your purpose is for reading and carefully discipline your choices - Fred Smith

...like being swept into the reality of a brilliantly written novel or charismatic movie: it's not that you believe in its literalness, but that there is a compelling truth in its organic life that envelops you and is absorbed by you almost on a physiological level. I remember experiencing a small earthquake in Los Angeles - only a four-point-six, I think - when I was there as a guest of the Academy the year they decided to develop a special Oscar for Philosophy in Cinema. A small earthquake, and yet the forced awareness that the earth beneath your feet was volatile, not stable, was terrifying, and for days afterward I was sure I could feel the earth trembling and threatening. I live with it still; it is ready to strike me at any moment, a special vertigo which is now part of my very physiology. Celestine was like that earthquake. Celestine was also like that first LSD trip, the one you perhaps took in a deli in Brooklyn, where suddenly the colors all shifted toward the green end of the spectrum and your eyes became fish-eye lenses, distorting your total visual field, and the sounds became plastic, and time became infinitely variable, and you realized that reality is neurology, and is not absolute.

never so happy in my whole life. Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines he wrote a poem And he called it “Chops” because that was the name of his dog And that’s what it was all about And his teacher gave him an A and a gold star And his mother hung it on the kitchen door and read it to his aunts That was the year Father Tracy took all the kids to the zoo And he let them sing on the bus And his little sister was born with tiny toenails and no hair And his mother and father kissed a lot And the girl around the corner sent him a Valentine signed with a row of X’s and he had to ask his father what the X’s meant And his father always tucked him in bed at night And was always there to do it Once on a piece of white paper with blue lines he wrote a poem And he called it “Autumn” because that was the name of the season And that’s what it was all about And his teacher gave him an A and asked him to write more clearly And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because of its new paint And the kids told him that Father Tracy smoked cigars And left butts on the pews And sometimes they would burn holes That was the year his sister got glasses with thick lenses and black frames And the girl around the corner laughed when he asked her to go see Santa Claus And the kids told him why his mother and father kissed a lot And his father never tucked him in bed at night And his father got mad when he cried for him to do it. Once on a paper torn from his notebook he wrote a poem And he called it “Innocence: A Question” because that was the question about his girl And that’s what it was all about And his professor gave him an A and a strange steady look And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because he never showed her That was the year that Father Tracy died And he forgot how the end of the Apostle’s Creed went And he caught his sister making out on the back porch And his mother and father never kissed or even talked And the girl around the corner wore too much makeup That made him cough when he kissed her but he kissed her anyway because that was the thing to do And at three A.M. he tucked himself into bed his father snoring soundly That’s why on the back of a brown paper bag he tried another poem And he called it “Absolutely Nothing” Because that’s what it was really all about And he gave himself an A and a slash on each damned wrist And he hung it on the bathroom door because this time he didn’t think he could reach the kitchen.

Positive Lifeparticles and Negative Life Particles" Lifeparticles are originally in a neutral, indeterminate state of limitless possibilities. What determines the quality of positivity or negativity is the kind of information given to the Lifeparticles. Think of it as pure white light that changes its color when it it filtered through colored lenses. when information is added, Lifeparticles move and change according to that information. If bright, positive information is added to Lifeparticles, they become bright and positive. However, if dark, negative information is added to them, they act as dark, negative energy.What changes the characteristics of neutral Lifeparticles ,then, it the mind.

Every time he moved, with every breath he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings. She tried to convey how it was like travelling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag. It took Ali’s breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling. She ran her fingers along his back, and the bone and the muscle and hadal ink and scar tissue and the callouses from his pack straps astonished her. This was the body of a slave. Down from the Egypt, eye of the sun, in front of the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death. Ali got one good look, then closed her eyes to the heat. In her mind, she imagined Ike sitting in the raft across from her wearing a vast grin while the pyre reflected off the lenses of his glacier glasses. That put a smile on her face. In death, he had become the light. There comes a time on every big mountain when you descend the snows and cross a border back to life. It is a first patch of green grass by the trail, or a waft of the forests far below, or the trickle of snowmelt braiding into a stream. Always before, whether he had been gone an hour or a week or much longer – and no matter how many mountains he had left behind – it was, for Ike, an instant that registered in his whole being. Ike was swept with a sense not of departure, but of advent. Not of survival. But of grace.

From Lewis's perspective, he saw us engaged in a great cosmic warfare, where real issues are at stake with real people, created by a God who created them in this wonderful, incredible way. We have the ability to enjoy so much and yet we have this thing that also corrupts and even works against us...Most of us in this world are sort of on the bench. We're not engaged in it. And what Lewis did was to take us off the bench and put us in this other world where we vicariously begin to live more actively. We participate in all these great themes. But the thing is, they all come from our world... Life becomes this exciting thing. Lewis is saying that if we look at our own lives, we'd see they are just as enchanted. A cup of tea here is just as enchanted as a cup of tea in Narnia. A tree here is just as enchanted as a tree in Narnia. We're not looking at the world anymore the way we ought to. It really is an enchanted world. ~The Magic Never Ends~

If you want to know the real reasons why certain politicians vote the way they do - follow the money. Arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg (a.k.a. JackOff Grease-Smug) stands to make billions via his investment firm - Somerset Capital Management - if the UK crashes unceremoniously out of the European Union without a secure future trade deal. Why ? Because proposed EU regulations will give enforcement agencies greater powers to curb the activities adopted by the sort of off-shore tax havens his company employs. Consequently the British electorate get swindled not once, but twice. Firstly because any sort of Brexit - whether hard, soft, or half-baked - will make every man, woman and child in the UK that much poorer than under the status quo currently enjoyed as a fully paid up member of the EU. Secondly because Rees-Mogg's company, if not brought to heel by appropriate EU wide legislation, will deprive Her Majesty's Treasury of millions in taxes, thus leading to more onerous taxes for the rest of us. It begs the question, who else in the obscure but influential European Research Group (ERG) that he chairs and the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) that he subscribes to, have similar vested interests in a no-deal Brexit ? It is high time for infinitely greater parliamentary and public scrutiny into the UK Register of Members' Financial Interests in order to put an end to these nefarious dealings and appalling double standards in public life which only serve to further corrode public trust in an already fragile democracy.

What a difference there is between possessing a woman with one’s body alone, because she is no more than a piece of flesh, and possessing the girl one used to see on the beach with her friends on certain days, without even knowing why it was on those days and not on others, so that one trembled to think one might not see her again. Life had been so kind as to reveal the whole extent of this young girl’s life, had lent first one optical instrument, then another, to see her with, and then added to carnal desire the accompaniment, multiplying and diversifying it, of other desires, more spiritual and less easily satisfied, which lie inert and unaffected when it is merely a question of the conquest of a piece of flesh, but which, when they want to gain possession of a whole field of memories from which they have felt nostalgically exiled, surge up wildly around carnal desire, extend it, are unable to follow it to the fulfillment, the assimilation, impossible in the form in which it is sought, of an immaterial reality, but wait for this desire halfway and, the moment the memory of it returns, are there to escort it once more; to kiss, not the cheeks of the first woman who comes along—anonymous, devoid of mystery and glamour, however cool and fresh those cheeks may be—but those of which I had so long been dreaming, would be to know the taste, the savor, of a color I had so often contemplated. One sees a woman, a mere image in life’s scene, like Albertine silhouetted against the sea, and then it becomes possible to detach that image, bring it close, and gradually observe its volume, its colors, as though it had been placed behind the lenses of a stereoscope. For this reason, women who tend to be resistant and cannot be possessed at once, of whom indeed it is not immediately clear that they can ever be possessed at all, are the only interesting ones.

What a difference there is between possessing a woman with one’s body alone, because she is no more than a piece of flesh, and possessing the girl one used to see on the beach with her friends on certain days, without even knowing why it was on those days and not on others, so that one trembled to think one might not see her again. Life had been so kind as to reveal the whole extent of this young girl’s life, had lent first one optical instrument, then another, to see her with, and then added to carnal desire the accompaniment, multiplying and diversifying it, of other desires, more spiritual and less easily satisfied, which lie inert and unaffected when it is merely a question of the conquest of a piece of flesh, but which, when they want to gain possession of a whole field of memories from which they have felt nostalgically exiled, surge up wildly around carnal desire, extend it, are unable to follow it to the fulfillment, the assimilation, impossible in the form in which it is sought, of an immaterial reality, but wait for this desire halfway and, the moment the memory of it returns, are there to escort it once more; to kiss, not the cheeks of the first woman who comes along—anonymous, devoid of mystery and glamour, however cool and fresh those cheeks may be—but those of which I had so long been dreaming, would be to know the taste, the savor, of a color I had so often contemplated. One sees a woman, a mere image in life’s scene, like Albertine silhouetted against the sea, and then it becomes possible to detach that image, bring it close, and gradually observe its volume, its colors, as though it had been placed behind the lenses of a stereoscope. For this reason, women who tend to be resistant and cannot be possessed at once, of whom indeed it is not immediately clear that they can ever be possessed at all, are the only interesting ones. For to know them, to approach them, to conquer them is to make the human image vary in shape, in size, in relief, a lesson in relativity in the appreciation of a woman’s body, a joy to see anew when it has regained its slender outline against the backdrop of reality. Women who are first encountered in a brothel are of no interest, because they remain static.

Due to Tommy’s lateness, he almost always missed out on filming in mellow morning light. From noon to 5:00 p.m., when Tommy liked to film, you get a wide range of light conditions, most of which are hostile to camera lenses. This should explain why, in the finished film, the Rooftop scenes all look like they’re taking place in different climates and countries, depending on the angle and the shot.

Even though the gospel is a set of truths to understand and believe, it cannot remain a set of beliefs if it is truly believed and understood. As Lesslie Newbigin states, “The Christian story provides us with such a set of lenses, not something for us to look at, but for us to look through.”2 Paul says as much in Romans 12:1, when he looks back on his rich exposition of the doctrine of justification in chapters 1–11 and states, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices.” Scripture teaches that the gospel creates an entire way of life and affects literally everything about us. It is a power (Rom 1:16–17) that creates new life in us (Col 1:5–6; 1 Pet 1:23–25).

I can only see my life through the lenses of my personal worldview. Everything is coloured by my lenses, and the events are made brighter or dimmer by my perspective.I believe what I see is reality, but everyone else in my world believes what they see is reality too.

From her vantage point, looking up at [Ian] through the water-spotted and slightly blurry lenses of her glasses, he was quite literally larger than life. Right at that moment, with his hands up on his head, his muscular chest bare, and his boxer shorts clinging to him in a most revealing way, water matting the hair on his chest and his legs and his eyelashes, he was ridiculously attractive. Even with his more conventionally handsome brother standing next to him. Of course the fact that Aaron was looking down at her with unconcealed dislike in his pretty hazel eyes might’ve had something to with it, as if she weren’t a person but instead a pile of excrement left on his pool deck by a wart-covered troll with an intestinal ailment.

Each one of us sees the world through the lenses of their own beliefs.

The mask resembles a plague doctor’s mask with emerald polypropylene eye lenses. It has a long beak-like nose to allow excess pollution to linger. The nose is connected to a series of distributor cables tucked under the bar. The designer ones are made from real leather and on some occasions, endangered animal skulls and other fine materials.

I was never tainted by my momma’s craziness. My past helped me see life through colored lenses. My life was painted with so many hues of wonderful, I could only surmise that it was because of my past, I was the woman I was today--the woman who had truly found happiness.

Radinka appears as a regular human female, normal in every facet except one: her eyes. She possesses a pair of grotesquely enlarged, almost froglike optical organs, their protruding lenses marring what would be an otherwise-perfect woman's face. These eyes are unique not only in their appearance, however; Radinka can perceive her surroundings only as they were in the past. She has therefore spent the bulk of her life attempting to marry her vision of the past with the messages she receives from her other senses of the present. The Conjuction, as she calls her condition, proves to Radinka beyond a reasonable doubt that reality is, in fact, more than the sum of its parts.

The English mystery writer Agatha Christie often used a fictional village, St Mary Mead, as a microcosm of all mankind. Framingham is the American epidemiologist's English village. Under sharp, statistical lenses, its captive cohort has lived, reproduced, aged, and died, affording a rare glimpse of the natural history of life, disease, and death.

John grows up normally, but doesn't talk, and this drives his parents to distraction. When he is about 16, at last, one teatime, he says: 'I'd like a little sugar. ' His mother is staggered and asks, 'But John, why have you never said anything up to now?' 'Up to now, everything was perfect.' If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection. 'I desire you' is obscene. 'You make me feel very good' is more subtle - the other is here the subject of pleasure, not the object of desire. Desire wants only orgasm; pleasure seeks to please. There can't be any desire to please - 'pleasing' is implacable. In days gone by, pleasing occupied the place of desire - today, desire discharges us from the need to please. Even age may function as a 'natural' perversion. Women are not so much in search of their fathers as of the simple mystery of another generation, closer to death, but also to a previous life. B.B. - My understudy has had an operation for appendicitis. - You're not going to sleep with the whole world. That's impossible, it's rape. - I have a real understanding for wild animals who are hunted, by camera lenses, by machine-guns. - A white Rolls and a black chauffeur. Woman to the power of woman.

Worship is simply a shift of attention that allows us to see God better. Worship is like corrective lenses for our souls, bringing God clearer into view. That’s important for all of us, especially when life goes off the rails. Worship puts God in focus. When the Almighty is in view, our giant’s power over our thinking begins to flicker and fade.

We become servants of and prisoners to our stories. Given that our stories are efforts to interpret the world and make it more knowable and more manageable, we come to depend on them to carry us through ever new situations. The good news rising from our stories is that often our interpretive fiction allows us to build on our knowledge, bind our days together and have reasonably coherent personality. The bad news that those same stories also impose the paradigm, the limited and limiting lense of the former onto the immediacy of the new. Thus we create patterns, whether intended or not. And we become prisoners of what we depend upon. Even when we find our choices and their subsequent patterns problematic even destructive to us and others, we perpetuate them because they are familiar, perhaps at that hour they are the only way we can see the world. This leads to the repetition-compulsion which over the lifetime dots our histories with stock places, blockages and replicative reenactments. It is so hard for any of us to realize that we are not what happened to us. What happened to us was an external manifestation by fate, but our story about that is uniquely ours.

At the messy, lovable, chaotic potluck that is life in the church, transgender Christians have a lot to bring to the table. We can help the church see Scripture through different lenses; we can help other Christians understand their own gender identities; we can help to break down barriers created by sexism and misogyny; we can remind people of the diversity of God’s creation, and of God’s unlimited nature; we can stand in the gaps and bridge middle spaces where others may be uncomfortable or uninformed; we can help make connections between the sacred and the secular, making the church more relevant for the world, and we can provoke people into asking questions about themselves and about God that they may never have thought to ask before.

I have engaged my students in the quest as well. In my MBA course, Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise, we study theories regarding the various dimensions of the job of general managers. These theories are statements of what causes things to happen—and why. When the students understand these theories, we put them “on”—like a set of lenses—to examine a case about a company. We discuss what each of the theories can tell us about why and how the problems and opportunities emerged in the company. We then use the theories to predict what problems and opportunities are likely to occur in the future for that company, and we use the theories to predict what actions the managers will need to take to address them.

While the JSC’s primary focus was the stars, scores of scientists there also toiled daily to make life on Earth better. Everything from memory foam to scratchproof eyeglass lenses came from the JSC, using NASA technology developed for spaceflight. If travel to the stars represented the cutting edge of technological achievement, then the JSC was forever sharpening the blade. After

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. “What’s been the most upsetting thing you’ve had to read about yourself?” “Well, those pictures the other day of my supposed cellulite upset me a lot actually. It really hurt me. It was too painful, too personal. It’s my body everyone was talking about, not just my face. I felt invaded because they put the cameras deliberately onto my legs.” Diana’s relationship with the paparazzi was obviously complex. She professed to hate them: “I know most of the paparazzi and their number plates. They think I am stupid but I know where they are. I’ve had ten years practice. I would support an antistalking bill tomorrow.” Then she took me to the window and started showing me the various media cars, vans, and motorbikes lurking outside. But when I asked why she doesn’t go out of one of the ten other more discreet exits, she exposed her contrary side: “I want to go out the front like anyone else. Why should I change my life for them?” “Because it would make your life easier?” I said. William was equally upset by the constant prying lenses: “Why do they have to chase my mother around so much? It’s unfair on her.” I was torn between genuine concern for the young man protecting his mum so gallantly, and a sense of foreboding for him that one day it would be him, not his mother, who would be chased just as aggressively. How do you explain to a thirteen-year-old boy that he sells papers and therefor he’s a valuable commodity to photographers and editors like me?

Immerse yourself in good books. Read one to two hours per week if you can, more if time permits. Become acquainted with the literary classics. Read as much as you can on personal improvement (self help), history, people, business, and finances. Study the great works of the philosophers. Study scriptures and read about religions and anything that adds value to religious beliefs. Invest in yourself! Learn as much as you can and become a student of life. You can learn a great deal from the experiences of others, from their great successes and also from their failures. Everything you read becomes part of you. Carefully choose what you read on a daily basis. Be very careful with what you choose to read. The words you choose to read play an important role in your personal development and overall outlook on life. Be open-minded about what you read and often take what you read with a grain of salt. Much of what we read is written through colored lenses and is the summation of someone else’s thought, habit, education, beliefs, and past and present life experiences.

Remove those darkened lenses of abuse and replace with God's lense of forgiveness and be free. ~Janiece Rendon

The 8 Basic Headers Work Family & Kids Spouse Health & Fitness Home Money Recreation & Hobbies Prospects for the Future Work The Boss Time Management Compensation Level of interest Co-workers Chances of promotion My Job Description Subordinates Family Relationship with spouse Relationship with children Relationship with extended family Home, chores and responsibilities Recreation & hobbies Money, expenses and allowances Lifestyle and standard of living Future planes and arrangements Spouse Communication type and intensity Level of independence Sharing each other's passions Division of roles and responsibilities Our time together Our planes for our future Decision making Love & Passion Health & Fitness General health Level of fitness Healthy lifestyle Stress factors Self awareness Self improvement Level of expense on health & fitness Planning and preparing for the rest of my life Home Comfort Suitability for needs Location Community and municipal services Proximity and quality of support/activity centers (i.e. school. Medical aid etc) Rent/Mortgage Repair / renovation Emotional atmosphere Money Income from work Passive income Savings and pension funds Monthly expenses Special expenses Ability to take advantage of opportunities / fulfill dreams Financial security / resilience Financial IQ / Understanding / Independent decision making Social, Recreation & Hobbies Free time Friends and social activity Level & quality of social ties Level of spending on S, R&H Culture events (i.e. theater, fairs etc) Space & accessories required Development over time Number of interests Prospect for the future Type of occupation Ratio of work to free time Promotion & Business development (for entrepreneurs) Health & Fitness Relationships Family and Home Financial security Fulfillment of vision / dreams  Creating Lenses with Excel If you wish to use Excel radar diagrams to simulate lenses, follow these steps: Open a new Excel spreadsheet.

Every culture and era flatters itself that we are finally seeing what previous eras and cultures could not see because of their own blinders and ideological lenses. To admit that we are in some sense no different from tenth-century peasants is unacceptable to most of us. It may be offensive. To accept it may take real courage.

What sets my photos in this book apart from other similar works is that all these images were taken during my daily life. No big glitzy photo shoots. No big camera. No heavy bag with lots of lenses. No tripod...I photographed things I thought were beautiful, funny, ironic, spectacular, sad, interesting...

Only when we choose to pause and to see life through a different set of lenses will we find ourselves grounded in a power that is greater than our own and rediscover what is deeply real and truly important.

In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze writes that “the purpose of demonstration functioning as the third eye is not to command or even to convince, but only to shape the glass or polish the lens for this inspired free vision” (SPP, 14). Deleuze then elaborates on Spinoza by way of Henry Miller, that great writer of life as adventure and ordeal, who wrote, “You see, to me it seems as though the artists, the scientists, the philosophers were grinding lenses. It's all a grand preparation for something that never comes off. Someday the lens is going to be perfect and then we're all going to see clearly, see

Surrealistically, the 18.5 sets us in what I have called “stoned space.” Mathematically, with the normal Hollywood lenses, if an actor walks forward three paces, he appears on screen walking forward three paces. With the 18.5, he moves relativistically in filmic space nine paces closer to the audience and seems to loom ominously — or ridiculously. This blend of sharper-than-normal focus and non-Euclidean relativistic space seems the best cinematic translation (thus far) of psychedelic perception.

For the first time in months, she got dressed without attention to anything else except the basic practical covering of her body. She didn’t do her hair. No make-up. No contact lenses. No heels. How much time she saved! How much more she would get done in this new life!

The solution is to remind ourselves that we can, despite our fears, survive the loss of hope. We are no longer those who suffered the disappointments responsible for our present timidity. The conditions that forged our caution are no longer those of adult reality. The unconscious mind may, as is its wont, be reading the present through the lenses of decades ago, but what we fear will happen, has, in truth, already happened; we are projecting into the future a catastrophe that belongs to a past we have not had the chance to fathom and mourn adequately.

Nature appears to be a hierarchy of many grades, corresponding to what the scientist calls ''levels of magnification." Thus when we adjust our lenses to watch the individual cells of an organism we see only particular successes and failures, victories and defeats in what appears to be a ruthless ''dog-eat-dog'' battle. But when we change the level of magnification to observe the organism as a whole, we see that what was conflict at the lower level is harmony at the higher: that the health, the ongoing life of the organism is precisely the outcome of this microscopic turmoil.

Look, the job is a little boring,” she said. “Let’s just admit that. It’s OK. Plutarch laid bricks. Spinoza ground lenses. Tedium is part of life.

Take for instance a phenomenon called frustrated spontaneous emission. It sounds like an embarrassing sexual complaint that psychotherapy might help with. In fact, it involves the decay of radioactive particles, which ordinarily takes place at a predictably random rate. The exception, however, is when radioactive material is placed in an environment that cannot absorb the photons that are emitted by decay. In that case, decay ceases—the atoms become “frustrated.” How do these atoms “know” to stop decaying until conditions are suitable? According to Wharton, the unpredictable decay of radioactive particles may be determined in part by whatever receives their emitted photons in the future.20 Decay may not really be random at all, in other words. Another quantum mystery that arguably becomes less mysterious in a retrocausal world is the quantum Zeno effect. Usually, the results of measurements are unpredictable—again according to the famous uncertainty believed to govern the quantum kingdom—but there is a loophole. Persistent, rapid probing of reality by repeating the same measurement over and over produces repetition of the same “answer” from the physical world, almost as if it is “stopping time” in some sense (hence the name of the effect, which refers to Zeno’s paradoxes like an arrow that must first get halfway to its target, and then halfway from there, and so on, and thus is never able to reach the target at all).21 If the measurement itself is somehow influencing a particle retrocausally, then repeating the same measurement in the same conditions may effectively be influencing the measured particles the same way in their past, thereby producing the consistent behavior. Retrocausation may also be at the basis of a long-known but, again, hitherto unsatisfyingly explained quirk of light’s behavior: Fermat’s principle of least time. Light always takes the fastest possible path to its destination, which means taking the shortest available path through different media like water or glass. It is the rule that accounts for the refraction of light through lenses, and the reason why an object underwater appears displaced from its true location.22 It is yet another example of a creature in the quantum bestiary that makes little sense unless photons somehow “know” where they are going in order to take the most efficient possible route to get there. If the photon’s angle of deflection when entering a refractive medium is somehow determined by its destination, Fermat’s principle would make much more sense. (We will return to Fermat’s principle later in this book; it plays an important role in Ted Chiang’s short story, “Story of Your Life,” the basis for the wonderful precognition movie Arrival.) And retrocausation could also offer new ways of looking at the double-slit experiment and its myriad variants.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.

A river is water, yes, but it is also soil, plant, and animal life—a watershed. Seeing it requires something more than merely historical or aesthetic lenses. It requires the poet's eye.

Goals and vision are different. They’re like the two magnifications in progressive eyeglass lenses. When you look down at what’s right in front of you—like you would with the “reading” lenses in progressives—you’re looking at goals. When you look out at the horizon—the “distance” lenses—you’re in vision. But when you try to look at both at once? That’s a recipe for blurriness, confusion, and a headache.

The next morning, I began a dissection of my business and personal life through the lenses of two questions: 1. Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness? 2. Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?

They both went quiet, imagining a river of irises. Thatcher lay watching the sky through the leaves, white clouds skipping across small lenses of light. Here was a world, where he’d asked for nothing. He would escape with his life before the dust had settled on the collapse of his falling house.

The perpetrator of such a misdemeanor must have a motive. Is UMMO the private joke of a group of Spanish engineers? Is it a psychological warfare exercise, as some French analysts suspect? Or is the truth more complex, rooted in a social reality where the ideas and symbols of UMMO have acquired a life of their own, their special mythology, and a set of beliefs that feed on themselves? We can at least be certain of one thing: the UMMO documents do not come from advanced beings trying to demonstrate their existence to us. But try to explain it to their disciples! Very few UFO believers, and even fewer of their New Age counterparts, have any formal training in science. They are easily awed by any document that contains a few equations and a numerical system of base 12. Yet if they had some awareness of modern technology, they would realize how easy it should be for an advanced race to prove its genuine skill to a society like the human race. After reading the masses of documents purportedly coming from the planet UMMO, I asked myself: if I had the opportunity to communicate with intelligent beings of an earlier time, such as the high priests of Egypt, how would I establish a meaningful dialogue? I certainly would not insult them by sending a letter beginning with ”We are aware of the transcendence of what we are about to tell you”—especially if I had an imperfect command of hieroglyphics! Instead, I would concentrate on a few points of valuable, verifiable information. Since the Egyptians already knew how to make electrical batteries and were aware of the magnetic properties of certain minerals, I would send them a simple set of instructions to make a coil and a compass. I could explain resistance and Ohm’s Law, a simple equation that was easily within the grasp of their mathematicians. Or I would tell them about making glass and lenses from sand. If they wanted proof, I would not bother to reveal to them set theory or the fact that E is equal to mc2. Instead, I would send them a table predicting future eclipses, or a diagram to build an alternator, or Leonardo da Vinci’s design for variable-speed cogwheels. That should get the attention of the top scientists in their culture and open up a dialogue. Unfortunately, the extraterrestrials of UMMO and other planets never seem to communicate at this level. Are they afraid of collapsing our society by appearing too advanced with respect to us? This hypothesis does not hold, since they have chosen a very obvious way of showing themselves in our skies.

When you go to the optometrist, you’re asked to read symbols off a chart through a large metal device filled with lenses known as a phoropter. As you read, the optometrist switches lenses, asking you which brings the symbols into focus. Is it better now? Click. How about now? Click. The purpose is to find an array of lenses that alters the way light hits our retinas so that we may see with greater clarity. When it comes to living a more intentional life, Reflection functions as a phoropter. It’s the mechanism that helps improve our perception, but in order

It’s only when we take away the lenses of competition and winning and losing that we can begin to correct and change ourselves.

But the world was a strain like that. Indeed it was also lighter with the light frame on the nose, the heavy steps he was used to no longer suited the new lightness in his face. But the world was closer and more oppressing, it demanded more of you, but its demands weren’t clear. When they became too much for him, these obscure demands, he retreated behind the old lenses that kept everything at a distance and allowed him to doubt whether there really was an outside world beyond words and texts, a doubt that was dear to him and without it he really couldn’t imagine life at all. But he could no longer forget the new view either

We must reclaim Romans 13 from both the tyrants and the cultured despisers, and read it with fresh eyes as it truly is, not through the mistaken interpretive lenses bequeathed to us by the centuries. Doing so may well help us discover a new “two kingdoms” theology, one which recognizes the fallen nature of the kingdom of the “powers that be,” and seeks to overwhelm them with the light of the inbreaking kingdom of God.

Most readers of this section of the book will smile at this point, realising that a seemingly sophisticated philosophical argument is clearly invalidated by the context within which Lewis sets it. Yet Lewis has borrowed this from Plato—while using Anselm of Canterbury and René Descartes as intermediaries—thus allowing classical wisdom to make an essentially Christian point. Lewis is clearly aware that Plato has been viewed through a series of interpretative lenses—those of Plotinus, Augustine, and the Renaissance being particularly familiar to him. Readers of Lewis’s Allegory of Love, The Discarded Image, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and Spenser’s Images of Life will be aware that Lewis frequently highlights how extensively Plato and later Neoplatonists influenced Christian literary writers of both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Lewis’s achievement is to work Platonic themes and images into children’s literature in such a natural way that few, if any, of its young readers are aware of Narnia’s implicit philosophical tutorials, or its grounding in an earlier world of thought. It is all part of Lewis’s tactic of expanding minds by exposing them to such ideas in a highly accessible and imaginative form.

9Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! 10For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

When a person converts to Christianity, he or she not only enters a relationship with Christ and inherits eternal life, but also adopts a worldview—a set of lenses through which to view the world. Other critical worldview questions include What is real? (metaphysics); How do we know that which we know? (epistemology); What happens to a person after death? Where is history going? and What kind of a thing is a person? (anthropology). For more discussion on the subject of one’s worldview, see James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door, 4th ed. (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2004); J. P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind (Colorado Springs: Nav-Press, 1998); and Nancy Pearcey and Phillip E. Johnson, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001).