The Mind and it's Games

Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your nous. (Rom. 12:2) “…Nous, in particular, is a very difficult word to translate. If you just say ‘mind’, that is far too vague. In our translation of the Philokalia, we, with some hesitations, opted for the word intellect, emphasizing that it does not mean primarily the rational faculties. The nous is the spiritual vision that we all possess, though many of us have not discovered it. The nous implies a direct, intuitive appreciation of truth, where we apprehend the truth not simply as the conclusion of a reasoned argument, but we simply see that something is so. The nous is cultivated certainly through study through training our faculties, but also it is developed through prayer, through fasting, through the whole range of the Christian life. This is what we need to develop most of all as Orthodox, something higher than the reasoning brain and deeper than the emotions.”- Met. Kallistos Ware