Anime Lectio: maboroshi

                                                            1. Why do Anime Lectio? 

Anime Lectio is a time for us to stop and take a breath. Between work, activities, family life, and social media, our minds are always moving. We rarely take time to contemplate and ask, why am I watching this anime? What’s the point of all this? And, how is this making me feel? 

2. Put away all distractions 

(phones, work, etc.)

We are so enslaved to things that stimulate our minds. Let this be a moment for us to free our minds, look inside of ourselves, and be at peace.

3. Deep Breathing

Take several deep breaths. Let your mind relax. If you’ve had any questions, desires, or struggles that you’ve been hiding or stuffing away, let them rise up to the surface. 

4. Open yourself to God’s Presence

Remember God places all our thoughts and desires inside of us, and He uses them to draw us closer to Himself. God gives us a community to help us understand who we are and what He is calling us to do. The faces of other people you know and don't know are like signs of God’s presence.  

5. Think About What’s on Your Mind in Relation to the Anime

Think about what’s been on your mind in relation to the anime.  The following is an example of such thoughts written by me. 

What is reality?  Reality is what you see and try to control/do something about and/or live with based on what you think.  This also involves what other people see and try to control/do something about and/or live with based on what they think.  This usually leads to conflict as it involves individuals living as a community in a certain way and in a certain place and figuring out what to do about their reality based on what reality as a whole is.  An example of all of this can be seen in the anime movie maboroshi.

6. Brief and written explanation of the anime

Pay attention to how the brief and written explanation of the anime seen on this blog, or seeing the anime for yourself since that's better than any explanation, might “speak” to you or shed light on the things that have been on your minds.

After a factory explosion in a small town creates a timeless freeze in it, the people in the town have to deal with a quickly collapsing reality. While the adults in town think one way about what is happening, the kids in town think differently about it, which involves not thinking about it at all in order to think about other things. Thinking about other things, like loving others, usually leads to problems since focusing on these other things causes you to literally lose yourself instead of focusing on your reality. However, this kind of thinking doesn't always lead to problems as long as it's done in the right way, which is thinking about others in your reality instead of just yourself.

7.  Reflect on the anime

Has this brief and written explanation of the anime shed any light on what's been on your minds?  The following is an example of a reflection on the anime from me.

There are several kinds of therapy that I learned about in an online professional counseling program that I was in before dropping out of it and switching to an online program that I finished in transpersonal psychology. One of the kinds of therapy I learned about was called reality therapy. Basically, reality therapy is a therapy that helps you deal with your realities - your reality on an individual level and your reality on communal levels, focusing on the direct community, or communities, of the individual. An important idea in reality therapy is the idea of the world of wants, which refers to the individual of a person's reality that is in conflict with others, like in the anime movie explained in this reflection. What you want should also be what others need and doing this requires getting out of your own world, or reality, and bringing it to others in the world, or reality, that we all share.

8. Final Prayer

Please voice any prayer intentions for friends, family, or people around the world that relate to this anime.  The following is an example written by me.

Let us pray that we can get out of our own worlds of wants, understanding that what we want should be what others need.