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Monday, June 07, 2010

It's All In Your Head

I have a real problem with needles. Oh, no. It's not a pain threshold thing. It's something in my head. I remember when I was in basic training they got up in front of the group to explain what they would be doing. They would be taking blood. He explained in detail how they would stick a needle in your arm and draw blood and ... well, I had to lie down before any needle got near me. On the other hand, I've had actual blood draws that haven't phased me in the least. Why? Because I went somewhere else in my mind. You see, it's all in my head.

It's a funny thing with me. When I'm just going through my normal routine, I don't get hungry. I can walk by a vending machine full of sweet treats and not bat an eye. Food isn't much of an issue with me. But put me on a diet and suddenly I'm hungry all the time. The vending machine calls my name. I desperately want to eat. Nothing really changed. I'm not really more hungry than before. It's just that I can't eat whatever I want when I'm on a diet, so I want to. You see, it's all in my head.

The mind is a complicated thing. We can operate from the subconscious or we can operate from the conscious. The military and the police and the fire department and all sorts of others have training exercises to insert responses into the subconscious that should be taken without thinking in certain situations. Because, you see, we all have both the subconscious and the conscious. So the subconscious can be a very good thing. It can act without analysis when analysis just isn't appropriate. On the other hand, it can be a bad thing. It can, for instance, make you dizzy when someone talks about needles or make you hungry because you can't eat when neither is really necessary.

The news media knows this. So do a lot of others with causes. They like to appeal to the subconscious. Don't make a coherent argument for the conscious mind to analyze. No, no, that would be a bad thing. Don't think; feel. I saw a benign example of this back when that earthquake devastated Haiti. The talking head was bemoaning the fact that help had not yet arrived. Now, the subconscious could run with this. It tugged at your heart. You could feel the pain of the little kids they were showing and the sadness of everyone around in tragic circumstances and the goal was to make you cry out in anger that no help had yet arrived. The truth was that help was all around. There were simply major logistical problems to overcome. There was precious little airfield space to land and offload supplies. Once it was there, there were precious few roads that could manage the means of transporting these supplies. It was an earthquake, for pity sake. The infrastructure was gone and people were moving as fast as they could to get help in to those who needed it. But, you see, those were the rational facts, requiring the conscious brain to figure out.

These days we are encouraged more and more not to engage that conscious brain. When you are berated for saying that it's a sin, for instance, to engage in sexual relations outside of marriage because "That's so judgmental", you are not supposed to analyze that and realize that those who are berating you are being judgmental. When you stand for truth and are told "It's your truth; truth is relative", you're not supposed to think it through to see that the statement is a truth statement that you are supposed to accept as true in contradiction to your own perception of truth. When someone says, "I'm a Christian" and you can't see the slightest clue that it's true but every indication that it's not, it's wrong of you to question their veracity because, you see, that's rational and you're not supposed to think that way.

We are commanded to "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" (Matt 22:37). We're pretty happy with the "heart" and "soul" ideas, but we're often way too quick to toss out the "mind" part. Faith and reason, we are told, are not connected. Love is a feeling anyway, right? Know that you're being lied to when you hear those things. We are to be transformed by the renewing of the mind. You've probably read that. But do you know why? "So that you may prove what the will of God is" (Rom 12:2). That's right. You're mind is skewed as an unbeliever (Rom 1:22, 28) and needs to be healed -- transformed -- so that you will be capable of proving what God's will is. The subconscious has its uses and it can be good, but I beg of you to work at engaging your conscious thinking in life. I beg of you -- not I, but the Lord -- to love the Lord your God with all your mind.

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