Our Minds

I read a phrase this week that has fascinated me. It is about what we allow to "colonize" our minds.

My studies over the years have included a lot of variety regarding how our minds work at various levels and in many models. For example, the subconscious, the conscious and superconscious; the visual, auditory and kinesthetic, etc.

Our subconscious mind reasons deductively, working with what is placed in it without argument. The conscious mind is the door-keeper and can argue, reasoning inductively. So if I say "I'm stupid," our conscious mind can argue with that statement with contrary evidence. If we say it with emphasis and feeling, especially if we say it repeatedly, our subconscious mind receives it and creates thoughts and interpretations of experiences in alignment with "I'm stupid."

So at the basic level we have colonized our minds with negative self-talk. The value of affirmations is we can colonize our minds with positive, life affirming, uplifting thoughts. Affirmations are sort of antidotes.

One of the pitfalls of "modern" life is that we are bombarded by intense negativity via movies, television, music, games, internet, thereby our subconscious is colonized with terrible things. And once installed in our minds, our subconscious has difficulty in sorting fact from fiction because it works deductively and not inductively.

It's funny that as I write this, the spell checker keeps changing deductive and inductive to seductive :) I guess that concept does apply because the violence and ugliness of so much input does seduce us to more and more violent movies, games, etc.

As we allow the violent and ugly to colonize our minds, we errect a sort of barrier to the superconscious, the part of us attuned to all things spiritual. So I see a correlation that I've not seen before. I have a hypothesis -  movie attendance/violent game playing/hateful music, etc.
 grows and church attendance goes down partly because the negative calls for more negative and sees the spiritual as something not believable.

Therefore, the great spiritual moments cannot happen in those whose minds are heavily colonized by the opposite.

Let us begin to be more careful about what we allow to colonize our minds. Let's prepare for a life more attuned to Spirit. Let's recognize our yearning is for God and cannot be satisfied elsewhere.