MANAGING YOUR MIND

"A man reaps what he sows." Galatians 6:7

Managing your mind should be one of your top priorities. Your mind is like a computer, it only spits out the data you feed it. Winners work hard at investing the right material inside themselves. Dr. Hans Selye researched and popularized a tiny membrane in the back of your head known as the RAS: Reticular Activating System. Your RAS has a primary function: it moves you in the direction of your dominant thought at that moment. We naturally act on what fills our minds. When we become preoccupied with a thought, eventually we want to act on it. This explains a lot of things like why so many rapes happen after guys have watched pornography night after night. It also explains the huge amount of violence among young people between the ages of 12 and 24. By then the average young person has seen more than 4,000 murders on TV, not to mention video games.

Indiana School of Medicine studied how the images we see impact our brains. For instance, adolescents who had a higher level of exposure to violence, had reduced levels of cognitive function. The more violence they saw the less thinking, learning, reasoning and emotional stamina they had. The garbage they fed their minds affected what came out. Their computer stored wrong information, now they could only retrieve the wrong stuff. The Apostle Paul did not know about computers but he knew about agriculture: "The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life" (Gal 6:8). So, manage your mind!