Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Mad Love to the RAS

Today is a new day! Yesterday was great, and today will be whatever I make it! Do you believe me? It's true. If I go into this day letting every little thing bug me, then I will notice a lot of things to bug me! If I notice all of the cool weird things int eh world, then I will be given opportunities to see more of those.

Why? Is it magic? No, it's your RAS, your filter, its job is to sort out the millions of bits of information you are presented with every second and pare it down to the 3-7 things that are most important. This is part of the reptile brain and its main job used to be to keep us out of danger. It categorizes things for us, like: Bear = RUN!!! or Green Plants= Yum.

It also deletes information that is not useful, like noticing what's written on everybody's T-Shirts, or how many tiles are in the bathroom at Wendy's. Stuff not pertinent to the situation at hand, or your conditioning. If you never wear sunglasses, it would be easy to not even notice a Sunglass Hut at the mall. Whereas, if you LOVE Sunnies, you'll spot a kid in the back of the room with a card table set up and a handwritten sign that says: 2/$15.

Another function, and this is the one that applies to how you see your day, is distortion. It will distort the information received in order to back up what you are already thinking. After all, if it didn't you would feel crazy. Say you believe that all all plants are beautiful. Your RAS will focus on all of the beautiful plants around you and bring them to focus in your conscious mind. Here's one of mine that I don't want anymore, and it just popped up. I tell myself over and over that I “always misspell conscious”, so I did. Not this last time, but the one before it. Now, I have the opportunity to dig that programming out and rewrite it to say, “I don't even think about how to spell conscious anymore, because it is just ingrained.”

Brains are neat.

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