December 13, 2011
Job’s Reindeer
There are times I’m confident I know a certain passage of Scripture and
what it means, only to discover that it doesn’t say exactly what I thought it
said. I find this especially true when looking for a word to direct me to a
specific passage of Scripture. In my quest I’ll check my own concordance,
brainstorm with another person or go on line to Gateway Bible. I really
appreciate the search I can do on Gateway, but it’s not unusual for me to type
in my phrase and read the response, “Key
word search ‘0’ results.” Recently a friend was into his daily devotional
when he began reading about Job’s Reindeer. Bob laughed, “I said, ‘Wait a minute…Job had a reindeer’?” After re-reading the
meditation Bob cleared his head and focused on Job’s Redeemer.
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Gail;
-----Memory is one of my fascinations, especially since mine isn’t all that good. It works great on concepts but doesn‘t link up to words so well. I’ve heard a couple different things about memory which don’t seem to correspond. One says everything you’ve ever experienced is stored in your mind somewhere. The other says that memory is more a reconstruction of the idea you are trying to remember than that it is like a retrieval of data from a specific sector of a hard drive (old cowboys say a hard drive is an F150 with a bad clutch.) I believe them both, each for different reasons. So I always have my mental playground. And to save you a whole lot of boring reading from there, I’ll just say memory might work like Aristotle’s concept of ideals and forms. The mind builds into the consciousness a portrayal of what the subconscious "knows" about the particular details stored. Sometimes the distance between the storage bin and the consciousness is great, sometimes it is hardly far at all. I think imagination mostly spans the required distance. Folks with meticulously accurate memories usually don’t seem to be too consciously imaginative, and visa-versa. Some lucky dogs are great at both.
-----But the rest of us troopers take from all this a lesson to be well attended: the construction of remembered details in the consciousness plays greatly according to the rules of the sub-conscious, and the sub-conscious does not always play by the rules of reality. It gets a bit childish down there. For various reasons, it will twist a little here and maybe more there whenever it gets a chance because it knows what it wants, and it ain’t going to allow reality to get in its way. So staying close to reality seems to be more up to the consciousness. Usually. (Conscience is a whole ‘nother convoluted topic. We won’t go there.)
-----The down side of all this is that learning is the intertwining of new information with recalled understandings forming new concepts we call, well, learning. These then become learned understandings for more learning done the same way tomorrow. And so on, ad infinitum, into the future. Now you’ve noted how frustrating searching for a verse can be. It happens to me all the time. There’s numerous possible reasons the sub-conscious wants to see a particular word for the conceived verse you’re trying to recall instead of the word that is really there. But whatever the reason, it does. And that is merely an example of what happens systemically throughout pondering and relating and concluding all our ideas, such that all our ideas have taint built into them by subtle and redundant inaccuracies. However much or little taint there is depends upon how deliberately a person continually checks his memories for accuracy, and checks his newly sensed information, too. So the natural question becomes, “Check it against what? If taint is built into our learning, how can what we’ve learned be used to stay learning‘s course?” Then we realize our own knowledge of truth is a process, not a completion, and when the chips are down and the knowing is important, only one source of untainted data's available for comparison.
-----It is humbling to read in that source, “Let God be true, though every man be false.” (Rom 3:4) Humility trains the subconscious to be less selfish in playing games with the memories so better accuracy will produce more straightness throughout the redundancies of learning. Information + memory + logic = intelligence. Intelligence + humility = wisdom. Intelligence + arrogance = foolishness.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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