The Taxes of Perception

Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, so that you obey its desires. And do not offer any parts of it to sin as weapons for unrighteousness. But as those who are alive from the dead, offer yourselves to God, and all the parts of yourselves as weapons for righteousness. – Romans 6:12-13

In the sixteenth verse, Paul goes on: Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are whom ye obey? We are mastered by and thus empower whatever we obey. So I have a question. What if someone wants our attention only? Are we empowering that entity by paying attention?

Our thoughts and certainly our minds are as much a part of our mortal body as hands or feet. To think on a thing is to, in a sense, yield our minds to it. There must, however, be a distinction between being aware of evil or threats or danger and the giving over of our minds as a “weapon of unrighteousness”. To simply consider a situation or an event, to observe and analyze even the most heinous thing is not the same as allowing our minds to be brought under the dominion of sin.

At the beginning of Miracles, C.S. Lewis says: What we learn from an experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. If we bring God’s perspective to our experiences in the world, we will derive from them God’s wisdom. If we approach our experiences from the world’s horizontal perspective, we will likely be conscripted into the army of unrighteousness. Our attention will be fastened on and fascinated by the world’s machinations as they appear from the flatland level.

I notice that I have been paying much attention to the wrong things recently. I’ve yielded my thoughts, my attention, and much of my space, if you will, to entities that crave that attention and are probably empowered by it. Governments, politicians, cable television hosts, news readers, and other flatland entities need to be put on a starvation diet – of attention before they are starved of monies. Governments can print monopoly money, but they cannot manufacture the power over me that they derive from my giving them undo attention.

There are consequences to the actions even of fools. Those consequences on the plane of material existence may have an adverse effect upon me. Nevertheless, I will not yield my thoughts to be used as a weapon against the good. By playing a fool’s game I become, if not a fool, indistinguishable from a fool. I am not saying that we should ignore completely the actions of the current cabal of idiots that would stand reality on its head to feed their cravings. I greatly appreciate the protestors who did their best to deliver an emergency shipment of reason to alleviate the plague of stupidity rising with the miasma of the Beltway swamp. But, now, the blathering simply needs to be turned off. The beasts have shown that even their beastliness exists only in a single dimension. I will step over them as I would step over a pile of dog poop and move on. I am aware of it. I will avoid it. I will not give it undue attention.

So it should be with much that would ensnare us.

You will keep in perfect peace the mind that is fixed on You (Isaiah 26:3).