Imprints

Did you ever wonder why you have a liking for what you like and a disliking for what you dislike? I mean, there are people who like ice cream, skateboarding, video games, chatting on the phone, watching TV all day, going to parties, etc.,etc. These are not mysteries to us. But there are also people who like ... Math. Statistics. Stamp collecting. Collecting Dresden figurines. Music by Beethoven. Really, really, really, long books. Insect collecting. Dead languages that nobody speaks anymore. Really old junk that has been lying in the ground since time out of mind. Looking at really, really far away things with telescopes. Looking a really, really, small things with microsopes. Thinking really hard about whether a tree really falls to the ground if no one is around to see it These things are mysteries to us. Why does one person like something and another person does not?

Well, one idea of science is that it has to do with what is called imprinting. I’ll give you a simplified explanation of imprinting.

When you are born, you are born with a new and smooth brain that is capable taking in and saving a lot of different messages. And you are born with a body that is fine-tuned to receive as many different messages as possible. From each bunch of messages you body receives, your brain then decides whether it likes all of the bunch of messages or not. When it receives a bunch of messages all at once, your brain does not distinguish them all from each other. It’s an all or nothing deal with your brain (or at least your very young brain).

So if your body receives a bunch of messages, and there are pain messages mixed in with them, your brain will call all of the messages “bad” and store them away as a unit of learning. If you body receives a bunch of messages, and pleasure messages are mixed in with them, your brain will call all of the messages “good” and store them away as another unit of learning.

For example, if, when you were a child, your body did not like lima beans and caused you to vomit them up the first time you ate them, then it is unlikely you ever picked up a liking for lima beans. If, when you were a child, there was a lot of angry noise going on around you when you were first trying to learn to read, it is unlikely that you picked up a liking for reading.

But this is not the whole story. Pleasure and pain messages can be indirect, as well as direct. As young children, we wanted to be around our parents a lot and have them like us. So we learned to like what they liked and not like that they didn’t like. (And this includes things that they clearly liked but didn’t want us to like.)

But note well that all these things are coincidences. If there happened to be nastyness going on when your were learning to read, that was a coincidence. If you have grown up with parents who happened to like smoking, that was a coincidence. They are coincidences meaningless to others, but very meaningful to you, because they have caused you to become the person your are today.

That is not to say that we have no free will, but it does point out that our wills are conditioned by imprinting. We can still operate against the imprinting, but it will not “feel right” to us. It won’t be fun.

So if we are the prisoners of what we like and dislike, we are actually the prisoners of meaningful coincidences. Of synchronicity. Some of which are from God, and some of which are from His adversary.

That was then, this is now. As sons of God by adoption, we can now apply at the door of our hearts to the Lord of the Synchronicities, to have our hearts changed and made free to love what He loves and hate what He hates, and be delivered to the Promised Land of His love. This is why I have in one of my Rounds a prayer of spiritual formation that goes:

“Lord God, cause me to love what you love and hate what you hate.”

Many are the journeys of a thousand miles that begin with that first step.