Making New Connections

Our brain cells are like little wires that transmit electrical signals all throughout the brain. If a certain sequence of brain cells is used repeatedly, those cells form dendritic structures which are like little tree branches connecting that specific cluster of neurons together, so that they can pass the electrical signal better. It’s like they’re wired up more efficiently so it’s easier to get the electricity across. So, over time, the brain cell in charge of, say, the color blue, gets wired up to sky and swimming pools and sadness and icees and so on. So, eventually, you can think of tree and go through brown-tall-shade or earth-seed-water. Either way, your brain eventually gets to tree. So, every time we read a particular scripture, we tell the brain to wire together a certain number of brain cells so we can remember that scripture better. And each time we read that scripture, we’re in a slightly different place in our lives, we’re thinking and worrying about different things, and we’re trying to discover a slightly different path forward because we’re in a slightly different landscape. So each time we read a specific scripture, we wire together a slightly different set of brain cells. But over time, we have this rich interconnected forest of trees whose branches are intertwined so that way we can make new connections that we hadn’t ever thought of before. That’s why we can read the same scripture we’ve read a thousand times before but suddenly feel like we’ve never read it before and have this whole new cascade of connections that we couldn’t have possibly imagined. It’s because that cluster of cells has now linked up with an entirely different cluster, and now we can arrive at the same truth using different neural pathways, each with their own branching connections. The philosopher’s say that you can never cross the same river twice, because even though the river seems to be in the same place and more or less looks the same, the specific water molecules that were in that river the first time you crossed it are long downstream or in the ocean. The exact arrangement of the pebbles, of the way the specific schools of fish were at that moment you crossed the river are not the exact same. When we read the same verse a second time, we’re not reading the same verse because our brains are literally wired differently than the last time we read it. But less anatomically, our lives are different than the last time we read it. We are told that we must learn line upon line, precept upon precept. That line might contain the same words as it did last time, but laid upon our previous memory, now with a slightly different set of connections, the same verse we read before means something different to us now. And the next time we read that line, we will add a little more, and a little more.