I recently noticed something a bit disturbing. After I finished reading one of the Discworld books, my thoughts almost sounded as though Terry Pratchett had written them. Short, terse, sentence fragments. And sentences begining with conjunctions. Disturbing, but true. And this all got me thinking.

What is a mind, anyway? Where do our thoughts come from? Can we only respond to our environment, or is there something more?

We do believe that we have an eternal soul which yearns to G-d, but is that enough? Is a soul strong enough to counter the forces and desires which buffet it and try to turn it backwards in its path? We certainly are affected, to a greater or lesser extent, by everything that enters our eyes and ears.
The Derech Hashem teaches that the battle of soul and body will end in either the soul elevating the body, or being dragged down by it. In other words, both the soul and the body can be changed. And this world is the means of change. We can use the resources which we find here to uplift our physical body until it works alongside the soul, or, heaven forbid, we can drag down our soul until it no longer remembers its divine mission. We can be led by our soul to eternal heights, or we can beat it, break its spirit, and keep it in a cage.

At the very least, we have to realize how impressionable a mind really is. If we forget it, we can be brought down without even knowing what is going on. That would be an awful shame.