Mind-Body Connection

Acti­vate God’s Design for Your Suc­cess.

Lit­tle known and scarce­ly under­stood truths about our mind.

Our Mind:  The Thought­ful, Choos­ing, Mind-Body Con­nec­tion.

Our mind has been sub­ject of debate, seem­ing­ly, for­ev­er.  There have always been dif­fer­ent views, from philoso­phers and sci­en­tists alike, on human mind func­tions and its rela­tion­ship to our lives.  Libraries are filled with books about the mind of man; so the sub­ject of the “mind” will scarce­ly be exhaust­ed by me as I write here of my learn­ing how God breathed life into man and he became a liv­ing soul.  Man, wow, what a cre­ation from God!  A liv­ing soul! (Gen­e­sis 2:7).  We were cre­at­ed with glo­ry and hon­or a lit­tle low­er than angels, with pow­er over our works. (Hebrews 2:7).  Our mind gives us the means to exer­cise this pow­er of “liv­ing.”

James Allen, in As a Man Thin­keth, wrote, “At birth the soul comes to its own, and through every step of its earth­ly pil­grim­age it attracts those com­bi­na­tions of con­di­tions that reveal itself, that are the reflec­tions of its own puri­ty and impu­ri­ty, its strength and weak­ness.

We do not attract what we want, but what we are.  Our whims, fan­cies, and ambi­tions, are thwart­ed at every step, but our inner­most thoughts and desires are fed with their own food, be it good or bad.  The ‘divin­i­ty that shapes our ends’ is in our­selves; it is our very self.  And so we are held pris­on­ers only by our­selves:  Our own thoughts and actions are the jail­ers of our fate — they imprison, if they are base; they are also the angels of free­dom — they lib­er­ate, if they are noble.”

From the inner core of the brain where our soul is, our mind thrives.  There is com­mon belief that man is body, soul, and spir­it; and with­in the soul our mind, will, and emo­tions flour­ish.  The mind holds a pow­er and dom­i­nance over our flesh­ly body.  It is pro­found­ly pow­er­ful and sure, yet com­plex for man to under­stand. Man’s soul holds a spe­cial con­nec­tion with the spir­it of man.  I have come to believe the soul, “man’s being,” con­nects man to the spir­it of man.  Then when we find Christ we are born of the Spir­it thus empow­er­ing us [our soul through our spir­it] to com­mu­ni­cate with God on a spir­i­tu­al lev­el.

Sub­con­scious Mind

There, in the soul, the mind cre­ates, receives, and trans­mits thoughts into choic­es and actions; and also oper­ates sub­con­scious­ly to con­trol all auto­mat­ic func­tions of mankind.  Maxwell Maltz called it the sub­con­scious mind.  He went on to say “sub­con­scious mind” is not a “mind” at all, but a mechanism—a “ser­vo-mech­a­nism” con­sist­ing of the brain and ner­vous sys­tem, which is used by, and direct­ed by the mind.”

Some human func­tions are built in, while some are learned such as when a child learns to talk and walk.  Some learned abil­i­ties such as walk­ing are embed­ded into our sub­con­scious so we can walk with­out tak­ing con­scious thought.  There are sci­en­tif­ic views emerg­ing that shows there to be com­plex links [inter­play] between the mind and body.  The mind oper­ates both con­scious­ly and sub­con­scious­ly to con­trol mankind.  Our cog­ni­tive fac­ul­ties include per­cep­tions, our thoughts, con­scious­ness, and mem­o­ry so as to process rea­son­ing, our choic­es as deci­sions, and prob­lem solv­ing; all part of the liv­ing soul of mankind.

Choice

I would be amiss if I failed to include “choice” in this mind-body dis­cus­sion.  With­in our mind we have been giv­en the pow­er of choice.  Yes, pow­er in the form of our free will to choose.  In the mind along with our per­cep­tions, our thoughts, con­scious­ness, mem­o­ry, and our abil­i­ty to choose, there is a bidi­rec­tion­al rela­tion­ship of the mind to the body.  Vik­tor E. Fran­kl,  in Man’s Search for Mean­ing wrote,  “Every­thing can be tak­en from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s atti­tude in any giv­en set of cir­cum­stances, to choose one’s own way.”  It is as Vik­tor Fran­kl said “…choos­ing one’s atti­tude…” that I write about here today.

Thoughts

What this means is this:  While we can­not always choose what we face in life, such as our cir­cum­stances, even our thoughts, but we can always choose our atti­tude toward those cir­cum­stances and thoughts.   That is we will always have with­in our mind the pow­er of choice!  So, from our minds we main­tain con­trol of our words and actions, good or bad.  We even have con­trol over thoughts in that we can “choose” to accept [to act on] them or “choose” to reject them.  This answers a ques­tion I have heard some ask, “Who real­ly has author­i­ty over your life?  Who is in con­trol? Our mind, our will, and our emo­tions spring forth from our soul into choic­es and actions, thus we live.  Moses made it obvi­ous in Deuteron­o­my 30:19–22 where in part he said”…Choose life..”

In dis­cussing the mind we must real­ize we can­not sep­a­rate the mind from many of the oth­er process­es of our being.  From the eter­nal core of our soul, our mind, will, and emo­tions, we cre­ate our­selves; our per­son­al­i­ty, and our char­ac­ter, our lives.  And in so doing we must remem­ber the soul is con­nect­ed to the spir­it of man and is often vis­i­ble to oth­ers as we out­ward­ly reflect our inner being.   The soul deals with moral, intan­gi­ble, and eter­nal aspects of our lives.

Mind and Health and Wel­fare.

Here in Amer­i­ca our health care sys­tem is still study­ing and treat­ing the mind and body as two sep­a­rate enti­ties.  I con­tend our Cre­ator linked our mind and body so we might ben­e­fit from adopt­ing more holis­tic approach to our health.  And I believe James Allen would sure­ly agree, our wish­es and prayers will be answered only when they are aligned with our minds and accept­ed thoughts and actions, all of which must align with the will of God.

In his book, Faith and Con­fes­sions, Charles Capps wrote, “ The word of God is the will of God.  It is God’s will, but it won’t hap­pen in your life just because it’s God’s will.  You will not be healed just because the Bible says, …by whose (Jesus) stripes ye were healed(1 Peter 2:24).  You will not become pros­per­ous just because the Bible says, …what­so­ev­er he doeth shall prosper(PS.1:3).”  He con­tin­ued, “The word must be inside you.  You can’t take a Bible down to the hos­pi­tal and lay it on some­one to get them healed, although the Bible is full of the Word of God.  But if you can get that word inside them, it will man­i­fest itself.  The Word pro­duces when it is plant­ed in the heart.”

Our pros­per­i­ty and our heal­ing, [our good health] begins in our minds.  So our prayers are cre­at­ed in our minds; as we think, we pray.

As I post this writ­ing, I pray that each of you read­ing this can find the truth of God’s Design in the mat­ter of your mind-body con­nec­tion.  It seems to me that our goal should be to align our minds thoughts with the WILL OF GOD.

Join me next time as I explore how our emo­tions can work for us on our suc­cess­ful life jour­ney.