This is part 4 of a series; The Selves is part 1.
We are not trained to recognize the voices in our head, but it’s very easy to learn. For one thing, any thought that begins “I want” is from the heart. It doesn’t matter what it says – it’s about the flesh. And remember, that’s not necessarily wrong! Wanting things is perfectly fine… just make sure your want doesn’t hurt other people.
The heart doesn’t care about “should”, since it’s selfish; thus, any thought that goes “I should” comes from the spirit, which is the source of all thoughts about right and wrong, do or don’t, fairness and vengeance.
And yet since neither the heart nor the spirit are always right, you need a third voice to interrogate them; to ask “do you really need another piece of cake, heart?”; “what evidence do you have that we shouldn’t eat chicken feet, spirit?” and then, having heard them both, to pass a judgment.
This of course, is the job of the soul. To it falls the responsibility of deciding, dozens of times a day, whether the heart or the spirit has a better case; and then to say “I will”, which is a word that comes from the soul.
Romans 2:14-15 (for when Gentiles who don’t have the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience testifying with them, and their thoughts among themselves accusing or else excusing them)
Note there are three things mentioned there; the heart, the conscience or spirit, and “their thoughts” – their soul. The BBE translates it “the work of the law is seen in their hearts, their sense of right and wrong giving witness to it, while their minds are at one time judging them and at another giving them approval;”
Choosing between the “want” of the heart and the “should” of the spirit. For while you would be relatively safe erring on the side of caution and always doing what you should do, you would still be unrighteous to deny your heart some of its wants just for the sake of an arbitrary, outdated rule that doesn’t really apply. Which is why you must judge between them, righteously.
In every human being there is this process where the heart and the spirit argue with each other, and their the soul chooses what to do. For even the Gentiles who were not commanded by God to keep the golden rule have still learned by experimentation that their lives are better when they keep some of its principles.
Which is why every human, whether Christian or Mafia Godfather, has a code of ethics in their spirits that makes them “right in their own eyes” (Proverbs 21:2). So when their heart’s lust pushes them to break their spirit’s code, their thoughts “accuse or else excuse themselves”.
Obviously the drug lord’s personal code is not God’s code, for that matter neither is the average Christian’s, but it is something that urges them to do the right thing as they define it, even when their heart would rather do something even more selfish.
What they actually do, how they judge in the end, is a reflection of the strength and wisdom of their soul and determines their true Self – for it is this judgment, how the soul resolves the war in its members, that determines who their “I” is.
THE COURTROOM
One way to visualize this process is a courtroom; you have the prosecution, the defense, and the judge. The prosecution presents its case for doing or not doing something; the defense then shows the other side; and the judge chooses.
Like the heart and the spirit, the judge is neither good nor evil; by nature it simply desires peace in the Self, which is difficult when you have a “war in your members” (Romans 7:23). And obviously, that’s a noble goal.
Unfortunately, like the goals of the spirit and of the heart, it can lead to evil when the soul attempts to take shortcuts to get peace today instead of working for a permanent peace in the Self.
Lazy souls who learned from their hearts to focus on short-term gains, seek to negotiate a compromise between “I want” and “I should”. But this desire for peace in the short term will rob the mind of peace in the long term; for there can be no permanent peace as long as the heart is selfish and the spirit is unbroken. As long as there is evil in the land, there can be no true peace (2 Kings 9:22).
So permanent peace in the mind cannot be negotiated; it must be judged into existence. And so a wise soul uses these daily fights in the inward parts as an opportunity to find the truth and then to make the wrong fraction admit it was wrong, to break that fraction’s pride.
Is the spirit right? Then stand behind it. Is the heart right? Then put the spirit in its place. But forcing someone who is right to compromise with someone who is wrong “for the sake of peace” is an evil judgment. And besides… it doesn’t even work!
Who can’t remember the heart saying “just one more piece of cake!”, and your spirit says “we really shouldn’t, it’s bad for us”, so the soul decides “Ok, we’ll just eat a small piece”? This is the soul negotiating between “I want” and “I should”.
And the inevitable result of this compromise is that after the largest possible piece of cake you can possibly call “small” has been inhaled, the heart starts over again with “just one more piece!” “You already had one”; “yeah but I want more, just one more little piece!” and this goes on until there is no more cake.
The soul was trying to find a compromise that makes both sides a little bit unhappy, but which both sides can live with, for the sake of peace – even though the soul knows good and well that the spirit was right.
If the soul lets it whine and beg and scream its way into getting piece after piece, the soul is not really in charge at all; it is the whiny brat of a beast who really runs that person, thus that person’s whole Self, lame embarrassing soul included, is literally “as a beast” (Ecclesiastes 3:18).
Would you want to go before such a soul for judgment? Could you have any hope of a righteous judgment from such a soul? Then now you know how your spirit feels! You may consider yourself #goldenruled!
A USEFUL HEART
The job of the soul is to stop this sort of spoiled selfishness by comparing the heart to the conscience, and spotting the difference between the needs of the body and the wants of the body, which are generally not the same at all.
The heart is going to push you, call its wants “needs”, and make your life miserable as you fight with it on these things. And it takes a strong soul to stand its ground against the endless onslaught of an untamed heart. It’s like having a spoiled child living in your mind 24 hours a day.
But it can be tamed, and it will get easier… if you treat it like ANY OTHER ANIMAL and be consistent, firm, and fair. Reward its obedience but don’t bribe it to obey you; punish its disobedience, but don’t beat it just because it speaks!
Because despite its selfishness, it’s important not to silence the heart. Because the heart is the source of our motivation. It’s why we get out of bed in the morning; to go to work; make money; feed our families; meet girls; get smarter; get attention; even if it’s just to go pee, that’s still a beast reason (peeing is, after all, purely selfish).
The problem is not the selfishness of peeing; it’s peeing on the toilet seat which irritates others. To be more precise, it bothers someone else’s beast when they sit on it. Therefore, since their beast doesn’t want it done, your beast wouldn’t want it done to you.
But what if you didn’t have any wants? What if your heart had no lust, no selfish motivation whatsoever. To many philosophers, this was the dream; and yet… if you didn’t know what YOU wanted… how could you know what you SHOULD to do others?
The golden rule says you must do to others what you would want done to you. But how could you ever know what you should do… if you didn’t know what you, yourself, wanted?
Proverbs 16:9 A man’s heart plans his course, but Yahweh directs his steps.
So without the heart to tell you what you want, the spirit wouldn’t have any way to understand what you should do to others! Thus wanting, and hence being selfish, is necessary to be an ethical person!
And yet simultaneously, restraining that selfishness, redirecting it to do good and not evil, is likewise necessary. So you must both hear the heart, and let it express its selfish desires… and yet not be blinded by them.
BETTER QUALIFIED
As a judge, your soul will make a mistake now and again – and the fraction which turned out to be right in the end will joyously use that as an excuse to keep you from making decisions it doesn’t like in the future. But your soul was placed in charge, not your lower fractions.
So when you mess up, apologize, make it right, and move on and keep judging righteous judgment (John 7:24). Because a mistake, ten mistakes, doesn’t change the fact that you are in charge, your soul is responsible, and no matter how many mistakes it makes your soul is better qualified to rule your Self than the heart or the spirit!
There are two main reasons why; first because the soul has reason to be objective; the body fears death, but the soul cannot be killed by man (Matthew 10:28). Hence, when the beast is afraid, the soul can be objective because it is in no danger.
Likewise, the spirit or conscience believes it is always in the right just because it intends to be right; but since the soul’s job isn’t to keep a record of rights and wrongs, it doesn’t bother the soul to say “that rule is stupid, we’re not doing that”.
The second reason, and far more interesting, is that the soul is the only fraction which is meant to think of the future. Remember that the heart’s selfishness is short-sighted. It thinks only of having what it wants today, in the present, just like all creatures lower than man.
Those few animals that make any plans for the future (think: birds flying south, squirrels burying nuts, birds building nests, leopards stashing antelope in trees, etc.) do so in a very limited and highly instinctive fashion. Otherwise, they are wholly governed by their selfish, in-the-moment beast instincts of hunger, fear, lust, and so on.
1 Corinthians 3:1 Brothers, I couldn’t speak to you as to spiritual, but as to fleshly, as to babies in Christ.
Like animals, babies are “fleshly”, which means “having the nature of flesh, i.e. under the control of the animal appetites” (Thayer’s Lexicon). They have no grasp of the future, living entirely in the moment; just like your heart does. Which is why, to the heart, now is the only time that matters.
Any animal would gladly trade a truckload of hamburgers tomorrow for one hamburger right now. This is why a cow will eat grain until it bursts if you let it – and then starve for weeks. Largely because to the beast, like to the human heart… tomorrow never comes.
As for the spirit, its job is to look to the past for rules, experiences, and examples – and bring them to the soul to prove that the heart shouldn’t do this or that. It’s meant to form conclusions from what happened and bring them to your remembrance later when you need them.
John 14:26 (GWV) However, the helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything. He will remind you of everything that I have ever told you.
Here you see that the job of a spirit – remember, God’s spirit is analogous to our own, since ours was patterned after His – so the job of anyone’s spirit is to remind us of things. Thus the spirit’s job is to look backwards, to draw lessons and conclusions, and remind the soul – and the heart – of what we’ve learned from our experiences.
This is why the customs of our tribe are so important to the spirit – because they are the ways of those who came before us. And even the promise of newer, better ways is not always enough to change the spirit’s mind – which is why it must be broken to serve the soul, not to serve the past.
THE EYES OF THE FUTURE
So the spirit looks at the past; the heart lives in the present; and the soul looks towards the future. Which makes it the only one qualified to judge, since it’s the only one that is thinking of tomorrow. And the whole POINT of judging is to do the right thing so that tomorrow is better than today!
Thus you can often identify which fraction is speaking in your mind simply by the time period of which they’re speaking – if it’s now, it’s a heart thought; “I’m hungry”. If it’s the past, it’s a spirit thought “I wish she hadn’t left me”. If it’s the future – as in a plan, a goal, or a dream, it’s a soul thought “I’m going to be an architect one day”.
It is this focus on time periods that are less important – the present or the past – which make the heart and spirit lesser fractions. Because the past cannot be changed or fixed, and the present is over as fast as it happens. Only the soul can prepare a happy future.
This is why the heart’s desire to be selfish creates such evil; because it’s selfish for today, and willing to trade any amount of suffering tomorrow for happiness today. And so the soul must prevent it from sacrificing the Self’s future for a fleeting moment of fun.
The heart’s tendency to live in the present is why people buy things they don’t need in supermarket checkout aisles, why people get drunk knowing they’ll regret it the next day, why people smoke knowing it will kill them – because now matters more than a few years at the end of their lives.
This is also why the spirit’s desire to obey customs can cause such evil; because it traps us in archaic rituals that didn’t help the people who kept them find salvation (Romans 6:20-21, Colossians 2:20-22).
The spirit’s tendency to live in the past is why people hold grudges; blame things that happen 40 years ago on your failures today. And the soul must force it to get out of the past, let those things go, and help the soul prepare for tomorrow.
The spirit must allow the soul to look ahead, and change the paths that were not good to the straight and narrow path that DOES point towards the kingdom of God.
Isaiah 59:8 The way of peace they don’t know; and there is no justice in their goings: they have made them crooked paths; whoever goes therein does not know peace.
Because the soul is the only fraction capable of looking into the future and saying “if I steal this I’ll be happy today, but my whole Self will be unhappy when I get caught”; or, “if I take the vengeance which I am owed today, my spirit will be at peace… but my Self will go to jail.”
Only the soul can look to the future and tell the heart “yes, I’ll enjoy getting her pregnant, but the next 20 years will be miserable”; only the soul has the power to then choose not to do something that the other fractions are too short-sighted to realize they will regret.
CONVINCING YOUR SELF
But while the soul has the power to decide – if its will is strong enough – that’s not really the ideal outcome. The soul can rule by diktat, but there will never be happiness and peace in such a Self. To have harmony in the Self the other fractions must not only be told what to do… they must be CONVINCED that they were wrong.
This is not as easy as it sounds, and it doesn’t sound all that easy. But it’s the real job we’re put here to do. We are not meant to merely control the selfish heart, we are meant to change it to be unselfish; by convincing it that the best way to get your selfish desires is to do unselfish things.
We are not meant to make the spirit weak, hesitant and doubtful; we are meant to teach it to bow to reason, and admit when its rules are not based in fact. We are meant to restore it to a pure state where all of its rules are based on the golden rule and it has no rules that are not.
To do this we must use reason, exactly as parents teach their children – to the heart, with arguments like “would you like it if someone did that to you? Then don’t do it to them”; “If you eat too much candy, you’ll get sick, do you want that?”; “Yes, you want a puppy but you won’t take care of it and I’ll have to do it”.
And to the spirit, you use arguments like “yes, what that person did to us was unfair; but if the world was fair, we’d be dead for our sins. So you don’t really want fair, do you?”; “Yes, that was a great relationship we had once… but do you want that dead relationship to ruin our present relationship?”; “Yes, our parents taught us to do things this way… but our parents were wrong about a lot of things, why not this too?”; and so on.
There is far too much to say on this subject to cover it here, but the point is that these arguments, rather than ignoring or silencing the fractions, actually reason with them and when you find the right arguments and words, the stress from that fraction simply dissolves.
And then your soul can have what it really wanted all along – peace in your Self.