Living on autopilot

Most of us think, feel, speak and act on autopilot. We go about our day choosing and acting without a clue as to what is going on in our own souls. I call this state of irresponsibility “autopilot”. The ship is flying but we have no idea who is flying it nor what ideas are controlling where it is going. Many of our most important duties, like raising children, worship, conducting our marriage and relating to  others  are conducted in autopilot. Now that is irresponsible and explains why so many of us are unhappy with our lives.

Some of this behavior is normal and part of the divine design. God designed the human soul to have an area where we are consciously aware of what we are visualizing and verbalizing to ourselves. This area is often called the conscious mind in the field of psychology and the nous or mind in the Greek of the bible. This faculty handles in the moment decisions like “turn left at the light” or “I will have a cheeseburger.”

God also designed an area of the soul that functions primarily below the level of our awareness. This faculty of the soul is called the subconscious mind and in the bible it is called the kardia or heart. This area controls our automatic functions that control our bodies like breathing. The heart also determines how we interpret the events of the day. We interpret all of our events using previously stored ideas we have believed. The heart stores our conscience and our value system where we have built beliefs about what is good/bad, pleasurable/miserable, spiritual/sinful, etc. When an event occurs or is contemplated, we look into our inventory of ideas stored in the heart to evaluate the meaning or place a value on the event. These evaluations occur habitually, at rapid speed and often without our awareness.

God designed the heart so that many of the evaluations we must make in any given day would not require consciousness. Just think, if every idea that pertained to any one event had to be mentally recalled, relearned, reevaluated in order to make a simple decision, we would not accomplish much. The autopilot of the heart is a good thing but we all, being lazy take it way too far. We stop being aware of what is transpiring in our own souls. We don’t pay attention to the things we are visualizing and the ideas we are verbalizing within ourselves. These inner pictures and dialogue are what we use to decide how to feel and respond to the events of our lives. When we run on autopilot, we respond out of habits of thought and very often our habitual thinking is faulty. These faulty beliefs and logic become obvious as we observe our inappropriate responses and behaviors. When we react sinfully to the events of life, it indicates that we are using faulty ideas to evaluate these events. If we were using the mind of Christ to make our evaluations, we would not be making choices to sin as our answer to these events. It is only when we begin to pay attention to what we are seeing and saying within ourselves that we can catch ourselves using faulty ideas to run our lives.

So, wake up sleeper, turn off the autopilot and become an observer of what images you are forming in your mind and what dialogue is taking place in your mind. If you will begin to listen to yourself, you will be amazed at some of the things that you are saying to yourselves. As a counselor, this is one of the basic skills I teach clients, especially those struggling with anxiety or depression. They almost always discover that their inner talk is filled with hateful or fearful statements aimed at themselves. When they learn to stop using these statements to describe themselves or their future, they almost always find immense relief from their negative feelings.

Stay tuned! Soon we will discuss how to change these statements and replace them with the mind of Christ.