One of the great mysteries of life is why “the heart wants what the heat wants”. All of us feel longings deep within our hearts that drive us, depress us and move us to make decisions that even we don’t understand. Lacking a logic we can explain, we finally stop trying to understand our hearts and simply live with our unfulfilled dreams and desires.
The bible, God’s message to mankind, is the answer to the mysteries of the heart. God does not want us to give up trying to understand our hearts, instead He wants us to seek out the answers in His word. The following discussion is the result of 30+ years of looking for answers in the word, from the sciences and from my own personal observations as revealed by the Spirit.
One of the ways we can discover the root causes of why our hearts want what they want, is by observing our own daydreams. Daydreams are a window into our motivations and into the beliefs we hold about happiness, relationships and personal fulfillment. This article will discuss the way we formed our original ideas that still motivate us and reveal what God has provided that will enable us to change our deepest motives of the heart.
Covert Influence
Our subconscious beliefs, thinking and ideas continue to influence us under the level of our awareness just as much as when the ideas were conscious choices. We consciously chose to adopt these ideas based on life events, consciously chose to implement them until they became habitual choices and then they faded from our awareness. They are still part of our total view of life and they are still being implemented from their covert position in the subconscious. Every idea that we have ever believed functions in the soul this same way.
Old Man Beliefs in the Subconscious
When talking about our way of life before salvation, the bible terms our unsaved belief system the Old Man (OM). The OM was our way of meeting our needs, dealing with the pain of disappointment and making life work using our own ability and power, without God. The Old Man (OM) was never prepared nor is it capable of successfully meeting our needs or resolving the painful events that occur in all of our lives. All of us have experienced painful events that overwhelmed us. When these events happened because we were on our own without God, we misunderstood what the events meant to us, about us and our relationships with others. Therefore, out of these events we have adopted false ideas and used them as corrupted strategies to pursue pleasure and prevent pain. The heart of man has a logic in accordance with God’s design but corrupted by the sin nature and by developing in an environment without God. The logic of building false ideas as follows:
Order of Events
We are born separated from God, with a nature to sin, in the devil’s world and with relationship needs that compelled us to find fulfillment. He made our needs so that only He could meet them. Yet because we are born separated from God to meet our needs, we automatically turn to the only relational option we have, each other. So, we begin to pursue fulfillment of our relational needs by reaching out to other people, hoping to get them to love us and want us. I call these initial pursuit Primary Functions . We falsely believe that by relating successfully with other people that we can fulfill the needs of our hearts.
It does not take long before we experience failure in our attempts to form love relationships. It might be with our parents or our peers but very early in life we all perceive that we have been rejected or left unwanted by someone in our life. When love relationships where we have placed our total trust fail us, it creates a terrible pain in our hearts. If we had a relationship with God and understood His plan, then we could use new man logic to resolve the problem, think it through and come to a place of peace about it. But in our unbelieving state without God we are unable to successfully think through painful events that inevitably occur in our lives. So we get stuck with pain in our hearts without the knowledge or strength to resolve it. Hunger for love caused us to seek out and attach our hearts to others, trusting them to love us in return. Almost all of these love relationships fail us and hurt us deeply causing soul pain. Soul pain drives us to adopt a defensive approach to life, implementing policies of relating designed to keep us from being hurt again. These defensive policies are called Reactionary Functions. We reach false conclusions that tell us “If trusting in love caused us to be vulnerable to be hurt, then we will never trust again”. “If loving another made me vulnerable to pain, I will never love again”. “If I have pain in my heart that I cannot shake, I will numb my emotions so that I cannot feel it”.
Our false conclusions when believed become OM strategies in the heart but are ineffective for fully resolving the pain we feel and the confusion we experience. As we use these false OM strategies in our relationships, they become habitual, unconscious choices. When we believe an idea and use it as the logic behind our choices, it becomes programmed into our belief system as part of our overall view of life. As we lose touch with our conscious awareness of these beliefs, they become part of the subconscious program of the heart.
Still residing in the subconscious is the heartache and confusion we felt when the events happened and these unresolved thoughts and feelings seek to be corrected. The heart is programmed to resolve any inner turmoil we have from holding conflicting beliefs. These inner conflicts reveal themselves in different ways, seeking to be brought out into the conscious mind so we can resolve them.
One of the ways that our conflicted beliefs reveal themselves is through our dreams, both those we have while sleeping and those we experience while awake. When we are doing some task that is so automatic to us that we don’t have to think about it, like driving, we will often use the time to daydream. We will imagine scenarios of events that express hidden desires, fears or unresolved conflicts.
Wikipedia contains an article with the following statement about daydreams. “A daydream is a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake. There are many different types of daydreams, and there is no consensus definition amongst psychologists. Daydreams may involve fantasies about future scenarios or plans, or reminiscences about past experiences, and may include vivid dream-like mental images. They are often connected with some type of emotion.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daydream
The purpose of the following questions is to examine your daydreams to find unresolved OM ideas that need to be removed from your soul. Answer the questions as honestly as you can. Not doing so serves no purpose other than revealing your own self-deception and commitment to
Questions
What scenario of events do you consistently imagine when you are alone and your mind is occupied with a simple task like driving? Briefly describe all of them that are consistent.
Ex: winning the lottery and giving the money to the Lord
What is the theme of your scenario of events?
Ex: Venting anger at someone; winning a sporting event
What specific actions do you perform as the scene unfolds?
Ex: Telling off mother-in-law; Embracing loved one
How does the scene end?
Ex: happy ending? Sad ending?
What feeling dominates the scene? More than one?
Ex: Anger, fear, exultation
What significant people are involved in the scene?
Ex: Mother, father, spouse, boss, God
Are these people from the past, present or future?
Ex: Father returns from long absence
Whatever you consistently imagine and envision reveals an unfulfilled desire of some kind that is connected to a belief that says “if I could just accomplish this” or “if this would just happen” then I would be happier, I would be at peace, I could finally move on with my life.
1. When you have answered the questions, ask yourself what event or situation connects with this daydream?
a. Is it an unhappy event from your past that you long to reconcile?
Ex: Parents divorced and you imagine them reconciling and in doing so, you feel like your world is right again
b. Is it an ongoing conflict in your present life?
Ex: Ongoing marital conflict that you imagine being resolved to your satisfaction allowing you to feel good about your present marital situation and even giving you hope for the future.
c. Is it a future event that evokes feelings you long to feel?
Ex: You are given a lot of money giving you financial security.
2. Whatever resolution and the feeling that comes from the resolution is what you want to happen in your life and is what you believe will give you happiness in this area of life.
a. Financial gain gives you security – your real desire is financial security
b. Marital reconciliation causes you to feel loved – real desire is to feel loved
· Whatever feeling you get from the scenario and ending is what you really desire.
· The scenario in the daydream is the way you believe it must or could happen for you.
· The desire reveals what you believe is necessary or could possible provide happiness
3. When you identify how you want to feel and the scenario/strategy you believe must be employed to create the feeling, then ask “how has God already provided for this desire?”
a. The daydream reveals a desire connected to a false belief about your happiness in life.
b. The desire reveals a false idea you believed at some point about happiness.
c. The goal is to discover the false idea you believed and are still believing about what is necessary for you to be happy in this life.
d. When you can watch yourself using this false belief to create the desire and then watch this desire being fulfilled in the dream creating the state of happiness, then you can get enough of a handle on the false idea to change it.
e. When we can see and then speak to our self about the false idea, we can tell our self to stop believing it and that it is not true.
f. When we consistently reject the false belief by telling self to stop believing it and by visualizing the false idea being removed from our soul, the false belief will lose its power to influence us.
g. Consistent disbelief toward the idea will remove it from its place of influence in our soul.
h. Once the false idea has been removed (Paul – taken off Eph 4:22) from the heart, we can then replace it with a New Man (NM) idea from the bible.
i. By visualizing the rejection of the false idea and the embracing of the NM idea, the NM idea replaces the OM idea in the heart of the believer and transformation takes place.
j. We solidify the NM belief in the heart by believing it for application to life experience.
k. Consistent application of the NM idea causes it to become a new subconscious habit that has replaced the false OM belief, allowing us to access the power of God.
l. When the NM belief has become the new habitual response to life events, your soul naturally responds to life the same as Christ did and you are glorifying God.
Your heart believes whatever you tell it is true. When your daydreams reveal the false ideas that people or events of this life can make you permanently happy, then realize that you believe that because at one point you told yourself that idea and told yourself it was true. When you did, you told yourself to embrace the idea as your own to use it in life. We use our ideas to pursue pleasure through relating to others (Primary Functions) or to prevent pain by defending ourself from others (Reactionary Functions). Either way, these ideas built and used before salvation are false, are not from God and are still operating as unconscious habits in your subconscious. God wants us to remove all of these false ideas and replace them with the ideas Jesus used in His life. The step by step process described in this article is the way to remove and replace any ideas in the heart.
We first must find the false idea. It will often be revealed by your daydreams. Then we must remove the idea by telling ourself it is a lie and not to be believed. Then we must replace the idea using the corresponding principle found only in the bible. (Notice that you must have learned concepts from the bible to have something to replace the false one. This requires a church where the word is taught in such a way that real answers are provided) We replace the false idea we have removed by telling ourself the biblical idea is true and that we are embracing it and turning it into action.
My friends, this simple system works. I have used it over and over many times to change my own heart to become more like Christ. Every time I remove a false idea and replace it with a biblical idea, I gain more freedom in my soul and I grow more and more like Jesus in my heart. I wish you good hunting as you track down all the false ideas in your heart.
