n our study on the Nature of
Man, we looked at how spirit, soul and body link together and communicate with each
other. In this study I want to show you more of what happens when information comes
out from the inward man. This is what causes the effects that we have called
Templates and Triggers.
I want to start by having a look at how your outward and inward man act
and react in normal life situations. Psychologists have discovered through research that
the "sub-conscious" mind has a very strong control over the things we do. They
discovered that when you are faced with an emergency or a situation where you have to make
a quick decision - like if you are in a motor accident, there is a short delay before you
react. During this time, you look inwards or "send a message" to the
sub-conscious to find out what to do. The answer comes back from deep inside, and you then
do what your sub-conscious tells you to do.
I am not going to try to prove this here, and since this doesn't come
from the Scriptures I want you to take my word for it for now. I will show you from the
Word later how it all ties together OK? But I would like to consider how the
sub-conscious makes its decision, and how this is sent to your conscious mind. You saw in
our chart in the last study how data is passed down from the conscious mind and also how
it is passed outwards from the inner mind.
These cannot both take place at the same time - it's a bit like talking
on a two-way radio. One side has to keep quiet for the other to take place. And since our
senses are putting out information all the time, it is usually the flow from the outside
to the inward man that is happening most of the time. But if you stop this flow from the
senses, then the outward flow starts right away, and data starts coming out from the
inward man.
It is quite simple to encourage this to happen. All you have to
do is shut off the output from your senses. This means closing your eyes to stop the sense
of sight, getting alone in a quiet place to stop sounds from reaching your ears and
relaxing your body to stop any sensations of touch. You can stop the senses of taste and
smell by keeping away from anything that will stimulate them. The only other way you can
make this happen is to allow your body to go into a state of relaxed suspension, where you
ignore your senses and you have an experience like "day dreaming." Then you will
find that influences from your inward man start to float upwards into your mind.
Be careful of not getting into some of the way out ideas of Yoga and
Transcendental Meditation here. That is not what I am talking about. You are
not emptying your mind here, you are just allowing it to fill with things from your spirit
instead of from your body. You have actually done this many times without being
fully aware of it. You allow pictures to come into your mind from deep inside.
Sometimes you picture things that you did not expect, and you wonder where they
came from. Have you ever thought when you were day dreaming, "Now what made me think
of that?" It is likely that something came up out of your spirit.
Have you heard about how when someone faces death, they seem to see
their whole life pass before their eyes? All that happens is the outward man goes into
suspension and all the memories that are stored in the inward man start to pour out
quickly. The same thing happens when you dream, and you find characters and images from
the past coming together into your mind to put on a little "play" for you. I
have covered this in another place in discussing interpretation of our dreams.
But to return to our subject; what makes your inward man come to a
decision, apart from the obvious reflex action of self preservation that we have in our
bodies? The answer of course is EXPERIENCE. The decisions you make are always made based
on your experience. You learn from the experiences of life how to handle different
situations, and as you learn these things, there comes a "TEMPLATE" in your
inward man, which is created specifically for such situations.
The next time you face a similar situation, you do not have to
re-analyze the situation and come to a decision again. Your inward man assesses the
situation and looks through your memory to see if something like this happened before. It
quickly finds a matching template. Then it passes back a decision based on that template.
This happens so quickly that you haven’t even realized that you gave it conscious
thought. You react instinctively, before you realize what you have done. This is the
essential operation of what I have called a Template. In the natural a template is
something that you use over and over again to produce similar results. Your
inward man does the same thing.
Let's go back to our chart on the nature of man and see what happens.
Remember we saw that data from the inward man may be passed outwards via mind, emotions or
will. If it is going to be passed via the mind, then the outward man must be quiet. If it
is going to be passed via the will, the person must be speaking. But with the emotions it
is different. The emotions cannot pass information inwards; they can only flow outwards.
Your emotions cannot be controlled by your will, so you can't push anything into
them on purpose like you can do with your mind.
So data from your inward man can be passed outwards to your emotions at
any time without anything stopping it. And in fact this is what is happening all the time.
What happens then is that when a situation arises in your life, you respond to it
according to how you feel. An inner feeling or desire motivates you to act. You don’t
really know where it came from, but a strong urge in your emotions overwhelms your will,
making you act quickly.
Your emotions are thus "triggered" by a set of circumstances
that match an inner template. And no amount of logic can explain fully why you feel the
way you do. Your feelings might not make any sense at all, but you cannot do anything
about it. They just come up and control you. We face these things all the time in our
lives, and most of the time we don't understand what is happening. One of the surest
signs of a trigger in action is when you find a negative emotion coming up in you and you
cannot explain why you feel the way you do. And you also cannot seem to be able to
shake it.
Some things are obvious. If you face a situation, such as a
danger that is similar to what you faced in the past, you immediately find the same
emotions of fear rising up in you. If you face a situation that made you angry,
depressed or guilty in the past, you find the same emotions rising up unexpectedly in you.
You might be able to identify it immediately, but most of the time you will find
that you are confused by the sudden emotion and cannot explain what is happening inside
you.
When this happens, then you can be almost certain that your current
circumstances are similar to a situation that occurred in the past. And the emotions
that you are feeling now are the same emotions that you felt back then. To identify
the trigger, try to remember when last you felt this way, and see if you can identify what
is happening. Then when you identify the past event or time period that it comes
from, you can start to find the template of the flesh that is causing you to react the way
you are. And you can give it to the Lord and allow His Spirit to work in you to deal
with it.
So a trigger then is a sudden strong unexplainable surge of emotion.
Your emotions place a very strong influence on your will, but the reverse is not
true. It is possible for your will to affect the emotions indirectly though. We will
look at this more in our next study, but basically, it means filling your mind with
thoughts that cause your feelings to change. This was how the trigger happened in the
first place. Now all you need to do is reverse its effects. What you have to
do is create new templates that will produce good triggers - triggers of faith, hope and
love.
