Apple Tree

Let me tell you a secret that has taken me decades to learn and will take the rest of my life to apply. It is a very simple concept that nevertheless is very difficult for me to remember. The secret comes in two parts Part 1: It is our subconscious that drives our behavior, not our conscious. What we are unaware of, or at least peripherally aware of, is way more important to who we are and what we do then what we think. Most of our thoughts are just catching up with our subconscious, filling in and making up stories that make sense of what is already decided and being carried out by our hidden mind. This may sound hopeless to you, because no matter how much thought you out into controlling your action, no matter how much behavior you try to shape, it will never as matter as much as your subconscious. But it actually gives me much hope because of the second part Part 2: you can shape your subconscious. I use the word shape very carefully. You can control your words and train our thoughts (at least some of them), change your behaviors but the process with the subconscious is more subtle. We don't control our subconscious, we influence it. Because we cannot "know" our subconscious, and can't grasp it, we cannot control all the processes of action. We feed, nurture, and remove obstacles for our subconscious, but the control is out of our hands. What I am talking about isn't just about psychology. In Christian Terms, this is about our soul, and this is the most import part of us. I like to see the subconscious as an apple tree growing in rocky ground and our consciousness is the farmer. We are taught in the bible that our behaviors are an outcropping of our soul, that we should measure our souls by our fruit. But we some how get confused in this process. We want to control the fruit, to show to our neighbors our shiny fruit, but we didn't write the blue print for the tree, we are not in charge of the recipe. No matter how much we prune our tree and mess with the fruit a blue berry will never grow out of an apple tree. As Christians it is very easy to focus on our outside behavior. We read the bible. We pray, we say nice things, go to church and try to follow the commandments. But these are all actions. And none of them directly nurture the soul. We are told that if we do a behavior enough it will lead to a change in the soul. This is true, to an extend. We know from psychological studies that if someone smiles over and over even when she doesn't want to she will later say she is somewhat happier. We know that if we have more "good" habits and less "bad" habits, we will cause less distress in our lives and it will lead to a change in us. But there is problems with this. Problem 1: This is very forceful. This is like choosing the shape the apple tree will grow and forcing it into your idea of what is best. When we force change from the outside and don't pay attention to what we need on the inside, our faith can become based off of effort Problem 2: But the problem is that our idea of what is best is biased. Problem 3: And forcing our character to fit our prescribed behaviors can make people feel hollow inside. It is like a beautiful apple that shines in the super market and tastes awful when you bring it home. If you force yourself to smile every day it will change you, but it can lead others to think you are phony. More importantly, eventually you will feel fake. Problem 4: As Christians we are taught that salvation comes from faith by grace. But there is another process, called sanctification. This is the process of turning the old us, our old nature, or sin nature, or immaturity or lies we used to accept and changing it all into who were are born to be. We are created as the imago dei, which means the image of God. The blue print is already set, the recipe has been decided by someone else. But we get this confused. We believe that God does the salvation part but our effort is to finish the job. We have taken over the sanctification process and tried to fix it with works. But true sanctification can not be lead by works, it has to be lead by God, through who he has created us to be. When we try to control the process, it shows our lack of faith that God already gave us everything we need. When we think we have to grow ourselves to god we are acknowledging the lie we believe, that we were made defective. The most common message to me growing up was to be myself. I was told to listen to my heart, to follow my own path, to be who I was and not what others told me who I was. I hated this. I had multiple problems with this 1. I didn't know who I was. Being myself sounded ridiculous to someone who felt like I could be whatever I wanted to be. 2. The little I did know of myself I didn't like 3. "being myself" sounded lazy and giving up I can know see that the environment I grew up in was extreme behaviorism, and the more people I meet, many from different religious cultural backgrounds or even who grew up on the opposite side of the world, all seemed to grow up in this behaviorism. But it is also because young kids are extremely concrete. It is a necessity of making sense of a crazy world. Kids have to think in black and white. The problem is, if we are in a open, nurturing environment when we are around early high school, we start to think in abstracts, we the world as more than good or bad, black and white, right and wrong. So many of us, especially in the culture I was raised in, never saw out of this. What surprised me most and still surprises me, even if it shouldn't is the connection with black and white, extreme behaviorism and how Christianity was practiced.