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I owe a great deal of my professional success to William Glasser, MD.  Bill took the risk of publishing his learning process.  During my PhD studies I settled on Reality Therapy and Control Theory for my theoretical foundation.  Then Dr. Glasser came to speak at an event in Dallas Texas and my journey to the dark side was complete.

Many of those all too brief minutes with the master have stuck in my mind as powerful reassurances in my subsequent years of professional psychotherapy.  Today I remember him saying that his way of learning something new was to write a book about it.  Control Theory came about from just such a self-learning moment.  I am finding an affinity with the idea as I write and learn.

Searching for a way to control our lives involves resetting ourselves to attain our goal.  We want to maximize our systemic activity in ways that eliminate useless behaviors, thoughts, and external influences and replace those with systems that we can continually improve.  Internal control replaces external control.  False beliefs are replaced by healthy beliefs in what is true.  Opinions are replaced by higher thoughts and understanding of reality.  Time wasters are replaced by life enrichment.

Sam Carpenter has a blog article that I read today that reminds me of a wonderful life enrichment process.  The four key factors or tools, as I understand them are:

1. Discipline
2. Planning
3. Efficiency
4. Quality

Sam uses the idea of Consistency, but the word quality conveys more meaning to me as a broader constant that includes continuous improvement.

Readers of my pastoral blog know that I am totally sold out when it comes to quality and to discipline.  Planning and efficiency are things that I can stand to improve in my life and are evident in the material that I read from Sam today.  He uses three tools that are in my tool kit and I hope are in yours as well.

1. A Sony ICD 8300 digital recorder
2. A Cell Phone
3. Microsoft Outlook and a PDA

Now if you love your blackberry that is fine.  I find it to be an unnecessary expense.  Sam uses the recorder to make notes on his thoughts all through the day, transcribes the thoughts into his Microsoft Outlook Tasks, Notes, Contacts, and Calendar on a daily basis and then synch’s that from his computer to the PDA so it is always available when he needs it.  The sacred hour at the beginning of the day is when he does his life control activities so that he knows what he is going to do all day long.

Sam also does what I do with the cell phone.  He uses it to call people and then turns it off.  This makes the on off switch the most important part of the cell phone.  Voice mail catches incoming calls and then he can call when he is in return call mode.  Cell phone interruptions can take over your life, just like email does.  This is another good reason to back away from the constant drawing power of ever present email in a blackberry.

Are you ready to devote some time to exercising control over your inner world?  The act of planning on a consistent basis leads to efficiencies that promote your business activities, your personal relationships and your spiritual well being.  Efficiency and planning reduces your errors and the omissions that plague an overburdened mind.  Recording your to dos, thoughts, ideas, reminders and contacts frees your mind to be creative, prayerful, thoughtful and powerful.

Devoting yourself to a discipline of time management, thought management, business management and life management permits you to develop the systems that either automate your activities or permit you to create a delegation strategy that you can assign to assistants and outsources.  Internal control then becomes wealth management.  Internal controls lead to permanent learning because you continue to do what works, improve on those things, and eliminate that which does not get you what you want and need.

To the four techniques that I mention above in respect for Sam Carpenter, I will add meditation.  Such a contemplative activity fits under the discipline category, but it can only become a practiced discipline when the mind can release all its unfinished activities.  Learning to operate effectively in the inner world involves acting on those things that we know to do.  Putting these things into a systemic model is the life enhancing secret to abundance internally and therefore abundance comes to us in ever greater waves of grace.

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The soul is the key figure in the story of your life.

You may believe that the key figure in your life is something or someone who is not you.  But everything else is secondary unless you continually give that person or thing overriding power over you.  The past is not in control.  Understand that as this soul slavery is happening and you have given yourself over to slavery, you make the decision to allow that situation to continue.

At this point, “Every Man” slams the book shut and refuses to continue.  Rubbish you declare.  My life is not like that and this is why.  My situation is special/different/difficult because of:

You say you do not believe, and I say that is why you fail.

So choose now. You can choose either

1. Change nothing and nothing changes     [or]
2. Change your soul and everything changes

If you are still with me you are either seeking to criticize or seeking to change.  We will proceed with the assumption that both students are in the class, but my choice is to teach the teachable.  Let us proceed.

Soul Fundamentals

To understand soul slavery we must first ask “What is the soul? “

The soul is one of three primary elements of the human.  In order of complexity we are comprised of body, soul and spirit.  (Some philosophers cannot abide a division of soul and spirit.  I acknowledge their position but I disagree.)  The body is made up of many parts and the complexity of the individual parts, like the nervous system, and the interaction of those parts is a marvel that still challenges our brightest medical and pharmaceutical scientists.  The soul is an order of magnitude higher in complexity than the human body.  The parts of the soul and their complexity are a vastly under-discovered universe that will still be mysterious long after the physical medical sciences have a cure for what ails you.

Still higher in complexity and mysterious beyond our comprehension is the spirit.  This is the part of us that is created to be like the Creator God so that is why the spirit is beyond universal in its vastness.  This is His realm, and some things are just not revealed to us.  We will not apprehend anything of the spirit that is not revealed, because the spirit is comparatively beyond our proverbial universe in size in its substance and complexity.  I will not attempt to explain spiritual matters to unspiritual minds.  Trying to explain the soul is a daunting enough experience in itself.

Having established the complexity in relation to our body, I run the risk of oversimplification of the soul by describing the major systems of the soul.  But keep in mind that describing a brain in terms of its parts does not even come close to capturing the difficulty we have in understanding everything there is to know about the central nervous system.  To tell you of the four major systems of the soul also only gives you a language to discuss the topic, it does not mean you know or understand the topic with any level of expertise.  Knowing that the brain has a prefrontal cortex does not make you a brain surgeon.

To enhance our discussion with a bit of common ground let me describe the soul as a system made up of the subsystems mind, will, emotions and heart.

There are several ways to give an example of what these parts do, but none of them are real, they are only simplified ways of understanding.

The soul is connected to the body through the brain.  When the physical brain is damaged, we lose soul functioning for all practical purposes.  A malfunction in the physical brain prevents the soul from communing with the physical realm.  Does it continue to exist without the brain?  If it does, that has something to do with spirit and I will leave it at that.  It is up to God.  He reveals Himself and us in relation to Himself as eternal.  I suggest that you pay attention to His expertise in this matter.

Let us form a portrait of the soul with a few broad brush strokes.  The mind is our logical and intelligent academic and skill self.  Contrast the mind with the emotions which are the different type of intelligence that equate with intuitive, feeling and emotive self.  Central to the soul is the will, acting like the chair of a committee, or the judge in a trial, the will empowers us to make choices that guide our internal and physical lives.  The will is a future oriented part of us that can override historical experience or fearful inhibition to achieve an unseen end.  The will is the seat of faith and obedience that when sufficiently disciplined can overcome logic and feeling to bring about extraordinary outcomes.

The wildcard of the soul is the heart. (Not to be confused with the cardiovascular mechanism)

Just like the brain is the highest in complexity for the body and the connecting place with the soul, the heart is the connecting place of the spirit. The heart is of all things in the soul, the most complex.   The heart is the most difficult to understand and to describe.  Some confuse the heart with emotion, and since it is so driven by its own motives, this is understandable.  Some confuse the heart with the mind and describe their inner workings as visionary or inspired.  Some confuse the heart with the will and are driven by inner commands that seem to be inner tapes of historical or psychic control.

One may view, from this description, that the heart is the seat of psychotic disorder and of psychic power.  This may be a useful insight and one that is worthy of continued study.  I bring it to the forefront here because the heart is the most complex sub-system in an already complex system.  I hold that the heart looks so much like the mind, the will and the emotions because the heart is made up of the highest elements of each and all the others.

What I know to be true of the heart is this:

• Your heart is made up of what you treasure.
• Your heart is a reflection of what you worship.
• Your heart colors what you know and what you believe.
• Your heart creates its own reality based on what you treasure, what you worship and what you believe.
• Your heart is deceitful.

This simple conceptual framework serves as an excellent structure upon which we can build a model of the ordered and disordered soul.  And, since I have a belief that the disordered soul is at the root of our addictions and slavery syndromes, this understanding allows us to develop a model for the achievement of personal freedom.  When a person is free from their internal bondage, who knows what riches can rise up from within and then be built to bring great wealth to the world.

Do you treasure your role as a victim?  Do you complain because you treasure attention?  Do you fail at establishing a living representation of your internal dreams because of your negative self-talk?  Do you believe that you have to live like this?  Do you place more value in fate-karma or bad luck than you do in taking the risk to overcome your past?

What is holding you back?  I believe that this day you can set your will in motion.  I believe that you can override the inner voice that has kept you enslaved.  I believe that you can identify the mistaken beliefs and trade them in for an active faith in truth that is greater than your-self or your historical performance.

This article is a result of making a change in my life.  While it may seem a small thing, consider what you can do with what you have learned.  If you make a new decision, if you make a new opportunity for you that you did not consider yesterday, then this article is no longer a small thing.  The ideas are real if you make them real.  You create the value from the value I have provided to you.  So now we have an answer to the initial question: What is Value?  Value is an effective solution to a problem.  But is there true value if you do nothing with the truth?  Is the solution a solution if you never apply it?

What is your next step?

It is to take action.

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Well this old preacher has not stopped yet.  It just looks like I have started over again because the old is gone.

Behold, the new has come!

Topics to come in the days ahead include

• What is the SOUL?
• Understanding the heart
• Christian thinking
• Christian’s emotions
• Christian choices
• Life Long Learning for the Believer
• Leadership and its Challenges
• Special Reports
• Rants and Raves

WebPastor Mike

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