Nature’s Mental Health

   Professional mental health leaders have known for decades that psychological and psychiatric practices, along with ‘medical enhancements’ are a stop-gap substitute for the church. ‘Church’ in this case carries the popular meaning its public service role has in giving to people solace and positive encouragement to live more productively. With regard to appealing to your selfish will to maturity, both clinical methods and church programs begin with entering a more humble and reasonable attitude where you acknowledge that the world is too big and ornery for you to objectively handle.

   From that perspective comes the socially pragmatic attempts at peace and order in describing religious observances of any persuasion, including secular mental health endeavors, as explanatory reassurances over your fears of the unknowable; beneficial for stable thinking processes and emotional tranquility. All spheres of interest in managing socially compatible personal well being share the same goals, just as much of the world’s population is employed in food production and distribution.

   The most commonly held belief is that your individualistic personal life in mortal existence has no greater purpose than experiencing your life in the best possible way. The world’s doctrine creates pride in conformity to the world as a unique contributor to the human condition. It is believed that hearts can be collectively united in sweet fellowship through mutual respect for our differences and love and joy will reign supreme.

   But, God’s realities as created in His plans for everyone’s trust in His leading are founded in a Wisdom that cannot be manufactured by human borne logically arranged standards, investigations, experiments, or rule of law. Ministers who profess to be God’s watchmen to invite crowds of followers into their leading fail to learn the truth either from the testimony of the ancient prophets or from the signs of the times.

   As worldly focused attentions and ambitions fill the heart, love for the One and Only True God in His everywhere presence through faith in His Word has grown cold; and when His doctrine of family unity through marriage privacy unto Him is presented, it only arouses prejudice and unbelief. Social order and controls, whether of government or organized church, greatly fears the risks involved with allowing your household free reign in trustful faith-based authority over those institutions.

   As of old, the plain testimony of God’s Word, Christ’s alive leadership pouring out from your inner being, is met with the inquiry, “Have any of the rulers of the Pharisees believed?” Finding how difficult a task it is to uncover a true Gospel witness amid all the conflicting variances of theological and philosophical thought discourages your hopefulness precisely where it needs be encouraged.

   Multitudes, trusting implicitly in their pastors, counselors, and entertaining theatrical propaganda designed to shear their emotional commitments out from their pocketbooks, do not refuse to listen to Christ’s honest moment-by-moment voice of freedom through responsibility; His Word of life is lost in the midst of the din of mass retained information pouring into people’s hearts through their senses. “Input! Must have input!” consumerism teaches in ways where you believe the more you take in the more you have to pick from in expressing your mark on the world.

   The messages God sends through His natural recognition that loyalty, co-dependence in decision making, and the integrity of properly ordered family privacy has His authority over the ‘information age’, reveals all too surely how great is the number who have set their affections on the world’s offerings. Offerings in the false gods of experiential opportunism feed organized social gatherings used to divert your reasons for living from trust in Christ. The ties which bind the masses to the earth through their disoriented belief in results are stronger through delusion than their attractions are to lead their households heavenward.

   God does not allow, much less cause, any illnesses you may be suffering. He does not provide discomfort and disease so that He may twist your alignments from self/worldly dependence into faith in Him for your healing and well being. Matthew 6:19-24, 7:1-12 speaks of the essence of what it means to be deceived by “spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12) and how confusion mixed with the fears self-preservation draws on defensiveness that distances your natural gift of faith from its functional reality; as spoken of in John 3:16-21.

   Mental health is defined in how well you meet the moment at hand. Everybody has generally the same needs; food, clothing, housing, etc. that makes for standards applicable to anyone you may encounter. Each person of that ‘everybody’ has specifically different approaches to how he or she will meet those general needs. However, as basic needs are understood to be about survival, personal choices to express your expectations with regard to having motivational desires are universally considered by most people as true reasons for continuing on to maintain their general basic needs.

   If your physical health is impaired by illness, disease, handicap, or any other reason, your mental vitality to function as desired is preoccupied from responding to what could be an optimum for what a situation might allow. In more thought altering debilitating physical cases, your mental impairment is directly as a result of physical ailment. Your body’s metabolism is affected both by your mental and physical dynamics. What happens with your body diverts your mind’s attentions and what happens with your mind alters your body.

   Your body’s health and mind’s clarity change with your diet, activities, and interpersonal affairs. Your mind runs your body and your body runs your mind. The give and take concerning positive health and negative illness has two aspects. Your physical body may be damaged in ways that impair your functioning, including chemical imbalances that impair your mental processing. And, your mind may be physically damaged in ways that impair your body’s functioning.

   Your physical body does not know the difference between what you think is true and what is true because your body does not have your mind’s ability to choose intent. Since choice in intent to do what you will needs agreement from your body, it is understood that your body is subject to your mind. Chemical imbalances that cause your body suffering from your mind are due to confusion over what you believe. The desires you have, combined with your reasons for having those desires, give to your natural ambitions the drive to focus your attentions.

   As you either are able to realize your goals or are thwarted away from success, your joys and sorrows produce different mind shifting chemicals, respectively. Your body, then, responds to the ‘mood’ of direction your mind is telling it it needs to prepare to meet and appropriately sends back to your mind the corresponding chemical changes. Mental wellness issues are about the conflicts between your wants and your needs with regard to your physical abilities to realize ideals.

   Having an ideal is not the same as idealism in that your desires to be physically and mentally well are usually about exaggerated fantasies instead of an appreciation for practical acknowledgement that you already are blessed with more than your unrealized dreams let you admit. Your own sense of being as separate from others and your sense of being in response to others, and other’s own senses of being and their senses of being in responses to you, make for ambiguously frustrating considerations.

   When you have a healthy set of concepts that give to your purposes satisfaction, your reasons for working to achieve your purposes are different. Choosing and organizing your personal patterns of organized confusion appeals to you as if there is no confusion in your choices. You, unavoidably, are a product of your particular region’s culture. History brings with it into the present a singularity in socio-personal continuation and multifaceted alterations of progression that change a people to be different in being the same. “As the tree grows, so grow the branches.”

   The acceptable ‘right’ choices you believe in, and the unacceptable ‘wrong’ choices you believe in, are more specifically drawn from your micro social environment that is either an example of or in opposition to the macro social environment promoted by your overall region’s societal standards. It is impossible to oversee all the variances of affectation the human collective is thrusting upon the circumstances that mold your personal moments, so you, by naturally protective default, do your best to focus in and on your personally independent concepts of existence and what continuing that existence means.

   Because no one person is an island, being created as only healthily prosperous when properly involved with taking care of the business of responsibilities, sheds light onto your personal pathway of living that your emotionally focused thinking avoids through resentful preponderance. What your God given responsibilities are, and to whom those responsibilities are directed, are a mishmash of fighting and flight that has you torn up to the core in ways that only God, if He were to take an interest in your happiness, is able to overcome. But you have come to believe that God is at the least imaginary and at the most mean and overbearing.

   Exploring the human experience is then all you have left to get a grip in living more industriously, or complacently allowing a folding into an ultimate ‘bowing out’ and away from the debilitating mess those around you impose into your cares and concerns. And nobody would blame you in either case because everyone wants to do the same in one way or another. Living participation may glaringly seem unhealthy the same in things generally recognized as right as though rebellion against personal well being is needed to explore the human experience… and there becomes no human experience barred to exploration when unfettered imagination has no structure behind your free will to choose.

   Therefore, it is necessary to make attempts to order your confusion into being less confused. This is difficult because being less confused involves trust. Deciding a direction to order your disordered attentions is a great portion of your confused state of awareness. Righteously stipulated distrust in those who are in position to keep established your growth into maturity gives to you a deserved wary countenance that makes it difficult to know to whom and where you may find the natural protections you know should be ever-presently at the forefront in everybody’s motivations.

   There are people thought of as bright, charming, and articulate. There are people thought of as dull, aggravating, and scattered in their attempts to communicate. Interestingly, the same person may be perceived as bright, charming, and articulate to you while he or she may be perceived as dull, aggravating, and scattered in their attempts to communicate to someone else. You most assuredly are aware that each and every person you know displays both those attributes and detriments. Behind the differences is each person’s battle with mortality, desires, and self valuations that are intertwined with other’s influences.

   Subconscious is, in its simple meaning, awareness that is behind your present conscious response to now. To keep focused in realizing the purposes involving mental and physical well being it is beneficial to keep understanding about the subconscious limited to the interaction between the two sides of your brain that are recognized to function in a balance. One side of the brain is thought to be emotionally motivated while the other is thought to be intellectually motivated. In order to allow your faith to guide your thinking it is useful to not delve into the vast array of particulars each has in affecting the other.

   We may consider that the overall intellectual/emotional functions of your brain are what makes up your mind. Memories, experiences, and your personal attachments to the same are the driving subconscious ‘forces’ that stir your concerns and considerations at any given time. When your concerns and considerations are functioning in unison they give to you the sensation that you are “on the right track” even though the agreements between your intellectual analysis and emotional acceptance of your opinions as a result may be far from the actual healthful realities your created living needs.

   This is because you are more inclined to seeking self confirmation than you are with allowing for revealed mysteries to guide you to who you are in your created purposes. Deciding your own purposes is only good when those decisions are within the parameters of faithful action. Unless or until you mature enough to understand that faithful action is trust in allegiances based in promises you will remain wallowing in grieving resentful retaliation against your and other’s failures in ways where your overcompensations drive you into further problems.

   The term ‘subconscious’ is used in many different contexts because its meaning is an all encompassing umbrella that requires no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a meaning-bearing concept for particular use, but is meaningful to make distinction between what is readily apparent in your consciousness and what is mostly out of your immediate reflection. It is used here because the term is commonly encountered in everyday speech and popular writing.

   Applying a casual meaning to ‘subconscious’ is uniquely useful to help understand matters of your instinctual/intuitional existence and how your living is more easily understood than many hopefully helpful people and organizations may be implying. Thus, despite professional agreement about what ‘subconscious’ means as inconsequential to enlightened psychoanalytic works, the word itself is not as important as the message the use of it can bring.

   So, in the following parable (descriptive scenario) the use of ‘subconscious’ loosely means the ‘machine works’ or mechanisms of structure behind the scenes of your consciously recognized awareness. It is easier and much less time consuming to explain the order of things with an allegory than it is to attempt direct dissection of each and every detail of a situation. That, combined with the fact that your situation is generally the same as everybody else’s, but unique to you, it is necessary to symbolize perspectives that may lead you to see the realities the convoluted metaphor speaks to illuminate.

   Think of your physical brain as a radio transceiver (transmitter/receiver). You, as the owner of that radio are the operator, hopefully, of that radio. Radios are for broadcasting and receiving communications. Internally, your radio of a brain receives information from your body and sends information to your body. You, as the master of control, allow that your brain radio’s autonomic functions are stable in processing the information your body sends to it and then is stable in providing the information it sends back to your body.

   Your consciousness of life, the ‘you’ that you know is alive, is of your unseen spirit soul residing in your seen physical body. Confusion about the difference comes from your ongoing present physical body’s maintenance as weighed against your constantly present spiritual soul’s desires for stability. When your sensible soul’s guiding will operates your radio, the information received and sent to your body provides an alignment your body can be satisfied with accepting for its orderly preservation. “A healthy mind makes for a healthy body” when your body is kept in subjection to your soul.

   Because everybody knows about the concepts of God, and the concepts of the devil, whether any certain person accepts belief in either as true, the unknowns and mysteries of the universe as well as your personal concepts about why you exist, while knowing you are alive and exist, give to you a perspective about Who God may be and who the devil may be. In that light, it is needful to extend the radio parable into ecclesiastical matters. As your transceiver brain encounters moments of experience it collects memories.

   But, since your brain is a radio, and not a file cabinet, it does not physically retain any of your memories. Memories, though usually thought of as details and trivia, are about your fascinations with emotional intensities until you make the discovery that their true purpose is about properly respecting loyalties. Your radio brain has three stations, ‘channels’ for channeling your communications: one station is dedicated to your physical living, another is dedicated to your personal concepts and beliefs, and the third is dedicated to God in Christ (but not religion because religion is formed by physical living).

   Your body station’s productions subject matter is about you, about God, about the devil, about the world, and about everyone else. Your soul station’s programming content is about your ideals, dreams, ambitions, and expectations. And, your God station’s broadcasting centers in reasons, rewards, and consequences. Since your mind is yours (unless you are married where your mind is connected with your spouse in Christ), you decide what to include or exclude on any of your three stations.

   What is mostly ‘aired’ on one station in priority to the others is what alters your choices on the other two stations. As one or another subject of choice may dominate your transmissions, your receiver receives responses to your transmitted content, and then your programming choices further enhance the directions of choices the dominating station promotes based in a progression of memories that work to create more memories. Substantiating your broadcasting responsibilities requires a continued motivation to avoid contradiction and compels you to stay a course of predictability that substitutes for accountability.

   Lest you presume that throwing the station switch in a reactionary and retaliating, off/on, manner to focus your programming broadcasts wholly from the God station will offset the vicarious output your body station is fond to produce, bear in mind that your radio brain is designed for you to ply your decisive will to choose, because you want to choose, instead of choosing because of dire need to change what you need to change. Your mind is designed, in the concept of the radio scenario, to center its content on your soul’s intent but your fleshly considerations resent your soul’s meddling.

   When either of your other stations holds dominance your natural soul’s station is at the bottom of the hierarchy. When your body station rules content, the God station is used to justify programming so that your soul station will follow suit, and when your God station rules content, your body station reviews that content to create a messiah complex that takes you away from allowing your soul to remain under God’s will. Thus, religion is used to justify programming so that your soul station will follow suit with your worldly pursuits.

   When your body is in charge it will deny God to achieve its aims and when your ego-god is in charge it will deny your body’s aims. But, when your soul is in charge, you recognize your place unto God and your body is relieved to follow better aims in trusting your soul. Personal confidence is found when you are able to let God be God and your body is able to let you be you because of Him; and you are able to be forgiving about your body being your body. That is why you are at times over-intensified with your preoccupations about either your flesh existence or God’s requirements.

   There is a reason He expects you to share your faith in His leading with others in a patterned and structured way; it is for you to understand that you do not have a superior corner in connection with personal righteousness, rights to the natural pleasures and joys of world living, or a particularly endowed sense of wisdom that is not available to just anyone for the asking. True freedom of expression is realized in respecting the required loyalties that personal and social relations naturally make clear.

   This is why Christ’s positive admonition about moderation in all things points to your always continuing will to choose to respect your choices in honoring your commitments for His sake. His concern also points to seeing that anyone you may hold in derision or disdain is under the same edict. The troubles that have you reaching out for solution, or running from the fears that those troubles will worsen, find no solution and do worsen because of your efforts to play God over your circumstances.

   You usually do this by working to eliminate those in your life who seem to be the cause of your insulted attempts to be free, well, and happy. So, it is advantageous to responsibly work through your conflicts rather than fighting to destroy the source(s). Conflict resolution is not grasped in managing compromises because compromise is a contributor to conflict’s causes. Rather, conflict resolution is a mediation process where everyone involved finds their own sensibility about who they are to you in the relational position they hold with you.

   Your memories, all of them, are in a file cabinet in God’s ‘control central’ for your immediate access at any time you wish to connect your radio to receive whatever memory you may be interested in obtaining. Your file cabinet of memories is alongside each and every other person’s file cabinet of memories. It is housed in the Body of Christ in His death on the Cross as He lives through anything and everything you live through.

   Since His radio is a reconstituted radio through His Resurrection, any respect you have for asking His assistance to free your sentiments from the death-ness of bad memories removes the file(s) of those memories from your cabinet. You may think, “But I still remember what I asked Him to help me forget!” While interned in the temporal worldly arena it is needful to realize something of a seeming paradox concerning forgiveness:

   Remembering helps you exercise caution to avoid falling into the temptations that gave to you your troubles; and remembering harmful situations you are freed from attending your attentions to is helpful to realize empathy for others. That is why sometimes it seems as if your forgiveness has yet to be finalized. It is where prayer broadcasting on your soul’s station will develop results that your body’s station’s efforts finds severely lacking.

   Sending and receiving on your God station about your body’s ambitions in its troubles gets overall soul directives, in return from God, to retune your radio to your soul station. However, as long as you are working to do soul business through your body station’s agenda you are denying your soul its place in authentication.

   Nobody is complete and purely free from troublesome despair over evil until physical life itself has transpired to fully expire. Meanwhile, there is work to be done. Christ’s radio is always connected to your radio as your radio is always connected to His.  The devil, on the other hand, does not have a radio. He, like some types of microscopic parasites that can use your body and alter your mind’s processes for their own ends, has access to your radio.

   He will do anything and everything to accomplish his one goal: To make sure your instinctual body’s motivations take prominence over your intuitional soul’s leading in order to rob you of your naturally inspired moments created by God. When your soul presence is the program director of your radio, your body’s station is properly led by your will as your God station leads your programming decisions.

   That is where you find, and continue to find, a naturally spontaneous order in knowing who you are to your loved ones and who they are to you. Companionship then becomes a relished appreciation where your personal will respects others’ wills. In your new standpoint of concern, the most grievous considerations you then find yourself anguished unto better attentiveness are dealing with the fact that most if not all of your earthly companions have yet to realize what you understand.

   But, you then have a true intercessory way of expression with merit sanctioned by God Himself that connects appropriately with His sure and true promises. You also come to see for yourself that nobody would be ‘the way they are’ if they understood to not be the way they are. Accepting who you are instead of who you thought you were is not a matter of perception, it is a matter of honestly realigning your attentions – not your intentions.

   Your naturally created instinct’s intentions always follow your fleshly attentions like a yoyo follows a string. Your naturally created intuition’s attentions choose or choose not to follow your soulful intentions. Your naturally created faith about who you are in Christ’s leading chooses both your attentions and intentions and neither is dependent upon the other to function. Because, through Him (or rather Him through you) where you decide to place your attentions, and what you intend to do about what you are given to apply your attentions to, are up to you to decide with confidence.

   There exists in popular culture an empty concept called ‘closure’ that echoes God’s decisive final judgment of humankind in the hereafter. Closure is used to create psychological blocks that deny redemptive processes. It is applied in ways that separate oneself from a cluster of difficulties usually associated with uncontrolled emotional stirrings that seem to have no resolve. Using disgust, one of the strongest instinctual emotions, to stigmatize another person’s identity with your perceptions of negativity, whose ways appear destructive to your self esteem and personal happiness, contradicts your own road to reconciliation through faith in Christ’s grace of mercy.

   Furthermore, as if denying a loved one’s rights to your intercessory witness in spirit and truth is insufficient for your self protective peace of mind, ‘moving on’ from an intangible past (another person you are using as a scapegoat) into a supposed better life closes your opportunities for putting barriers against those who are wrongfully keeping you intermeshed with their use of you. It closes your expressive freedom to more soulful openness with that one and only who intimately loves you; and additionally closes your spontaneous natural appreciation for possibilities over improbabilities.

   Anyone you reattribute hardship to, having left them holding the weight of miseries so that you can escape your responsibilities, becomes not a person but a rejected symbol of your own weaknesses.  Contrary to your self deception, it does not also gracefully free him or her to make their own choices to also do to you what you are doing to them and yourself. Making decisions for others by stealing or manipulating their personal and positional permissions of will puts you into fault finding habits that seem to you to be righteous defenses against the world’s insults to your life.

   Many people you hold accountable for your problems already hold themselves accountable for your sake. You misread that as an opportunity to deny them their desires to help in their way, as they can, because the load they are carrying to lighten your mountain of miseries looks to you like what you want to be rid of – and the mess scares you enough that you further twist your self-loathing spite into increasing your projected pressures until you identify yet another person with your mess.

   The longer things go and the more people that are sewn into the fabric of your influences, the more your hatred looks for release until you find ever more faithful longsuffering innocent victims to add to your diary. The more virtue you need to overcome your frustrations, the more frustrations you cause to obtain the virtues you need… and it seems like you are beyond help, beyond redemption, beyond beyond and there is nobody who really understands.

   When you meet the moments where you know for a time that the entire process is needless and simple to correct, your fury with yourself reaches such a pitch that you cannot contain your internal hurricane so you yet again forget your natural way and strike out unnaturally with suspicions that hear and see your negative interpretations of others positive sharing. You then look for a new face, a new substitute for Christ you can tease into complicity, by allowing you to dump your darkness in their lap while escaping with their compassioned virtue.

   Since you are clever enough to know those others are innocently not giving to you the negatives you are looking to find, you play yourself into working the meanings of their positive attentions into negative intentions until you have them convinced their zeal for you is actually founded in deceitfulness.  In your wit and skullduggery you deem yourself a cut above your quarry and hold their unawareness against them by condemning their subsequent living wretchedness as just deserts for being less than a real person.

   However, as God creates all things through His Word, He describes the devil as the author of confusion and confusion is the cause of most of your illnesses. To be blunt, the world’s troubles for the most part are generated and driven by gossip, meddling, and thievery. For the short answer to get you on the right track: Keep your mouth shut unless it is with your spouse. If ‘alienated’ from your spouse, get on the next whatever and go to where he or she is – and stay there. If not married and intimately involved, get married.

   It does not matter how bad you think you are or how trashed your life may seem to be.  If you are alive enough to be reading this then God is not finished with you. It is better to be appreciated by the committed one who loves you and be disliked by the world that makes sport of blathering over your troubles, than it is to be thought a fool for your relentless gainsaying ridicule and have your ways despised in your own household.

   Overcoming a problem can only happen where that problem is and when it is resolved everyone benefits. Running from a problem by running from your spouse, children, or family to ‘have your life back’ makes what you believe is a problem, then, a very real problem worse and you are hard pressed to know what to do. Remember, God is wherever you are and His will is to lead and guide you within, instead of away from, your responsibilities.

   Mental and physical health work together where one affects the other and the other affects the one because mental and physical problems are mostly, except for accidental damage and environmental pollution, formed and sustained by your misunderstood reactions to your physical surroundings and inter-relational responses to others.

   This site, if studied with interest in finding working solutions to your emotional/intellectual and malfunctioning relational problems, is provided as a tool for your natural health and well being. Otherwise, your wisdom defeats itself. Put another way, if you read into this site what you want it to say, you will feed the problems from which you wish to be free.