Actually, we can’t even read our own minds.
I recall a popular topic for discussion in the very active teenage group at the church I attended. The basic assertion is the Devil can’t read the mind of a born-again soul. Thus, if I was to pray silently, the Devil can’t follow the traffic and doesn’t know what I’m praying, because my soul was a walled castle to him.
You know what I’m going to say: This is just one more example of asking and answering the wrong question, so typical of Western Christianity.
If all we had were verifiable scientific facts, it wouldn’t be much. While a certain kind and flavor of human mental activity can be detected using various electronic scanners and brain activity sensors, actually “reading the mind” is far more subtle and complicated. That’s primarily because most of us aren’t properly self-aware. We cannot reliably report what’s going on in our minds. The thin slice of humanity who even come close are so far out of the norm, you can’t get a really good base for scientific study.
I realize the reporting on this is far more optimistic, but every time some big noise comes out, we discover some time later it wasn’t quite so good as they said. I’m convinced there are limits to this. The population you can easily read is the same population which blindly believes the underlying cultural advertising which teaches things like feminism (à la, Sex and the City), our American divine right to dominate the world, and a whole range of benighted mythology. Do you really want to read what’s on their minds?
The whole question symbolizes the same effort to reduce humanity to an easily herded beast of burden, the underlying assumption of our modern technological state system of government. The ruling elite want no part of this for themselves. Having worked among the children of said elite as an educator, I can tell you they are generally not at all like the kids at your local school house. Those elite kids are years ahead in terms of consciousness and general perception of how things actually work. They didn’t take me seriously until I made it obvious I was above their heads on at least a few things. The kids in the local school system are generally incapable of recognizing I am over their heads, in the sense it never occurs to them to care. This is what the elites want.
Now bring it back down to where we began: Active spiritual learners, as that church youth group was striving self-consciously to be, are a cut above the herd already. Not in every way, not all the time, but the mere presence of an interest and investment in studying such things places them a little farther up the bell curve in some ways. No, they aren’t fully aware of the complexity of studying an Ancient Near Eastern spiritual system all dressed up in Post-Modern Western rationalism, because that whole question evades the Western churches in the first place. But they are aware of a distinct and very real reality beyond the obvious default collection of mythologies from which they are seeking to escape. They are aware of at least the disjuncture between what this spiritual system demands and what it seems they naturally do, and something in that system draws them to keep trying to work it out.
This activity creates a serious jumbled up mess in their heads, at least if you were trying to measure it with technology. Yes, being a teen in the Post-Modern West is already insane, a jumbled mess of its own, but trying to claim the ancient spiritual heritage at the same time produces a truly chaotic consciousness. There is a core of internal peace and order only as a contrast to the rest of one’s mind being even more chaotic. This is somewhat the norm for those who are on a higher level of consciousness. It is inherent to our human condition things will be a roaring storm passing over tectonic shifts in the soul when we seek anything above the herd level of awareness. Even as someone pushing 60, having pursued this for most of my life, I am just now discovering afresh how chaotic the human mind can be. You can’t read very much of that no matter how hard you try, whether on the inside or outside of it. While a certain moral calm has been imposed on the chaos in my soul, it serves also to reveal just how messed up is the human condition. The more peace I gain, the more chaos I find inside needing peace, and the deeper and darker are the recesses exposed by the encroachment of the moral clarity into that space.
Can the Devil read that?
Let’s keep in mind, the Bible symbolically depicts him as having begun his existence as the very veil of God through which all Creation, and all the angels and various spiritual entities, had to pass in order to get God’s attention. That’s what is implied by the English translation of the term “Covering Cherub.” He was there as a prior creation before humanity was formed, and understood us well enough to pull us off track into the Fall.
At the same time, Paul reveals in far less symbolic language your own spirit is the best gauge of what is in your mind (1 Corinthians 2:6-16). He says this as a means to explaining why no entity can really understand what God knows. Our biggest problem here is our minds can’t comprehend what our spirits know, but our spirits can still steer our lives if we train our brains to obey, not rule. What’s in our minds is, in that sense, not really worth reading. Of far greater strategic interest to the Devil would be what’s in our spirits. So long as we struggle to obey the Spirit-spirit nexus, there is a sense in which he has nothing that matters, yet already has every other part of us. And if the folks writing Scripture can so easily explain our sin nature in terms we can use to improve our spiritual understanding, how could you imagine Satan wouldn’t also understand such things?
The Devil does not have to read your mind. He pulls the strings and you dance, until you start cutting those strings. That’s the common human condition.
Implied by the question of whether the Devil can read our minds after spiritual birth was the security of the soul, and the implied tactical advantage. The question itself assumes a vast mythology of what Satan does, what he cares about. The question itself is one the Devil wants us to worry about, because it misses the whole point. It’s not a matter of concern whether Satan knows what I’m planning to do, but whether he can do much about it, and what that would be.
Yes, there are divine rules confining the Devil, but they are written and understood above the human intellectual level. They are spiritually perceived. You can bet the Devil knows those rules, and would love to keep us deceived about them. Even saying it in those terms does not get at the issue of what Satan is and how he works. When the likes of The Hobbit and the mythology of Sauron in Mordor become the all-too-literal understanding of how Satan operates, we will never approach a real solution. That imagery is not an accurate depiction of how it works. When you read that sort of mythology back into the Bible, you will never walk free; you will never cut the strings.
Stop worrying about what the Devil knows about you. Under any terms, here in this realm he knows you better than you know yourself, and always will. He cannot interdict activity in the Spirit Realm beyond a certain but incomprehensible set of limits. He can do one whale of a lot here because he rules this lower realm, in a certain sense, as a vassal of God doing things which are supposed to make our human existence miserable. It’s his assigned task, and God is too complex to fit in some simplistic image of the nice old grandfather struggling hard against a vigorous younger Devil. God rules utterly, but the West is entirely confused about what matters to Him. All of our mental categories are insufficient to capture the truth, but even what we think we know is largely false.
You aren’t supposed to win here, except in the sense you understand how utterly false is everything you think you see on a human level. You win when you can disengage and simply do what’s morally superior, what’s drawn from the higher realm. Start with that and the rest of it will make more sense.
