Let’s keep this brief; you can ask for individual clarifications as needed. This assumes a familiarity with psychology, religion, philosophy, etc. I can only explain this as I experience it, so your mileage may vary, but I’ll try to connect it with widely known concepts.
First, you have to understand the concept I call Two Realms. The universe is human space, but is merely a confined bubble within the larger Creation. Our plane of existence is constrained by time-space considerations that don’t apply outside of it. What we have is lesser and lower in the broadest sense than the other realm. What’s outside our universe is truly outside, in the sense we can have some limited awareness of it, but nothing in our human capabilities can ever really understand it. We might get some indications how we can relate to it, but that’s the limit. Whatever and whoever is there can easily invade this space, but we cannot cross over to that other side unless we die. That other realm I call the Spirit Realm.
Second, you have to understand that humanity is born with a faculty to connect with that other, higher plane of existence, but by default does not. While it’s plain to see some humans have a spiritual awareness, it would appear most do not. At any rate, the level of awareness is certainly not equally distributed across humanity. A part of us can therefore belong to that higher realm before we leave this one, so the difficulty is how to reduce the internal barriers between our spirit faculty and the rest of our being. We aren’t born knowing how to exercise a spiritual understanding, and a spiritual awakening is only the beginning. The brain has to be trained to cooperate and we can rest assured the intellect is not happy with subordination.
Our working model posits a human body. We can infer a soul within that body, divided into three functional elements: intellect, emotions and will. The emotions are the primary link with the body, along with the senses. If you could imagine a recording track of senses and emotions, all the senses together are a considerably smaller portion of the track than the emotions. Our memories of events are mostly emotion. The intellect is what makes conscious sense of it all; it’s the seat of reasoning and logic, among other things. The will is harder to explain because it’s rather foreign to Western traditions, but it is separate from the mind in that some part of us decides things, sometimes contrary to our minds or emotions, or mixtures of both, etc.
In our working model, the will is the link to the spirit, if the spirit is active at all. To the degree having a spirit makes any difference in the human routine of operations, it will work through the will, and the intellect is incapable of receiving direct communication from the spirit. I won’t tell you that God can’t speak to your intellect, but that it is exceedingly rare. Don’t count on it happening; the normative model is the spirit placing non-intellectual impressions in the will, and the mind attempting to make sense of it via the conscience. We could say the conscience is the mind’s interface with the will, but that the conscience is more variable than what takes place in the spirit. The will operates from convictions, a word for something that escapes intellectual definition, but tends to be uncompromising in what it says.
A fellow without a spiritual awareness as an anchor will find a mixture of things in his will occupying the space and function of convictions. It amounts to whatever his real commitments are, conscious or otherwise. It’s this stuff that hangs around after a spiritual awakening and has to be cleared away like rubble. Either way, the mind can attempt to override the convictions, as do the emotions. Our biggest problem as Christians is a huge confusion between emotion and spirit, because our cultural biases are a serious massive counter to genuine spiritual operations.
So you can bash your conscience around and it will become wounded and weak enough to quit working too well. This means you’ll never quite understand why you do the things you do. Or you can cooperate with your conscience, hopefully with the realization that the conscience itself has to learn. What the conscience says today in a certain context might not be the same thing it says tomorrow, because it is learning how to read the convictions. We could properly imagine the convictions as some wordless drive, carved into the foundation of our very being, and the best we can hope for is clarity in reading what’s there. If the convictions work at all, they are written by the hand of God, so to speak.
With this much given, we see the task as teaching the mind to trust and obey in terms of organizing and implementing those ineffable messages from the convictions. The mental frame of reference itself is adjusted from time to time, consciously so. You’re hoping you can teach your mind to stay out of the way so that the will is not hindered from doing what it naturally does when the spirit rules, because your spirit is presumed to be in communion with God’s Spirit. You are too small to have all of Him, but you get enough to do what makes your life worth living in the first place. What you have is not universal, though at times it might surely seem so.
Some of the things trickling through my conscience are things I know God wants for me alone. It’s often little more than a matter of adjusting my perception. It’s rather like allowing some external authority to organize and label the books in the library. It’s only my books and my library, and it’s not likely to be all that useful to you. It does have a lot to do with what I write, say and do, but it’s more routine administrative traffic. This is the sort of stuff that tells my mind what to expect from God on a routine level.
On another level I sometimes receive a pretty forceful command to commit to something. That would be on the order of my calling to pastoral ministry, being a writer, or even my serious efforts at fitness. It orders big chunks of my life. The level of communication across my conscience is much more forceful, a firm imperative I would deny at the peril of my personal sanity, my sense of peace. If my mind resists these things, the result is some serious discord, perhaps mostly on the level of neurosis. This is my divine duty, and I had better get to it. I have long ago learned I don’t have to succeed by any human standard, but I have to engage the task persistently as understood at the time, expecting future refinements.
On rare occasions, something will tumble out of the interface that is too big for my conscience to process easily. It requires some serious quiet time, contemplation and concerted focus of resources trying to digest it. It’s usually very moving, causing the body to squirm and tremble with how powerful it is. This is a serious invasion from Heaven, as it were. So far, it’s not something that comes in my dreams, but always in my waking moments. While I might refer to it as a “vision,” that isn’t my favorite word for it. It’s a wordless impression that writes itself on my awareness in huge letters and bold relief. Resisting it would result in serious psychosis. This thing drives me near the territory of death simply because it contains a burning core of eternity, that other realm. These items are prophecies.
It’s not as if I can’t prophesy on lesser impulses. An awful lot of Old Testament prophecy was simply restating the obvious in terms of what everyone could have and should have known from the current revelation of God. This is rather like my book, “Biblical Morality” — a perception of the divine order woven into Creation itself, a sort of cosmic truth and justice. The awakened spirit can read that moral order that is invisible to other human faculties, and it’s pretty obvious that a certain course of conduct will result in certain fairly automated responses from God’s character simply built into Creation. Just about anyone with some inclination can be a prophet of that sort. It simply requires some training not so terribly different from what modern lawyers get; you are learning a body of understanding tied to a moral orientation. However, if you aren’t already committed to that moral structure, you’ll never understand it very well.
On that level, if you ask me a question, I can come to a conclusion solid enough to share without fear of besmirching God. Sometimes I sense a need to respond to something someone else says or writes, or some event, and sometimes it just seems like there’s something needs to be said. These are all based on my calling, and more than merely my opinion as a man. When I don’t sense that firmness, I’ll say it’s my opinion. If that higher substance is there, I’ll tell you I know what God requires of me to say. I never pretend what God tells me applies to you on this level.
On top of this more routine understanding of what makes God happy or angry, the Lord also has his divine whims. He takes a personal notice in the sense of a grand potentate wishing to make double sure something works to suit him. Some prophecies are highly specific in that sense. I’ve only had two items on that level. (1) If US forces attack Iran, God will destroy the troops and equipment we use for that. The agency of that destruction is not part of the message. (2) The US is being destroyed. That much would happen in the normal routine of cosmic moral justice, as governments can only get just so stupid before things simply quit working. In this case, instead of using a foreign invader to humble and oppress, it is our government God is using to destroy the nation and oppress. It has become a defacto foreign invader, and we are supposed to hunker down and ride it out. Those who actively resist, for whatever reason, will fall under God’s particular attention for punishment.
Everything else I claim is a message from God is more of that routine nature.
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