It surprises some people to hear it, but the early Christians taught that one ability that our human mind doesn’t have is the ability to be Spiritual.  The early Christian writers taught that our mind can understand things, choose things, and exert will power – but it’s can’t be Spiritual.

     Of course, that’s the exact opposite of what the false “Secret of Success” taught when I was a youth.  It taught that our mind is a type of “god” that can perform mysterious feats.  But the First Century Christians said our mind has no supernatural abilities.  Instead, it’s Spiritually neutral.  In other words, our mind is motivationally neutral.  It can’t motivate our outer behavior until some force stimulates it to do so.  Then, when stimulated, it motivates our behavior based on the type of force that’s stimulating it (good or bad).  Let’s illustrate that idea by comparing our mind to a computer.

     Digital devices such as computers are divided into two parts:  hardware and software.  For example, a computer’s hardware is the plastic and metal box sitting on a desk.  But a computer’s software is invisible.  It’s the set of electronic impulses inside the computer that make it work.  The point is, a computer’s hardware is useless without its software.  Without its software, a computer is just a plastic and metal box sitting on a desk.

     The record shows that the early Christians said our mind is like a computer’s “hardware.”  It needs the force of an invisible source of “software” to make it work.  They said our mind is “programmable” – and that it operates equally well on whatever type of software (good or bad) is “uploaded” to it.

     The principle is this:  Our mind only does what it’s told to do.  If it’s told to produce bad behavior in us, it produces bad behavior in us.  If it’s told to produce good behavior in us, it produces good behavior in us.  Our mind is a piece of “programmable hardware” waiting for a motivational force to tell it what type of behavior to produce.

     To summarize this point, we can see two reasons why the world is so full of trouble.  First, in their original condition, people’s inner spirits are Spiritually dead and can’t produce motivation for good behavior.  Second, people’s minds are motivationally neutral and also can’t produce motivation for good behavior.  Putting these two reasons together, we see a painful truth:  The average human being is a vulnerable and helpless creature who is easily overwhelmed by all the evil in the world.

     Now, before we continue our discussion of motivation, let’s slow down long enough to talk about the most common synonym (interchangeable word) that the early Christians had for our mind.

     We saw in Session Two that the early Christians had a common synonym for our inner spirit.  They often called it our “soul.”  Thus, we said in Session Two that to keep this seminar simple we’d standardize on only one early Christian word for each of the circles on The Three Circles diagram – and in Session Two we standardized on the word spirit to represent the First Circle, putting the word “soul” under the circle in parentheses to show that it’s the most common synonym for the inner human spirit.

     Now, here in Session Three, we need another such standardization because the early Christians also had a common synonym for our mind.  They often called it our “heart.”  The Greek word for “heart” is kardia (pronounced “car-dee’-ah”).

     To the early Christians, the word kardia could indicate our mind; or it could refer to the source of our thoughts; or it could mean the seat of our understanding; or it could refer to the source of our intelligence.  It could even refer to our attitudes, feelings, and opinions.  The truth is that the word kardia is a much more colorful and generalized term for our mind than the basic Greek word (nous) that we learned earlier, and that may be why the early Christians used it so often.

     That being true, let’s now see some evidence proving that the early Christians used the word “heart” as a synonym for the word mind.  Let’s look at that evidence next, in Part 3 of this session.