INTRO:
Hello friends. Over the past few weeks, we've had the opportunity to sit down and talk with a few authors that have something worth sharing.
So, while we work on the next series for you, we're going to deviate, just a little bit, from our typical format, and pretty much just share those conversations.
Last week we began our discussion with Dr. Ken Baugh, director of IDT Ministries and author of "Unhindered Abundance: Restoring our Souls in a Fragmented World." If you want to catch up, go ahead and skip back to that episode. We started talking about God and Trauma and how the intersection of neuroscience and ancient spiritual practices like Scripture meditation and memorization can help forge paths of healing.
This week we pick up the conversation exploring the way different dimensions of our brains work, and how this interaction points to the massive importance of redemptive relationships in our healing.
Again, we hope you enjoy, and beyond that, hope you are encouraged and edified, by what follows.
CONVERSATION:
Ken: Let's talk now about the left and right side of the brain, unless you had a quick response to that— Wil, did you have something else you wanted to throw in?
Wilson: You're you're on a roll.
Ken: On a roll, okay, let's keep going. so one of the things that I've been learning, and this is newer to my study is that the right hemisphere of the brain is what processes information from our five senses first.
So there's more horsepower, if you will, in our right side of our brain than there is in our left. Basically your brain and mine are processing what's going on around us; the left side processes at six times a second, the right side processes at five times a second.
So there, we’re— even though there's, there's a one second difference, your right brain has more horsepower than your left brain, meaning that when something happens and you need to make a decision, you will often make that decision, depending on the situation, instinctively, and you don't even have to think about it.
Let me give you an example. If you're driving down the freeway, and you're looking at your phone, you're not texting because you know that's wrong, but let's just say you glance at your phone quickly.
And then you look up and you see a bunch of red car lights in front of you. What do you do? [pause]
This is, this is not a rhetorical question.
Wilson: Oh, I do, I do that to my classes all the time and I get the same response— [laughter] just deer in the headlights.
Ken: Crickets. Yeah. Yeah.
Wilson: I press the brakes.
Ken: There you go. Now you hit the brakes without even thinking about it. If you would have had to go— I think if you had had to think about it and go, “Red lights, what does that mean again? Oh yeah. Everybody's hitting their brakes and stopping and I'm going at quite a clip here. So if I don't hit my brakes, I'm gonna run into the guy in front of me and my insurance is gonna, is gonna go up. Somebody might get hurt. Really. This is gonna make for a bad day.”
If you had to do all of that processing cognitively, what would happen? You'd run right into the back of the car in front of you— but you don't. Why? Because your brain, the right side of your brain is able to make a decision before your left side is even invited to the party. That happens all the time.
And so, in fact, neuroscientists will tell you that the majority of your behavior is the result of what is going on in your non-conscious, not your conscious mind. That's why you can be driving home at night, and let's say you had a rough day at the office. And you're driving home kind of processing and thinking about that, and the next thing you know, you pull up in front of your house and you're like, “Man, how did I get here?”
That's because everything was automated, and so your brain was able to process your day without having to think about driving home. The same is true when you learn how to ride a bike— you don't need to relearn how to ride a bike every time you get on a bike. Once you know how to ride a bike, you know.
When you learn how to drive a, a manual transmission, a stick, you don't have to relearn that every time you get into a car. Why? Because, you, some people can refer to it as muscle memory, right? There's a, it's almost like the matrix. When you need to fly helicopter, you just dial in the helicopter program and boom. You're able to fly the helicopter.
In a similar way, your brain has already pre-programmed responses based upon these different scenarios of your experience. Cause you know, cause you've driven a hundred times on the freeway and you see red lights and you know to hit your brakes. So you don't have to think about it the next time you see red lights, it's an instinctive thing.
Well, we do the same thing emotionally. So if you have a pre-programmed response, let's say you're walking down the hallway at home as a five-year-old little boy and you're checking to see if, if dad— who you're not sure had a good day or a bad day, and you're not sure if he's going to go off on you or not, so you're kind of trying to read what's happening to gauge your response—if he looks at you, you can know if you're in trouble or not.
Okay. So let's, let's say you, you park that experience and fast forward 20 years. Now you're walking down the hallway and your boss is walking towards you and he gives you that same look that you thought was the same look of your dad, and what are you going to do? You're gonna go down that rabbit hole with the same feelings because those feelings have now been triggered by that memory.
This is the important thing to understand: the brain has no concept of past or present. It's just there. You, your brain has a hundred billion neurons in it, approximately, and it can store the equivalent of the entire worldwide web.
So, every experience that you and I have ever had— good, bad or ugly—is in our memory banks, and can be triggered at a moment's notice, depending on the situation and the intensity of the situation. That's why you can walk into a restaurant and smell an apple pie and go back 20 years when you were a child and you'd go to your grandma's house and she'd have apple pie waiting for you when you got there.
You may not have thought of that— that memory may have not come up for 20 years, but you walk into this restaurant, smell that apple pie and bam. You're right there. So this is the important dynamic of our thinking and our left and right brain.
So, here's the other aspect of the right brain: the majority of our character formation— this includes our formation in Christ— is a right brain dynamic. Meaning that, character is formed not by information, but through relationship.
Information helps with that process, but it's not what determines the outcome. So, for example, one of the things that we have been conditioned in our current Christian subculture is that truth is what informs your will, and then all you need to do is make the right decision. Well, I've made a lot of dumb decisions even though I've known that those were the wrong things to do. So my knowledge of right and wrong did not change the decision— I still made the decision. I still acted on that.
So what's going on? Well, We've identified that if, especially if it's a sinful behavior, well, that sin and you just need to stop doing that. Yeah… but that's not helpful. That doesn't help me stop doing it, just identifying it as sin.
Now, maybe it kicks my willpower. and it's like, “Okay, I'm going to try really, really hard to not do this anymore.” But what happens, you're focused, your, your thoughts are focused on not doing it, not doing it, not doing it.
And the same thing has happened in: “Don't think about a pink elephant in the room.” And what did you just do? You just thought about a pink elephant in the room.
So again, it goes back to the point that what we think about is what we move toward. What changes character is relationship. So that old Adam, that more is caught than taught, is absolutely true in regard to character.
That's why Jesus invited the disciples to come be with him. Not just show up at the synagogue at 9AM for your next Hebrew lesson. Now, I’m not minimizing the importance of scripture, at all. Nor am I saying that scripture isn't a unique dynamic of cognitive information, because it is. But information alone, and the emphasis that we have put on information, which I think goes back as far as the reformation, is not what changes our character. It's our relationship.
That's why Jesus said, John 15, the metaphor he used was: “Abide in me.” “If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit.”
So essentially what he's saying is that “As you spend time with me, you're going to become more like me. Therefore, the decisions you make will be more in line with who I am and what my people do in that given situation.”
Wilson: Yeah. That makes me think, just. I don't know— I guess I can edit it out if it feels like I should later— but just this morning, I was teaching a Christian tradition class, and there were several students that they were really having a, really having a hard time processing that it was almost 400 years before the church canonized the New Testament say… before, they said like, “This is the new Testament.”
Now, of course, those writings were around, they were in use, but this is where I helped them see like really the reason we call it Christian tradition is because it, it all comes from—that seed is the relationship with Christ that, that personal, that time with Jesus and why… the key factor for any teaching and what they, when they came to canonize it, is it what they said “Yes. This is canonical scripture. This is part of our Bible” is it was apostolic. Because the apostles spent time with Christ and it wasn't like they spent time listening to people talk about things that Jesus talked about.
It wasn't, it wasn't like watching a bunch of Jesus's TED talks. They spent time with Jesus.
Yeah. I mean, it makes me think of the… there's a 20th century philosopher named Michael Polanyi who, that he was one of those guys, he started off as a chemist. He was like a renowned chemist and then decided, “No I'm going to do philosophy.” But because— and he crushed it in both—but because he started to get frustrated with the way he thought, similarly to how we think about knowledge with scripture:
“Oh if you just, if you just know the facts, if you know the right things, then you'll be able to do this stuff.”
He was saying, “No, I'm a chemist and that's not how it works. That's not how knowledge actually gets passed on.” Like, sure, we can write the textbooks and the manuals, but that's not how a scientist makes more scientists.
And one of the key examples that comes out of this is he says look: when in World War II, when the US was rushing to develop the technology uh, to… to generate an, A-bomb, they had all the right manuals, they had the best labs, they had all the great funding, but they couldn't get the results. And what they eventually had to do was take the… they were European scientists that had written the manuals and bring those scientists into the labs, and now the key was the person.
Now that there's the person that has that knowledge in them, right? Not just, not just the manuals that they wrote, but now that that scientist, that person is here with the lab and with the funding, then they got the results.
Similarly, I think the analogy here I'm trying to make to the Christian tradition and scripture is, when the church was discerning between “No, that's not scripture, this is.”
Or “No, that's not a Christian teaching, this is,” the key was apostolicity—whether or not it was apostolic. The key there is, like, does it— and I think of it, like, they spent time with Jesus, and so Jesus relationally attuned them to the truth—to him as the truth. And then they spent time. Right?
Going back to, way back, when we did the Apostle's Creed episode, Kevin Portillo was, when he was talking about Irenaeus, when he's, when he starts to like help the church discern between what's true teaching, what's Christian, what's not, the apostolic thing there was not just like, “Could we credit to this,” and “Are the footnotes proper?”
But it was more, “No, no, no. Who, who taught you? Who has, who have you spent so much time with that they shape who you are, who taught…”
And that's what he's getting at with taught you, “Who taught you? Because I was taught by Polycarp, who was taught by the apostle John, who was taught by Jesus.”
And again, that's not just, you know— Jesus wrote a note that was passed from this person to this person, to this person. Jesus spent time with John and that attuned, that shaped who John was, and John spent time with Polycarp, and that relationship shaped who Polycarp was, and this is… this is how the message gets pushed out.
So when I told my—bringing it back full circle— what I told my class was, I think what's way more important and interesting than how long did it take for them to say “This is the new Testament,” was what kind of people could write it.
That Christ comes and shapes the kind of people that could generate— that could create. That could… that could be in tune with God and God's inspiration so that God could use them, to like bring this into the world.
And what kind of people could recognize Christ in these writings, and, “Well, these are good and edifying, but not scripture,” and “These are actually misleading and harmful.” And the key there is that relationship and how we rub off on each other.
Ken: Yeah, and I like, Wil, what you said, of how it shapes us. And that's really important to this conversation… because Jesus invited the disciples to come be like him. So let's just take an example. One of the things we know to be a disciple is that we are to love our enemies.
So, Jesus says to the disciples, “Okay guys, I want you to come follow me. I'm going to teach you that my people love their enemies. Then I'm going to model this for you of what it looks like to love your enemies. And then you're going to get the opportunity to love your enemies. And you're not going to do it perfectly at first. But over time, as you watch me do this, you're going to become the kind of people that naturally and habitually love their enemies.”
It's not going to be a Herculean decision on your part when you have that opportunity or not. It's not like you're gonna have to wrestle down your willpower in order to love this person, because you have now become the kind of person that loves their enemies. That same principle is what plays out in how we actually change.
So let's just take a current example: we know that a lot of pastors and church leaders struggle with pornography. So— and pornography is sin. So the typical way of dealing with that is… “Well, you need to get an accountability partner and you need to be able to tell that person and know that you're going to meet with that person once a week and going to have to tell them everything that you've done.”
Now the assumption is, my knowing that I'm going to be meeting with this person is what's going to motivate me to not look at pornography. Well, I would question that motive to begin with, right? Because, if I still want to look at pornography, but I don't look at pornography because I know that I'm gonna have to answer for it to somebody and get in trouble, so to speak, then I'm going to do one of two things:
I'm either going to not look at it for the wrong reasons, or I'm gonna lie about it. And so, instead of addressing the pornographic behavior— that is not the problem. It's a problem, for sure… But the problem is what's going on in the heart. And so we have to address it from a heart issue.
So the, the goal in resolving a pornography problem is to deal with and address whatever is going on in the heart that is looking for pornography to numb it or help cope with it, and get that resolved, that pain resolved relationally, so that I'm not even tempted by pornography. It's not that because I make a choice at the moment I'm being tempted…
It's more about: I've just become the kind of person that is no longer interested in pornography. That's why Satan's temptations of Jesus didn't work. It wasn't because the temptations weren't real. It's just that Satan didn't realize that Jesus was the kind of person that wasn't tempted by impressing others. He wasn't tempted by the riches of this world. He wasn't tempted cause he was the kind of person that wasn't tempted by those things. So— and I'm not minimizing his divinity, I'm just saying that the temptation, for it to be temptation, had to be legit. Right? So— and we can get into a whole conversation about that.
But, my point is behavior change is connected directly to our character. Our character formation takes place much differently than we've ever realized before— that it is largely a right-brain, relational, bonding dynamic than it is an intellectual, cognitive, propositional truth dynamic.
Ken: Those, those two things do work together. I'm not advocating a right or a left-brain Christianity— I'm advocating a whole-brain Christianity.
Dr. Jim Wilder, does a really good job talking about, uh, these aspects of right-brain left-brain and such, and I've been learning a lot from him. And he actually was kind enough to do some editing in my book to help kind of bridge the gap a little bit because my book is very left-brain oriented.
And again, it's not that the left brain dynamics that are in my book aren't helpful, they are… but they don't have the same horsepower to actually bring about life change as the right-brain. So, the revised version of my book is going to include a chapter or two that really get into these dynamics of the right-brain.
I hint at it in my book. Dr. Wilder helped connect some dots, for me, even in the editing process of doing that, uh. But it is a… It is fascinating how God has actually set up the change process for us, and then as you start overlaying that understanding and let that understanding inform your thinking about why Jesus did ministry the way that he did you see, “Oh my gosh, it was all relational— it was being with him. It was spending time with him.”
Yes, he did do some teaching. Of course he did. Right? He taught parables. He taught, he taught the crowds— the disciples, most of the time were there listening. So there was a cognitive aspect like we would see today, and I'm not minimizing the role of preaching or anything like that.
I'm just saying, that there's a whole ‘nother part of the right-brain dynamic that we need to add to the conversation if we really want to see change take place as it is available.
Julius: Yeah, I- I mean, I-I’ve just enjoyed everything that you've said so far. I think what's been going on for me, listening to you, is I think you've helped me kind of reconnect—
I, probably like Wil, identify more with, like, the right-brain processes, the very affective, like, emotional… not that I, not… I mean. I can probably over-think just as well as I over-feel, but, like. I think over the past few years, especially, like— I'm re-reading right now a book by James K. Smith called “You Are What You Love,” and his books, um, work from a very very similar, if not the same, like, kind of anthropological-neurological framework that you just spoke about and uses kind of the same analogies as, actually, that you did.
Ken: Oh, interesting.
Julius: So you guys are on the same page.
Ken: Cool.
Julius: But that was one of the really formational readings for me was, um, was this idea that so much of what governs our actions and, and what we, I guess, believe, is informed by the, the, the non-conscious, like the unconscious level, and how it's our everyday habits and our embodied practices and, like taking it to like a deeper, like theological level, like are the liturgies that we participate in, whether they’re liturgies that form us towards God's kingdom or towards like desiring… a different kingdom. Um… That it's, it's our habits that form, like that shape what we desire, and that our desire is what pulls us and what kind of like… That’s kind of what drives our… I don't know.
Our desire is, is a, is a vehicle that, that drags our emotions and our actions and all that stuff. But because of that, like, it's working from this anthropological model that human beings are not just “brains-on-a-stick.” That we're not just… that transformation doesn't come from gaining the right information, but that it is about like re-formation. Like spiritual formation is about like reforming our desires and it's more embodied than just learning the right things.
And I think because of that, I actually have not known what to do with the thinking part. And I think, um…
What you were saying earlier about, um, connecting that to all of the calls in Scripture to pay attention—to taking captive of every thought and setting our minds on the right things— I think for a while I started to resist those scriptures, or at least hold them, like, suspend them and not know what to do with them, because I was starting to operate from this:
“But wait,” like, “You can't think your way into goodness,” or like, “You can't think your… like… cognitively change your beliefs” and, and I don't know… You can't decide, “I'm just going to think good things and so, like, I'm gonna feel good things.
Um. But you said something about how the… when we think either negative or positive thoughts, that that kind of creates a gray matter in our brain, that kind of creates a rut in our, like, whatever parts of our brain caused us to feel and tell stories.
And, I think what you helped connect for me is that paying attention to our, to our thoughts is…
Like, thinking is a habit, and so it's worth paying attention to what are we often thinking about. Which, which really draws me today to the importance of—you mentioned like meditation and specifically like meditative practices on like meditating on scripture, or like, I think of something like Lectio Divina as a practice that I think really beautifully marries the, um.
It's a marriage between like the cognitive parts of our brain, or like the left-brain, if you will, that has like to do with like the cognitive processes and the intellect, but also um. Even just thinking of Lectio, there's like a, there's a slowness to it, and there's also like an involvement of, like, our affect because of that, that um.
It helps train our mind into, like, habitually thinking. It still invites thinking into the conversation because we're meditating on these thoughts and beliefs and sayings, um. But it also invites all the rest of the gears into it… you know?
And so, yeah, I, I… I hope that makes sense. But I, I think w-w-you… just even further helped connect everything so that the… My understanding of the human soul is so much more robust, and holistic now.
Ken: Yeah. Holistic is a bit is important word. Okay. So let's, let's invite another person to this party and that's the Holy Spirit.
Julius: Hmm.
Ken: Because the Holy Spirit is the primary agent of change. The Holy Spirit is referred to as the spirit of truth, who guides us into all truth. There is no change without the Holy Spirit.
So, he is the one that we partner with in this change process. And that's important because Western Christianity—not exclusively, but primarily—has been a left-brain faith built on the truth of scripture, cognition, intellect…
We can go back to not only the reformation, but the enlightenment. There's a lot of cultural dynamics that influenced, uh— that Wil, you could, you could certainly speak much, uh, much more eloquently about than I can. But here's my point: the early church, most of the people in the early church were illiterate.
So even if they had a Bible, they wouldn't have been able to read it. And, the Bible didn't exist—the New Testament didn't exist for them to be able to read every morning in their quiet time. And even if they would have had one, they couldn't have read it. So, how did people grow and transform pre-printing press? Right?
Pre… everybody having their own copy of the scrolls, which nobody did— not even a synagogue had a complete copy of the scrolls, right? We would kind of lend them to each other. You have this scroll, I have that scroll, let's swap next week and, and so forth.
So again, the Holy Spirit is key, key, key in this. He is the one that makes us grow. What we do—there is a part that we play in that—but that part isn't the growth part. That part is, is creating an environment where growth takes place. So for example, I like to use the analogy of a farmer.
A farmer can't make a crop grow. But he can plow the soil, plant the seed, water, the seed, nurture the seed through… you know, fertilizer and so forth. What is he doing? He's creating the environment for that seed to grow and thrive, but he can't actually make the seed grow.
God is the one, through the work of the Holy Spirit, that makes us grow. Paul talks about that clearly in 2 Corinthians 3:18, that the growth process— we are being conformed into the image of Christ, and that conformation process is driven largely by the person and work of the Holy Spirit. So… there is a part that we play that doesn't make this legalism, that doesn't make this a works-oriented salvation— it's a participation.
And, that’s important because there are things that we need to do. And I think scripture, especially the new Testament… Well, it's not just the New Testament—it’s the Old as well, and the Shema, right?
It’s: “Think about these things. When you're walking along the pathway, when you're talking to your children at dinner, before you go to sleep at night,” right? The Pharisees would tie the phylacteries around their wrists and on their forehead in order to remind themselves of the Torah, an…
So there's all of these tools, if you will, but it just shows us not only the importance of God's word, but also the importance of meditating on God's word and… going over it over and over and over again. And so, some of these newer exercises to evangelicalism, I would say—like Lectio Divina, that— what you just referred to, right…
That's not a new thing to Catholic traditions. It's not a new thing to a lot of main, uh… mainline denominations. But for evangelicals it…. can even be heretical, right? Because there's mystery involved in that, and, you know. A lot of people get really challenged by any aspect that is mysterious.
I just say that it's humility, uh, that we need to have.
But I really think that we have to, when we're talking about change, we're talking about all these dynamics that we are, we have to bring the Holy Spirit and his central work into the conversation.
Wilson: Ken, is there, is there anything else that you just, you wanted to get on tape?
Ken: One of the things I'd like just to encourage your listeners with, is that there is more life available to you than you ever dreamed possible. Jesus wasn't kidding when he said “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
And that abundance is not material abundance, necessarily. It's not another version of the prosperity gospel. It is a life characterized largely by love and joy, peace, hope… All the fruit of the spirit would certainly apply. And when we think about it, these are all aspects of the nature of Christ, and the character of Christ.
So his character is being formed in us. And all that Jesus experienced in this life, in his quality of life—he was never rushed, he was never stressed, he was never trying to meet everybody's expectations—his quality of life, as well as his character is what constitutes, in my opinion, the abundant life. And that is available to us.
But we hinder it—thus the title for my book, “Unhindered Abundance”—we hinder it by our own choosing and our own pain and the, our own defense mechanisms, and our own resistance to working through or resolving those things that distort the image and character of God— some of the things that we've talked about.
But if we will sum up the courage and rely on the person and work of the Holy Spirit, and enter into community with other believers that are safe—not every believer is a safe person… But to find those people, and then start doing life with those people, we will start to experience things differently… and we'll experience a quality of life that Jesus has made available to us.
That's my goal for the book. That's, that's my desire for my life, that's my desire for all the people that I get to journey with, and that's really what I've tried to capture in this book as—and I don't want to simplify by saying this is the “how-to,” because it's not a “how-to”— but it is practical.
And it is— there are things that we can do, and I hope that it becomes a tool that will help people in their discipleship to Jesus and that transformation process.
MEDITATION
We're going to keep this meditation short.
But we're also going to ask you to really do something. And not "really" as in seriously. But as in physically. Tangibly.
I'm going to read a story from the Gospel of John, that we've dealt with before on this podcast.
As I read it, would you pay attention to, and note, one concrete way your reading of Scripture shifts if you begin to intentionally use it as a means of entering the Apostolic faith,
Understanding that "entering the Apostolic faith" means spending time with Christ?
Becoming like Christ.
As we're reading it with the understanding that it's not being done to collect some facts or data, but to enter into the story, and to be with, and to be influenced by, Jesus, if anything distinct or fresh happens, would you actually write it down, and keep that note near your Bible for a little while?
Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" She said, "No one, sir.” And Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again." - John 8
And if in scripture you can find some way to spend time with Christ, would you also write on that note the question, "What would it look to live in Christ's presence, with others?"
END.