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0:02
Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. This is Dr.
0:05
Lee Warren, and it is Theology Thursday here on the podcast.
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Every week we try to do an episode where we get into science and faith and smash
0:15
them together in a unique way, a little bit heavier on the spiritual side.
0:19
And today I want to give you just a couple of thoughts about the difference between your
0:22
right half of your brain and the left half of
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your brain and some ideas from Scripture and science about how the world is
0:30
viewed by those two halves of your brain and how that may come into play when
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we try to grapple with big things like how to handle trauma and tragedy and
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massive things that occur in our lives and how we even come to understand and know what we believe,
0:44
or what we feel about the world and the universe around us and maybe even where God is when things hurt.
0:51
So today we're going to do Theology Thursday. We're going to talk about left
0:54
and right and two ways of knowing things. And we're going to kind of wrap up this German language concept that we've been
1:00
talking about for a couple of weeks now on the spiritual brain surgery and Dr.
1:04
Lee Warren podcast size. We talked about it on Tuesdays with Tata.
1:07
These three German words for knowledge, I think, has something to do with our
1:11
right and our left brain. I think that has something to do with how we encounter God and the universe
1:17
around us and what we do when things hurt.
1:20
And I want to give you some quick thoughts on that on Theology Thursday.
1:24
But before we do any of that, I have a question for you.
1:27
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
1:32
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the
1:35
neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything
1:40
starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?
1:43
Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.
1:46
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired.
1:49
Take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become
1:54
healthier, feel better and be happier. This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
2:00
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
2:04
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
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Music.
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All right you ready to get after it so on the
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podcast on the spiritual brain surgery podcast and
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the dr lee warren podcast for the last couple of weeks i've mentioned a
2:24
few times that in german there are at least three different verbs for what you
2:30
say when you're talking about what in english we would say i know something
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or i know someone in german it parses it out into to three different words that
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mean three different things. There's this word kenon that's the.
2:42
Description you would use if you're saying that you know the qualities of someone.
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Like when I talk about Lisa, I can tell you a bunch of facts about her.
2:50
I can tell you how tall she is or where she was born or what her birthday is,
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those kinds of things. And that's not Kenan. Kenan is, I can tell you what I feel when I see her walk across the room or
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when I hold her hand, how she sounds in her spirit when she's happy versus when she's sad.
3:07
I know these things about her because I have have a relationship with her and I've experienced her.
3:11
And that's a different kind of knowledge than a set of facts.
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The facts about something are wissen in German. This idea that when you say,
3:19
I know that, you mean, I know how it was manufactured or I know how much it
3:24
weighs, or I know the general shape of it.
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But kennen is something deeper, something more experiential.
3:30
I know the ways of, I know the nuances of, I know the experience of knowing
3:35
this person or knowing that thing. And then there's a third word, Conan, that's meaning sort of,
3:40
you know, how something is. Like if you say, I know French, you might mean that you have a passing familiarity
3:47
with the French language. In German, that word Conan would actually mean, I know how to speak it.
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I know how to read it. I know how to translate it. I know how to communicate
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in it. It's a deeper level of this sort of knowledge about the how.
4:01
So there's this sort of what, this sort of Wissen idea, the facts about something,
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and then there's this sort of experience of something, this canon,
4:10
this deeper experiential type knowledge, and then there's this sort of how idea of Conan, okay?
4:16
So I'm giving you that because I want just to reintroduce to you the idea today
4:20
on Theology Thursday that your brain is divided into two hemispheres,
4:24
left and right, and they look the same for the most part on the surface.
4:28
There are some observable differences, but for the most part,
4:30
They generally look the same, and they generally both do the same set of stuff.
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They're involved in language and experience and movement and sensation and all that stuff.
4:40
So you could say on a mechanical level that the two sides of the brain do a lot of the same things.
4:46
But on a deeper level, they have differences.
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Yeah, the left hemisphere is more focused on language.
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The right hemisphere is more focused on experience and awareness and a broader
4:57
level of attention than the left hemisphere is. But they have some very distinct
5:02
differences in the way they process and understand what we would call knowledge or experience.
5:07
And one of the principles that I'm learning from Ian McGilchrist in his indomitable
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book that, again, don't recommend you buy it right now, The Matter With Things,
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because it's like 8,000 pages long. So don't go buy it. But I'm going to try to give you some ideas from McGilchrist
5:22
that help you understand this left brain, right brain thing and why it's important. Okay.
5:27
Before we go many farther, let me just say, if you're not a spiritual person,
5:31
I want you to come to this podcast with a willingness to ask questions.
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And so I assume that you're here. Most people get here because they've gone
5:41
through something hard and they're trying to find hope. And somehow they found my books or somehow they found my website or my podcast.
5:47
And they're just trying to find some answers. But if you come at it from a non-spiritual place, if you're not interested in
5:53
God or you don't believe in him or you don't know any of those things,
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it's okay. okay, I want you just to understand one thing.
5:58
There is a way that you assess what you think is true in your life.
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There's a set of principles that you operate by, and your brain certainly has
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a set of principles that it operates by. So understanding those things is important.
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And when I talk about spiritual things, I just want you to be aware that there
6:16
are different ways that you can experience things. And over the course of Western civilization over the last few hundred years,
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we have focused strongly on the left side of our brain and the way that the
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left side interprets reality.
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And we've mostly distilled what we think is real into what the left brain presents to us.
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And what the left brain does is it takes a bunch of snapshots of the experience of the world.
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And it tries to put a concept in your mind, if you will, of what those things
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are so that you start to see the whole world and the universe around you as
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a set of things that can be interacted with. with.
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Relationships, people, the universe, the cosmos, your experiences,
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your traumas, your tragedies, all a set of things, a set of data that can be known or understood.
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And if you could just figure the things out, then life would start to make more
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sense. That's kind of a left brain idea.
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But the right brain is much deeper than that.
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The right brain is all the things right now, look in front of you and out to
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your peripheral vision, there's a whole room around you, a whole car around
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you, a whole world around you. And all of that stuff is getting into your brain, whether you're focusing on it or not.
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Like right now, I'm looking dead ahead at my computer screen,
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but I can see Lisa off in the far left side of my peripheral vision, having a cup of coffee.
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I can see my Fender Telecaster guitar off to the right.
7:34
I can see the statues and figurines and books on the bookcase off to the right-hand
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side and the lamp off to the left-hand side.
7:40
I can see the picture of Jesus off to my far left.
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There's things around me that I'm not focused on or consciously aware of that
7:48
are getting into my brain and my consciousness. And my right hemisphere is using all of those to make me feel a set of things
7:55
and know a certain set of things.
7:57
I know where I am. I know that I'm safe. I'm in my home.
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I know that people who love me are close by to me. The things I love to do are nearby.
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The books that I have for information and knowledge are close by.
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And all of that sort of experiential stuff that Kenan is filtering into my right
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brain and building a worldview for me that says I'm home,
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I'm safe, I'm surrounded by people and things that I need and that need me and
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that I love and they love me and all that kind of stuff.
8:23
My left brain, however, is taking a snapshot.
8:27
And it's saying, I'm sitting in my office, I'm recording a podcast,
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I've got to get this information out because I have to get to the office pretty
8:33
soon and make rounds and take care of patients. I've got this set of data in front of me, and I'm trying to transmit that to you, okay?
8:40
So again, if you're not a spiritual person, understanding the way that your
8:44
brain creates the reality that you view as your reality will come into play
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when you have something hard happen and you are going to fall back on your preparation.
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You're going to have to process this hard thing in some way.
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And if you can learn to use both sides of your brain to do what they do well,
9:02
then you'll find a better path forward, okay?
9:05
And so if you're just willing to come to this podcast and ask big questions
9:10
and be willing to accept some maybe big answers.
9:13
Maybe some ideas that might change your mind about some things,
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then when I talk about spiritual things, don't be turned off or put off by that. Yeah.
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Just be willing to say, maybe there's more at play here than I thought.
9:26
Okay. Let's start from that place. Now let's go back and let's just talk for a second.
9:31
If we know that the brain is presenting different ideas to us about how the
9:36
world works, okay, that the brain is presenting different types of information.
9:41
And we know that those two sides of our brain are connected by the corpus callosum,
9:44
which is a big bundle of white matter fibers that connect the left and the right sides.
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And in humans, the corpus callosum is mostly inhibitory.
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In other words, it's trying to convince the left and the right half of your
9:57
brain not to fight over the processing of that information, to integrate it somehow.
10:02
And so that the ideal state of how your brain is working would be for you to
10:07
find a way to synthesize that fact-based sort of viscent idea of what your your
10:13
left hemisphere is presenting to you, and that experiential type of information and knowledge from the right side of your brain.
10:20
And what I want to present to you today, in just a quick moment on Theology
10:25
Thursday, is that this idea that Jesus had a brain, right? Jesus had a physical brain.
10:32
He was a person with a brain who was also God, who connected his mind and his
10:37
spirit to his Father all the time and used his brain,
10:40
his mind rather, to communicate with his brain and And therefore,
10:43
since we know that in the science of neuroplasticity, we know that our thinking
10:48
affects the structure of our brains, right? So if Jesus had a brain and Jesus had a mind and he communicated with this mind...
10:56
With his mind to his brain, then he would have never created harmful synapses
11:01
or harmful physical structures in his brain with his thinking, okay?
11:06
Now, you are told in the Bible, in 1 Corinthians, that you have the mind of
11:10
Christ, 1 Corinthians 2, 15 and 16.
11:13
If you are a spiritual person, if you come to know him, then you have the mind of Christ.
11:17
So, that means it's possible for you to operate your brain on a level that looks
11:23
more like how Jesus operated his brain, Okay, so if we just accept the idea,
11:28
even if we're not a spiritual person, if we say, okay, we know that how we think
11:32
changes the structure of our brain, and we can either harm our brain and make
11:36
it harder for us to live a life that seems to be becoming healthier and feeling
11:39
better and being happier, or we can make it easier,
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then let's apply that neuroplasticity, let's apply that neuroscience to our
11:46
own benefit, and let's start following the Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery,
11:49
which the first one is, first, no harm. arm.
11:52
Relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise. So if we have this attitude
11:56
that we're going to use our minds to improve our brains and make these better,
12:01
then we need to understand that our brain presents to us two different ways of looking at the world.
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And that we've focused for the last several hundred years in the Western society,
12:11
at least, on this fact-based idea.
12:14
And I would just submit to you that if you keep trying to figure out the world
12:19
and it's just not working and you keep trying and you keep trying to change
12:22
things and change your attitudes or overcome habits or overcome traumas and it's just not working,
12:28
maybe you need to get a little bit more in touch with the right half of your brain.
12:33
Because the right half of your brain will say, wait a minute,
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yes, I went through this hard thing, but there's a whole room around me,
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there's a whole world around me filled with things that are also true at the same moment.
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What your left brain is trying to say, this thing that happened is the only thing that matters now.
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This event, this trauma, this tragedy, this massive thing, this problem.
12:57
It's the only thing that's true anymore. Your grief will become the biggest thing.
13:01
We talked about Anthony Roberts a couple of days ago on the podcast about getting
13:06
something stuck in your vision. And we talked about Tina Tisdale getting stuck and being unable to accept the
13:12
fact that she had pain, but she could also still have a life.
13:16
And that's a left brain type thing. This thing happened and that's now the only thing that matters.
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And your right brain is saying, wait a minute, but there's still a whole set
13:24
of other things that are also true. And so I want you to start using your corpus callosum to integrate those two
13:32
realities that are both true at the same time.
13:36
And now I want to give you some scripture to build a framework around that.
13:40
Now, again, you're not a spiritual person. Just let these be ideas that you can ruminate on and think about,
13:45
and maybe they'll start helping you in some way. Okay, Paul talked about, the Apostle Paul, St.
13:50
Paul, talked about in Romans 1, how God was frustrated with people because they
13:55
refused to believe Him. It says in Romans 1.19.
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Now, let me just submit to you that in the church, I've always heard this taught,
14:23
that you can just look at the universe and you see all the things God made,
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and obviously there has to be a creator, and obviously God's real,
14:29
and people that don't see that are just delusional, and they don't see it,
14:32
and they're condemning themselves because they're refusing to see what God made.
14:37
Well, that's one way to look at it. But I would tell you that's a very left-brain way to look at it.
14:43
I think what God's really saying here is use your whole brain,
14:47
and you look up at the stars, you look at the sunset,
14:50
you look at the mountains, you look at the sea, you look at the baby being born
14:54
and the miracle of birth, and it's not a set of facts that say to you, oh, there must be a God.
15:00
It's an experience of the awe and the wonder of creation and the fact that God's
15:07
invisible qualities, if He made these beautiful things, He must be beautiful too.
15:11
If He loved me enough to to put me in this place with these people who love
15:14
me and this world that is painful but also beautiful, then he must be able to
15:20
navigate those realities at the same time.
15:22
Get that right brain involved, and it starts to become clear that there's way
15:26
more to this story than just a bunch of facts.
15:29
Because the problem is if the facts start to feel like they outweigh,
15:33
that one set of facts start to outweigh the other, that the trauma and the tragedy
15:37
and the pain and the grief and the suffering and you start to outweigh the good,
15:40
then you can start to build a case in your mind, well, there can't be a God
15:44
who loves me if all these bad things are true.
15:47
But if you start using that right side of your brain, you start seeing the beauty,
15:51
you start remembering that you can't be anxious and grateful at the same time,
15:55
that joy and sorrow can coexist at the same time, that there are people who
15:59
have done that, and so maybe you can do it too.
16:01
That's a right brain type of idea, okay?
16:05
And so I'm just saying, let's start trying to integrate and use both halves of our brain.
16:10
And then I think we're going to start seeing some other scripture come true.
16:14
And I want you to realize that the Bible, the New Testament particularly,
16:18
is full of scripture that point to the idea that what we see right now isn't the whole story.
16:26
Paul talked again, the Apostle Paul, 2 Corinthians 3.18, talks about how we can contemplate God.
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And he gives us this metaphor of having a veil over our face.
16:35
He says, with unveiled faces, we start to contemplate the Lord's glory,
16:39
and we are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory,
16:43
which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
16:46
So in other words, when you start communicating with the Spirit,
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when you get into your right brain, when you calm that language center down,
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you start this abide idea that we've been talking about with meditation.
16:55
You start to let the right half of your brain come more alive.
16:59
It's like taking a veil off your face and you
17:01
start being able to see things that are bigger and more sort of more wondrous
17:06
than you can imagine with that fact-based left side of your brain and paul says
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take that veil off your face and you'll start being transformed into his image
17:15
paul further says in first corinthians 13 12 we don't yet see things clearly.
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We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist, but it won't be long before
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the weather clears and the sun shines bright. We'll see it all then.
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See it as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly as he knows us.
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What he's saying here is there's going to come a time in the future when your
17:37
brain is able to see things clearly.
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You won't have this divide anymore. You won't have this confusion over facts
17:44
versus experiences. You'll have the Kenan and the Visen all smashed together
17:48
in one place, and you'll be able to see things as they really are.
17:51
And Paul then tells us in Ephesians 1 to pray for that, to pray that God starts
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giving you the ability to see these things more clearly.
17:59
He says, I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that
18:04
you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious
18:07
inheritance and his holy people, to see his incomparably great power for us who believe.
18:13
The power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ
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from the dead and seated him at his right hand.
18:20
I'm telling you, friend, this is how you survive trauma and tragedy and massive things.
18:25
As you start to be able to see, open the eyes of your heart and start to be
18:29
able to see the fact that there are two things that can be true at once and
18:33
that you actually do have the power to navigate this hard life because you're not alone.
18:39
You're in a room full of things that you are experiencing all at the same time
18:44
as that fact-based left brain is trying to make you think there's only one thing.
18:47
But in reality, you're still in a world full of good things,
18:51
even when some of those things are harmful or hurting.
18:55
So you're not alone. You're not stuck with a bunch of facts that seem to outweigh
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the fact that there is still some good stuff out there. And you actually can change.
19:03
And we could have a long conversation about quantum physics and non-locality
19:08
and how the fact is now science is starting to understand that even in the quantum
19:13
world, even in physics, two things are always true at the same time.
19:18
An electron can be in two places at the same time.
19:21
And we can have a whole conversation about how Einstein wrote a whole paper
19:25
in which he finally admitted to himself that the fact is the universe is far
19:30
more complicated than you can put on a piece of paper or on a set of facts or in a set of equations.
19:36
And I just say that to introduce the idea that even science has come around
19:41
to the understanding that what you see with your eyes is never the whole story.
19:46
And what you seem to be able to distill into language and articulate about how
19:52
life has made you feel a certain set of things is never all there is to the story.
19:57
And so just today on Theology Thursday, I wanted to give you this idea that
20:01
you need to start spending some time letting that right half of your brain convince
20:06
you that what you feel isn't always what's true,
20:09
and what you see isn't always the whole story.
20:13
And what your left brain is trying to turn into a set of words that you can
20:17
put around this thing that's happened is only a small part of the whole picture,
20:22
because you, my friend, have a whole brain and a whole heart and a whole life and a whole mind.
20:28
And it's not just what you feel today. And it's not just what you went through yesterday.
20:32
And it's not just the fact that you feel like tomorrow's destined to look just
20:36
like today and yesterday did, because you have the same power that God used
20:41
to raise Christ from the dead inside you.
20:43
You have the mind of Christ. You don't have to conform anymore to the way the
20:48
world wants to to make you think that you're just a set of electrons firing
20:51
off impulses and your whole life can be deduced to this electrical stuff happening in between your ears.
20:57
The fact is, you are a creature that's fearfully and wonderfully made.
21:03
And there's more to the story than one half of your brain can tell.
21:07
And it's time to learn that both sides can help you become healthier and feel better and be happier.
21:13
And both sides will tell you the truth that you can't change your life until you change your mind.
21:18
And the good news about that, my friend, is that you can start today.
21:23
Music.
21:28
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren podcast is brought to you by my
21:32
brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering
21:37
from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.
21:40
It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.
21:44
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
21:48
available for free at tommywalkerministries.org.
21:51
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the most high God.
21:57
And if you're interested in learning more, check out tommywalkerministries.org.
22:02
If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer,
22:06
wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer, and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter,
22:12
Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014,
22:15
helping people in all 50 states and 60 plus countries around the world. I'm Dr.
22:21
Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your
22:23
life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.
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