There is a modern day maxim, a secular exhortation, that is pushed from every which way in our Westernised, overly romantic media.

There are countless songs or poems encouraging us all to just ‘trust our heart’, explaining to us that we can find our answers there, especially when it comes to the issue of romantic love, or finding out exactly what you want to do in life. Yet what I have seen of people actually doing such a thing throughout my life is that when they follow this advice, they make all sorts of mistakes… sometimes very severe ones. For example, there are those I’ve personally known who have committed the heinous act of adultery for the simple reason that their ‘heart is telling them’ that they no longer love their spouse anymore and have found another whom they have a rekindled passion for; there are also those who I’ve known who just ‘know in their heart’ that the Lord God would NEVER send anyone to hell, that He isn’t some kind of ‘condemning, judgemental monster’ that listens to us avoiding treading on eggshells, trying not to upset Him, and thus they feel comfortable to live in fornication care-free, and other things the bible actually condemns, because they do not have that needed healthy fear of doing evil (as God sees evil). There are even those who attempt to take this worldly advice completely literally, who listen for and act on every whisper that the heart makes by intimately following what they think it’s saying, every moment, without restraint, in order to cast off the conditioned shackles that modern society places on us to keep us in line. I am (sadly) a personal testimony to this last one, as I shall endeavour to share with you now.

I once followed an Indian man, a so-called guru called Osho. I followed him for a couple of years, like a committed disciple; I tend not to do things by halves when I have a passion for it. It all started when I lived in the South Island of New Zealand, after I one day read a book of his that I found in an esoteric, witchcraft-y book shop in Dunedin, as I was painting my way down there through some lonely months in the winter for some extra cash. The book was specifically on creativity (which caught my eye) and I was greatly encouraged by it, having read it twice through with great interest. I just loved his blend of eastern mysticism mixed with intelligent poetic art, and I started to see the world in a totally different light because of this. It should be mentioned that he was a very clever and articulate person, which I admired and aspired to, so I ended up buying many of his books after that initial one in quick succession, feeding on them like manna from heaven, which caused an ever growing respect for his seeming wisdom, ending up in a sort of reverence for him. As he was self proclaimed to be an enlightened man, I felt like he really could help me on my own course to enlightenment and finding the divine, which in fact he ironically DID, but just not as either he or I had planned. I bought and sent off for his set of special tarot cards that were recommended in the back of one of his books after a few months of reading all of his work, which also came with a large guidance book with suggestion of how to use them properly and explaining the cards in depth with poetry, and I religiously started to intensely play them often, after a short while becoming very addicted to them and hardly being able to do or commit to anything without first consulting them. I had learned very quickly that there was a very real power to them, and without me realising it at all, they had a deep hold of my soul. Darkness had been dressed up as light, and I had swallowed the hook that the devil had baited with the tastiest bait he could find for me… mystical wisdom, in relation to myself.

In some ways, you could say I was brave, in the same way that someone coming out as gay or who commits suicide is brave, for I was casting off what I thought were the shackles of Christianised society, which was a spider’s web that ignorant men had laid at the expense of the truly spiritual. My mind was being warped into a lack of concern for what most people considered ‘normal’ behaviour, and I was continually pushing my reality to test boundaries in order to please the tarot cards, because they were revealing to me my conditioned behaviour that I had to overcome in order to be ‘enlightened’. They seemed to reveal the poor condition of my heart, and were encouraging what my genuine spiritual heart truly desired, and I wanted to follow this down the rabbit hole wherever it may have lead, because I thought it was leading to enlightenment (I had a keen interest in Buddhism and transcendental meditation for a long while before I discovered Osho). Needless to say, I started to get myself into all sorts of trouble doing this. But, the point here is that I truly was following my heart, and doing what it said. I had no idea of the demonic at this time of my life, although it would’ve been quite clear to anyone with godly discernment who may have seen me that I was totally in the flesh, not in the spirit like I thought I was, and that I was in fact being played like a puppet on strings. It’s worth mentioning that I believe the Lord created me with an evangelistic heart, but in the time before He revealed Himself to me, the devil would use this gift intensively, for I always shared my esoteric knowledge with others around me, teaching them what I had come to know, and even giving out card readings to people trying to show them their own conditioning, and predicting their future events or mindsets (to my eternal shame).

I don’t think the Lord will mind me mentioning that there was one card that I always really hated to see, for every time I saw it it felt like I had failed (unless the context of it in the tarot layout was that I had overcome it, which then caused me great delight). This was the card called ‘Conditioning’, which had an image a lion amongst sheep on it, with the lion wearing sheep’s clothing on it. I so desperately wanted to be that lion, in a world full of stupid sheep who knew nothing of the esoteric, who blindly went about their daily lives without any thought of the depth of spirituality and the importance of breaking karma, maya and samsara. It was a great burden to me to think I had grown up blinded by the conditioning of my culture and my parental upbringing, all with the ignorant Christian limitations placed upon us deceiving our souls; also having been taught to be a capitalist from an early age, and having never been taught to explore my interior and discover myself as a self actualised ‘god’. The cards had shown me that there was a very real spiritual force that most people are completely oblivious to, and I felt I had tapped into the divine within myself, that all the books I was reading at the time were convincing me of. I already knew (from playing with a normal set of tarot cards a few times) that the ‘Conditioning’ card was also ‘the devil’ card, and because of my lack of knowledge or a fear of real evil, and also me not believing the devil was even a real being, having the wider knowledge of the devil card also being the ‘Conditioning’ card simply represented the wickedness inside of me that was always preventing me from the state of enlightenment. You can perhaps see now just how much my utter confusion was with life, yet I tell you that there are MANY people who think like this across the world, due to the influence of the new age religion. Anyway, this was the way the devil spun the yarn to me, and I was a devoted student of it as he used this man Osho to take me deeper and deeper into the esoteric, fully teaching me how to ‘use my intuition’ by listening to my heart as though it were a real voice directing my every step. The tarot cards were simply a manifestation of a much deeper reality happening within me, and the goal was that one day I wouldn’t need the cards anymore, once I push past my conditioning. How ironic to realise that I was being conditioned to think like this! The devil is both subtle and very tricky… never underestimate his power to deceive. When I returned home to England a couple of years later, I brought the cards with me, and was playing them the whole time, even during my conversion experience (I was asking them who Jesus was after I had encountered Him at the psy-trance festival, and had many questions about Him for them, and had some very interesting answers), but a few months after it happened, my mother (who had obviously noticed I was not right in the head) went through all my stuff and found them and burned them, along with my stash of weed, which I will forever be grateful for, both to her and to God, for it broke something in me that needed breaking (even though I was initially VERY angry with her, for she had destroyed both addictions without my consent).

The Christian knows that the ‘heart is desperately wicked, and very deceitful’. An unregenerate heart is the heart of flesh, that is lead by the devil, for the devil is the master of all those who have not been born again of the Holy Spirit. For this reason, no matter however much you search it, the heart is completely unknowable to anyone but God, so with this in mind, possibly the worst advice anyone could ever give you is to listen to your heart! Jesus told us that it is out of the heart that all our wickedness comes, from adulteries to murders to idolatry. Until He has been invited in to take His rightful place on the throne of someone’s heart, residing in the holy of holies within the temple that is a human body, the human heart cannot be trusted AT ALL, which is exactly why satan encourages us all to listen to it in all those secular songs and poems. He knows that if he can keep us locked into the flesh, we will continue to produce the works of the flesh. Results of me following my heart unto the bitter end, with the mentioned ‘bravery’ to cast off social conditioning thrown into the mix, ended up with me doing things like running around my local town naked in the small hours of the morning and getting arrested for it, and doing reckless things like intending to walk barefoot all the way to Israel with no money or baggage on me (I started but didn’t finish – in fact I never even made it out of the country, ended up instead in a terrible mental asylum in London), and much more. I was reckless to say the least, but it all made sense in my head, because my ‘heart’ was telling me to do these things, in order to cast off my conditioning and rise above it, in a spiritual way. To me, at that time the devil was both an archetype of my own failures and for the wicked world that I intuitively knew was around me. Even if I was wrong about a good many things, I always instinctively knew that the world was very broken, that everyone was involved, and that there MUST be a remedy. My heart had been tricked to believe that I could be a saviour, by overcoming the world myself and becoming enlightened, so that I could then help others break the mould and spiritually evolve just as I had. If I truly was in control of my own actions like a solipsist, then I would attempt to break through what we had all been taught was truth and destroy the ‘illusion’ the devil had created around mankind. In fact what really happened though, was that I discovered that I am just as broken as the next person, and that I needed a Saviour who could do what no one else could do, including me. HIS heart is totally pure, which is why He has a direct communication with the Father, and is why He can be trusted.

Since knowing the Lord, He has spoken to my heart ‘audibly’ several times over the years. This isn’t the vague ‘did God just say that?’ vibe; no. The voice I hear now has all the force of eternity behind it, the unmeasured power of holy love creating every word spoken. The words are unmistakable, and they are always life changing for me. He speaks from within my heart, and i listen to Him gladly. Am I therefore now ‘listening to my heart’? I suppose that the answer is, in a sense, both yes and no. Rather than listening to the heart, I listen to Him speaking from it, for He actively speaks to my spirit, which is in the centre of my being; but, I guess this is what most people would call the heart. But now I don’t feel the need to always focus on it and listen out for it. The Lord will speak when He wants to speak. Much of the time, however, I’m aware that my heart still mulls on wicked things too, which is why all of us must continually deny ourselves to follow Him, daily choosing spirit over flesh. Just because the Lord speaks there from His throne, does not mean we mustn’t continue to deny our flesh, for we must never forget that it is out of the heart that all our wickedness comes. It’s worth mentioning that I believe Eve sinned when she decided in her heart to take the fruit to eat, and not just in the physical act of eating it. But if we listen directly to the Spirit of the Lord, He will enable us to overcome the flesh… it’s just becoming acquainted with His voice, and knowing it really is Him and not ourselves.

So, let’s all take this to heart!