THE COMBAT MANUAL

Thought Processes

The Four Modes of the Mind — and Why Only One Is God’s

Taught by John Lenhart  |  flowcess.com

THIS MONTH’S READING ASSIGNMENT Please read Chapters 6–10 of Modeling God by John Lenhart. These chapters cover faith, grace, and uniqueness — particularly how grace is the mechanism through which we hear from God. This content will be directly referenced throughout this lesson and the next several months.

Step Two: Thought Processes

Last month we covered Step One — your Intangible Driver, the WHY behind everything you do. This month we move to Step Two: your thought processes. This is an overview. Next month we begin applying it — identifying and rehearsing away your triggers, and learning exactly what it takes to hear from God. Understanding thought processes is the prerequisite for both.

There are four thought processes. I number them 320, 160, 80, and 10. You have already seen these numbers throughout the course as markers on the flip count. Now we go deeper — because these are not just levels on a scale. They are fundamentally different modes of operating, with different brain regions, different spiritual vulnerabilities, and different relationships to truth.

NUMBER	LINE COLOR	BIBLICAL NAME	BRAIN REGION	KEY CHARACTERISTIC	SPIRITUAL DANGER
320	Green — Go	Evil / Blood	Fully unconscious — no logic, no thinking, straight reaction	One external event triggers amygdala → instant destructive reaction	Demons operate from the unconscious — this is their highway. No thinking = no resistance.
160	Yellow — Slow	Flesh / Animal	Nucleus basalis shut — conscious thinking voluntarily abdicated	You choose not to think. Unconscious runs everything — habits, avoidance, control, addictions	Demons access unconscious when thinking is abdicated. Spiritual warfare feels like too much effort here.
80	Red — Caution	Human / Understanding	Conscious brain fully engaged — logic, reason, the WHY	You think you are in control and understand everything. You act like God.	Most deceptive thought process. You think you are godly but you are human. Eve was here — convinced she was still following God.
10	Blue — Truth	Godly / Truth	Mind/soul chooses to be influenced from outside itself — then lets it out intentionally	Your unconscious can determine truth and signals it through feelings — bypassing conscious logic	This is the only thought process God designed for us. Giving up control to His influence — this is flow.

WHY 80 IS THE MOST DANGEROUS

Most people, when they hear this framework, assume that 80 — the logical, rational, controlled thought process — must be the safe one. It sounds responsible. It sounds Christian, even. Think before you act. Know the why. Understand what’s happening.

But I color it red for a reason. The 80 thought process is the most spiritually dangerous of all, because it is the one that deceives you about itself. When you are in 80, you believe you are right. You believe you have assessed the situation accurately. You believe you are following God. And you are completely convinced of all of this — while operating entirely on human reasoning, without the Holy Spirit’s influence at all.

Eve was not in the evil thought process when she decided to eat the fruit. She was in 80. She looked at the tree, she reasoned through it, she reached a conclusion — and she genuinely believed she was still in God’s will. She had added one limitation of her own and removed herself from the truth. But from inside 80, that is invisible. That is why it is the most dangerous.

320 is frightening. 160 is obvious. But 80 looks like wisdom — and that is precisely what makes it deadly.

Conjunctives: How God Structures Every Truth

Here is one of the most important patterns in all of Scripture, and once you see it you will never stop seeing it: every biblical truth is a conjunctive. A conjunctive is a specific type of Venn diagram — freedom with one limitation. It is not a list of rules. It is not a single unrestricted permission. It is always exactly two halves: what you may do freely, and one boundary.

“Eat of any tree in the garden, except this one.” Freedom. One limitation. That is the template for every truth God communicates.

The four thought processes map exactly onto where a person positions themselves in relation to that conjunctive:

POSITION	THOUGHT PROCESS	EXAMPLE — GARDEN OF EDEN	RESULT
Both halves — Freedom AND Limitation	10 — Godly / Truth	“Eat of any tree you want, except this one.” — God’s original design	The narrow path. This is where God’s truth lives — freedom held in balance with one limitation.
Limitation half only — restriction without freedom	80 — Human	Eve to the serpent: “We can neither eat NOR touch.” Two limitations. She added one.	Logic and reason divorced from freedom. You think you’re following God — you are not.
Freedom half only — license without limitation	160 — Flesh / Animal	Adam and Eve hid from God and deflected blame. Avoidance. No accountability.	Habitual behavior, drift, and avoidance. Doing what feels easy rather than what is right.
Outside both halves — neither freedom nor limitation	320 — Evil / Blood	Adam blamed God: “The woman YOU gave me…” Turning against the Creator Himself.	Destruction. Accusation of God. Complete severance from truth.

What this means practically is that you can identify which thought process someone — including yourself — is in simply by listening to their language. Are they in both halves simultaneously? Are they all restriction and no freedom, or all freedom and no restriction? Are they outside both entirely? This is a diagnostic tool you can use in real time in any conversation.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR SPIRITUAL WARFARE The enemy’s primary tactic is to move you from 10 to 80 while convincing you nothing has changed. He does not need to get you to 320 to defeat you. He just needs to get you reasoning without God’s influence — and you will defeat yourself. Every time you apply logic to a spiritual problem without the Holy Spirit, you are in 80. Every time you avoid confronting something difficult, you are in 160. Every time you react instantly to provocation without thinking, you are in 320. The conjunctive framework tells you exactly where you are.

Biblical Examples: The Pattern Is Everywhere

Once you have this framework, you start seeing it throughout the entire Bible. John 1:12-13 makes it explicit — but it is in narrative after narrative once you know what to look for.

But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. — John 1:12-13 (NKJV)

Notice the structure of that passage. John identifies three things that spiritual rebirth is NOT — not of blood (320 / evil), not of the will of the flesh (160 / animal), not of the will of man (80 / human). Then the contrastive: “but of God.” He is using elimination to prove his point. Three identified. Three eliminated. What remains has to be the fourth — the godly thought process. This is contrastive thinking, and it is one of the primary tools of biblical argumentation.

PERSON	STARTS AT	10 — GODLY	80 → 160 DECLINE	320 — EVIL
Solomon	10	Receives maada — divine wisdom. Solves the two mothers / one baby case with perfect insight.	Builds God’s house through human effort and achievement (80). Drifts into idol-building and avoidance. God warns him repeatedly — he ignores it (160). Idols still standing 400 years later.	Ecclesiastes — he knew he needed to obey God but couldn’t bring himself to do it. His heart was taken from God. Full disobedience with full knowledge.
Eden	10	God’s design: eat freely of any tree — one limitation. Freedom + boundary = truth.	Eve adds a limitation: “We can’t eat OR touch.” Two limitations — human thought process. Then both eat (flesh/avoidance). Then hid from God (160).	Adam blames God directly: “The woman YOU gave me.” Accusation against the Creator. 320.
David & Nabal	10	David’s men approach Nabal in truth — explain honestly what they need and why, based on what they’ve done for him.	Nabal answers logically — gives reasons he won’t help (80). Gets drunk for seven days — pure avoidance (160).	When Abigail tells him what she did, his heart hardens (320). He dies shortly after. Cardiac arrest is the physical manifestation of the evil thought process taking full hold.

The pattern in every example is identical: someone starts in the godly or truthful thought process, transitions to 80 (human reasoning — convinced they are still right), drifts to 160 (avoidance, habituation, flesh), and ends at 320 (accusation, destruction, complete separation from God). Solomon, David and Nabal, Eden — same arc, different details.

The application is not to judge these figures. The application is to recognize when you are on the same arc — and to know where you are before you reach the bottom.

The Research: Why Our Brains Work the Opposite of What We Think

Now I want to share the research that underlies all of this — research I conducted over thirty years ago that changed how I understand both the brain and human happiness. You can read the full write-up at flowcess.com/research/mind-brain-introduction, and I strongly encourage you to do that. What follows is the core of it.

THE AIR FRESHENER PROBLEM

In 1995, I was working for a company that sold an air freshener that plugged into the wall. The product was engineered to work for 45 days. That was a verified fact. But consumers kept reporting that they could only smell the fragrance for 21 days. Tests confirmed the product was still emitting fragrance at full strength at day 45 — visitors to those same homes could smell it. The consumers who lived there could not.

I was tasked to figure out why. It took me eleven models to solve it. What I found is one of the most significant conclusions I have ever reached about how the human brain actually functions.

ADAPTATION VS. HABITUATION

Before I explain the finding, two definitions:

ADAPTATION VS. HABITUATION ADAPTATION: Twenty-one minutes after you enter a static environment, you can no longer smell its surroundings during that encounter. Short-term, in-the-moment.  HABITUATION: After twenty-one days of entering the same static environment daily, you can no longer smell it in any future encounter. Long-term, permanent — until the stimulus is removed and reintroduced.

Most pleasant aromas have seven or more unique smells — called notes or accords. On Day One of smelling a new fragrance, you only pick up four of those accords. Your brain files an incomplete profile. Because the profile is incomplete, you only experience the effect of 60% of the aroma’s actual strength. Here is what the brain does over the following days:

DAY	AROMA PROFILE FILED	STRENGTH EXPERIENCED	HAPPINESS LEVEL	WHAT IS HAPPENING
1	7 accords → 4 filed	60%	100%	Still learning — missing key notes
2	8 accords → 5 filed	70%	100%	Learning — seems to grow stronger
3	8 accords → 6 filed	80%	100%	Learning — continues to strengthen
4	8 accords → 7 filed	90%	100%	Learning — almost full reality
5	8 accords → 8 filed	100%	100%	PEAK — full reality experienced. One day only.
6	Same as Day 5	95%	95%	Habituation begins — brain starts zeroing out
10	Same profile	70%	70%	Noticeably fading
14	Same profile	40%	40%	Significantly diminished
21+	Same profile	0%	~40%	Fully habituated — cannot smell it. Happiness crashes.

On Day Five, you finally experience the full reality of the fragrance — all eight accords at 100% strength. But here is the critical finding: Day Five is the only day you fully experience reality. Starting Day Six, the brain has completely mapped the fragrance and begins the process of eliminating it from conscious experience. By Day 21, you cannot smell it at all.

As an engineer, I can only reach one conclusion: our brains are not designed to fully experience reality. They are designed for something else entirely.

Here is the follow-up question that matters even more: what happens to the person’s happiness across those same 21 days? Happiness rises from Day One to Day Five alongside the perceived strength of the fragrance. But beginning Day Six, as the fragrance starts to fade from perception, happiness falls — and falls steeply. By Day 21, the person is experiencing what I call the yearning state: they remember when it used to smell wonderful, and they cannot understand why it does not anymore.

This is not a quirk of the sense of smell. This is how the brain handles everything. Romantic love. Friendships. A new job. A new home. A new achievement. A new car. Every external experience follows this exact curve — learning phase, one day of full reality, then the long decline into habituation and the yearning that follows.

THE ONE EXCEPTION

There is only one category of experience that the brain does not habituate to: the expression of your own uniqueness in response to what you encounter. Your uniqueness — your Intangible Driver, your perspectives, the specific way God made you — is not external. It is not something that arrives from outside and gets mapped and filed and eventually zeroed out. It is internal. It is the source from which you respond. And because it is internal, the brain cannot habituate to it.

Every time you express more of your uniqueness — in a relationship, in your work, in your spiritual practice — you stay in the learning phase. The curve never turns downward. That is what flow is. That is why we call this the Flowcess — your individual process for getting into and staying in flow. It is not a mood or a technique. It is a mode of being rooted in who God actually made you to be.

THE MAGIC WAND TEST

Here is a test I give to groups that illustrates exactly where a person is habituated. I ask: “If you had a magic wand and could have or do anything — one thing that would make you permanently happy — what would you wish for? Write it down. You do not need to share it. But be careful what you write, because your unconscious sees it, and if you do not mean it, your unconscious will sink your energy.”

There are only four possible answers — and each one maps directly to the thought process a person is habituated to:

TP	WHAT THEY WISH FOR	EXAMPLES	WHY IT FAILS
320	Enemy’s destruction	“I wish my competitor would go bankrupt.” “I wish they would fail.”	Habituated to destruction as the source of relief. Brain requires escalating harm to maintain the same satisfaction.
160	Comfort, ease, no tension	“A million dollars.” “Retire on a beach.” “I just want to relax.”	All external. Brain habituates to everything external. The cabana becomes normal. The million becomes insufficient. You descend toward 320.
80	Achievement, recognition	“A promotion.” “An award.” “A degree.” “To win.”	Still external. Once achieved, brain habituates. You need a bigger achievement. Eventually you can’t achieve at the level you need — and you wish for ease. Then 160. Then 320.
10	Expressing more of your uniqueness	“I want to bring more of who I am to whatever I face.”	Internal — cannot be habituated. Your uniqueness is infinite in expression. You stay in the learning phase permanently. This is the only path to permanent happiness.

Notice that the 320, 160, and 80 answers are all external. Every one of them will be habituated to by the brain within the arc we just described. The person who wishes for a million dollars will get used to having a million dollars. The person who wins the award will need a bigger award. The person who retires to the beach will find the beach boring. And when they can no longer achieve what they have habituated to, they will wish for ease. When ease is insufficient, they will wish for harm to others.

The descent is not dramatic. It is gradual. The video game analogy is the clearest illustration: a teenage son habituated to 160 is happily playing his game, all attention on the screen. You bring him up to 80 to have a conversation. He complies — but he is not happy about it. He answers your questions as quickly as possible so he can return to the thought process he is habituated to. You can bring people to a higher thought process temporarily. But if that is not where they are habituated, they will not stay there. And spiritual warfare at 160 or 80 will always feel like too much effort — because it is, for a person habituated below it.

THE GOAL OF THIS COURSE This is why the Flowcess principles and the spiritual warfare tools must work together. Ed is giving you the right tools. My job is to move your habituation up — so that when you reach for those tools, you are not fighting against your own brain to use them. A person habituated to 160 finds spiritual warfare exhausting. A person habituated to 80 thinks they are doing it right but is operating in human reasoning. A person habituated to 10 flows into warfare naturally — because God’s influence is their default state, not an effort they have to manufacture.

⚔  THE MAGIC WAND EXERCISE Write your honest answer here — the one thing you would wish for if you could have anything. Be specific. Then look at the table above and identify which thought process your answer maps to. What does that tell you about where your brain is currently habituated? _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________

⚔  IDENTIFYING YOUR CURRENT HABITUATION Think about the activity, state, or situation where you feel most energized and most like yourself. Is it internal (expressing your uniqueness) or external (achieving, receiving, controlling, or avoiding)? What thought process does that most resemble? What would it look like to move one level up from where you are? _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________

Next month: identifying and rehearsing away your triggers — and beginning to hear from God.

Full research at flowcess.com/research/mind-brain-introduction