197 Appropriate Graciousness

Let’s talk a bit more on the subject of sentience, Gentle Reader. In fact, let’s look at a few of the quandaries for the human “being” posed by sentience.

Consider this quandary: Of peril to sentient human beings is that sentience is an experience able to exalt or debase. Sentience can result in beauteous being or monstrous being. Expressions of love for our fellow human beings are beauteous (John 15:12, NKJV). Expressions of hate for one another are monstrous, and so on.

Consider this quandary: God lives an exalted life of mastery of sentience by exhibiting emotion with an appropriate measure of graciousness and justifiability at all times—by choice. He wants us to live this life of mastered sentience, too, of appropriate graciousness. By the example of Jesus, He shows us how to master sentience, master our feelings, harness them to good, how to perfect this appropriate graciousness (The Beatitudes. Matthew 5 – 7, NKJV). Everyone at one time or the other chooses not to live with His appropriate graciousness.

Now, admittedly, because of the fall of humankind, such mastery is, of course, routinely a very limited commodity among us human-type people. But because of Jesus, the cross and His Resurrection, the Bible says (and the Bible is “the” book of exalted thinking) that humankind, each and every one of us, can choose to be made “new,” made a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17, NKJV) governed by exalted thinking of the highest order, made “new” by choosing Jesus—letting His Way be our Way (John 14:6, NKJV).

To be continued . . .

196 The Sentient Being

To build on my understanding that human beings are homo Sapiens (knowing beings) and zoe (spiritual beings), I consulted Wikipedia—the free encyclopedia—and found reference to sentience as “the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences . . . a feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought.”

Now, last blog I said, “Made in God’s image came to mean to me to be made a sentient being like God.”

Some among you may say in response to that, “Why are you so focused on “feeling” in the nature of God?”

I think the answer is fairly simple. Our God feels! Not only does He have consciousness, not only is He Spirit, not only is He reasonable; He feels. And over this I rejoice! And I rejoice because His feelings integrate His thinking into meaningful patterns such as mercy in the wake of judgment.

Without sentience, God would not be capable of compassion, nor even morality. He would be a machine. But due to the sentient nature of our God, He weaves carefully edited emotion into the mechanics of His thinking with the result that what emerges is pinnacle thinking, being, and behavior characterized by exalted thinking—thinking of stunning moral and magnificent significance.

Further, He says we are capable of the same like of being—we are like this image: spiritual, knowing and feeling. With sentience we are like Him in that we can be a rich resource to ourselves and others. Without sentience we would be merely relentless machines devoid of feeling devoid of any notion of right or wrong.

Therefore, I can confidently generalize that sentience is critical to both humanity and relationships, be they human-to-human or human-to-God. With sentience we can relate, we can empathize, we can care. Without it, we cannot. It takes sentience to relate, Gentle Reader, and the imbedded meaning in that truth is the stunning actuality that our God relates to us personally and makes us able to personally relate to Him and to each other. He is the Master of Sentience. He is the Master of Relationships. He is the Master of Being and Doing.

To be continued . . .

195 Discovery

My new orientation to life and relationships established, I took off on the trail of the spiritual reality of the mind (or one might say I began to focus on the being part of the human being).

I wanted to know, if not just bios then where-from zoe? Where did I get this spiritual mind, this zoe? How? And what is it? There was so much that I didn’t know and had never really considered before.

But my Bible had answers. Genesis 1:26-27 says, “Then God (Elohim) said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.’” When I read that, I (though I had read it many times before without an “ah-ha” moment) had an “ah-ha” moment and zoe connected with the image of God and then us, me— the human being. With that discovery, one thing led to another. Made in God’s image came to mean to me made a sentient being like God.

With this new and immediately cherished understanding, I noted that everybody talks about that statement—made in God’s image—though most just kinda’ hem-and-haw around, never fleshing out any really attention-grabbing musings on the subject (me, too!). But not this time, I vowed. This time I would overcome my own inertia and look deep into the great waters of zoe with indefatigable persistence.

So, to discover more as to what exactly defines a human person, I proceeded to investigate what a simple description of person derived from the doctrinal Christian teaching of dualism would look like. And what I found is that one can derive from dualism that a human person is basically built of two components: an invisible self and a visible self.

A person of pure soul-spirit is the nature of a person of the trinity (not us) who is also capable of being and doing in this pure form. But being the same and yet different from a purely spiritual being of the Trinity, a human person is built of a combined and inseparable soul-spirit in conjunction with a body, thereby empowering her/him with the capacity to be and do in our current form.

What a tier of discoveries!

I hope this strikes you as vividly as it does me. But, if not, at least we had a sharing moment!

Thank you for sticking with me.

To be continued . . .

194 The Mind: Being and Doing

Let’s start with The Mind: Being and Doing.

All these years and I am only lately registering the concept of mind and its remarkable importance in the experience of life—God’s life or my life!

Oh, I have studied human, mind-related things in the past—biology of the brain, psychology of the mind, philosophy and the mind. I spent one delightful summer taking Philosophy and Karate at college in Hawaii. My brother once said, “I think she wants to be sure that if she doesn’t get them one way she will be able to get them another.” “Them” is the opposition, I suppose.

But to continue—eventually, I also realized that the Bible talks about the mind, too. God and His mind, and human beings and their mind are the subjects of virtually every God-to-human interaction and human-to-human interaction portrayed in Scripture. In Jesus that mind-to-mind interaction with the Father and Holy Spirit is always perfect. With us He is perfect—His mindset toward us is perfect. Us in return? Not so much!

Obviously, most of my life my notion of what the mind is for (its purpose) had been a gross oversimplification of the truth until this realization. I was merely focusing on the human physicality of the brain.

But now Scripture began informing me that the human mind is not just biology (bios). Not just brain matter! Not just a nervous system. Not just a set of electrical impulses. It is all that, but it is also more! Bios and zoe (spirit)—physical life and spiritual reality—combined!

So in my case, here at 60-plus years, I was finally on the scent of just how true that scripture is that says we are fearfully and yet wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14).

To be continued . . .

193 Significant Truth # 3: Relationship

So what about relationships, Gentle Reader?

It’s all in the mind: Relationship, that is. At the Divine level or the human level, what is in the mind determines our relationships. Absolute truth determines God’s mindset. Perceived meaning (unfortunately) makes up our fallen human relationships. Oh, let’s start from the beginning!

Hint: So far all the action in this little narrative has taken place in my mind!

Everything that appears in this blog had to first be framed and detailed in my mind.

When I perceived the singular nature of this inner process, I sensed a significant truth emerging there.

After all, I thought, what was I using repeatedly to explore God, or meaning or anything else?

My mind, of course!

Not that in the box-of-life I find so much attention being paid by others to the mind and its operations per se. I see most people “do” (command external things) with their mind instead of “be” (an internal reflective process), much less hold to any objective, absolute and worthy inner truth.

Now you have to agree with me on that one! Thus the phrase “What were you thinking?”—a rhetorical question implying that the person was not thinking at all, and certainly not systematically either; or else he would not have done or said whatever it was that provoked this outcry. But, anyway, “doing” is big-on-the-charts in the box of life.

Yet I say again, Gentle Reader, mind is what really matters in everything, relationships included. Therefore, when I’m talking more about being, I’m addressing the “being” that comes about in the mind. Though, as I think of it now, the “doing” is going to matter too. So, what-the-hey! As Significant Truth#4, I chose Mind—Being & Doing and we’re going to explore both Truth #3 & 4 in conjunction with each other.

To be continued . . .