Life Is But a Dream

 Growing up, I was taught that the body, soul, and spirit were nested.  The body was the outermost aspect of existence, with the soul just on the inside, responsible for thoughts and emotions, things we typically attribute to the mind. Then, the innermost part of us, the most sublime, was the spirit. Somehow, this was the part that was responsible for our free will, even though memories and feelings and ideas were in the soul. I think this is because the idea was that our ability to choose was considered sacred, so had to be a part of our most sacred selves. 

I wasn't educated about Gnosticism at the time. I didn't realize how much this was just like Gnosticism in that it was not only dualistic, but also held the spiritual up to be greater, better, than the physical. 

In time, I read the Bible for myself. Bits and pieces stuck out to me. Jesus talked about how angels were different from humans by nature, when the Pharisees asked about the widow and the six brothers, in Luke 20. Our understanding of demons, of the devil, as fallen angels, never having the chance at redemption. God is a forgiving God and, unless constrained by rules he agreed to abide by, keeping mercy out of reach doesn't sound like him. It made me feel like maybe angels existed outside of time. Without time, you don't have causality, meaning there is no "now" and there is no "later". Redemption is all about turning back from decisions you've made, turning towards a better choice. You can't be redeemed, you can't repent, if there is no later time in which you can turn away from your bad choices. 

There was also the discussion of the resurrected body in 1 Corinthians 15.  This spoke about how the body relates to spiritual reality to me. When our relationship with the spiritual is actually healed, like after resurrection, then our bodies will be able to live forever. It got me to thinking about what death means, spiritual death specifically. It made me think about something I read in a book called In the Likeness of God by Philip Yancey and Paul Brand. Paul Brand was a world famous physician who worked with patients with leprosy. 

Leprosy is an interesting disease. It kills the nerve endings that detect most of the sensations we attribute to the sense of touch. So, texture, pressure, pain, temperature, all these aspects to touch go away. This is what makes life so hard for people with leprosy: they can't feel pain. Sometimes this means they hurt themselves and they don't know and then they just keep punishing their bodies, pushing them through the pain and damaging them more. One of the potential effects is blindness: when a person can't feel their eyes getting dry, their body forgets to blink. Long enough time of this and the eyes can get seriously damaged. Eventually, that can lead to blindness. Paul brand once had a patient that had come to this point. A new medication for leprosy came out, and he used it on this patient. Apparently, there was a very side-effect of the medication: deafness. Unfortunately for this particular patient, he succumbed to this side-effect. For eight or nine months, this poor guy was deaf, blind, and couldn't feel anything. His story ended on a better note, eventually they were able to perform surgery on the guy that returned some of his vision. But knowing that he was bed-bound, completely aware and awake and conscious, but couldn't see, hear, or even feel the world around him, that made me think. I imagined that maybe that's really what death was, being cut off from the senses and the ability to interact with the reality outside yourself. 

Eventually, this formed a model in my mind that, admittedly, is mostly my own fabrication. There are passages of the Bible that inform it, there are observations of the world as I know it that inform it. But it's just a model. It's probably wrong, but it seems right to me, and until I can think of something better, I'm going with it. Instead of the body, soul, and spirit acting like some kind of pyramid that brings us higher into the court of God, I see us as more of a reflection of God's internal relationships. I see our soul, the part of us in charge, as a reflection of God the Father. Jesus, God the Son, is then reflected in our bodies, in that God interacts with the physical world the same way we do, through a physical body. Then, obviously, there's the Holy Spirit, reflected in our own spirits. If the soul is the seat of the person, the what is the spirit for? Well, it's basically the spiritual version of the body. The body has senses and muscles. It's through these that the soul interacts with the physical world. We see things, we hear things, we smell things. Then we move. Even our speech is a product of highly controlled muscles. 

The spirit probably has some analogs. Some way we can perceive the spiritual dimension of reality, some way to act on it. This is extended to my understanding of living beings. I believe there are living things that have bodies, but no souls or spirits. I imagine bacteria, insects, lizards and plants. I believe there are living things that have bodies and show the characteristics of a soul, like most mammals, some birds. I don't believe they have the parts that exist outside of time, the spirit. The Bible also tells us that there living things that do have spiritual existence, and the properties attributed to the soul, mostly feelings and thoughts and the power to make decisions. Angels, which I have already expressed to believe that they exist outside of time because they don't have access to forgiveness. I believe when God made humanity in his image, he made us unique in that we spanned both dimensions of reality. I'm also using the word dimension denotatively, meaning analogous to height or width and length. I think reality has physical dimensions and spiritual dimensions. I'm not talking about some kind of alternate plane of reality, as in the infinite worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. 

Anyway. That was my model of reality. Still mostly is. I guess I'm back to nesting. I've already covered my concept that the mind of God is basically the Matrix, in the article Best Laid Schemes. In short, God is basically the operating system running the universe. Everything exists inside his mind. We're all emulators, programs that are their own operating systems self-contained but running on the foundation of the higher order operating system. So, we are our own people, but we are run on God's hardware, whatever that might be. This is the primary model of reality that I run by. But I also believe in physics, and chemistry, and biology. I act like matter is real, even if it isn't, because the simulation God is running to make this reality seems a lot like it's made of matter. The same is true with the metaphysical model I came up with when I was younger, the one I outlined above. 

Something I've realized a long time ago, when it comes to God, there are turtles all the way down.