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BULLETIN ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN
THE CONCEPTION OF CONCEPTS AND COMMANDS
AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS
Concepts and commands, considerations and errors, magnificences of thought and bifurcation of the divided mind, vision of splendour and dourness of the crabbed mind, penetration to essentials and aspiration to nobilities, all are territory, functional items of the mind. You can burr a concept, or see it brilliantly in its ideational setting, rightfully mock it or wrongly endorse, and do either with purposes of various kinds. The mind is not fixed.
It is both versatile and fragile, robust and discerning, as the case may be; and to man there is given vast ground for contempt for human exaltation and good ground for admiration, depending on where and when and why the mind works, its efficiency and its purpose. But there lies the supervening reality so often missed by so many. It is rather the management of man, at the inherent level, which has the purposes and resolves which programs are to be run and which not and when and how. The last, how it is to work, begins to move back to mind itself but from the overseeing function in the life of man. It has been for millenia been called the spirit of man and is that facility and functional, creative aspect of man's equipment which chooses WHETHER to follow what is good, or evil, self-centred or self-sacrificial, ingenious or disingenuous, helpful or a hindrance and to what and in what terms and why.
Called the spirit of man, it is precisely here that you find the response of anyone who reads these things, or thinks them, or considers them. Some prefer to be reductionist, ignoring in fantasy for SOME reason or other IN their spirit, some choose approbation or disapprobation, some desire for fairness and justice, goodness and truth, or move for a superficial disregard of these things, ignoring whole realms of functional fact in their own natures. They vary with a facility to achieve this, including careful weighing of possibilities with aims to be aligned to, or avoided in new aims. When avoidance of truth, which is most common in this or that dimension or desire at least, is victor for some reason, whether consciously or in some suppressed unconscious mode, there are results just as there are causes. They are personal. They are dangerous.
Ignorance is blind and perilous; but many shrug and go ahead as they may, possibly postponing their 'thoughts' to their latter days, when in age and comfortably placed, they may ruminate, while they travel or cogitate while they enjoy things. It is all choice, whether aspects of the facts be ruthlessly omitted. (One near relative of mind, on my return from theological training, presented with challenge, declared, 'Christ will not be mentioned in this house!' To be sure, I visited him in his office, but our ways diverged, reason was not met, and I was sad to see the direction, so different from before the war, after which he had resolved with no enigmatic determination, to follow his ideas to their end!)
But let us consider concepts in their milieu of mind. Since mind is a free agency, avaiable for captivity to folly, lust, drugs, wildness and inhuman steeliness, depending on the case, or for passionate pursuit of the Creator of the ensemble with its facilities, some of which we as creatures cannot even begin to create (like freedom in a person). Indeed, some are so far above us technically that frightened people, afraid of having such an overlord as their Creator, PREFER to imagine a few things contrary to reality: for example, that nothing made everything (whether or not in stages, it remains impossible whether at the first or in type, on the way), that chaos made logic, or that the working of chance IN systems, made them!
Concepts may be apt, inept, ingenious or incisively penetrating, true or false, misleading or masterful or both together. They have a genesis for normal working of natural man, as he has been constructed. And that ? it is mind. This courts or distorts them, hacks them in hatred or graces them in truth, seduces their atmosphere to evil or towards looking so, and so on, almost ad infinitum. Mind is well known for its works, and how they work, and in terms of priorities, principles and preferences, rationalisations and psychosis, for the type of thing and the type of causes inherent and operative in it. It churns out concepts, appointment, definitions, penetrates realms, orders or disorders them.
Beyond the facilities of mind, as noted, is the spirit which has the extra facility of purposely REJECTING what the logic of mind has to divulge, full well knowing that this is an attack on truth. Yet the purpose, perhaps self-elevation, may be to have it so. The spirit of man is what gives him distinctive life, and the mind is what adorns it, except when it is diverted by impervious or imperious passions. In this world. That is so common as to constitute one of its main bases for wars, and as these increase, through time and thought, intelligence applied in weaponry and progressions of procedures, they threaten very definitely the very continuance at all, of this race. That is fully in accord with the teaching of the Bible, which provides oversight in turn, not only of the production of man's spirit, but of his life, which still technically amazes him in its vast sophistication, ingenious logic and in any unbiased terms, design (cf. DEITY AND DESIGN, DESIGNATION AND DESTINY, Section 2 with Section 8).
The multiple priorities, perceptions, appropriations of ideas and purposes which come like maelstroms or blessed winds to man - the case with man is intensely variable as works display! tend to gouge out or force in, or simply regard aright, the myriads of considerations concerning himself and life. One of these is the institution of dependent being (nothing did not make it, so something did, including the means), and in the process , man make concepts. They may be senile canards, flourishing propaganda themes, when wrapped together, or wise counsels of pitfalls and vision, to stop man becoming like a ditch or a dirge, and to enable him, through lack of distortion, like disorienting glasses, to see what is what and what is not. Being so vulnerable and misused for so long, in his history, by so much and in so many ways, man's spirit tends to toil and to veer away, like a wounded limb from further impact.
These things being so, concepts held in the mind of man are mental productions, caressed or forced or twisted out of truth, and readily recognised. This is as much the way mind works and spirit supervenes as are the first and second laws of thermodynamics, part of the course for matter. They are recognisable in source and in function.
Concepts appear in coded form in programs. There is the APPLICATION of mind with all its vulnerabilities and potential virtues alike, and there are the MENTAL MEANS expressed in concepts, considerations with them, qualities of thought with them, progressive depiction alongside and purpose inherent. The concepts may be expressed in language, cut-down codes instead of glorious assemblages, yet in man's construction each generation, codes of all but incredible sophistication and ingenious thought control. Where these are, mind is recognised. This is what does it. We live that fact, and never find it denied in practice. Code does not sit down, personified, and write itself, in fact. Poetry has a place, but this is not it.
Our DNA is the outstanding case of such code. The mind back of it leaves ours, even once we have SEEN the operations of this one at work in our midst, like children. It is like a father's work before the mind of a three year old. Its spatial miniaturisation is a marvel, its sophistication constantly being revised upward as man finds its multiple internal operations in various forms of complexity, harmony and inter-dependence, along with multiple use of relatively simple means, nucleotides. These have such a variety of modes, including reading backwards and forwards, that it is a masterpiece of interpretation of motion, notion, sequential construction and mutuality of operation. In this it resembles a factory where various operations of a specialised kind may be provided for, even though in time they come later. Time is not the point in creation: you make what you want for WHEN you want it, and it all depends on your constructive, creative orientation, not on what the materials would do, if they could do it.
The mind back of it , the human creation for example, is called - as the source of these and other functions, with all else involved - GOD. It is not a leap of faith to believe in him, but as shown so often in other ways (cf. SMR, TMR, Bulletin 105 and so on), a necessity of logic. There is faith also, yet not as an alternative to reason, but as an application. You do not have to receive it: someone may say, As long as I live, I will not receive it. That is one of the wonderful facilities of mind and spirit in man: not here, in content, but in capacity. Imagine being so made that you could do that! Try making one, and you have but a puppet, with provisions to imitate but not execute as an independent unit.
Commands, such as also found in the DNA, and for that matter the Bible, the only vastly testable and readily verifiable religious document purporting to be the very word of the God who made man physically as well, the word FOR this creation: these too, in type, have implications. Commands involve concepts (whether of direction or protection or production or cessation or activation or whatever else enters into the mind of the Command Producer), and action to match. They also involve purpose, which may or may not be obvious. We are all so very used to this, in general terms, in our daily lives.
These alike show the source in person-spirit-mind-power, the last in the event, as with our DNA, that certain things happen. These include the following: the intelligibility, whether in a symbolically cast program or directly, of the terms of the command, as also the concept of command, the materials for execution of the command, the chronological mutual placement of command and means of fulfilment and the conceptual harmony of the elements of the command (in principle and very largely in practice, for a large failure breeds meaningless dysfunction).
As to the symbols used, the correlativity of what these are, and their referents, of form and function, is a mental operation, whether direct or via program production. Matter does not specify codes where some one action is prescriptive for another, some symbol must mean such and such, though it may and does of course involve in its very construction such a way that naturally, what is envisaged AND expressible in law, is made to happen in practice. In matter, this is inherent however and not a matter of coded assignment. Yet it all involves impartation with law, through law, in terms of logic, with mental contrivances. Consigning the assignments requires power, penetration and control, so that what is made, stays put in type, unvarying in performance and in meaning.
Indeed. when one considers the superb heights of power, precision and understand needed to INVENT a being with conceptual capacities (to construct, to destroy, to attack with facility or defend with agility), to impart existence to man, it brings a delightful experience of awe, that such things could be, based on creative solicitude and a multiplicity of designs. This goes so far, that what may be accomplished in one way, in the DNA, may in another type of creation, be constrained to exist by a different method, even when similarities are in view for results! There is a certain exuberance as many know in themselves as mini-creators, which rejoices in undisturbed originality.
For assignation - this means that, and let us keep it so - you need decision, purpose, direction. For that you need the relative functions to secure these results, which come back to mind. The laws of matter also do matter and are part of its construction by what is able in concept, form and function to make it happen in this sovereignly assigned manner.
Nothing comes from nothing, and to get something, you need to have what it takes, not unexampled contradictions of law as a funny-man substitute for thought, which is the current popular disorienting dream, taught to many human children.
Fantasies of this kind tend to make for confusion, passion plays of trying to become the most advanced, and prevent all competition, in a most childish manner, misplaced use of force and emulousness. It is not that such things are unknown without such fantasies, as found in modern scientism and evolutionism and reductionism, but each fantasy greatly increases the delusion, the attraction and the grounds of tyrants for their self-elevation which often goes with the death of millions for their pleasure, purpose and pollutant putsches. Often this has included a swelling of heart, seeking to make hay while the sun shines, and then industrious planting of more spreading crops of similar morbid intention, to aid the subjugation of the nations.
Oh for such glorious superiority, they rollick and morbidly frolic. It is indisputable that such thoughts have influenced major tyrants of the past century, deluding into disregard of atrocities so vast, so inhuman, so passionate, so sustained that the understanding of judgment is greatly increased, and even man set up his courts at Nuremberg.
To escape the bury-go-round, it is necessary to get off and rejoice in what is substantial and true cause for it, the salvation provided by the Creator (John 3 enunciates it, for example) in Christ Jesus.