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CHAPTER ONE

CONSIDERATIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

WHETHER OR NOT ONE IS CONSCIOUS OF THEM

CONFINING THE CONCEPT THAT HAS SUCH LIBERTY

Consciousness is not some stream whether of atoms or thoughts or culture or hope. Its various possible contents are not what it is, but what it conveys, like any other entity made in specifiable form. Its results are relevant to what it is; but not the same. Its functions help to define it, but are not identical with what  it is. Doing is part; being is part, and  they relate, but they are not identical.

Consciousness may contain thought, or  its  dispersion,  order or its disruption, reason or its  distemper. It is susceptible to both aspects in  each case. But these are not what it is,  but that of which it treats.

Human consciousness is an orientative facility which like sight, may become disorientated. In this, it is like a  compass, with power to  point, but susceptibility  to be disappointing, though always for a reason, if this be the case.

Consciousness is similarly, not  determinative. It  does not act  as lord of one's life. It is however greatly facilitative. It enables awareness of occurrences within,  without, above, below, of marvels, of  sorrows, of  griefs and of gladnesses,  and  often of the reasons. In  this, however, it is not  simply inert, as if the eye were beholding what is there, more or less accurately. It is inhabited not only by content,  but by content cursors, which enable  focus on features, functions, within or without, below or above. This may be well  done or poorly, and become helpful or a hindrance to purpose

Consciousness gives scope  for the manufacture, consideration and variation  of purpose, and challenge  to the same.

In short, consciousness is  the  TV which possesses many channels, but is not in itself a channel. The channels are  available for  consultation, but  that is but one function of  consciousness.

This collaborative, conceptual, imaginative,  evaluative, perceptive, inspective facility is the street address of the person concerned. It is the focus for thought, tablet for perception, exhibitor of ideas, whatever their source. In it,man has a console to  consult, a composer to  consider, a graphic, dull or vivid carry-bag of  considerations which reach up  and  down to the controllable  to the uncontrollable, to  things mighty in significance, or midget in mission.

Consciousness is the appointed way to consider appointment or  disappointment, the exhibit of thought,  the  manifester of  will, the parade ground of ideas, the experient of wars of attrition from temptation, where the specialised phase of conscience is at work, this an arm of personality, and its parade ground. Back of it,  lies  scope for  deep thought,  which may be summoned without requiring it  at all times  to be articulated,  while it is working in the background.

It not only perceives, but relates to sensor,  and in this, it enables review  to be imposed on it by will, for a purpose,  and things visible  and invisible, beyond it or before it,  to be considered openly, ready for assessment or investment alike.

It is not a part of  a brain, or a nerve, or a neurological system, though it can  use all of these,  just as a tape recording is not a part of an opera star, say  her throat, or head, or ambience. It is a diligent recording of  RESULTS of the occurrence, without the  slightest awareness of or contribution to the production of the same. Genesis and gyration are not the same.

SCOPE AND HINTERLAND

Consciousness  is available for much, but in itself, bound to  nothing except the limits and criteria of its  own  nature. This is not of a material  kind, though it  can  both view  and review  matter, being beyond it in contemplative  power  and irruptive  capacity. It is used  to subordinate  matter, but can be  embarrassed by it,  since the person is set in a matrix of much which is physical,  the consciousness of which can be clear and impelling, or confused and  dispelling to urbanity.

The  kind of conceptual power  found in consciousness is in the orb of the logical-voluntary-irruptive-personal-purposive. That is its nature. In fact, it is its explicit nature and efforts to bury it in something else are not merely the folly of reductionism, but of perversion. It is what it is, and material  criteria are not that, just as an aeroplane is not the ground on which it sits, or for that matter, assorted bits or contributions.  It has a manifest and statable purpose, securable through its functions, and this has nothing to do with the nature of the bits per se, provided. These are subordinated by plan, articulated by purpose, built from imagination and exhibit what is behind them just as utility and futility come from purposes in general, means  procured, inured or directed as the case may be.

Beyond consciousness is the power to survey, which may be found active in it, to purpose, which may arrest it, and imagination, which may grip it. The gripping is not, however, what is gripped. The functions are not the entrants, but the site for treatment. The nature of the human person is what consciousness tends to exhibit, for it is here that the forces and  purposes, both inscribed and inscribing,  both as received and  as worked out, are on  display. It may be distorted by desire, so that it  may even appear that  something is so when it is not. It may be distorted, like a face from a  fist, when d desire is seeking to direct it,  clandestinely or openly. From many sources come its  components in  composition; but it is no grab bag. It is a site for conflict or concussion, contempt or  conclusion.

Because of its many sending contributors,  and amending powers, its facilities and potential imbecilities, wards of desire, whether misconceived or mutinous, consciousness is vulnerable.  It is not merely so  as is a TV if it be  vigorously shaken, but if subtle changes are made in its configuration. Nor is this all.  It  may be  disturbed by assault on its memory banks, lodged in the brain, just as might a tape be compromised by excessive heat,  for the simple reason that the receptors are not made to withstand that. There is nothing mysterious about it.

In considering a functionality it is necessary to consider a number of features, if one wants comprehensive knowledge of it. Thus there is,  as above, the consideration of its facilities, types of input, modes of deployment and response, scope for purpose and so on. Then there is its mode of  entry into existence, its genesis, and next the cause of that. If  there is fudged confusion about this, because of desire, as is common, then the (relatively) simple becomes complex and the readily resolvable becomes immune to comprehension. Such is normal in any scientific or organised enquiry. It is  so,  for  example, in the current debate about the arrival of our earth and of our lives.

Shrink the evidence  and  you shrink (your awareness of) the realities. This is shown simply at the outset in  SMR pp. 140ff., for example,  with The Original ... Chs.   4 and 10,  Agitation, Cogitation ... Chs.   1 and    8 and  multitudinously thereafter, as in the list below, for example.

Dig Deeper ... Ch. 1, Ch. 2,

Deity and Design, 2 and 8.

Possess Your Possessions Volume 7, Ch.  1, esp. *1A, (PP), PP Volume 12, Ch. 6,

The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of  God  Ch. 2, Ch. 7 (words, works, wit), Ch. 6,
Ch. 1 (review reductionisms, matter, mind and spirit),

Calibrating Myths ... Ch.  2 (machining mind, avoiding mindless machinations),

Stepping Out for Christ, Ch. 8 (dialogue),

Not Only is God Great, but Glorious Ch. 5, esp. *2,

SMR Ch. 4, Extension,

The gods of naturalism have no  go!  20 (dialogue), cf. PP Volume 9, Ch. 2,
Op.  cit.  36 (day-dreaming and nano-fragment), 37, 21

 

Sparkling Life in Jesus Christ  Ch. 8 (includes  Davies, Mark 2),

Delusive  Drift  or Divine  Dynamic Ch. 7, dialogue, gospel application, Ch. 6 (moron),
Ch. 4 (versified with multiple exposures of naturalism),

Redemption or Revolt, Chs.  5    and  7,

1504 (The Bible ... Ch. 4),

One Only but  Not  Alone  ... Ch. 9 (dialogue, includes slavation and trinity),

History, Review and Overview Chs.  4  (multiple exposures),     5,

The Defining Drama Ch.  3 (includes  work about Genesis 1, and  Reference to Let  God be God Ch. 12, covering some recent mouthings contrary to the word of God infesting where it has no place),

Christ, the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch.    9 (words of no mean import about nothing),

Lively Lessons in Spiritual Service Ch.   5 (includes Hartnett), Ch.  3,

Cascade of Mercy, Torrent of Truth Ch. 6 (pointed),

Hallowed be  Thy Name,  Ch. 8 (father and son),

Scaling the Heights ... Ch. 2

Dizzy Dashes, Heady Clashes and the Brilliant Harmony of Inevitable Truth Ch. 6, Ch. 4,
Ch. 2 (variety of quotations),

The Desire of the Nations ... Ch. 2 Epilogue (angelic conversations),  Ch. 2 (dialogue),

Sums, Summits and in Sum  Ch. 12 (wide-ranging dialogue).

Agitation, Cogitation, Aspiration  and Conclusion Ch. 1 (stupour and the stupendous, creation and creativity), and Ch. 8, a dialogue on dynamics, form and function.

 

     ESSENTIALISING THE BREADTH

AND CONCEPTUALISING THE HEIGHTS

However, when these  things are  re-organised and faced scientifically, by scientific method, and logically,  then there is an  answer for the vulnerability of consciousness, both in theory and in practice. Answers are always relevant, and the more so when no other option is present.

Man's spirit is equipment for consideration, ramification, appreciation, volition, purpose,  comprehension, composure, and of  course the various diseases which afflict it,  just as they do the body. As with the body, this is often for the most obvious of reasons, including intemperance, listlessness, forlorn indifference and other asthenic or super-vital thrusts of loose laxity or inane ambition as the case may be.

It deals with things logical, spiritually stratospheric, in the bases of spirit, and spiritually debased, as in selling its very powers for some one pleasure or desire that demands satisfaction,  long or short term. Its domain is conceptual as well as perceptive, imaginative as well as purposive. Moreover, its facility in finding the logos order of the universe ready for matching with the logical order of the mind it deploys, is both gstark and remarkable.

Its place is subordinate; its powers can make it seem inordinate. The confusion,  wilful or otherwise, between the two contains in a capsule much of the mischief of human history, right from the very first (Genesis 3).

It loves to exalt itself to the heavens (concerning which it can in its own way, assuredly deal) or to pretend it is mere earth (though the earth was never so earthy), being ready to be angelic or devilish, ultruistic or sadistic.

Its limits are as normal with man - enough to enable vast enterprises, and to cancel even competence at a stroke. Its volatility is met by its vulnerability. Like all  designs in this world (cf. Deity and Design ... Sections   2 and    8, The  Divine  Sublimity ...Ch.2),  it is subject to  attrition, and  unlike  some, to contrition, having access to the sublime  and the infernal, to its construction as to its destruction.

When its genesis is made subject to irrationality, and it pretends itself a lost cause, or a pseudo-divine one, at odd times or in oscillation, being confused, naturally there is a trend to dependence on mazes of inchoate thought, or physical medicaments,  medical drugs which displace psycho-analysis and its expense and dubious reputation, on this or that in confusion as a brother; and this not a little (cf.  SMR Ch. 4). There is a sense of triviality, bathos or cynicism (cf. SMR Ch. 3 ): a certain rawness may even enter, a dyspepsia of the spirit, confined instead of sublime, denatured instead of redeemed. This is as with any disease, a sad and in this case, a wilting thing, leading to endless literature and non-gliterati literati. Despite the profundity of such sorrows however (and who better than Dostoevsky among the novelists to depict them in  their delusive horror)., this disease is dispensable. It requires reality as with most disorientations.

This is available from the source of its genesis, the constructor of its logical thematics, and the liberty to defy or defile them alike. Like the recording equipment with sound, or video, the mode is highly specific. It is not just gush. It requires discipline. If what is to be received and kept in storage is to be well used, then significant is the discipline and understanding required. Yet how much more is this so with the spirit itself, which produces the matériel for such ministry at the personal  level!

It involves steps which, though in one sense 'bits', are actually part of a rationally construable whole, purposive and personal. That is natural since man IS personal. There has to be first DETACHMENT from false premises, and ATTACHMENT to right ones. This involves repentance and believing. There is more to it than that; but not less. You come to the One who made you and  to the inscription of the position,  and the requirements for restoration, healing, clarity, understanding and liaison.

THE EASY (FOR US) AND THE HARD

THAT CALLS SO CLEARLY

On this see Ch. 2 below, further.

In one way, they are exceedingly easy. The conscience can rest easy here, because the Creator of the Genesis for consciousness has a deep knowledge of man. In the default which is active in fallen man, there is no other way than restoration by gift without price paid by man, the Physician paying this Himself. Sickness can be like that: you cannot contribute to the restoration (as in a coma). Christ died for sinners, and loved them even while they were yet sinners. Only love could be bothered (Romans 5). Christ became the centre-piece for restoration in bearing the sickness (sin) and overthrowing the result (death) in one action, duly prepared and predicted for millenia (cf. SMR Ch. 8   -   9) and foreseen in its results from what are now millenia backwards (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5).

Taking this home is the therapy, and since Christ is alive  and ready to return, it is person-to-person by the means of the Holy Spirit who ministers till the Lord comes back Himself (Colossians 1:27, John 14:121ff.).

Crucifixion is an outcome for sin, a penalty, and Christ suffered this for us and its liberating and pardoning results accrue to those who believe (Isaiah 55, Titus 2-3). Receiving Him as such is spiritual, but also mental and moral, giving interpretation, restoration and reality in one. Beyond all, it gives access to the God who made the scope for consciousness, the grounds for personality and the ability for logic and logical analysis of the universe, even including  its blatant abuse for the  sake of  self-assertion or that of the gods chosen in lieu of the God of power,  prediction, principle and performance (Isaiah 64:4-5). This,  for man, is not difficult: he does not have to pay, pardon or  restore, though squeezing into the narrow gate provides challenge to the  additive heart, which cannot yield its  callow possessions! (Matthew 7:15).

However, there is a harder part. WHEN and ONCE one has received Him, one is regenerated (John 3 - the Lord is thorough and does not merely mess with things).Then there is ahead a life not of prosperity as its criterion, or for the ME plus NICE THINGS FOR ME, mentality, but one in which one sacrifices what seems good to erring consciousness and adopts what IS good from God Himself. This, to be sure, requires  discipline as of a solider,  self-discipline, and application, as with an athlete; but with results (I Timothy 2:3-7). The best is a gift; but in the quest to pursue it,  there is devotion and dedication (cf. Ch. 2 below).

For me, for my part, I would never trust any other mere human being with such a load of wisdom and direction, or put all my eggs in one basket. Indeed, I would fain keep them  all in my own, where I could at least continue to know, more or less, what is going on. However, when it comes to God, I  make an exception. The same loathing to glorify fallen man and the desire to glorify glorious God (really a very proper thing to do, an accurate and acute thing), meet in one. Turning from the one is a marked pleasure (one is not so great in oneself either, alas, so that self-trust is no improvement), just as turning to the Creator and Redeemer is a delight.

If there can be labour, what is work-power for ? If there is humiliation, what is pride's rebuke but fitting, and if it is fraudulent humiliation by tricksters (and the spiritual world is loaded with them - II Peter  2, Jeremiah 23:16-26 esp. 20), then that can be borne for Christ's sake,  as  roofs can bear rain. They are made for it. We are not here for enjoyment (though this may come), but for the service of God. The equipment, including the felicitous potential of  consciousness, is not for nothing. A dog can rush with relish into a run, and career about with energy and zest, in various quests. It is not entirely an imposition. It can bear harness and accomplish delicate purposes. It can rejoice in its attainments. Powers are not for corrupt indulgence, but spiritual point and purpose.  Some clamour against God as if they were meaningless; and yet, give them opportunity through the Gospel for purpose and meaning FOR God, and there may come another ache. Serve someone ELSE! How atrocious, they clamour.

That is pure selfishness, an abomination because the self is neither the centre nor the point of the universe. It HAS point, but the point is from God not from a particular member of creation. To treat it otherwise is seduction of  spirit and devastation of thought. On the other hand, the soul, the life of man is unique and so is the love of God for it, since the payment made by the appointed and anointed Saviour, the Messiah (cf. SMR Chs. 8-9), attests well  enough the value given to man. In fact, the woes of man are largely proportionate to the height of his creation, his styling, his point and his purpose. Spoil this complex, complicated, and yet singularly wrought piece of marvel (cf. Waiting for Wonder Appendix), and you do indeed enter into depths without limit, falling without foundation.

Find it however, and in your consciousness now there is a basis, a series of principles, a point and a purpose,  a  good and a bad, an aspiration and a contentment, a grounding and  a  non-confounding, a consistent, insistent basis and at a stroke, it is as if vacant or polluted land were suddenly transformed into an aerodrome, each part fit for use: some is to be refurbished, some refined, but all becomes seething with functionality as the planes from this and that source come and go, and the administration deals with them as appointed.

What then is the meaning of "the seat of consciousness" ? It is like asking, What is the seat of wind ? Just as wind has no solid seat, so consciousness has no spatial seat. Just as wind pours throughout places, so consciousness engages with many places. Its genre however is mental, its scope includes the spiritual, its outreach is multiple, its genesis a divine dower enduing with significant liberty, and its type in man, a correlative of personality, the result of the archetype. What man IS, the plan, schema, design, entity, integrality, spirit plus  container units of various kinds and functionalities myriad, is the seat of consciousness, but since this is not of a material domain, spatial terminology is readily misleading. It reaches to the material, in that it has sensors that report; but it breaches those limits, in its own domain of imagination, control, intrusion and profusion, analysis and oversight, overview and intensity of purpose, error and scope for wilfulness, for the arbitrary as for the delving and the disciplined.

Parts of the brain may relate to  reportage which it uses, parts to memory storage, which is consults, parts to implementation of direction, which it makes, but these are instrumental to its nature, an array to enable this earth to receive spirit, to  make intimate room for its actions in this realm, and to operate with it and for it.

Vulnerable indeed is the liaison, and horrific are the drastic corruptions, corrosions, intrusions, disorders to which this entirety is susceptible. As the body needs the spirit to give orientation and overall purpose,  conspicuous gallantry or miserable cowardice for example, so the spirit needs its container-shield-meaning-direction-basis for its  lair  and habitat. Wounded it can become worse than useless! Aligned, alerted, cared for it can become a marvel! That is because of the nature of the Creator who ALONE CAN make spirits, not mere objects directly or indirectly susceptible to various commands, or criteria for commands, be these mathematical in formulation, merely statistical in information or other. He alone can give life, not mere physical grounds for its exhibition, but personal life which rises to consideration, contemplation, conclusion or falls to concussion in  confusion, responsible even when it chooses to become irresponsible (cf. The  Divine  Sublimity ...Ch.2,The Original and Eventual Magnificence Ch. 5 and Epilogue).

The body cared for, how different from the frowsiness of neglect: and man  CAN care for it. The mind cared for, what lucidity and brightness it can produce! The spirit cared for, what splendours can come; but  the care is more than attention for its correct running. It is inspiration for its relevant milieu. The spirit is made for purpose, the purpose for principles of operational felicity, this for objectivity, not mere delusion or obstinacy, which can be deadly; and it all depends on God who made it, not for instrumentality merely, but for freely desired association with Himself, who is Spirit. It is on Him and His creative and redemptive actions that rest all material paraphernalia and their limits, and it is  through Him that  these investigable rationalities are made correlative to mind, just as His own domain may become a discovery for spirit. Seek and you will  find does not cease to be relevant. Inertia does not cease to be blind.

The spirit may be heavy either with guilt or with duty; it may be cast down with wry feelings or seditious wanderings, looming wonderings (cf. SMR Chs. 3-4); but it is susceptible to refreshing as the body is, to understanding as the mind in its own milieu also is, and to inspiration, as when for the body, the lungs are filled suddenly with fresh, clean air, pure from the sea, or the hills.

Consciousness is a scene-maker for the spirit of man, a formulation office, an information review-panel, where propositions may be introduced and mulled over, inserted with insight, correlated with truth, disordered with deliberate error or fondled with fatuous repetitiousness, as if mere sources of pleasure.

Consciousness, it is not a king-maker, but a source of scenarios, for their registration and application. These may be brought up from deep meditations and insightful illuminations, established understandings together with constructed and constructive vitality and agility of mind and relationship with good or evil, indeed with God or even the devil.

When man's course is done, then his spirit (cf. Matthew 27:50) departs the former combination, the body rotting or become ashes, the mind at work on this earth no more, its office demolished. When a man knows the basis and Creator of his spirit, however, then the departure is not disruptive or dispersive,  since it is merely the former form and format which goes, the communion and containment being indifferently affected, though enhanced:  as Paul put it, to  depart and be with Christ is far better (than the close association the apostle had with Him already, on earth, as it was!).

When the spirit of a man is intoxicated, however, and his spirit is divorced from its base and basis, in God, then the question is simple: Did the person see and hear the things of Christ and reject them ? (John 15:21ff.). If so, what has the potential to offer closer relationship before the resurrection of the body, is but removed the greater  distance!

God does not lasso His sheep to get them in! What however of the spirits which have never been given the Gospel, to face them and invite in  all their lives ? One thing is certain, if there was a way, if love could find an access without violation of its own character, if technical  facility were all that was needed, then in  His own time, the Gospel will have its due outcome with such, whatever that may be.  How rightly the Westminster Confession refers to ELECT INFANTS, people who in this world, in this spirit's lair, have never heard the Gospel. These will be  saved. God knows them, foreknew them, and will have them in His kingdom.

There is NO category of omission or  deprivation which will  be lost  just because of simple ignorance, nor gain access but mere circumstance. God is not subject  to  conditions! HIS condition as in John 15, is clear, as are its  consequences (John 3:19, Luke 9:26). Even if it were necessary to descend into hell, such would be the arrangement. It is the Lord's own business, and His own principles:  He  will  perform. in  nothing seduced, in  all things reliable, His motivation and actualisation  as broad as needed, that to the uttermost, the world be not judged nor the lives perish. Yet that uttermost does not devastate liberty, ruin the image of God in man, ignore the individualities created, or fudge the facilities granted. 

If  they would none of His counsel, as in Proverbs 1 and as in the eternities of foreknowledge, then that is it; and if they thus reject Him when they hear,  that is the same (Luke  9:26); but if they are not aware, then He is not confounded by circumstance, but still secures by His Gospel the elect in the irreducible ambit of His love (Colossians 1:19ff., John 3).  Likewise, He does not secure what would not have Him, as  wisely He is aware, knowing time as a stream seen from  above, before, after and during  any season or situation.

What matters is not whether you are CONSCIOUS of guilt or need; but whether your consciousness rises above a mere stream, and in it and with it, you introduce considerations just and apposite, or  suffer them  to be introduced. Then, having the mode of access to your spirit's basis and mind's creator, your life's condition and origin, you may restore yourself to Him in surrender, or mask yourself from your Maker, in spiritual isolation, however many may be those spirits with whom you amply commune on this earth! There is a spiritual isolation which relates to God only!

The  spirit sends, cries, is heard (Acts  2); but its  equipment is not its  altar, merely its venue. As to the human genome, it is a type, not an option; its condition of growing  derangement is a vulnerability, not a mere flip. The human spirit needs cover, and if so, well (Psalm 32); but without the cover  for its guilt, its vulnerability, then its trend without its  Supervisor is toward meaninglessness (like a  fountain pen in a rugby scrum). Then it is choosing a sport for option, whether for the imagination, the body or the mind or some combination, this instead of finding work for one's day, engagement for one's Creator, in relationship  with the Redeemer. Then it is as with a wind that strips and defoliates the trees, a site of trouble, fit for no good thing.

Its self-relish or disrelish of God becomes all important. As with a car, it is seemingly so  small a matter in its robust steel case, that one should have to pay successive visits to the mechanics; but this may save not only the car, but the driver, and others as well! With the Maker of the spirit of man, it is but one trip that is needed, from isolation to insulation, from  feckless recklessness of spirit, to redemption,  from renegacy from the Lord to surrender (Luke 14, John 4:14).

The  physician of spirits is not a national health care program, nor even an international one, but He and His granted Gospel is more vital than air to the lungs, for it is He who is the inordinate co-ordinator and inspiration with vitality of truth itself, in which peace is an unguent, and love an outcome.

CONSCRIPTS FROM PARALLEL  SITES,

TO  ALLOW  READY EXTENSION

I

FROM CHAPTER 4 of

THE ORIGINAL AND EVENTUAL MAGNIFICENCE

slightly extended
 

Heights and Depths

There are  principles behind the manipulation of matter in finesse and fashioned results,  correlative to actual needs, and modes of being used. Figs do not grow on thistles (Matthew 7:16), and expertise  does not  "arise" from domains dominated by their own demonstrably limited  capacities and observable incapacities. In particular, as  Paul  Davies correctly points out (see below), atoms do not craft code, being  for such purposes, 'stupid', incapable of such requirements, internally not so placed and  planted.

Code commands, but it needs  first to be  commanded, written, enforcible. The merry-go-round does not descend from the clouds, even if there were clouds, or  space or time or specificity to have. It is  started as a contrivance, functionally formed and formatted of such  and such a quality, for a reason and  stops on the same ground. That is  simply where it sits;  but its nature and its action and its diversified  correlation-potential with operator and client, this is not a marvel of groundless  enterprise, but of  adequate  cause. This being of the  creative type, the conceptual variety, it is started  (that is what it is there for), and  betimes it is stopped. It is  that sort of thing. Its relation to creativity is of that type; creativity is in that domain.

It goes round for its time. It starts  for  good  reason, and it  stops  for the same.  In fact, stopping is just  as dramatic as  starting, and quite as significant. Take Shakespeare (but not too far, for he has much that is good to say). He started. There  was a reason. It appears he  wrote plays and acted in them, before perhaps an eye  tumour wrote in unmistakeable terms, STOP. There  was a reason why he stopped. It was a very important one.  The abilities, facilities and human functionalities of this richly endowed man, with his distinctive Gospel and biblical utterances (cf. The Gospel in Shakespeare, by Hubert V. Little),  and high moral purposes exposed with thrust and  vigour in a good many of his plays, worked, for he was there  to work them. He wrote them. That was why they were there. A sufficiency of cause proceeded before the efficiency of result.

The plays came.  They effused in abundance indeed, sometimes with brilliant and evocative communication which bespoke person to person empathy and connection, speaker and spoken sharing a common consciousness and interpretive capacity, in various degrees, all substantial. He wrote, people acted, all-coordinated; people listened, interpreted, all in the domain of symbolic presentation and prior understanding. The plays wrought, and results accrued in a stimulus-response situation, spiritual in kind, intellectual in matrix, moral in thrust in the main. They acted, being adequately and intimately based relative to results, equipped for all the interplay and inter-working of personality; and then it was different.

Then they stopped.

No  more was the  effectual  cause of his plays, at  work. It had not presumably  been by his own will  that it  stopped (though abstractly, such  might have been the case). That is why they did not keep coming, over the horizon into time, like swallows flitting, yes or directionally magnificently equipped antipodean birds, changing their  north or south quarters. This facility, plus will, was no more. Not a play further came by this author, with that signature of understanding and wit, verbal facility and understanding,  sensitive perception and  rotund conception,  revealing reflection and essence-like epigrams. Not one was to be found,  though they might be searched for, like the celestially evacuated body of Elijah (cf. II Kings 2:16ff.). It stopped, for  good reason. They came no more.

Now if the playwright had grown weary of writing, instead of dying, or had  felt that some  play reached the  summit of his  desire,  before death, then he  might have stopped  for another reason.  It would have been the exact  correlative of the reason for  starting. To start, he had not only ability,  facility and functionality, personality, but purpose. To stop, he could lack any one  of these, including the last. If purpose  was no  longer present, then performance  would  likewise cease. We  do not  normally find the  correlation of power and purpose, capacity and conquest, cause and effect, sufficient ground to resound in results  so  very hard to find.  We may  find it  a little difficult to find  WHY it was a purpose.

As noted before. C.S. Lewis  was quite scathing about people who took it upon themselves to know why a writer wrote, the circumstances and conditions. Knowledgeable they  might sound, but when you have  the advantage of BEING the author,  it is easy to compare the wise surmises of literary critics about why you wrote and so forth, with the facts. He  found no matches!

If you forsake reason, then you cannot validly argue,  for that is to use reason. If reason were invalid, then invalid is the performance of someone believing that, and then arguing by its aid. If however you do not  so forsake, then you are merely forsaken in imagining that the reason  the multi-functional  performers, Shakespeare or the merry-go-round, performed, was this: nullity. Some by imagination  may wish to work in some kind of a mad  world (cf. SMR pp. 284 - 290); but this one is investigable by reason, and by reason  are the investigations assessed, and the results considered, and approved. If it be  assumed at any POINT that reason had no relevance, then in that type of thing, domain, you have an irrelevance, should you wish to reason. If you found reason for  considering there to BE such a  point, then  that reason would be invalid too,  since the entirety of the method with its sub-units of thoughts rests on but one basis, without which argument is irrelevant. Giving  reason for what is  outside that  domain is simple self-contradiction.

 

THE RUN DOWN ON RUNNING DOWN

So is it with this world. Its observable nature includes a movement  to reduce available energy, towards  entropy^*1A so that this as far as process goes. Such is the case in this world which is being investigated, this object in which information is sought. In this investigable domain, there must have been a preliminary store made UP,  so that it  could COME  DOWN. As Europe attests rather well,  spend what you have not got, and you become very troubled; imagine it there, and it does not help. Imagination is great, but not for a substitute for  reality. Any number of entities or one, it makes with precision, no  difference. SOME OR ONE of  these must have had the goods, for  ANY ever to be able  to make use of it; then  it is simply a matter of finding what makes the  goods, and as always in science, avoiding the  specious and keeping  to  principle (cf. Lively Lessons in  Spiritual Service Ch. 5).

Even Paul Davies Mark  II,  as in Sparkling life in  Christ Jesus, Ch. 8, came to admit such things as these:

• 1. The known laws of physics, chemistry and biology do not explain the origin of life.

 

• 2. Ideas of chemical evolution, as in the Miller Urey experiment, are not relevant, since "Throwing energy at amino acids will not create delicate chain molecules, just as putting dynamite under a pile of bricks won't make a house."

 

• 3. There is no evidence for an inbuilt bias or even conspiracy to create life, in 'Nature'.

 

• 4. Chance is not favoured (after all chance is merely the name of structure or system in which one's purpose is not held in view cf. Ancient Words: Modern Deeds Ch. 13, Deliverance from Disorientation Chs.  1,  7).

In  apparent exasperation, quoth he, "How did the stupid atoms spontaneously write their own sof'tware ... Nobody knows ..." The atoms  were not stupid; merely limited, delimited, equipped  to be atoms, as we to be human,  and what they were, they did. What they were not, they did not do. Is  that really so very hard! It is when you ignore the  etiological  reality, what is really needed, that you run, like Stephen Jay Gould^*1B and so many others - though he was especially outspoken - into inevacuable troubles.

Nobody knows ? Well  there must be a lot of nobodies, since  nothing  COULD be more obvious. Information science is quite clear about the writing of  software of this kind, such as DNA^*1C. Using factual information about information, so  that  this  world  and not  imagination is in  view, ONLY intelligence  writes such software, and it is quite  apparent why this is  so (cf. Not Only is God Great, but  Glorious, Ch. 5, Jesus Christ  Defaced, Unfazed...Ch. 4).

What then ? Let us examine for a little the sadly sickly alternative of authoritarian irrationalism, such as with many  is now all the rage, in both senses of the term! (cf. SMR Ch. 3, Wake Up World! ... Chs. 2, 4, 5, 6). Something neatly arranged with force and pressure and space and time and interactive constituents, all to be watched and crooned over, which does not do anything  like what it is supposed to  do when it comes of age^*1D, expands with a force without ground, all  prepared, constituted,  arranged and organised, and THIS is the irrational tableau. It is like accounting for a carved table.  Well then,  there was this site and that wood and it all was  moved by vast forces that came from nowhere, in a domain that did not have any reason to  exist, and the things somehow or other, in ways we find impossible to make reasonable, all somehow again arranged amongst themselves to get a very nice,  logical,  accountable world going in which thought about the disorderly  becomes orderly,  and the disorderly becomes investigable and works according to  reason,  so that  all you need, is there from the  start, and acts as if it had made it already, but that  from nothing and for no reason.

So does unreason defile rationality, and provide the ultimate fudge; but dodging the bull does not remove it, and dodging  lack of funds with empty cheques does not supply funds, despite any pause  while the bank assesses things.

It is not a blessed concept, except to excite dreamy children, who  find it easier to consider than the careful handling of evidence and reason. So the myth mounts like a radioactive cloud. Cultural consciousness embalmed in curriculum tyranny becomes the mid-wife to children still-born, borne on the arms of intrigue, or custom, intelligence arrested, the pride of human racism branded on their foreheads, unless they escape. For that the concept of forcing indulgent independent schools to bite the same consciousness pill, and dream curricular teachings without foundation is a further step, amazingly in much already taken. How deep is sleep here!

But in what does their delusion move ?

The merry-go-round  MUST have no cause.  Its wheels and whirls, music and correlation in functional  power  leverage to human hands, this CANNOT be for a reason. It indeed cannot  be  that  some stupid (his word) atoms spontaneously built the  thing, but it all worked  out the  way things are never witnessed to do, though some want them to do it anyway, as if invoking an ogre amid the nuclei, first to spawn and then  to activate them: but such  powers  within nature are not to be found. A principle may be invoked (cf. News  57,  59, Prospect, Retrospect ... Ch. 5, Dig Deeper ... Ch.  I,  *1A), the one you do NOT see working as you observe what is happening, and it can be turned into power by sleight-of-mind; for you need not only a law or principle, which describes what happens, but the THINGS THAT HAPPEN THEMSELVES. Principles without that are fairy-tales; notions without that, are illusions. You are fighting World War II with Spitfires that never left the drawing board, and so  lose!

 What happens when you ask for  splendour from the failed, or grandeur from the spiritually demobilised, or action from the stoppage ? You are rationally inert in that case. Reason, however,  stands and such "nobody knows" dithering is mere space-filling waving of the  flag of irrationality, mounting the NOTHING charge, or the invisible principle thing, a thing of nothing in observable actuality. So is it moved in the mind of imagination,   in order  to make the better  progress, not bothering  about actualities, about horses and  all that sort of thing, in the thrust of a spirited charge. You charge in principle, though never a horse is to be seen, or seen moving!

Might they not come  from under cabbages, these laws, formats, powers, production mills, writings, structural preliminaries, logical applicabilities ? Oh to be sure, you never SEE this happening, information is just not found making up its concepts  and their application, and doing the thing ab initio! Don't  worry about that. THIS is science!

Is it not very like Europe, allegedly in much living beyond its means and  wanting moneys ? THIS is where money comes from, surmises one ? but where ? and from whom ? and  from  whose work to make these symbolic tokens refer to  anything ACTUAL!

It is true that in practice you DO see how birth occurs, of ideas and of humans, that  sort of creativity thing; but  don't worry about it. It may only make your  hair go grey before your time.

Such is the sort of progression which logically  is in place, in whatever form,  concerning the many who ignore the logical necessities and follow the nothings they prefer. They act as if to prefer concerts without  concert halls, music or musicians, and  to enjoy the reasoned analysis of the music that does not result. Somewhere, somehow it must have  come, they say, and it is grand how it responds  to  reason when you entirely ignore generation, foundation, power  and qualities. There is a wonderful execution of things,  which can be imagined,  and as to the results, let us inundate in these, though they lack heritage, and  wallow in wisdom about what had none, these things arising at need, the way they do in no known case, except there be what is independently capable of MEETING such a need.

Such approaches may find in many a preference to be pre-occupied  with what it now does, even if it never conforms to hope. But it must go further, when  we come to the institution of things.  First, they just come and grow like Topsy. Then they stop, for a few thousand years. That too is just a hiccough ?

Thus, WHEN it STOPS, equally, stop thinking  about that  too! This is the intellectual short-cut.  So this brand of  science is some sort of irrationality procedure, for in this field, the appeal is to what is not now empirically found, whether in action or in principle of information deposition. But science never made its  name by that, but  rather by the sort of thing Dr Werner Gitt does and illustrates ^*1E,  looking at what happens and seeking  coherent grounds  for it, that  stand up to testing. You don't tell the  tests where they can't come; you just test. You don't invoke what is not there; you look instead and find what IS there in the  way it is, not in a pre-prescribed notion instead of pursuit of reality. That is merely truncation instead of truth.

What then  do we find ? It is this. The FAILURE of information to come, so that atoms  can be  called  STUPID and no  possible source, and the FAILURE of  principles (descriptions of what  adequate power and capacity does) to substitute for actuality in the making, leaves us with the point that  what DEMONSTRABLY and ACTUALLY and experimentally IS  found to create information, can stop, as well as start, and it is because of its  necessary minimal nature that it both can and can be  expected  to  do just that. There in causal source  is causal reason both for commencement exercises, and the cessation at end of Term, for an output and a completion, and so a stoppage.

 

2

FROM Ch.. 10 OF THE ORIGINAL AND EVENTUAL MAGNIFICENCE

Lord, evil and  good, truculence and truth,

Creativity and the  Callow

Bits and Bitterness

Resurrection and  Remedy

Logic and Light

The evil is present with the good, sometimes invited, even implored, sometimes met like an enemy, militant after much incitement from many, seeking seduction both in consciousness and in action. What could have produced the one and yet the other, often  so closely joined  ? the wonder and the woe, the magnificence and the shame, pursued often with passion, even glorified as in Nigeria! The very inventiveness of thought, at with much else at which we have been  looking, is a ground of the misuse and abuse. If we did not have power freely to think, to envisage,  to imagine, to order our thoughts  diversely or even contrary to what is before us, what could be done! But we do have this power: it is good and intriguing and marvellous in its intricate functions, and its correlation with the activities of the universe is enthralling and instructive.

There is a common logical theme, investigability capacity, and availability. Evil is as open as the day and often actively sought while it lasts; good is brilliantly present, in readiness to sacrifice for our children, church, nation, sympathies, empathies, seeking better things, adoring the God of creation, delighting in His redemption, seeking to share while air remains. It is happening all the time:  creation,  presenting in its midst, by this means and that, good and evil.

The evil tends to abuse the properties (intellectual, equitable, physical) of what it infests. The just regards them. It can be direct and personal (cf. SMR pp. 590ff.), or present as impediment or diversion. The evil tends to presume  to  destroy, alienate,  manipulate, without respect for truth,  as if it were a god, not a recipient, its imagination diverging not only for understanding,  from what is before it, but from conformity to its underlying realities - such as WHO created an idea, a law and so on,  and WHY  and WHEN,  often  contested in an act of intellectual theft.

WHY ? It is because we have the capacity to distort, as well as imagine for information and deepening of the meaning in contemplation, and this liberty being present, it is used or abused,  just as food may be, in obvious conformity to the needs of stomach and its supply chain from it, or in equally clear gluttony or disregard. Tests accrue from the Creator, whether of appetite, moral, mental, physical, as if it were god and could dictate, or of repulsion as with 'classes' or races or types or whatever else suggests itself, and many fail abysmally, often while lauding their own enlightenment, which but darkens counsel, and sets heads at each other, as if they did not contain the most marvellous designs^*2 seen visibly on this earth! The Designer is ignored, and so the product is polluted, first actively, then residually, while results accrue, and safety nets are torn, flesh ripped and morality scorned, as if it were mere choice, when our very bodies are not at all our choice, except for more abuse, but directed and dictated to the last point.

Yes it includes the results of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as in effect attested so well by Professor Sanford of Cornell*2D, with deterioration over time, increasingly acute for the generation by generation of our physical structure. In a fever of perversity, the  myth of integral progress in our lot continues despite evidence not only lacking, but to the entire contrary. We have become in much a very heady, unsteady, dreaming, scheming race, increasingly antipathetic to actuality, mordant concerning God, as if  gods and goddesses, who tell our Maker we will remake, and invent as if our human race had never been invented. They study circumvention, and achieve folly, for which they may then blame their Maker! They ask for evil,  get it and complain, in a very ecstasy of artful  connivance with what the Bible calls 'vanity' - that is the worthless, the ostentatiously pretentious which has no reality, the dreams of delusion and the clamour for confusion, lest truth dawn.

Despite the due rebukes to folly,  tempered by mercy, morality laments, weeps at these travesties. Many dismiss it, as if a small and provocative child, whose hunger however,  must be met. Yet morality surges when many are vexed, they complain at its breach by persecutors, those who ruin. Thus it erupts on the tongue, when injustice or laziness or presumption or arrogance or irresponsibility or recklessness enters: how DARE OTHER people do such things! While God is dismissed, rights are invented from nowhere. Past dismissals, thus standards revive. It is as if the morals were timeless, as they are, and yet they can be mouthed by modern gods and goddesses, only when annoyed or deemed to have suffered transgression.

The mutable standards in the fever phase, inventions of the 'meaningless' in a wild desire to be meaningful anyway^*2E,  pass like dreams. The results of the imagination thrust or bust mentality, void of fact, they are erected like refugee camps with variable population and deprivation. They are subjected to increasing imaginary categorisation though enduring truth,  to the duped crowd of confused contenders,  is as vomit, while virtue is derided and righteousness is decimated, like the Jews under Hitler, held as  unbearable, or the Christians in many Islamic lands, dispensible, even to the death.

The beauty is destroyed, even to the heart, the children are mentally molested, as if to inset a furnace of destructive imaginations in their hearts, as myths are taught, as if the predictions of the Apostle Paul were being followed as a script and a scenario (cf. II Timothy 4) and those of Peter as a compulsion (II Peter 3).

Liberty, logic, imagination, capacity to program, to institute, though first constituted, or to overturn what is just and to invent and invest things with what is frankly self-centred, and hence wrong, since no one of us is the centre of the universe: it is at work. Man can, and very often does, act as if his will  were  paramount, irrespective of reality, because of imaginative constructions, unverified, unvalidated, nestling in the heart (cf. News 19, On Stand-By) .

The self-centred approach (whether it constructs mighty morals or  amorals to taste or philosophies to sate appetite or whatever form it may take) is so clearly a lie, misleading, that it is subject sooner or later to the result of conflict with the Maker of mind and spirit and creativity and design, and the continuum of logic between observers in certain cases, such as man, and the observable, between imagination and  actuality. Maker as well of the power for merely intemperate  disjunction from truth in stuttering dither which is the substance of much of philosophy, which therefore changes like the weather, He gives man  temporary power for the illicit, for the cantering to peril, the rush to ruin, the laments of tragedy and the scope for learning lessons which do not lessen, no, not at all.  Results like weeds may take a little time to take-over, but their progress can be deadly to productivity, and drastic in overview!

WHY is it so ?  How did the wonder come, for unless it come, it cannot be molested or destroyed! Nothing could not do it. Something must have done it. Something could not be invented from nothing (a contradiction in terms, for then it is not nothing but something with the potential at a certain  time or  modality, to act). Hence something must have been there always. If it were inadequate for the results, then they would not come: that is just a matter of definition. It  cannot absorb more from nothing either,  as it goes along, from no source, for no reason, and contrary to all reason, so not nothing but the Adequacy must always have been there, sufficient.

Causality must have been present whether in this form or that,  depending on the modes of creativity used to bring to pass the things that the something made. Often enough, the inevitability of causality has been considered (cf. SMR Ch. 5,  Causes, Predestination and Freewill Section IV). It does not budge, not for any fudge. You cannot even attempt to  'explain' it without using it as a datum.

WHY, however,  was liberty caused in man with his imagination and power  deliberately to schedule or mis-schedule,  to  follow reality or to deny it,  to abuse or abort it, and to create a  temporary confusion, before it is met ? What does liberty enable  ?

It enables one  to show regard for goodness and self-control and  watchfulness and adaptation  to reality; or  to make war on it,  and to seek to overthrow it, cast  aspersions on its ways,  and  to  elevate one's own wisdom, like a snake, elevating itself on its little tail,  to seek to  achieve  an intimidating posture. Liberty in operation tends to classify, in much to self-classify, not in word which may be, and often is, a case manipulative mental squirming, often not in truth, but how ? It is in deed that it tends to classify, in deed that can speak for itself... deeds with qualitative criteria, in spirit, in mind, in result in aspiration.  These deeds are in the mind, as sponsor, the spirit as author, the body as agent. They can be as foul as a dried up country lake in drought, or appear as beautiful as a salt lake, poisoning its pastures in surround; but their nature is investigable and their results appear. Christ exposed such things in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). Past the moral coastline, there is the interior.

There is then alignment potential in man. He can even seek to kill another person, so  presuming to seek to control  destiny, even when he himself is subject  to instant death by heart  failure, just as he was to not quite so instant birth, without consent. It is a massive subordination of what is not in one's own purvey, overweening presumption at man's mere option. Patience and forgiveness is another option,  much praised in Romans 2. Here, instead of escalating unrealism and presumption, one gives more scope for  recovery and reconstruction,  aborting cycles of a destructive dynamic, where this  may be done.

In liberty, there is  also scope for love,  for that practical alignment which seeks to understand and imagine and test and configure in the realm of relationships, and in pursuit of goodness,  to find attraction in others, despite what may be in them, many undesirable features. This can come   even  as a  love which imagines and seeks to implement what will improve and deliver the one loved:  as with parents and friends. It is the correlative of hatred, just as mischievous imaginations are the correlative of honest  probing for truth, and relishing of the verified and validated results of the same.

Without freedom, you could neither pursue goodness nor choose to love. You might respond in behaviour, but without understanding,  like any other material thing. Freedom is the pre-condition of roaming, or diverse realisations with thought and principle behind them, of love, of goodness; for a robot is neither good nor bad, this quality residing rather in the creator of its activations, and their mode, and the reasons for that creation.

Creativity is the friend of imagination, and the ally of love; or of hatred. Man is full of it. The formation of units with controls, limits, licence for action, instruments for guidance and the like, is like a child at play, compared with making freedom (The Splendour of Biblical Coverage Ch. 2, Ch. 5 above, Not Only is God Great but Glorious Ch. 1^*3 ).

Only what makes spirit, individuality and power to weigh and imagine options, without interference, explicit or implicit, whether from statistics or other, can make freedom since it is a personal province. Only the Maker of spirits, whose realm is personality and not mere material apparatus, who IS a Spirit, not limited by constraints imposed (by nothing), CAN make spirits. He can spawn them freely,  as the mother a child, a man an idea; for in Him is the capacity to make persons in His own image, not indeed infinite, since they are too late in coming, and incomplete in provisions, but capable of such a relationship with Himself that their potential becomes active, and their self-borne limits are surpassed (cf. Not only is God Great, but Glorious Ch. 1^*3).

 

In some ways, it is rather like a dog in human company: they can almost read your thoughts in much, at last. God however, with man, did not merely make a companion, but one able to construe and contest, however unwisely, to the uttermost (cf. Job  13:15-19), whether defiled or remedied. Remedy becomes the sine qua non, the ultimate necessity, for broken equipment can become not merely a nuisance, but a grief.  Such  a creation is like an island of meaning, amid a structure for its habitation; or if disruptive of the relationship to its Maker, it is like an island in the Sargasso, obscured, polluted with other growths that spoil, uncharted, unwanted. Such is the nature of equipment befouled, spoiled, and of spirit, unfurled in a calm, paraded in a storm, the sport of folly with all its tearful consequences, when passion does not rule, for contemplation (cf. SMR Ch. 3).

THE ESSENCE OF CREATIVITY

But what of the essential features of creativity ? what are they ?

This function  involves imagination as we have seen, initiative and power to envisage,  discernment, robust thought, feeling, assessment, but ever  so  much more. There has to be a soul, a life, a basis and a background just as for a gear to be operative, you need that to which it IS geared. Creativity needs what it is that discerns, thinks,  chooses, moves with initiative (or not), with feeling (subdued, extant, massive and mighty, or not), with purpose (otherwise it is an event dependent on its matrix and core structure, a resultant, not arising to  creativity, but to mere reactive behaviour).

What SORT of a life then is creative ? A dog may be creative in measure,  for example as one has seen, with a sheep dog, when it HEARS what the boss is TELLING it to do, and does otherwise, the result being splendid, and apparently surpassing the lesser perception of his master! That is what one might call 'savvy'.

The dog (and some are masterpieces of canine intelligence, perception, estimation and watchfulness, pragmatic,  speedy in thought at the level given to them) used initiative, recall of past events or imagination or a little of both, intelligence and decision. Decision  can  enter in,  as illustrated in the case noted in an animal encyclopedia, where an otter or some such creature, used to coming to the call of the feeder, was about to take some ingredients for a nest, to a point where it was swimming. It started to  alter  course to the  feeder, then stopped, resumed the direction of the nest, and then this being fulfilled, duly turned back to the now secondary objective, the feeder. Much of the  same is readily visible.

A dog may love and lie down and die by the grave or place of  falling of the master, discerning life with and without the master, and resolving which course to take.

Sacrifice and love are as  apparent as hatred and distortion.

To create, then, you may act within what is disruptive and eruptive, self-willed and unrealistic, or with anything right up to downright  devotion, and preference for principles of undeviating love. You may create within these realms. You even have the options for either. There are psychic dynamics which tend to follow from earlier choices,  to limit or disturb later ones. We, mankind, are not gods, a fact often forgotten. There are payments in series for choices made. Obligations and actions may be in discord and so clarity of thought may come to be in discard! Lady  Macbeth's spot, which she would have, but could not have out, of her formerly murderous hand ... it tended  to  contain her thought, invade her clarity, evacuate even her sanity.

There are relationships of the life to good and evil,  justice and truth and  their manipulation, defamation and  assault. There are consequences. The body is not the only place  apt for infection, available for  inspection, subject to consequences, just and  horrid, since the cause was horrid, or more mellow and for a time, ready to wait.

Creativity is then of  LIFE, through MIND and IMAGINATION, but in accord with PURPOSE,  for while it may function discretely and dynamically, it is still  relatable to the will of the recipient or proponent. It can be marred by an effort to justify oneself, where  truth does not admit this motive, for example, or  to disparage another, in the same situation. This is no mean thing in observation!

It can be  distorted by a deliberate choice not to recognise the not-nothing,  always-adequate  Maker of things in their domains and limits, limitations and correlations. Romans 1  pursues this theme in Romans 1:17ff., showing how departure at this  level,  can lead to delusion (cf. II Thessalonians 2:10), can disorder thought and feeling and realism and make of life a writhing morass of intemperate thought, inveterate evil, disruptive ebulliences and hatred. This of course is precisely what is now being broadcast in empirical detail, in nearly every newspaper  daily, as inconspicuous nations become newsworthy in horrors of hatred, murder,  vilification, ambush, distilled viciousness, unnatural feeling and desperate  desires and discardable designs.

THE RESULTS OF CREATIVITY AND ITS FUNCTION

Any departure from reality makes for results, not only in the logical processing (which has to be distorted to allow for the presence, like a fallen king, of the delusion in place of truth), but in the texture and quality of life relative to truth.  A sour psychological taste, of which embitterment is merely an example,  may  tend to distort what is disturbed, like successive waves from different splash sources, from objects  thrown into a lake. They multiply  results, and these interact with one another, cresting and dipping.

Creativity can however be  pure,  without such disturbances,  without messages of manipulation or disdain based on imaginative but unrealistic self-elevation and the like, and can be exuberant, realistic and imaginative at the same time,  soaring in thought, rollicking in reality, sighing with wonder,  descrying great things and placing them with delighted agility to create or  convey vision. It  can even  do  this with felicity of form, format and sequence. It is the very opposite of 'bits' (cf. Ch.  8,   above).  There is a place of fluency, and of the static, of the bricks of a building, and of its architecture, and all efforts to remove the one of the other teem with reaction, for what is there may indeed be dismissed in thought as in imagination, but not in reality (cf. SMR pp. 332Gff., Repent or Perish Ch. 7 ).

More however, than this consorting of diverse aspects in life and its creative ministration from the first, to bring into being what now in this scope of magnitude, is found only in the maintenance phase (cf . Ch.  4   above), in the creation, the institution of the information concerning life, now stopped in its majestic deposition, and not found without intelligence in our more minor pursuits*, there is the actual  life of the spirit. That is, in mankind there is scope for contemplation, consideration, imagination, consultation with many realms, purpose and motivation,  vision and understanding, perspectives and prioritisations, perceptions and pronouncements irrespective of the actual available powers. A pauper can dream of creating a new aeroplane, even one harassed in prison, conceiving the perfect State, and one in dying,  the grounds of life.

There is a specific spiritual facility,  as there is a physical one, and though they are normally somewhat conjoined, this is not necessary. This is only one of the facets of freedom, singularly present in man amid the visible creation*4. The spirit is freer than the rest, its restrictions being less intrusive, its speculations and hopes more liberally roving. It is this which is our nearest approach to the Maker of all the facets of freedom  and  law, power and weakness, brilliance and scope for revolt and rebellion, the obverse of the power to love.

God is not susceptible, as eternal source without constructive parameters hemming Him in*3,  to the limits which our assigned,  written-up,  as in DNA responding bodies, which have these things have thrust upon them, indeed as criteria of their very continuance physically. He  makes the laws, since laws without God would be effects without a cause, delimitations without what delimits, constructions without a construer and constructor. What HAS to be so that anything with such premises could be, is by that very fact without the limits of what is made (as in John 1:1-3); as is the eternity which is necessarily His. With Him, is liberty without limit and power to dower limited versions of it^*3 .

A spiritual being without the components of limitation, God has made man with spirit^*4 , and the two may commune at His option, and indeed ultimately, that of man, as when one does not reply to an  RSVP invitation. This, however, would be simplistic as a total image, since man may be subject to scrutiny,  writhings of conscience, powers beyond his own control within himself, ragged relics of rebellion and the like: it is the ultimate result that is here in  mind.  In his mind, heart,  life, conscience, consciousness^*4 , man may alter reality into segmentations which do no justice to its lively keenness of integrality, adorn it with his own limitations and many things in between. These things constitute barriers which may ramify,  as when silt builds up in a river,  against some  restraining apparatus. (Red not in text).

In spirit, man may move as a sea-gull in an adverse wind:  delicately, carefully, with some  skill; but it is not at  all like movement with the wind,  or without the barrage and the barrier of contrary dynamics. He may move in spirit actively assisted by the God of creation, pardon and peace, with vision extended, or with subdued spirit because of some error, or with delight because of some divine exuberance, transmitted with illumination leading to the praise of God and the  perception in enhanced vigour, of His words (cf. Ephesians 1:17ff.). The spirit of a man may deploy (or annoy) his mind, and stir his heart, and create with various adjuncts, as when many streams pour into a lake.

The spirit of creativity may extend and  amend its  course with realism, with discernment as shown in some  cartoons, with splendour as in vision to cover evil conditions, with affairs of the heart, to find for love an outlet in improvement, and in the end, in not merely a clustering of so very many elements working together as with matériel, but a unity of its own, for which these are contributions and assets. This may be, while that same unity, his own  spirit, may be in company of God in a greater or lesser measure, in happy consort. The sky therefore is not at  all the limit.

Just as this good is possible, so is the correlative evil not only possible, but extensively visible on this earth, evil geniuses learning to genuflect to craft and distortion, manipulation and pure wilfulness, till the happy day becomes a clouded menace, a tornado of truculence, a vicious pugnacity, a very lair for evil even an observer of the madness of man, captivated by rebellion, captured by culture of his own, or his society or his choice.

It is all, however, invested with some kind or indeed kinds of creativity.

It all requires the constituent character of a person with correlative liberty, imagination, reason, investigative capacity, functional fluidity and imaginative power, capable of containing imagery and principles, moving them integrally in oversight,  allowing for them, overflowing them with ardour and insight, beyond what is given, into realms where thought is the creation of spirit, construction the dower of deftness and knowledge the  servant of enterprise. The person to have these qualities, facilities, agilities, innovative expressions, understandings, needs a cause correlative with these functions, which like a handbrake which may have many parts, has but one purpose and result. What is the cause of person ?

It is the consequence of what understands it, has the intrinsic and absolute originating power that the person is to receive in derivation and dependence,  in the necessary realms of logic, comprehension and enterprise. Great as are the derivative capacities of man, then, overshadowing the thing itself, there is the uttermost facility to make what has this facility: it is a master-maker that is needed for the personality which makes creations of thought, and imagination, wisdom and outcomes desired past utility.

The master of persons, the Creator of their capacities, the Maker, has to know how to induce liberty, and hence to have it, since any lack there would be communicated in correlative and subordinate outcomes. The Father of spirits, then as He may be called, has to be as inventive WITH the construction of human spirits,  as man is within his own domain,  as a GIVEN from God. That of God is ultimately innovative; that of man is derivatively creative. The vastness of triumph of the divine enterprise of the  Creator,  is the beginning of our own adventures of creation. There is the magnificence of the ORIGINAL MAGNIFICENCE (Colossians 1:16,  John 1:1-3,14,  8:58).

What of this, our own state and condition ? Its  essence is  a lively spirit,  a competent mind and an articulative power, or its practical correlative.

The bit-work with which some disadorn their understanding (cf. Let's Be Reasonable ... Ch. 2,  Chs. 3 and    8, esp. *3B above)), is a species of disintegration of the totalities involved, rather like French impressionist dot paintings, except that it is less than these, for they attempt to suggest into life, and in some ways they pretend to cover the case in stirring graphics, yet the impassioned bit-ter is bitter indeed, losing sight of life in its integral functions, the  thing becoming mere disassemblage-ism, to coin a term, an obsession with parts that can be subsumed and contained in architectural wholes, though the plans are lost and the bits are embossed, the better to pre-occupy,  and given wonderful powers in thought, though these never evidence  themselves.

Nor is this all. Many things are not even simplistically and reductionistically kavailable at  all, even in splashes of consciousness replacing thought. Such are love and truth, purity and spirit. Elemental past construction, they are of course subject in man to constriction,  spoiling the construction, and  his denial of them fatuously,  as if the empirical were now  (in desperation) actually banned. Nevertheless, such things apart, where parts limit, spirit may soar, where  spirit dominates, integrality is self-declarative.

Yet where spirit may move, sourness can come, and this indeed parts the whole, making it a distasteful commodity, like a crashed car. Here indeed, in many capacities and facilities in man,  parts or even departures tend to become conspicuous, because the architectural totality is ...alas, no more. Some  seem so pre-occupied with the scenes of ruin,  that they cannot move beyond their nature, like a car disassemblage expert, who has quite forgotten what an actual car  looks like, or indeed what it is for!

The origin and source of these integralities,  reason,  spirit,  mind, the body as architecture, is not available for mere intrusive disassemblage except in one case, where there were conditions.  It concerned the Messiah. He MADE Himself available (cf. Psalm  40). Here murder had dismissal for its invasion, and slaughter had a scenario for its evil  aspirations. Resurrection mocked pride's ruthlessness, to destroy the most constructive and creative being ever seen on earth, the One of most palpable goodness linked to power,  divorced from self-interest. No parade of the Prince of life was possible, though the  scenario was set a thousand years before, adequate time for preparation, one should think!

Death can be  served; but for God, and Him alone, it may be met, and He has chosen  that path, an illustrious meeting, sad and  rotten in human intention,  glad and triumphant in divine plan and  performance. As  He said, so He  did, as there was piercing of hands and feet, so there was;  as there was to be a meeting in the great  assembly, so there was;  as there was to be an eternal Gospel based on it, as in Isaiah, so there was. As the  Church of Jesus Christ  was  to come into spawning existence, so it did (cf. Isaiah 60, 65:13-15, 53-55).

As there was to be light  (Isaiah 8-9),so it was; as it was to shine brightly in Galilee, so it did;  and as the darkness  would not comprehend it,  but seize to kill the very Creator (Isaiah 49:7, 52:13ff.),  so making Him also by His overall plan, the Redeemer, so it was.

What was  to be, was; what is to be, is (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5). It is not heartless, but  filled with heart,  though hearts hardened and inured to sin may long ponder their obliterative internal scene, before light strikes it. Back even of this is another theme, phase and gift.

As there is might and blight, creation and desecration, so there is a further but parallel prodigy: it is that of remedy. But how would it both be effective and become apparent to  man,  flirting with fancy and tragedy as if possessed, which often is indeed the case.

The Creator had not merely a provision in the field of disease, in an entire system, but for distress and degradation of spirit. He was not willing to have evil cavort to destroy His work, though its power to comment on misused liberty and man's arrogance is not bypassed! (cf. Isaiah 37:21-29). As shown in Isaiah 40, in the arch-originalities of His creation, so we see in Hebrews 9-11, the completion of creation in salvation.

Just as the  LOGOS is  apparent

	in our DNA orders, articulate, assigned, active, agencies of scanning and banning, direction and designation, and again;
	in our minds susceptible to success in such investigations of a similar outcome in logical construction and  constriction in the universe outside, enabling the aggregation of power to man as he learns what is already there:
	so for the third part, it is apparent in the commands and conspectus of just one other book*2A, not this time within, for the very construction of the body, indeed in every nucleated cell of the body, to the billions, for it is one written TO man, to remake  him,  not FOR him, to make him.

It interprets his plight, sets things to right, in scope and opportunity, exposes him to perspectives of comprehensibility, though these do not flatter, to the conspectus of truth; but it does far more than this in its testable grandeur^*2A.

It provides the answer, to be sure, to the meaning and plight of man, but it provides the method for his restoration to what his disordered soul needs, to the spiritual site from which it came,  to the mind  who gave man  mind, to the Spirit which gave man  spirit, to the source  of his insights and blights in belittlement of folly, of his very life.

It gives the remedy, being more important and vital than any treasure map for fortune. This is not only possible, it is necessary (Acts 4:11-12). Restoration, indeed RE-generation, is not only good, but essential to the case of man, for God will not strive forever with him (Isaiah 57:15-18, Luke 13:1-3). This book is set in the very same organised, ordered, constrained, effective way that makes man generation by generation, and that makes his logic effective when deployed in the universe (when it is not disturbed by the tempest of irrelevant dreams, based on nothing, more or less expressly). It is the third and the chief deposition into life. Here the divine LOGOS has His quest fulfilled in word, as He enacted what it propounded, prescribed, in Himself in His appointed time^*2C.

 

SPIRIT

Endnotes and references above should all be working. In particular, note *4 which points  to Deliverance from Disorientation Ch. 8. This gives  some appraisal  of  spirit, as  does  SMR pp. 348ff.,  and  those interested in pursuing  this  background  to consciousness have in this  Ch. 8 an  additional resource. Its first section along  with the next  Chapter,  9, is especially pertinent.

 

3
 

FROM Ch. 1 GLORY, VAINGLORY AND GOODNESS

Consciousness, Spirit, Reality and the
Rhythmic Thump of Ridiculous Ruses being Smashed

Consciousness ? A Spiritual Work from the Face of God
 

Consciousness is a matter of vast concern to the unruly. HOW does it arise as something different from directed mail, from directed ingredients, directing all things ? WHY does it work as it does, in acute correlation with that of which man is conscious, such as stars, and cars, communication and concept, physical and chemical law, aesthetic conceptualisation and artistry ? If it has to be, why is it such an indubitable component in conceptual parallel to many things, all with their own systems, significance and significations, and what leads it from what is, to what ought to be!

Seeking to find from materialism - that naive insistence on the material component as if it were all, when in fact in consciousness it is necessary to have validity for thought before you can have any theory about anything at all with warrant, what it is all about - is like seeking to find from a nib, the purpose of a pen. You really need to consider the whole pen. Then you look for this: by what it is being used.

If it cannot be seen, heard, quantified, it is not real ? But is that theory quantifiable ? This is mere antilogy, the antics of angry fluff, the hubris around bluff, making man sneeze unwarranted words.

You move from consciousness as a conveyor, the thing at work, to what it works. What does it work ? It is an enablement for thought, personality projection, communication, symbolisation, reading of symbols, resistance to force, or to breach of law, deliberate false assessment to further illicit motives, deceit, greed, connivance with corruption (that is, what removes the functionality of man by trickery, deception or force, on the basis of desire).

WHY is it such an enablement ? and what is its relationship to the component called conscience ? and what does it so work ?

It is because consciousness is not only a link, as an overseeing part of a multiplicity of systems, all attuned and co-ordinated with the brilliance of a military compaigner, a scientific genius, a mathematical star and an industrial giant (except far more so, the sophistication surpassing man's ability even after thousands of years to get going with his gifts). It is an also interpretive part, formulable in command, functional in creativity, fathoming in address. It can embark on the assessive, whether physically or morally.

Thus we need to pass beyond mere consciousness, an aspect of the human capacity, to the powers which it enshrines, the personalities which it enables and the laws and rules which it admits. We come then to spirit, the name not for a mere graphic, verbal or conceptual awareness, but for the willing, purposing, conceiving, imagining, imaging, surveying, sympathising, hating, loving, corrupt or virtuous producer, according to taste, waste and basting. The products require a producer; the functionalities require what functions and the multi-purpose deployments require what deploys. It is neither a vacuum nor a nullity. It is what has what it takes.

If we are going to consider one part, we must in all order, conceive all of which the element is that part. Consciousness in this broader setting of integral functionality of the type noted above, is merely the screen, the awareness of the powers, of their use, of their usability, including the power to propose, to purpose and to fight. The self-awareness of spirit is a necessary correlative of its capacity to be personal, to be functional as a unit of thought, thrust, plan and assessment.

It is part of what spirit is, and without spirit it would be a mere phantasm, a figment, a thing hanging in the air, with neither physical nor logical roots. That is precisely why secular 'science', that is, the sort of thought which assumes the irrationality of materialism as a preliminary to thought, fails to 'solve' what consciousness is, and talks all around and about it with the daring non-composure of a child walking on the keys of a grand piano.

 

We hear so much about the 'god of gaps' that there is a strong tendency to forget the gaping gap between what is and what is not. What is ordered and systematic and conceptualisable and subject to command by symbols, but only within its own scope, and constructed in logical terms, some implicit, some written, is not a matter of gaps. It is a matter of a chasm between this and the empty naturalistic chatter which assumes everything, from substance to law, from order to logic, from force to fashioning: and provides nothing.

ALL that is required is missing; all that is needed for what is, is not present in the secular world view. The gaps between types of things, always vast in units of information input required, and the conforming ability of each kind that lives, towards various pressures, alike are simple empirical facts. The gaps between each realm of order and of operation and the basis, origin and power to make them, and nothing, the other option, are rather like a choice between a chasm as the source of a mountain peak, and earth with power and propulsion upward in its system.

We have then not a god of gaps, but a gap in place of God, a logical gap, of which all the smaller gaps are mere applications. It is rather like finding a house and four garages, one with a boat, one with another car, one with a space vehicle and one with a robot, and then entering the climate controlled house, and asking how the underlying matter really managed to move from the floor to the walls, from these to the ceiling, from there to the roof, from there to the air, from there back to the basement, from there to the vehicles in the garages, and before there, to the garages, and finding the one questioned becoming slightly impatient with those who do not SEE that OF COURSE it was all like that. Like Topsy, it just was: why worry about how or why! Such science...

The very IDEA of creation is naturally ludicrous, since this is the ONLY way anything of this systematically original and integrated, overall purpose-oriented kind ever comes to be in all empirical reality and systematic thought that does not forsake causality. It is naturally ludicrous for common SENSE is a forbidden word, logic being uprooted while surreptitiously used, and so creation is anathema. Since you can't use it, then it cannot have happened, even if the sheer majesty of the maverick substitute for thought resembles an atomic creator.

Yes, there is a gap, the creation on the one hand and the correlative and vast arenas of integrated and multi-functioning powers and wisdom needed to put it there.

There is another: the design^*1. Creation, the propulsion into existence, it is one thing. Then, creation involves design, to some extent, and sometimes magnificently. Of course you can doodle on a pad while you talk on the telephone, and that can be fun and in a way, creation. I remember a medical specialist doing that, perhaps frustrated. However this is not the scope of what we actually have. It is rather more than doodling that enables us to converse right now: it involves, logic, symbolic communication, systematic thought, personalities with consciousness, spirits with survey properties, patience, interchange of underlying thought modes without static or at least without tune out, ethical and moral principles duly applied; and this is merely the beginning. Yes, it is more than doodling.

Such a complex, purpose-driven, system-enabled, personally related totality does not create itself, the only other alternative, since matter does not have these qualities, and wanting it to evolve, is not the same as finding it is able to do so! Nor does nothing secure matter in the first place. On this, let us look at an excerpt, below, slightly adjusted for this purpose, considering the obfuscatory art-work of the diligent anti-creationist in the drugs and stimuli of reason-forsaking misalliance with chaotic thought and disenfranchised life.

With such things in mind, we turn now to a series of excerpts from other works on this site, which consecutively explore arenas, worlds, dimensions and perspectives found in such a diversity in such integrality as is ours, before making a final assessment. Before  Number 4, there is another entrant.

 

THE FURTHER SERIES OF CONSECUTIVE EXCERPTS

 

4

THE GENERATION OF THE DISPOSSESSED

(Barbs ... Appendix 1)

slighted extended

 

The Gap in place of God is the emptiness for the fulness, the imagination for the reality, the despair for the triumph, the woe for the wonder. The generation of ashes finds itself fancy for a time; and then the disrepair of the heartless sets in, or the disruption of the dispersed, or the shadows of the illusions, the once gleaming aluminium foil of the pretences and pretensions, the false ideals, the imagined hopes fall twisted, making crazy patterns, some gleaming for the time in the dirt, some "successfully professional", some already visible relics.

And where are those patterns? In the dust. Wandering man disdains his dust and imagines his life is self-productive in the generation of the dispossessed; but the dust is the material and God is the Creator both of dust and of destiny, of soul, and mind, and spirit and emotion, of feeling and of the whole architecture which is the basis of the product called man. Ignoring reality is the stuff of dreams and the site of irrationality.

What is it like? It is like a pen that thinks, but disdains to write, for it conceives there is no author, and it was produced in a fit of abstraction by what is not there. So it is used to dig the fields, and it leaks and it breaks and the maker of pens is disdained, or despised but in any case not considered. Ink-blots are then the least of the troubles, for the 'advanced' case where paper is still considered 'relevant'. The philosophy of the relevant replaces the spirit of service; but relevant to what?

"Just keeping fit, Uncle!" says the young man in Punch, as he goes off to tennis in the days of mere gadding about. "Fit for what!" returns his senior. Fit to be considered, in that case, recklessly irresponsible as his glamour world of self-entertainment misuses the joy of sport by substituting the life of self-satisfying balms, which turn sour. Survival of what? of ashes, of twisted metal, of dirty houses, of broken staircases to the loft, to the skies, so that the light is not seen in the sunken basements, carved out, hewn from below for the purpose?

 

THE FOLLY OF THE MOCKERY

The architecture of the house is ignored.

The schema of the life^*2 is disregarded.

• Its physics in leverage and mechanics,

• its inorganic chemistry in interactions and reactions,

• its organic chemistry in manufacture of life materials,

• its circuitries for transmission and reception,

• its sensors for assessment,

• its nuclei for information storage,

• its engineering capacities for continuation of the scenario,

• its feelings for response,

• its analytical thought world for mental review,

• its moral grounds for integral understanding of purpose,

• its spiritual dynamics for assessment of proposals, construction of response, disposition of personality, response at group level, guidance of direction, return to the Maker, deliverance of understanding:

• its worlds of function, all inter-related by the integral design, the overall co-ordinating triumph which is man, the person whose mind and feelings and body and heart and soul and life in the vision and vigour of multitudes of planes and facets:

it is ignored like dust, returns to dust; but not only to dust.
 
 

THE VISIONARY VICES

The mental wreckage is a destructive act; the visionary vices are a warping distortion, the wild sprees are a frustrated dysfunction, the blindness to fact is a toxic violation of the power to imagine, the assurance of godlike powers is the denial of God, and the denial of God, even when a false god who has no power, no creation and no judgment is imagined, is the assertion of delusion.

Deluged with delusion, what do you expect? Will not even mentally active professional people of discipline in the mental world, show their barrenness in the moral and the spiritual, because they do not understand that it is there.

Immersing themselves in 'Nature', which is somehow made into something real, rather than a series of products inter-related by plan in the multitudes of inter-meshing worlds, with which they live, they look to the visible, as if a pen worshipped paper when its maker would use it, and the two went off on a spree of finding out what "life is like". It is then like absconding with equipment, with madness for vision and recklessness for reason.

The feelings that go with the exultant trip are those of ruin, when the fling is past, and of ashes, when the fire is burnt. Some fires burn more slowly, and the bitterness of facing death without reason becomes a lust for life that will pay thousands for drugs to extend it just a little. Some rejoice like Solomon in their works (though in Ecclesiastes he saw through its vanity to the truth); but the worker is ignored, and his destiny is like that of any thief. To the productive worker in Song of Solomon, comes this word: "Your own vineyard you have neglected!"

To use the words given: "I have not taken care of my own vineyard" (Song of Solomon 1:6). What if it is not remedied? When judgment is delayed, it is not dismissed.

The dispossessed are repossessed, if not by demons, as we see more and more frequently, in higher and higher profile, then by lurid dynamics, broken systems out of control surging and charging, like an aircraft on one engine, inadequate and only partial; or a power aircraft acting as a glider which looks to the drafts which cannot lift, because it is constructed for power; and because the engines are not there - but only things that happen with a roar, so that no oil or service is provided as the pilotless craft crazes through the skies of life into the oblivion of dramas ending in death.

Perhaps it crashes into other craft before it hits the ground.

Captured  consciousness and captivating allurements alike are a fitful prelude.
 
 

THE STARK HULKS OF MISEDUCATED MISSIONARIES

Stark hulks without life, they are often taught by miseducated missionaries to believe in their sacred selves, their internal fulfilment, their hold on life; so that? so that they may look to their survival as relics, spiritual outcasts, demented meddlers with mind without the knowledge of its place in the hierarchy of the soul, and the place of the soul in the agile vigours of the spirit, and the placement of the spirit in the hands of God who made it: for the realities of fellowship with the One who having given it meaning, means nothing else! (Cf. Ecclesiastes 11:9-12:13).

 

5

FROM   PROSPECT, RETROSPECT ... Ch. 3, Epilogue, *1

Spiritual Spewing and Renewing

Appreciation and Depreciation

On spirit, consciousness and conscience, for example,
as well  as consisting, existing and persisting,
see Glory, Vainglory and Goodness Chs. 1, 2, 3
and with this more broadly,
 Dizzy Dashes and  ... the  Brilliant Harmony of  Inevitable Truth Ch. 6.

 

When the conscientious becomes the mere flow of consciousness and  desire, remnants of morals, bits of thought, left-overs from truth, banners of belligerence, torches for burning opposition, stages for dictation, then you have what is increasingly, the modern quasi-democratic norm.

The text background to *1 as above, is as follows.

Chapter 3  concerned Australia, but since Australians are persons,
and things are moving like a tornado, in the cultural  misconceptions of persons:

	making them in much like rather dumb robots, instead of exceedingly ingenious creators, not only of thoughts about
	making things, but those about
	making myths, like organic evolution, starting with nothing from anywhere, since there is nowhere from which to obtain it at the first, in that model, other than begging the question in bits, or altogether,  according to taste,
	and making hay while the sun shines ...

it is well to look sharply at our situation. That is, doing so while the mining figures shine, and debts multiply, till stubble only remains from the heyday. Invite living on this scale, and the minor key awaits.

In considering this sweep to devastation in  Australia, but not here alone, one rather worse than that suffered by Hiroshima,  since that stopped at destruction of buildings and health and life. This ravagement, however, is moving into the domain, quite explicitly of eternal  life,  the lodging place of the spirits^*1 which adorn man, and which he so deeply and  so  often disadorns. In this context,  we have come to man's destiny and its spacious and varied grounds, not all  of them to be desired,  as with life here.

This naturally drew attention  to  the working of  the Creator in creating minds, spirits, morals, will and workings, logic and its application, structuring with the methodological containment of causality and organising with the brilliance of mathematical empowerment and engineering facilitation  so  far  above our own. This is such  as to reflect in our kindergarten of growing knowledge, our aspirations to reach Primary School one day as a race.

For  all that, our start is impressive, given our waywardness, but not so when given the image of God prowess conferred at the first, and being defiled in endless international ravenings and national depravities to the  last. Thus not only in vapid  thoughts,  but in constructions our productions are left crimped by comparison with the work of deity, not in boasting so much as in  effectiveness and  comprehensiveness. Crimped ? yes they are increasingly self-immolated, buried by belligerence, a mockery by devilries. The world is under threat from the enemy within, and man reels into the dreams of unrealism, and the realities of trembling,  pain and anguish, starvation for some and physical obliteration for others, with increased appetite for spiritual  pollution, and  resultant nausea.

Where is the answer ? It is as it has been these several millenia.

This brings us to  the  testable and verifiable aspect of  all religion, the  sole testable word claiming God, our  God as the author, as in SMR, while that  leads on  to the entire  schema for  salvation which God has instituted, He making laws, laudability and spirits, options and powers of  thoughts for His creation, the same making a mess, amid the grandeur of the better aspects  of man's own productions, one of which most markedly is his plight!

In  covering in short form,  some aspects of this, there is scope for what is in essence an outline. Let us  consider one  such presentation. After what has gone before  in  this and allied chapters, such as  Ch.  1 and 3 above, this is purely  summative.

OUTLINE OF THE SALVATION THAT PERSISTS PAST  THE CREATION OF MAN AND IS AVAILABLE FROM T HE CREATOR

God chose us who believe in Him, His Son,  Jesus Christ,  and in His demonstrated word^*2,  the Bible.

This He did:

	first, in creating us at all, an innovative act, absolutely.
	second, in  pre-planning the Gospel to be  what it is,  to cover  misuse of freedom, to be wrought  through Christ Jesus, with all of love, grace and mercy, and no works or merit of man's own, racially or individually: for this elected and selective purpose,  accepting only His own labours to save.
	thirdly, by acting in  Christ with the principles of  love that while it never forces, where it belongs, it never fails.
	fourthly, by finding and knowing us outside this realm of sin, both sovereignly and graciously,  through these means, before history was.
	and fifthly,  in applying the  result infallibly after time  was born, with the relish of  repentance seen from the first, applied to the last,
	and  all this to His own glory,  for He IS glorious.

Naturally, time did not limit this,  His finding and knowing His own, so  that the  progression here is logical,  rather than chronological. Similarly,  the  progression in destiny is logically from being desired,  with all in heaven  and on earth, to being found or being involved in the eternal elective, foreknown to God^*3, the option, to  STAY lost.

Thus is

the essential  liberty that belongs  to the image of God placed in man, duly preserved^*4, rather than smashed, contorted or aborted;

the  sovereignty of God, who does what He will, exhibited;

the purity of love that never forces,  affirmed;

and the foreknowledge of God wedded to the pervasiveness
of His outgoing love,
that  of Him who IS love, applied to those who are His,
with infallible  grace.

So  did foreknowledge duly lead to  predestination, to  the call in Christ,
and  to justification, yes and  to glorification,
both that which has already come, and that which is to come.

 

6

FROM CH 8 OF

NOT ONLY IS GOD GREAT BUT GLORIOUS

ON NATIONAL  CONSCIOUSNESS

AND RACIAL FLIGHTINESS

(somewhat extended)

Judgment can never  do better than to be according to truth (Romans 2:1ff.); and  man can never do worse than  face this without a basis, shown by reason, provided by revelation,  applied by faith, covered by reality, one which operates not in mere symbolism but in power of  thought,  word and deed. The Bible  provides this, and it is never the desire to  FORCE people to follow it by sanctions and prison sentences and torture of the mind, some of which is here already in a secular government of its own bent, but rather to present and offer, to  call and win. If some used its name for its violation, that is so in many realms, a sort of plagiarism not to the point. This is what the Bible says (cf. SMR pp. 58 - 71).

Judgment without mercy for that sinner, man, is like a fire, without water or extinguishing means, enveloping a village. For this all of all  races now on this earth are liable, a very levelling situation! It is this available access to divine mercy, this acknowledgement of the God who  MADE the land, and has stated ownership of all the land and lands (Exodus 19:5^*5) that is skirted like an island eyed  for possession. Indeed, it is this God who delights to help people of any race,  find Him ("taste and see that the Lord is good," (Psalm 34:8), "Blessed is the man who trusts in Him."

This creates for all who acknowledge Him in truth according to His word, a unity of races (cf. Galatians 3:28). God meanwhile inspects  and considers  ALL races before the end (Acts 17:26-28). It is vain trifling to be carried away by divisive concepts of races. That is not where reason and revelation alike, lie. It is folly to  exalt them or to hallow them; for if they live on  their own, vanity crushes them; and if they are lauded, unreality is their ruin. It is entirely parallel to make a national flair or custom or culture into an item for fealty, for indirect god that it is, it is merely ashes as they fade in the night, deliberate negative option for  deliverance, dreams before the day, expensive, extrusive of the psyche, sightless and intoxicated with self-assurance, whether that self be national or personal or social. Consciousness can become national in intent, given some  coercion and pride, and when it lives on itself, it is singing hymns while the Titanic goes down; except that they are paeans to human praise, not hymns to  God in this case.

 

7

FROM CH. 9 OF

NOT ONLY IS GOD  GREAT

 However, within the truth, the love finds no restriction, and this is the nature of what faces man from the side of deity, in the Gospel. It was a love of such a testable character that when ONCE He sent His Word as man, and as His only begotten Son, even then He sacrificed Him, showing deity versus death with victory as man. This covered the case of man in all justice, so that mercy could reign in all liberty and man be restored in all reality. This was not in poetry, but through  the rasping breaths of the dying Christ, and the simple totality of His challenge to show life afterwards: "Handle Me and see!" 

These were amongst the most explosive words ever uttered, simple amid vastness, direct amidst fears, superbly assured amidst bewilderment, sovereign and supreme, as when a high jump specialist clears the bar.

What then ? There is NO desire presented in this giving context, in this loving context, for the world to be judged. On the contrary, in John 3:16ff., we see specifically that in the coming of Christ to this earth God was acting in this very motivation, that the world be not judged. This was the way and the only way to achieve this for any, and in fact, for many; but since most declined, then the other option is at length followed. This love however was the flush of fervour; while that departure of many is the duty of dismissal. Yet the love is in command, and only where rejected in its practical  application, is the thrust to save at last complete and completed in those won (John 3:15-19,36).

Right back to eternity it goes, the inexorable refusal seen in this,  "I would ... you would not," Matthew 23:37, this preference for darkness the criterion of differential judgment.

With what anguish does the Lord leave His desire, that all should be reconciled to Himself, even in heaven and earth (Colossians 1:19ff.). How then is hell to be found ? Indeed it can happen ONLY IF this gift of eternal life is despised, ignored, passed over (John 15:22 with John 3), as one passes over any opportunity in life, exalted to the heavens though it be, and the postage for this gift is via death and in the format of resurrected life, not left to rot, but raised to live. His desire is our liberty in love.

Anyone doubting the love of God has this as the referee, reference and testimony. To death, He loves (cf. Song of Solomon 8:6-7). Anyone who wanted to twiddle the dials and bring on deceit, to alter the case, still has death, since deceit has no place, and love knows its own, where it is received in reality, right back to eternity (Ephesians 1:4).

Christianity without the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is bread without flour, wind without medium for it, thought without mind, or sailing ships without sails. It is pivotal, with all things revolving about it, on the one hand, and the death itself in its testimony and purging power, on the other. Small wonder in the irreducible minimum for faith at the outset as in Romans 10:9, belief in this resurrection,  so  starkly defined in the Bible, figures!

Just as the resurrection cannot be rationally dismissed, so the glory of the great God is not subject to scatter-brained denial. The conditions were predicted right down to the body not rotting (Psalm 16), a necessary act to preserve assurance, and one more identikit performance, not easy to bring to pass ... unless you are God.

Mortality becomes immortality, so breaching the appalling horror of CEASING to be a person with power and scope,  suddenly and peremptorily dismissed, disrupted, though the thoughts reached to the heavens, and the love purged, rose to the Lord. The axe of death is thus blunted and its power removed by the sin-bearing of Christ, and the intensive horror of the sudden rupture from consciousness, life and God, is overcome. It is overcome in one day indeed (cf. Zechariah 3:9, Hebrews 9), though its results are for ever, in eternal life (I Corinthians 15).

This gift renders stark the silliness of sin, which sells the Saviour for an absurd price of its own (mirrored in Judas' deal with the priests, pre-characterised in the prediction of Zechariah 11:8-13), vis--vis the cost of love, and its willingness, with the treasured regard of God for man; and it shows the folly of not seeking to show it to one another.

It is, like the power of God, what works; and as it made us, so it remakes us and makes us who believe, to be transformed and formed anew and taught and shaped so that we can see where it was dark, and grow in stature towards the ways of the Lord, where we sank far below, and appreciate one another, when this becomes an  exercise in joy, where sin no longer blinds the eyes or binds the hand (Philippians 3:12-14, Ephesians 3:14). 

Man continually and often recklessly aspires to greatness and  glory, and in forsaking the source of his power and psyche and desires, he has turned aside to vainglory and viciousness, contest and competition of spurious, furious irrelevance, killing and maiming only to grow old and die, disregarded. The greatness is there, but in the Lord, and it is not alone, as in some tyrant, but wedded to glory, for it is His goodness which astounds, and this as well as cruelty has some mirror amid man.

The provisions of God are precious and the God whose they are is infinite in glory, glorious in majesty, splendid in compassion and magnificent in mercy. Without Him, man constantly and now more and more dramatically as a race is manifesting himself to be inglorious, often horrendous, like a car out of control, with a mad driver, heading down a concrete road to the ocean immediately below. It is a form of madness that he so acts, his churning and toiling inner forces in disarray, his guidance system awry and his glory coming in pants as he destroys and is destroyed.

It is time to awake and find the Lord, to repent and seek the Lord, to believe in His provision in Jesus Christ, and through faith in Him without adornment, live life as it is given,  life which you would WANT to last forever!

Never blame God. HE is glorious.

 

8

 

 

CONVENIENT FILE LIST

Below are some files relating to consciousness and  conscience in that milieu.

The Lights and Perfections in the Lord Ch. 9,

Dig Deeper ... Ch. 1, Ch. 2,

Deity and Design, 2 and 8.

Possess Your Possessions (PP)  Volume 4, Ch. 4 esp. ,   3,  
Volume  6,  Ch.  8 , Volume 7, Ch.  1, esp. *1A,
Volume 10, Appendix, Volume 12, Ch. 6,

The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of  God  Ch. 2, Ch. 7 (words, works, wit), Ch. 6,
Ch. 1 (review reductionisms, matter, mind and spirit),

Calibrating Myths ... Ch.  2 (machining mind, avoiding mindless machinations),

Stepping Out for Christ, Ch. 8 (dialogue),

Not Only is God Great, but Glorious Ch. 5, esp. *2,

SMR Ch. 4, Extension,

The gods of naturalism have no  go!  20 (dialogue), cf. PP Volume 9, Ch. 2,
The gods of naturalism have no go!   36 (day-dreaming and nano-fragment), 37, 21

Christ's Ineffable Peace Ch.    1,  Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch.     7 . The second relates closely to Le Carré's creation. The others also provide basis for understanding of the issues involved.

On spirit, consciousness and conscience, for example,
as well  as consisting, existing and persisting,
see Glory, Vainglory and Goodness Chs. 1,  2, 3,
and with this more broadly,
 Dizzy Dashes and  ... the 

Brilliant Harmony of  Inevitable Truth Ch. 6.

Deliverance from  Disorientation Ch.     1

Glory, Vainglory and Goodness  1 (consciousness, phrases for phases of creation's aspects!)

SMR pp.  . 4-7; 144, 349B, 582ff..

Regarding liberty, moral mandate and consciousness in man, see:

Glory, Vainglory and Goodness Ch.   1,

Christ's Ineffable Peace Ch.    1,  

Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch. 7.

The second relates closely to Le Carré's creation. The others also provide basis for understanding of the issues involved.

 

See also:

Repent or Perish Ch. 7.