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CHAPTER FOUR

THE PERISCOPE OF MAN

CEOs  are always Small Relative to their Buildings

but They Do Run Them

THE SPIRIT OF MAN

In the Index, you will find no less than 50 items on that topic, the spirit of man.

However, just as here is found the underlying essence of man, the directorship and the personal emplacement, the invisible  but activistic enablement of his whole unitary being, it does not cease to be as fascinating as explicative. You do not need to be ignorant of what you are, for all the propaganda pollution of the current Age.

Here then, in man's spirit,  is the site for the function of

	consciousness, such a profound trouble to reductionists*1, of
	conscience,
	imagination,
	placement of priorities,  selection of principles for operation, (including the pretence of having no principle, for even the unprincipled make a principle of that, being their selection - just as you could select to be bankrupt and take suitable steps to achieve that end, fulfil that purpose).
	capacity for confrontation or appreciative commendation,
	moral evaluation,
	divine aspirations on the one hand and revelation on the other.

Here is the life which, like finger-prints for the body is exceptionally revealing (but in its own sphere), impelling and which indeed may be broken, in the sense that an overwhelming thrust to do its own will, may be forfeited (for good, relative to its proper Source), or prepared for ultimate collapse, as it becomes unresourced.

It is in this domain of spirit (as invisible as courage, cowardice, peacefulness, hatred and other qualities of a person, yet available for material intent), that what drives man, or may attempt to do so. It is here that it is to be found, as effective as hope, as fallen as listlessness (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 9), as beautiful as the reflections on  an Alpine lake, or as derelict as a dump. You say, At least it is not monism. We have already seen this to be impossible, a pinnacle of reductionism. Another says perhaps, Ah, this is merely dualism.

Not at all. There is mind and body and spirit, a trifecta. It is so because these are the separable functionalities. Some may say, Brain and mind are inseparable: try killing your brain and see if your spirit minds it.

They are however certainly separable. You may 'lose your mind' or become 'mindless' while still you.

They are unique co-operative units, mind, spirit and on this earth, brain. They work together and anything may be corrupted, as in other teams, such as team spirit, reliability, and by many affairs, such as self deception, laziness, slackness, carelessness. You see it rather readily in football. There is a physical football; and one may say, THAT is what the game is all about. But this is not so; it is what the team pursues. That it is, which is a decision. In the meantime, the mind of man may work with craft and superb or ludicrous strategy, mental discernment or bucolic remissness, and beyond this, the mental, there are considerations of spirit, which may baulk, abort, distort the strategies of the mind, such as gambling abuse about the game, or personal pride surpassing team objectives and so on, spiritual categories which quite simply may be the top of greatness, or at the base, with ignored warranties for action, or the manipulating with or by the sold spirit, the sordid soul, addressed by a lying spirit.

The important point to note on this trifecta is this. You have to have what BINDS it together. Parts in association need a unity for operation. They are not here stuck with glue, or junked or jumbled together. As is customary in man (and not man alone), there is always what some might call the persona, the personal, the organisation about which parts are sustained. In a car in action, similarly, there is the engine, braking system, the body and the driver (with or without a dispensable aid by program made by man). There is more, but not less.

The driver may seem very ordinary amidst all the machinery; and indeed in this case, he has his own body; but what is quite extraordinary about him in that setting is this. He directs it all. True, the engine or braking system or body may break down; but this does remove its nature, and if it needs fixing, it may be fixed by another person, and then go on operating in association, but in terms of one person. That person may be assailed, or assaulted; but the principle remains the same. It is just a matter of which person in that case, secures the car.

With man, the spirit is not only a component of the whole, and equipped with it the imagination to try to vie with God, or worship, or treat Him with contempt or as exempt from thought or any other shiftiness or shiftlessness or some other form of  appreciation. It is also the meaning of man. That is how he is as a man, discernible in the end, the means of expression being instrumental and not directive. If his spirit envisages in its imagination and desire, to become as a god, and it yet is not, then there are consequences; and these will be felt by his spirit in due course. Sever and be clever! may be a motto. However, this is not a profundity but a denudation of man, leaving him adrift and perhaps wondering about that, or complaining, or glorying in it. Leaving your Maker is  like having a car, but leaving your service agency, manufacturer and all the skills associated with this, and burying yourself in a do-it-yourself manual, some of the original instruction books remembered, some imagined and some rather blurry, the reason for morals worldwide being stressed, variable but having certain common features, where the blurs differ, while the underlying force and life lapses.

God IS a Spirit. All the temporariness of matter and its energic levels is missing. He was not made, and if He had been, and He were material,  it would not be god but some derivative of which we spoke. The Spirit of God may act on the spirit of man, refreshing it, illuminating it, giving it comprehension, battering its pride,  rebuking its presumption, endorsing its sincerity or embracing its faithfulness, or whatever else is the focus of His personal Being. Curry may stir the imagination in dreams, or some other foods, but it is there to be stirred. Also there may be a stirring from guilt, search for answer, a sense of impending trouble, perhaps justified by decisions having been too gallantly or deviously made. Such things as Carl Jung showed in cases cited in his works, may indeed operate in the night. The spirit of man may also bow to the inevitable (because he did not first bow to God), betray its possessor or his friends, with whatever prioritisation or de-prioritisation may occur, when this or that pressure is applied, to be resisted or given ownership rights.

As Ecclesiastes point out, the spirit of man, when the time comes for dissolution of the partnership of mind, body and spirit, returns to God who made it, and the body to the dust from which it was made. In a degree of parallel, a hat designer may rapidly remove the materials of some exquisitely designed hat, and leave but a crumpled mass, without the éclat and appeal, which though not measurable in inches, gave the hat what its first purpose and characteristic was.

The spirit of man can stand up like a lion, or hop about like a flea, exalt itself like a tyrant, humble itself like a fawn, be endearing like a dog, faithful like the skies that continue, or fickle like a designing man or woman, he perhaps about his best job prospects from  time to time,  and she in her own way, much the same. Or the positions may reverse, a popular variety show today.

The body can react chemically to the movement of the mind of man, perhaps to anger, with hormones or ulcers, though the cause of the latter is being reviewed lately. For all that, the tensions can interfere with normal working, working in their own domains, and so lead to weakness with its own rewards. The spirit may react in deviousness, wholesomeness or cunning from the discernments of the mind and, mixed with irresolution on the one hand, or domineering passion on the other, may become itself a casualty, unreliable or wandering or inciting to actions, arresting or divesting whatever is the normal domain of the spirit. Fixations can control it, and  the spirit of man  may grieve or glory.

Man is a person. His spirit is the administrator, the brain is the multi-task repository for memory, the respondent to  spirit, or a suggestion source from availabilities brought to light for its use, the collation resource for searching, the intimate assistant of mind. It is just one type of resource for the activities of person, standardised in the case of man. The brain may be shamelessly abused by drugs or ambition, or negligently undeveloped by ease. If so, it then limits the spirit of man, like a diseased body, and both may be at risk through purposeful ignorance, the person shielding itself from truth for the sake of 'peace' or power or  wealth or simply the pleasure of being unstirred, like tea, if it were personal, not wanting to be stirred because it did not want the honey to be mixed up with it.

The spirit may blight the brain, condition the mind, teach itself to be wily or workaholic, settle down to  low morals and lower purposes. It is a resource for purpose, and the mind may bring grounds for purpose vigorously to its attention; but  the spirit needs to respond, rather than Hamlet-ise. It has a work. Leave it undone and there are results, as in leaving your house unpainted till the wood rots.

Giving meaning to the trifecta is the God who made it, and did so in a way so that it may relate not only to itself, but to Him (or not), gifted with choice to satisfy its woes or whims (cf. Proverbs 1), or to seek Him. From Him comes the perspective of truth, and through Him the power to meet the (naturally) impossible with the Maker's disposal, dispersion or overcoming of challenge. For Him comes the spirit of joy in His salvation, if this be taken, and thus the information of entry into His grace and path; and this is able to convey the purpose for the soul concerned. The soul, by the way, is the name often used for the whole living being called man, on an individual basis, operating as one before God.

Even this unifying spirit operative throughout the entirety of a person, may be broken into segments, like a piano broken in half, ugly to see, horrible to 'play' and a pity to behold. You may find therefore elements of double-mindedness is early cases, or even of split personality, schizophrenia and the like, a disease with many contributory causes. You can give names but the elemental basis is always there for break-ups and wake-ups, for woe and for weal. Beyond is the unity of God, who can not only confer unity on the soul, but renew it in regeneration so that its woes are countermanded and its way is opened up, like a path suddenly found out of a forest, into the arresting world of light.

The leader in such matters, is the Builder of all the matters, incarnate in personal surveyal, superintendance and salvation by ransom, paying the price of sin and securing the peace of pardon from those willing to accept it who also DO take it. You may be quite willing to take an anti-biotic, to speak physically, but here as there, it does not work until it IS taken. Fluttering about the door is mere double-mindedness or weakness. You enter or you do not (cf. John10:9,27-28); but if you do, then your are changed, accepted, regenerated, made new; which was entirely needed. For man is astray, and his monumental slaughters, so vast in the last 100 years in particular, as his power and surveyal capacities improve; but his heart does not. This simply illustrates the fact that this world has been given a freedom for evil as well as good, and divorce from God merely removes the remedy.

It is necessary to secede from spurious supposition, and find peace where it may be found, rather than moral-immoral dramas of self-stylisation and autonomous glory and grief. The truth will not bend; and it is glorious in grace, wonderful in place, tender in ultimacy, but available for no fooling.

NOTE

*1

Reduction, say of a grade for some academic work, as from an A to a B result, is clear enough. What however
is this reductionism ? It is a philosophic mode, a manner of approach to the data concerning a topic, and the one here in view is man.

It means that instead of beholding, considering, studying and incorporating EVERY main feature of man in an effort to comprehend him, you consider only what appeals to you, or fulfils some partial motive or aim less than the truth.

If there is a programmatic side to some aspects of man, you want perhaps that there be no other. If a personal side, the preference may be that it be all personal. If there is a learning side, your fascination with this may ignore all the givens, the grand quanta of things beyond learning as if it were a work of discovery that makes up life altogether, and with your own authority dismiss 'authoritarianism' and so rebel against what you are. Indeed, there are almost unlimited ways of distorting, aborting, contorting and disporting the evidence. In particular, reductionistic reactionaries, may wish to have man arrive from, amount to or lead on with ... nothing.

The theoretical pantomime can be pursued in origins, outcomes, methods of study, significance of methods of study and so on, SO LONG AS all that is in view is not taken, but only a selection.

In the process, convolutions of matter may be ignored as to their powers; and their facilities for action personally, confused with what acts upon them; the equipment for the agent, and mental and spiritual domains may be ignored both in the creation of man and in his operation: this may be done,  though the desire itself to do just that, IS itself spiritual.

It is a cut-out option, a choice in terms of preference and personal principles,  which has nothing to do with equipment, but choice. As to a particular preference, it is conceptually discerned, mentally analysed and personally thrust upon the equipment for its execution in practice, as a sovereign disposes of tax wealth which comes into his hands. As a means, this wealth certainly applies his desire; yet it is not itself that desire, however the means for its expression may be contrived, however brilliant. It is instrumental, not accidental, intentional not forced. Purpose is not found in matter, nor as has been shown, is it missing in man whose use of matter for his mind and objectives for his spirit is his own boon or contortion.  His spirit, like many other things, visible and invisible, and we use both all the time, is subject to error even at its own level of choice - choosing what is wrong or wronging what is choice - and just as its formulation and formation in its institution is of a unique quality both in kind and degree of gift, so is its destruction operative or its consummation, according to the purpose of its Maker. It is a dimension beyond our power to contrive; but just as its arrival is at the choice of the One who made it, so is its continuance, and the mode of it.

That He has love for man is the assured biblical reality (as shown for example in SMR, TMR), and that He so acted in practical sacrifice is the personal offer to man. Here is the height of option (cf. John 3), and the epitome of gift, even that it may be refused, and that either with indifference or venom.