A Theory of the Relationship of the Soul to the Brain, and Memory

      I had an interesting thought for an alternative theory of memory. What if the brain was more like a Chromebook than a Desktop? That is, what if the soul or "psyche" was stored "in the cloud" as opposed to "on the device"? It's been fairly well known that the storage of memory in the brain is still something of a mystery as, while different parts of the brain are clearly dedicated to motor control, sensory inputs, cognitive processing, threat assessment, and so on; there yet remains to be found a memory center of the brain, that is, a dedicated storage device or "hard disk". In this case, the hardware of the brain would maintain a constant connection (possibly due to quantum entanglement?) to the majority of the storage and software of the soul (except perhaps a kind of "BIOS" which allows the brain to function and connect in a minimal way) which is held "in the cloud," the brain itself writing, rewriting, and adding to that software throughout the person's life.

     The theory of memory comes in because the soul, potentially being eternal and therefore not subject to the motion of time in and of itself, is simultaneously present at all points of that person's existence. The soul itself is still present in what the brain, being subject to the motion of time, considers the past. The further through time the brain moves away from a certain moment, the harder it is to remember because all conditions around it, including the structure and makeup of the brain itself, are dynamic and constantly in flux as they are subject to the motion of time. 

     Those memories which are associated with strong emotion, and in particular survival emotions, are retained the longest and sharpest because those have the biggest imprint on the soul, that is, the soul is still being forced to contend with them by the brain at the moment they are happening. As a person changes over time, some memories are harder to recall because the brain itself has changed so much that it can no longer process that software as cleanly or as accurately as it does in the moment when it happens.

     This might also, hypothetically, allow for the idea of reincarnation as well, and why the brain frequently does not synchronize with the previous brain's events and experiences stored with the soul. As I have written before, the brain needs common symbols and frames of reference in order to process information. The soul is still present in that distant past, but because of the extreme differences physically, culturally, linguistically, and so on, the most which can be processed with any accuracy is emotions and feelings, which then the person in this life has no idea where they come from. It might also explain why there are more accounts of very young children being able to remember details from a past life which are more difficult to recall by adults later in life. And the more recent the past life, the more linguistically and culturally similar the past life, the more clear details which can be remembered. In particular, I remember a recent article (CNN I think), within the last year, about a very young boy in the South (3 or 4 years old) who began talking about the murder of his mother's brother as though it had happened to him, and who pointed out the murderer in question.

     This is just a hypothesis, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But it is an intriguing concept. As to what the "cloud" is that the soul might be stored in, my thought is that the soul would be stored and held within God, connecting with the brain within the body, but never actually changing "location." Again, just a hypothesis.

How do you Forgive the Deepest Hurts?

     How do you forgive the deepest hurt committed against you? By choosing to love the person who committed it. By choosing to see the person as someone with their own hurts, their own history, and saying, "I understand why you are doing what you are doing, and I cannot say that, in your shoes, I wouldn't have chosen the same path." Love, the word actually used in the Greek text, has little to do with romantic attachment or familial affection, and everything to do with choosing to have compassion for the other person.

     How do you forgive a murderer, a rapist, a person who has become a monster? You look deeply into that person and recognize that they were not always so. You look at the experiences of the child they were, the neurological considerations of their biology, the education and what they know or knew at the time; you look at everything and really ask yourself, would I have done any differently were I them?
We always want to say, "Yes, of course I would have done differently." Ah, but you are a different person, with a different past history, a different brain chemistry, a different set of learning experiences from them. Of course you would have done differently, you were never that person.
     The only path through the bitterness, the anger, and the hurt which we feel is by choosing to love the other person. By setting that person as the object of our compassion. Fear is always the root of things like anger, frustration, hurt, and bitterness. But Love tosses fear outside, always, and because it tosses fear outside, things like anger, bitterness, and hatred are tossed with it. These cannot exist where there is no fear, and thus they cannot exist where love and compassion are present.
     Loving the other person isn't always about the other person, but it is always about ourselves. Loving the other person may change the other person, but it will change ourselves. The other person may or may not understand, or even have knowledge of this love. That is not always the point. They may be so twisted within themselves, and thus dangerous to themselves and others, that it may not matter whether they recognize it or not. Again, that is not the point. Loving the other person is about overcoming your own fear, your own anger, and your own hatred. If it overpowers theirs as well, so much the better.
Love always lets go. Fear always clings. Fear always holds on to wrongs, love always releases them into the void. It is because of fear we become either attached or averse; fear of loss of something we perceive as beneficial, or fear of gain of something we perceive as harmful. But attachment, either positive or negative, is always driven by fear.
     God loves and is love, but He holds no attachments. What need is there for Him to be attached to anything? All things depend on Him for their existence. Nothing is ever lost to Him, but is merely transformed.
     How do you overcome the fear, anger, and hatred from the most grievous of offenses? How do you forgive the one who has caused you the greatest suffering? By choosing to love them, and letting the fear go because of that love.

No One Comes to the Father Except Through Me

      There is no salvation outside of Jesus Christ. This is one of the most basic, foundational understandings of the Christian faith. Jesus Himself said in John 14 that “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and no one comes to the Father except through Me.” We all have a pretty good idea of what traditional Christianity means when it proclaims this. That is, no one goes to heaven unless they, at the very least, profess belief in Jesus Christ.

     But is this what He meant?

     Really, the concept of salvation meaning going to heaven as we now think of it wasn’t within the worldview of the ancient world. The word which we translate as “heaven” actually just means “sky” in nearly every case, and the “sky” is where the divine dwelt in virtually every ancient pantheon (the Greek gods dwelt on Mt. Olympus, but that was still basically in the sky as far as they were concerned). It was where the divine dwelt, but no mortal living or deceased ever set foot there. Mortal souls descended into the underworld to be judged and sent to either paradise, torment, or someplace in between depending on the cultural worldview. The idea that a mortal soul would dwell with the divine after death was foreign to everyone in the first century, either Jew or pagan.

     The concept of a mortal soul going to the realm of the divine after death stems from what Paul says, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” That is, for those who are joined to Christ as part of His body, where He is, they are, and where they are, He is. And so, of course when one of these endures physical death he or she is automatically with Jesus Christ, because they are joined as one thing, one body. It is not a prize to be won, per se, but a fact of their union with Jesus Christ. But the hope of the follower of the Way of Jesus Christ was not even this, but the resurrection and transformation of the physical body as immortal like His body after the resurrection.

     But was this actually the salvation Jesus spoke of? It was certainly the end result, but the salvation He spoke of throughout His life was the rescue from our common malfunction which in Greek is called “hamartia.” Not the consequences of that malfunction, but the malfunction itself. The Way He taught and modeled to His disciples was about letting go of your own will, attachments, and desires, and surrendering all of it to the Father so that He did not say or do anything which the Father did not say or do through Him. It was a voluntary cooperation between Himself and the Father, not forced. And on the night before He was crucified, He explained it in really no uncertain terms that just as He surrendered Himself and remained in the Father, so His disciples were to surrender themselves and remain in Him, so that it would be the Father acting and speaking through the Son, and the Son acting and speaking through the disciple what the Father acted and spoke through Him.

     Paul also elaborates on this heavily in his letters, detailing the internal workings of this salvation from our own malfunction, explaining that the malfuncton itself is both hereditary and biological in nature. And only those who submit themselves, or enslave themselves, to the Spirit of Christ with whom they have been joined will be able to function, to speak or act, apart from that malfunction because it will in fact be the Spirit of Christ, which is without the malfunction, speaking and acting through them.

     So, the salvation which was first proclaimed had very little to do with the afterlife and everything to do with what we do and how we function in this life, in these mortal and physical bodies. It was meant as a final solution to the problem of the human malfunction which, as it was voluntary, would not violate our free will. As long as we voluntarily cooperated with the Spirit of Christ within us, our malfunction would be rendered inert and unmanifested. Once we chose to not cooperate, it would manifest itself again.

     And it is this salvation, this voluntary possession and control by the Spirit of Christ which bypasses our own malfunctioning biology, which is impossible without Jesus Christ. There are things like meditation and philosophy which can mitigate our malfunctioning behavior, rules and laws which can restrain harmful behavior, but it is only this cooperation with the Spirit of Christ which can bypass the malfunctioning source of behavior altogether. It is this salvation which He and His Apostles taught first and foremost, and everything else which happens including the union with Jesus Christ as a part of His body, including being present with Him wherever He is whether in the body or outside of it, and including the final transformative resurrection to be like Him in every way is a byproduct, a consequence of this submission and cooperation with the Spirit of Christ within us.

     And it is this salvation, this rescue from our own malfunctioning selves, which is the most important to understand, to preach, and to practice. If we understanding nothing else about salvation, if we understand nothing else about theology, if we are going to call ourselves true disciples of Jesus Christ then we must, absolutely must, understand this.

A Ramble about Human Language and Theology

The problem with doing theology and then comparing notes with others is that human language is completely inadequate for the task. Any human language. We could literally be describing the exact same thing, but use such wildly differing descriptions that we argue militantly about what we've observed and experienced. Why is this? Because of what language is, and how it works at the most basic level.

     A language, as such, is essentially a group of symbols whose meaning has been mutually agreed upon by two or more parties. This is true whether those symbols are composed of sounds which can be heard, or written, drawn, or engraved pictures or characters which can be seen. Thus in English, we have the written symbol "bird," which we have agreed represents a vocalized labial stop, an unconstrained sound, a liquid sound made with the tongue curled against the hard palate of the mouth, and a vocalized dental stop. Further we have agreed that both written symbol and the sounds it represents themselves represent a warm blooded two legged vertebrae with wings, feathers, and a beak, which may or may not be capable of self-powered flight. But for the Chinese speaker, the audible symbol is something like "niao," and the visual symbol is something else altogether.

     What these symbols which we have agreed upon represent come from the things we experience with our five senses. What we have smelled, what we have touched, what we have tasted, what we have seen, and what we have heard all become symbols stored in our brains. Our brains then use these symbols to process other symbols and information which we encounter.

     The human brain however, can only process and describe something using the symbols it has, and the symbols it has are limited to our three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. A concept like Eternity, even when experienced as Eternity, must still be filtered through those symbols which the brain has at its disposal. As a result, if one's internal set of symbols, or internal language doesn't match someone else's internal language exactly, one person will not fully understand what the other person is trying to describe and may misunderstand it completely.

      One analogy of this deficiency might be the color "blue." Most ancient languages, Greek in particular, have no word for "blue." This was not because "blue" did not exist, but they simply did not experience it as a separate color. In order to describe it, they used terms like "wine dark" or "the color of sapphires" and other similar descriptions. As a result, this could lead to confusion about what color someone might have been trying to describe a thing. And even with English having this symbol "blue" there can still be some confusion as some people see and experience color differently from another, and of course there are different shades, and still, one person might swear something was "green" while another will swear it is in fact "blue."

     Spiritual realities take place in more dimensions than we as human beings can experience, and because we cannot experience them, we have no symbols to accurately describe things within them. With no common frame of reference, no common "lexicon" if you will, there is no way to really describe with any accuracy what one sees and hears when the veil is lifted for that person. We have the English symbol "Eternity," for example, but we have no functional, agreed upon experience to attach to it, and so we resort to different descriptions like "timeless," "the ever present now," "all of time happening at once," "outside of time and space," and so on. And none of these descriptions presents a clear and accurate meaning to our brains because our brains can't experience it through their inputs, the five senses.

     And so, when someone does have an experience with God where the veil is pulled back, they fumble and grasp for ways to describe it. And sometimes, the way they describe things is different from the accepted descriptions we have agreed upon through study, opinion, and mutual discussion whether or not we have had such an experience ourselves.

     Another analogy which comes to mind is the old one about the blind men and the elephant. There are a group of blind men who are trying to describe an elephant, but they of course cannot see the animal. So one describes the elephant like a rope, feeling its tail. One describes it like a wall, feeling its side. Still another describes it like a tree feeling its leg, and still another describes it like a hose feeling its trunk. All are attempting to describe the elephant accurately, but are unable to do so because they can only describe what they've experienced using the symbols of things they have themselves previously experienced.

     This is why attempting to maintain a strict dogmatic theology, a strict description barring all others, simply doesn't work when dealing with the Reality. This is the reason why one's personal theology must always be held as being able to adapt, change, and grow as one experiences God in different ways more and more.

On the Meaning of the Word "Heresy"

 

     The words "heresy" and " heretic" in the New Testament are badly misunderstood by most today. Most believe they have to do with false teaching and false teachers. There's a new thing going around saying they have to do with "choosing" and making a choice. But neither of these things is really correct where the Greek terms used in the NT are concerned.

      The word "hairesis" in Greek literally means "faction." And the word "hairetikos" literally means "factionalist." The words have to do with creating factions within what is supposed to be a unified body. These are the words used, for example, if you wanted to describe a political party and its members, or separate sects or even denominations of a religion. These words have to do with schisms and schismatics among a population.

      So, both Republicans and Democrats are heretics according to the actual meaning of these words. Both Liberals and Conservatives are heretics. Both the hard core Catholic and the die hard Baptist are heretics. Anyone who seeks to cause or maintain divisions are, by definition, heretics. And where Paul was concerned, anyone who sought to cause or maintain divisions within the Body of Christ is a heretic regardless of what theology he or she professes to hold. Anyone who puts their theological opinions above the love which Christ commanded which holds the body together is a heretic, regardless of how correct those opinions are.

      And according to Paul, heresy was a product of the flesh, not the Spirit of Christ. The need to be right is a product of the flesh, whereas the love for one another, putting each other's needs above our own is a product of the Spirit of Christ.

A Ramble about NDEs

      Recently, I've been watching Near Death Experience compilations from a YouTube channel called "Love Covered Life." The gal who runs it tends to be more progressive, if not outright New Age, but I respect her intentions and her Bible knowledge. These compilations are clips from interviews she's done with folks who have had a near death experience and can remember what happened. None of them know or have ever met each other to my knowledge. But the reason why she put together these compilations of clips was to demonstrate the consistency of their experiences, all of which had been tailored to the individual, yet all of which shared remarkably the same features regardless of who was experiencing it, what age they were at the time, or what their background was. All experienced a "life review" through the eyes of the people they interacted with. All experienced God in roughly the same way, as pure and indescribably love and light. Most experienced meeting Jesus and conversing with Him, regardless of their denominational or religious background, and at least one experienced hell before being rescued from it by crying out to Jesus (this last one I have seen his entire interview).
      "In the mouth of two or three witnesses let everything be established" is what the Scriptures say. There were roughly five to ten people represented in these compilations of interviews. And, as I mentioned before, they did not know each other and had never met each other. It is for these two reasons that, I believe, these accounts cannot just be dismissed.
      What strikes me most about these accounts, which I cannot ignore, is how much their descriptions of God and creation's relationship to Him during their experiences coincide with what I have written over the last several years, even though I have only just seen them (I did see Howard Storm's interview before I left California, but that was the only one). What I wrote came from prayer, study, and my own personal experiences with Him. What also strikes me is how much the Spirit within me agrees and refuses to let me argue with them, but rather gets me to see and hear past the surface words to the commonalities of what they're describing.
      These people weren't theologians. The majority of them that I observed had no axe to grind. They were just ordinary, random people observing and trying to describe what they saw and heard according to how they understood and perceived it. But what they saw and heard profoundly changed them and their beliefs from the time they died to the time they woke up again. The aforementioned Howard Storm, who was the one who initially had a hellish experience before being rescued, was an atheist professor visiting Paris at the time. He is now a UCC pastor and has been for the last thirty years.
      One might say, from a conservative Christian perspective, that God will never contradict His word. And yet in His word He very much does contradict what He has previously said when the need has arisen. One glaring example is Peter's vision of the sheet with the unclean animals on it. Peter knew God had commanded in the Torah not to eat them, and yet here he was being commanded by God to kill and eat them as a metaphor for including the Gentiles into the Church. Jesus' contradictions of Sabbath keeping, one of the Ten Commandments itself, were legendary. So, where these accounts might seem to contradict at least traditional theology if not His actual word directly, I think this must be kept in mind as well as taking the accounts themselves with a grain of salt, discerning what is being embellished and what is not. And where the account descriptions become nearly identical is where I sit up and pay attention. Where they start matching the conclusions I've already been led to is where my attention becomes like a hawk's.
      Like it or not, these experiences are data, and potentially valuable data once the personal inconsistencies are sifted out. And for that reason, I don't think they can just be dismissed. Theology as a science, like any science, must continually evolve in its understanding as more data about its subject is acquired. As you get to know a person, either previously held misconceptions about that person are changed or you become disillusioned. Where God is concerned, either you allow Him to change your misconceptions about Him, or, stubbornly holding on to them, you make those misconception an idol, and refuse to know the real Person in favor of a God of your own creation.

On the Practice of Being a Christian

     The whole practice of the Way, of following Jesus Christ, is essentially channeling Him. You can see this in Peter as he stands before Caiaphas and accuses him of Jesus' murder. You can see this in Paul, not only in his writings, but especially in his later years as he interacts with people. And you can see it in the first few weeks and months of the church after pentecost as they were all of a single mind and heart, parts of a body connected to a single head, as it were.

       Our practice is to not say or do anything except what He says or does through us, just as He didn't say or do anything except what the Father said and did through Him. Just as He said, "I can't do anything at all from Myself," so also He said, "without Me you can't do anything at all." And in the ancient church of the first and second centuries it was understood that a person who wasn't living as He taught wasn't to be considered a Christian regardless of what came out of his mouth. That is, if you couldn't see and hear Jesus from this person, then he wasn't a disciple. 

     The power of the Gospel is more than just words, it is literally the Spirit of Christ taking over and living and expressing Jesus Christ out through us so that all around us can see and hear Him even though He wears our faces. Without this, without being able to see and hear Him through us, why should anyone follow or believe what we say? How is it different from any other religious belief without the Spirit of Christ making His presence known? As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, they would know the power behind his words when he came to them, and that he didn't initially come just speaking words of human wisdom.

      This is the greatest problem and challenge in the churches today. People just aren't experiencing Him, seeing Him, or hearing Him from those who claim to belong to Him, and they're calling BS on it. There are too many today who "preach the Gospel," and simply don't see the need to actually follow Him or do anything He said. Thus we have situations like the many pastor scandals, the entertainment churches which, when viewed behind the curtain are full of very material and fleshly concerns, and those who "preach the Gospel" by arguing their own theology viciously and hatefully against others. They "preach the Gospel," but do not love, do not forgive, judge and condemn, and teach others to do the same through their actions if not their words. They "preach the Gospel," and prey on young women and even boys. They "preach the Gospel," while making themselves wealthy from their congregants. They "preach the Gospel" while enslaving their listeners under rules and moral codes which amount to another Law which Paul wrote those who are in the Spirit are not under. They "preach the Gospel," but have no idea what it means, or if they do, do not care.

      You know when you've encountered Jesus Christ through someone, even if you don't make the connection at first. You never forget Him. So also should be all those through whom He lives His life. "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live but Christ lives within me..." This isn't a metaphor, but the summing up of what it means to be a Christian, not following rules and moral codes, but fully surrendering your words, actions, and thoughts to the Spirit of Jesus Christ with whom you have been made one thing rather than to your own neurological and psychological responses.
     So, yes, absolutely preach the Gospel, but more importantly, be the Gospel.