Mind Of Man

Modern day world-renowned pioneer on mind-body healing, Deepak Chopra, suggests that the body and the mind are experiences locked into time and space. The body as an objective experience, and the mind as a subjective experience, with the body constantly changing and the mind with it’s thoughts, feelings and desires that always comes and goes. The experiencer being the authentic you that is the "timeless essence in every time-bound experience, the feeler behind the feeling, the thinker of thoughts, the animator of body and mind." Chopra asserts that contemporary science can isolate a thought or intention within a micro-second after it came into existence, BUT that the origin of a thought cannot be revealed by any piece of scientific equipment. You, the soul, are a non-local field which cannot be found in energy or matter, but finds itself trapped by the body and mind in space and time and finds it’s expression through the body and mind. This soul, "……exists in the silent spaces between our thoughts. There is an interval between each of your thoughts in which the thoughts themselves are brought into being, and in that interval you are the infinite choice-maker…… the real you is found in the immeasurably small yet somehow infinitely large space between thoughts".

In his approach to determine whether mind can survive bodily death, Prof. Paul Davies draws a clear distinction between the mental world and the physical world. He says: "The physical world is populated by material objects that occupy locations in space and have qualities like extension, mass, electric charge… the mental world is populated… by thoughts. Thoughts are obviously not located in space, but seem to occupy a universe of their own which is, moreover, a private universe, inaccessible to other observers" . Problems arise when the physical and the mental worlds interact. "Our universe of thoughts is not isolated from the physical universe around us, but is strongly coupled to it." We think, and then we act, every moment of every day through our entire lives - I think and then I act.

If we adopt the Chopra-assumption of the authentic you and the soul, the thinker of thoughts, the "I-my soul", think and inform the physical brain of my decisions and instruct the physical brain to instruct the physical body to act as I have decided it should. The "I-my soul", is linked to the physical body and the physical body lives under the reign of the "I-my soul", just as the "I-my soul" is under the Supreme Reign of the Holy Spirit, Third Person of the Godhead.

According to Davies, decision-making is a crucial element that does not tie in, despite the obvious consistency between the mental- and physical worlds, which, he says, is the result of a conscious act of volition, a choice. "Where is there room in the deterministic predictive laws of electrical circuitry for free will?". Davies sees one answer in viewing the mind as an operator in control of a complicated machine: "………so can the mind fire the relevant brain cells(neurons) to activate the body in accordance with its decisions. But how does the conscious decision… cause the relevant brain cells to fire?……… Can the mind somehow reach into the physical world of electrons and atoms, brain cells and nerves, and create electrical forces?" He concludes with "The only minds of which we have direct experience, are those associated with brains, and arguably computers. Yet nobody seriously suggests that God, or departed souls, have a brain."

The physical body stands out as a separate entity from the soul.

"The mind is not located inside the brain, or any other part of the body, or indeed anywhere in space at all". In his book "God and the New Physics", Davies speculates that the mind could perhaps be a substance. "Not a physical substance, but a tenuous, elusive, ethereal sort of substance, the stuff that thoughts……. Are made of, free and independent of ordinary ponderous matter."

Dr Paul Brunton in "The Quest of the Overself" says: "………. The real man himself, the soul,………….. is emphatically not his body. The "self" cannot be seen by any material microscope. We do not realize that the moment we withdraw self-awareness from the brain it is nothing more than a piece of inert matter, like the meat in a butcher’s shop. Without that self-presence it could not produce a single thought, it could not formulate any idea………"

When we hypothesize on the soul or the spirit or the mind, we seem to hypothesize on one thing only, the breath-of-life as we received it from God. A particle of neshamah transplanted into one more inimitable corporeal body.