What is spirit, and how does it interact with our physical bodies?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Robert_Sock
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
R

Robert_Sock

Guest
God is pure spirit, and He has to be infinitely different from nothingness. How is spirit qualitatively different from nothingness? If spirit has no ‘substance,’ how does it exist, and how does it influence our physical bodies? Isn’t it a “law of nature” that only physical entities can affect the physical body?
 
The cause of everything is God. We don’t need to understand it.
 
Robert_Sock said:
God is pure spirit, and He has to be infinitely different from nothingness. How is spirit qualitatively different from nothingness? If spirit has no ‘substance,’ how does it exist, and how does it influence our physical bodies? Isn’t it a “law of nature” that only physical entities can affect the physical body?
Click to expand...
Your soul is a spirit, it is the form of the human being, governing all its acts, physical, sentient, intellectual. But you cannot see it. You know it exists because you know yourself, you live, grow, process nourishment, think, will, remember, etc.

Angels are spirits, pure intellect and will with power to interact with the rest of God’s creation.

God is Spirit as well, but in Him all is One, Intellect, Will, Knowledge, and Perfect in every way. And His Oneness is purely and simply Act, Pure Existence. And He created the entire universe out of nothing and keeps it in existence. He is present throughout His creation, guiding, keeping all in existence, leading all to perfection.

He can influence His creation in any way He chooses. He constantly interacts with man through inspiration and Grace.

How Spirits, how God does these things we will not know in this life, perhaps not in the next. We just don’t know.

Linus2nd
 
Robert_Sock said:
Doesn’t a field contain energy, or is the product of energy?
Click to expand...
Yes. In any case a ‘field’ is a spatial entity. Spirit is a non-material entity not composed of matter or energy and not extended in space or time. Our own souls are an example of a spiritual substance. They are united with our bodies as a unitary entity, and because our bodies are material and occupy space and time, we are conscious of temporality and spatiality.

But pure spirits such as angels have no material component. God has no extension in space or time. He experiences his being as all simultaneity, rather than as a series of instants extended over a stretch of time.
 
JimG said:
Yes. In any case a ‘field’ is a spatial entity. Spirit is a non-material entity not composed of matter or energy and not extended in space or time. Our own souls are an example of a spiritual substance. They are united with our bodies as a unitary entity, and because our bodies are material and occupy space and time, we are conscious of temporality and spatiality.

But pure spirits such as angels have no material component. God has no extension in space or time. He experiences his being as all simultaneity, rather than as a series of instants extended over a stretch of time.
Click to expand...
I agree but what analogy can we use to make sense of a non material substance?
 
Michael_Mayo said:
I agree but what analogy can we use to make sense of a non material substance?
Click to expand...
We can’t use an analogy because every analogy we uses normally involves something material. And spirit is not matter. But we can try to observe the workings of our own intellect and will. That’s an actuality. Intellect and will are non material faculties of the soul, but in human beings they have a necessary (name removed by moderator)ut of the material through the senses. Still my abstract idea of anything has to be non-material, otherwise it would be specific and not abstract.
 
crumblymunky said:
The cause of everything is God. We don’t need to understand it.
Click to expand...
Even ‘accidents?’ (I say this based on another thread I started that all ‘accidents’ are caused. I also contended that all human mishaps are caused by spirits, via the unconscious.)
 
The words translated in English as spirit, in Latin (spiritus), Greek (pneuma), and Hebrew (ruach) have in common that they all mean “breath” in the original languages.

Breath keeps us alive, as it enters and leaves our bodies. But where does it do so?

At our nose, it enables us to smell.

In our lungs, it enters our internal body.

But the actual aliveness takes place in all of our body cells.

I would imagine that the Divine breath or “spirit” (which GOD breathed into Adam’s nose) interacts with our natural self in a comparable way.

ICXC NIKA
 
You cannot see love either, just the fruit, yet it exists.
It is better to feed your spirit with goodness and prayer then to submit to the flesh that you can see. The spirit is closely connected to God. Read about the fruits of the Holy Spirit, which we all receive during the sacrament of Confirmation. None of these fruits are material.
 
mommy_k said:
You cannot see love either, just the fruit, yet it exists.
It is better to feed your spirit with goodness and prayer then to submit to the flesh that you can see. The spirit is closely connected to God. Read about the fruits of the Holy Spirit, which we all receive during the sacrament of Confirmation. None of these fruits are material.
Click to expand...
Entities like thoughts and emotions must also be intangible, but they must result in mental activity in order to be experienced. Likewise, spirit must affect our mental activity in order to be experienced. My concern is how does pure spirit cause mental activity?
 
Robert_Sock said:
Entities like thoughts and emotions must also be intangible, but they must result in mental activity in order to be experienced. Likewise, spirit must affect our mental activity in order to be experienced. My concern is how does pure spirit cause mental activity?
Click to expand...
This is where I mix it up a little with materialist atheists. They will say it is all matter based. Consciousness and anyhting else like emotion or what we would call spirit is emergent property: Your brain contains several billion neurons that perform a very simple function: relaying electrical messages across synapses to their neighbors. It’s a physical action, yet out of their collective firings somehow arises a psychological phenomenon—the conscious mind. Can consciousness be reduced to the interactions of neurons? Experts have no way of knowing, because the brain is orders of magnitude more complex than any computer today, making answering that question at present difficult if not impossible.

pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3410/03-ever-nf.html

They are satisfied with that.

No doubt, there are chemical and neural patterns associated with with different brain states, thoughts, & emotions. But we are more than our thoughts and emotions. That is why the apophatic way of people like St John of the Cross has a rightful place in our spirituality. The goal of meditation is to come to contemplation where we rest from thought and emotion in Holy Spirit.
 
As with anything, practicing these concepts take time to accept the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes it is automatic too. By prayer, contemplation and a total commitment to God,and Jesus, the results of a changed person will come about, and thought processes, and behavior will be in inline with Jesus’ teachings.
Example-discernment of what is right in God’s eyes, the fortitude to go through trials with faith, hope, and so on.
It has been my experience that when you trust what your spirit is telling you, good things will happen-relaionships are strenghtened, I am kinder and more understanding, andforgive easier when I listen to my spirit.
 
:twocents:

We are a unity of body, mind, spirit.
These don’t interact, but are different “structures” that we can define and understand as parts of that totality.
If you want to know how it is you see a rose, you talk about photons, retinas, the brain and other such things. You can talk about the experience of its colour, the thoughts and memories it brings to mind, communicating them to another person: all this has to do with our being mind. A rose reminds us of our Lord, the redness of the blood He spilled for our salvation, the thorns that were placed on His head to mock and torture Him; the rose’s beauty can bring one to contemplate the Source of all beauty and as a symbol of love is becomes part of the world of the spirit.
Nothing interacting here; all necessary parts of our existence as human beings.
 
Aloysium said:
:twocents:

We are a unity of body, mind, spirit.
These don’t interact, but are different “structures” that we can define and understand as parts of that totality.
If you want to know how it is you see a rose, you talk about photons, retinas, the brain and other such things. You can talk about the experience of its colour, the thoughts and memories it brings to mind, communicating them to another person: all this has to do with our being mind. A rose reminds us of our Lord, the redness of the blood He spilled for our salvation, the thorns that were placed on His head to mock and torture Him; the rose’s beauty can bring one to contemplate the Source of all beauty and as a symbol of love is becomes part of the world of the spirit.
Nothing interacting here; all necessary parts of our existence as human beings.
Click to expand...
How are you differentiating mind and spirit? Simply the nature of our thoughts? If you are thinking about Jesus then it is the spirit rather than the mind?
 
Roscoe_Turner said:
How are you differentiating mind and spirit? Simply the nature of our thoughts? If you are thinking about Jesus then it is the spirit rather than the mind?
Click to expand...
Animals have mind: sensory perceptions, feelings such as anger, pleasure, fear.
Pets understand us, and when you see them sniffing around, they are clearly thinking hard about what it is that they are “studying”.

What we have that animals do not have is an eternal nature and the ability to know truth, love and beauty; our experiences occur within a being having divine, albeit fallen characteristics. Our perceptions can lead us to contemplations of this reality: that we are created by and can have a relationship with God. We can use our minds to pray, to understand and to carry out His will.

It’s not a matter of the nature of the thoughts, but the Reality that is being revealed. Here I am using words about the transcendent. This involves the spirit, the mind (words, perceptions) and the physical (monitors, retinas and brains).
 
Aloysium said:
**Animals have mind: sensory perceptions, feelings such as anger, pleasure, fear. **
Pets understand us, and when you see them sniffing around, they are clearly thinking hard about what it is that they are “studying”.

What we have that animals do not have is an eternal nature and the ability to know truth, love and beauty; our experiences occur within a being having divine, albeit fallen characteristics. Our perceptions can lead us to contemplations of this reality: that we are created by and can have a relationship with God. We can use our minds to pray, to understand and to carry out His will.

It’s not a matter of the nature of the thoughts, but the Reality that is being revealed. Here I am using words about the transcendent. This involves the spirit, the mind (words, perceptions) and the physical (monitors, retinas and brains).
Click to expand...
We need your definitions here. Animals have perceptions and reflective instincts, but that’s about it.For example, there is no evidence that animals process a mind, the seat of the faculty of reason. Sounds like your anthropomorphizing here. I don’t mean to be overly critical here, but this is a philosophy forum.

We were made in the imagine and likeness of God, but we were never divine, nor do we have divine characteristics. We process spirit, but it too is not divine. (Look up ‘divine’ in a dictionary.)
 
Robert_Sock said:
We need your definitions here. Animals have perceptions and reflective instincts, but that’s about it.For example, there is no evidence that animals process a mind, the seat of the faculty of reason. Sounds like your anthropomorphizing here. I don’t mean to be overly critical here, but this is a philosophy forum.

We were made in the imagine and likeness of God, but we were never divine, nor do we have divine characteristics. We process spirit, but it too is not divine. (Look up ‘divine’ in a dictionary.)
Click to expand...
I believe we have a definitional problem here.

Animals possess a psyche, soul (which in Latin is anima, hence animal), which enables them to live and to experience emotions.

They do not however, possess a human soul, which generates the human mind (Greek nous).

ICXC NIKA
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top