September 17, 2015
Perspective
In researching broadband for
the local community I interviewed various entities to understand their piece of
the multifaceted puzzle. When I gleaned information form one source and sought
to verify it with another source invariably I’d hear, “Well, that’s not exactly
right.” I was taken aback that each entity not only had their own perspective,
but they disagreed with their counterpart’s view. Not only were these folks not
on the same page, I wondered if they were reading the same book. Hmmm…not so
unlike believers reading the Word and coming up with different denominations. “I
appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you
agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you
may be perfectly united in mind and thought” (1 Cor 1:10 NIV).
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2 comments:
Gail;
-----”…so that you will be perfectly united in mind and thought.” Then, we conservative types herd like cats. Let’s do a thought experiment. Turn off five of your senses, and I’ll turn off five of mine. No fair peaking, hearing, touching, tasting, or smelling. In this experiment you are only allowed your sixth sense of pattern recognition. Obviously we are left in a situation where you know only the information you have already gathered through your other five senses, the patterns your sixth sense sees in it, and the knowledge your logic process has tied it together to perceive. It will be the same with me. From this point forward, neither of us will have any new information; we will have only what we had until now. We should be able to reach the first step of clarity here.
-----Will our minds stop working because no more information is flowing into them? No. Because new information is flowing within them. It is derivative information. The sixth sense receives correlations between information bits from memory, eg, bright lightning-bolt/thunder. Then your sixth sense quickly receives another message from the informational patterns in your memory, lightning/no thunder. Silent lightning. Now that’s interesting. It’s another kind of informational pattern: the anomaly, the pattern which may have either a missing piece or an extra piece than what is normally expected. Then your mind goes to work on this anomaly, recalling the many times you saw me talking to myself, but you couldn’t hear me because I was too far away. The patterns compare, and you conclude lightning/no thunder is lightning/thunder too distant to hear. However, when I turned off my five senses I only noticed the loss of four, because I was born blind. I only know thunder. My memory has no concept of lightning to serve my sixth sense as any part of a lightning/thunder perception, and especially not a lightning/no thunder anomaly, because to me, that‘s just nothing. My logic process finds nothing in my memory to compare with thunder, except for other frighteningly loud noises. But you compare from your memory the apple tree on the hill you saw struck by lightning one day, and the smoldering mess you found of it the next day. I perceive thunder as something the cause of which I would be reluctant to touch. You perceive lightning/thunder as something you must not touch. How united are our minds? Somewhat? How much variation are we going to tolerate?
-----”We see dimly as in a mirror…I know in part.” (I Cor 13:12) By turning off our five external senses, we saw just how “in part” we really do know, because truthfully, the only knowledge in us is made through that sixth sense of recognizing patterns served up through what the other five have sensed. And if those five senses serve us only “dimly as in a mirror”, then even if we turned our senses back on and the Lord healed my blindness, you and I would yet not see the same things because what registers in your mind out of the dimness won’t exactly the same for me. That’s the nature of dimness. So tell me, how can we be united in mind and thought?
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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-----Don’t mistake knowledge for the mind. That mistake has been ongoing for too many centuries. Knowledge is not mind. Knowledge is the contents of mind. The mind makes it. That’s all. And since there is so much dimness in our seeing then there is so much diversity in knowledge. So there is no unity in knowledge. But there must be unity in mind and thought. The Bible says so.
-----The mind is the process by which knowledge is achieved. I tell Char increasingly more often that I am going to describe to her what are the spins making up our streams of consciousness, and then I drop a couple more bits of information about them upon her. Slowly but surely she is learning the “raw materials” from which spins can be understood and how they are the mind performing knowledge. The mind is enormously complex, though it is remarkably simple. The Bible is sure to reveal its functions in a more understandable way. Psychologists could better have served us had they obeyed it. Speak of the devil! The most important function of the mind as God made it, the mind of Christ: o b e d i e n c e. “Oh! Ya, ya , ya, ya. Obedience to what!?” Now there’s a pattern our sixth sense might pick up on! No, no, no, no, I don’t mean the retort’s similarity to that 60’s style music -”ya, ya, ya“. I mean its similarity to that 60’s style thought: “I have my bag man, you have yours.” In other words, I’ll obey me, and you’ll obey you, the raw materials for the mind of the Antichrist.
-----In this very first step of obedience, there are three degrees of unity to have: First degree unity is in obedience to the Word; Second degree unity is in obedience to reality (which is why we don’t slam our hands with hammers, jump off cliffs, latch onto power lines, and stuff like that;) and third degree unity, the one misused and abused so badly that hardly any unity has been had by operation of either obedience to the Word or reality: obedience to the rules of logic, the mathematics of thinking, and respecting feelings. God gave us a mind and said, “Come, let’s reason.” Problem is, it almost seems we think He meant, “Reason with Me only!” He also meant reason with each other.
-----In addition to obedience there are lots of other elements to the mind and thought in which we unite. There is humility, the simple adjustment of a perception when we’ve noticed it differing from the Word or reality. And there is love, the attachment we make through perceptions squared right up true with God. And that is akin to consideration, the early inkling turning the mind’s process to search for loving actions. And there is gentleness which does not throw babies out with bathwater, but senses the more tender inklings of consideration. Of much importance is patience, the wait for more information by which to solve an anomaly, and forbearance, the willingness to allow an anomaly to be an anomaly until patience has brought us more information. And does not all this, and the rest in the Word not smack of intimacy?
-----I mean, the mind of Christ is laid out in the Bible, and it develops the attitudes and behaviors the Bible celebrates. The knowledge dividing us into denominations is not the basis of unity. But for two thousand years church leaders have led every church division into its own unity of knowledge unto the disunity of the whole body because they did not lead in unity of mind and thought. Maybe our precious Lord did remove Ephesus’ lamp stand from its place in the beginning: “But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.” (Rev 2:4-5) No. The church did not repent and unite in the mind of Christ. It proceeded to bicker and divide, demanding (I Cor 13:5) unity in knowledge (I Cor 8:1). Oops. Now. Is that a lampstand removed from its place, or what?
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