Dependent and Mutable Components

I wrote in the last post:

“If ‘we’ are our thoughts, then our individual selves are as encumbered as our progressively-collected thought-lives: sometimes and in some manifestations handy and undeniable, and sometimes uncertainly and inexplicably wavering and fading and disappearing into what can be experienced by us as a distance.  Or sometimes inexplicably lurching again into view . . . . That is what it is to think, and that is what it is to have an idea of ‘self’ inseparable from one’s individual thought-life.  That ‘self’ is a glory of incompleteness, even as that ‘self’ clutches to a conceit of itself as a whole . . . . To ‘question’ anything, then—as being that elevated process of inspection with which we credit ourselves—is always to question that thought-basis we identify as our ‘selves.’  The first and most important part of questioning everything is to question every aspect of our thoughts by which we reckon ourselves to be individual ‘things.’”

It is this necessary notion of questioning everything that I believe we must apply to a question of Jesus that is generally held to be of importance: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26, KJV).  I suppose—given our present theme of “questioning”—it might be fitting to question whether or not that passage from Matthew has to do with people being cast into hell, though I imagine the answer will be in the affirmative.  Nonetheless, it must be mentioned that some Christians will maintain that Jesus’ warning is against failure of "discipleship” (or some such) among believers, leading only to a loss of potential rewards.

More importantly, I will ask in connection with the passage, what is the “man” who is understood to be distinct from his “soul”?  Are we not our “souls”?  I realize that Jesus describes the possibility of us being cast into hell with our undiminished bodies when we might choose instead entering heaven with the loss of an eye or a hand, but we know from looking at our hands with our eyes, or in considering persons missing one or both eyes, that the “person” is distinct from the “body”.  But our “souls”?

Is it not incumbent upon us to consider the possibility that the soul with which Jesus is concerned is we ourselves, and that the “we” that we individually personalize as “me” is just a phenomenon of consciousness?  And is not consciousness partial and temporally-defined?  Who are we to imagine that what we “think” or even what we “feel” is the substance of our persons in the eyes of God?  The upshot of all this is the realization that we might—in our personal religious searchings—satisfy (or not) any number of acceptances of belief, or performances of ritual, or experiences or conviction, and yet possibly none of that might extend beyond that part of ourselves that is maintained in consciousness.  What yet do we know of our souls?

If we reckon that our soul-future is amenable to being fostered by what we think, or do, or attempt to train ourselves to feel, and yet we are not privy (at least as much as God is) to the entirety of our souls, then is it not prudent for us to consider that such soul-fostering must be attended to in every form possible?  Why, for example, would we fixate on the notion that there was some moment or some isolatable episode in which we “came to believe?”  Would that be sufficient for the “light” (or whatever) of that realization (or conviction, or conversion, or whatever) to “illuminate” in necessary fashion the required number of corners of our unmappable souls?

This is perhaps—even after my years of key-striking—the proper jumping-off place for my exploration of “roused, readied, reaped.”  Every question and every matter can be haunted by the notion of whether anything of substance in eternal significance is really being addressed.  “Did Jesus really exist?,” we might ask.  And what manner of criteria are we applying to the (purported) evidence, and what specificity of historical basis would be necessary to declare, “Yes, it is the case (or the preponderance of evidence would affirm it to be the case) that Jesus existed”?

Are we not affirming all along what we ourselves “exist”—as we understand existence?  Is not our affirmation premature?  After all, that—counter-intuitive though it might be—is really the sort of thing that religion must answer to begin with.  Jesus asks us to consider whether we can retain or lose ourselves, and we meanwhile reside comfortably in our notions of self and admit only to discomfort (or assert our squelching of discomfort) for the future of those selves.

If, however, the notion of our actual possession of our selves is the matter in question, then our proper approach would be organic, not cerebral.  Our ideas and our beliefs come and go.  We know this to be true.  To say that we “know” this or that, or that we “believe” this or that, is merely for us to take momentary situations of our thought-lives and brand them as “real”—and all the rest as momentary aberration.  What a ridiculous approach to fundamental and eternal matters.  In any analogous, lesser matter of our lives, we would resolve to stretch and practice and exercise and exert ourselves—yet to God we give only thanks for comforting that perhaps minor part of our selves that we comprehend at any given moment.  It is small wonder that Jesus convicts us simultaneously of awesome arrogance and of pitiful insufficiency.

We are not creatures of thought saddled with the infirmities of bodily imperfection.  We are creatures who define our personal “we’s” as our consciousnesses, even as those consciousness-selves are but dependent and mutable components of our entireties—known but to God.