Going
through
Cut the brain in as small portions
as you want, you will never find the organ of thought! Probably you
will find only the material 'support' of the spirit, something like
its 'crutch'. The spirit itself is elsewhere.
It is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It emerges in the
'gaping' of simply biological realities. It is 'between'.
It is 'through'.
Through the brain. Through the body. Through the
whole body.
Through the body, but not out of the body! What could, indeed, be the spirit
without a body? Thinking does not go without tiredness nor
without body expressions. Thought can make the body sick as the sick
body can disturb the thought. The spirit
is physically experienced. The spiritual activity is lived and
felt through the physical reality. The spirit is experienced as an
incarnated spirit. The body, the whole body, is thus the
instrument of the spirit. An incredibly expressive
general-purpose instrument! The body vibrates in communion with the
spirit. It is through the body that the spirit sings, smiles, speaks,
works.
The spirit crosses the body vertically. Moved
by it, the body, mediator between horizontality and verticality,
tries out its 'opening' on an 'other' order. By it the body lives out
its transcendence. Isn't man a strange spiritual animal? And how marvellous…
Can I be myself without a
body? Can I be identified without my body? What would I be without my
body? We do not have any experience of an 'I' without a body. In
extreme cases I may conceive myself with an only virtual body, but
this virtual body refers to my real body! My spirit is concretely
where I say 'I'. The personal reality that I am is identical with the
vertical repercussion of the spirit through MY 'own' body.
To
separate the body and the soul concerns pagan problems.
For the Judeo-Christian approach, in the Bible, man is basically and
fundamentally 'one'. Man is never considered without a body, even in
an other world. The problem is never one of immortality but of
resurrection, and even of resurrection of the flesh,
meaning new creation of the whole human reality, body and
spirit.
How can you explain the mental human activity reduced to his simple
material immanence? See the famous statue of Condillac. Tabula
rasa in qua nihil scriptum. All you have to do is to equip this
purely material statue with openings. This are the sensory
organs, as well external as internal ones. Nothing enters the statue
except through this openings. All what is written on the clean slate
thus comes only from experience, and only from sensory
experience, the only and single source of our representations. Nihil
is in intellectu quod not prius fuerit in sensu. There is nothing in
the spirit that was not first in sensory organs.
You have still to explain how the statue can get 'ideas', can think and build its spiritual universe. Here remains only the materialist possibility with its recourse to the mechanism with its own presupposition.
First, that every complex reality can be totally explained starting from simple elements, here elementary sensualistic impressions. Then, that these elements combine by simple contiguity and by simple 'association'. The whole human spiritual life is thus reduced to a simple business of combinations. A miracle of the naked statue!
The spirit is not 'in', it is not either 'around'. It is 'through'. The countless efforts, tirelessly reiterated, to find for the spirit a
'seat', a 'centre', an 'organ' or a convolution of organ, all failed.
Could it be different? The spirit is not an object you can dispose
of. The spirit is a dynamics which crosses the human reality right
through. Why seek the spirit where it cannot be and where it would
be, on the side of matter, in contradiction with itself? If one found its 'place' inside the biological reality, it
would surely not be the spirit.
The spirit crosses not only
the bodies. The field which it crosses is broad like the spirit
itself. Crossing of the particularities towards the universality.
Crossing of confusion towards clearness. Crossing of subjectivity
towards objectivity. Crossing of dispersion towards unity. Crossing
of inconsistency towards coherence. Crossing of the complication
towards simplicity. Crossing of absurdity towards sense. Crossing of
indifference towards the difference…
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