Triessence

In the classic Dickens story, A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge sees a ghost. Skeptic that he is, he does not believe what he sees. When the ghost asks him why he doubts his senses, he replies:

"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them.
A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may
be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of
cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of
gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

While this is not a true story, Scrooge does make a valid point. Our thoughts and perceptions can be influenced by what we ingest. That is why we have laws about driving while intoxicated. When we are cold sober, however, it is usually safe to assume that our thoughts and perceptions are our own. And so we do.

The adoption of a materialistic point of view questions this assumption. If all we are is what can be seen, touched or measured, then what we commonly experience as our own thoughts and perceptions is nothing more than "an undigested bit of beef." To the true empiricist, everything that we know as our consciousness, our minds, our souls, and our personalities can be reduced to random chemical reactions and electrical impulses.

Call me pretentious, but I can't resist the compulsion to see human consciousness as more than a cosmic accident. Call me greedy, but I prefer to take ownership of my thoughts and refuse to attribute them to a blob of grey jelly inside my skull that is at the mercy of what I eat and drink.

I love my brain, but it is not all that exists of my mind. I am thankful for my heart that beats so strongly and makes possible the vast conduit of health throughout my body that is my circulatory system, but it is not all there is of my soul. So much of what we are is not accessible to our senses and never will be.

Human consciousness is much more than "a fragment of an underdone potato."

We have always had an inkling that we are greater than we seem, that there is more to a man than meets the eye, and that there are depths to a woman's soul that no man can fathom. Even the late nineteenth century psychologist William James, who authored the seminal text on the psychology of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience, could not imagine "that the world of sensations, and of scientific laws and objects may be all." He concluded rather:

"The total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow ‘scientific’ bounds. Assuredly, the world is of a different temperament, - more intricately built than physical science allows."

Empiricist philosophers are bending their brains into all kinds of contortions trying to find a purely biological explanation for what we call the mind. They end up with nothing but inadequate and unsatisfying hypotheses. How do we know that we have a soul? Is there a purely spiritual aspect to the human personality? How can we know this, and how can we define how our spirituality defines us as humans? What does this have to do with God, and what does God have to do with us?

These are the issues that will be explored in this space.