There is a popular worship chorus widely sung in the church for years. It goes “open the eyes of my heart Lord, open the eyes of my heart, so I may see you.” It may appear at first glace to be nonsensical as there are no physical eyes affixed to the organ of the heart, but the imagery is designed to speak to the idea that there is a self deep within us that awakens to “see” the Lord. Many use the words heart and spirit interchangeably referring to that deep inner self that is within us. When we experience God we experience Him in Spirit and in truth. Both in spiritual and physical experiences as well as in truth that engages both our deep inner self and our mind.
I have been writing primarily of late to engage the mind as I have been avoiding use of non-physical terminology. However, I am leaving out a very important element in doing so.
I recently watched the 3-D IMAX sensation, Avatar. In the movie the Avatars have a tail with receptor tentacles on the end. They use these to connect at another level with the animals, nature, and even each other. The imagery suggested a spiritual connection with the world around them and the divine elements of that world. They communed with the beings or the divine respectively on a non-physical level—or rather a supernatural level.
Humans are also able to experience both the physical and the spiritual world. I have been mostly writing on this blog about those instances when the spiritual world births something physical. However, we also have the ability to perceive things that are not physical at all via our spirit and this ability is increased when our spirit is rightly aligned with His Spirit.
In a fictional comparison consider when the Avatars connected to the Tree and experienced a connection with reality in a whole new level. In comparison, I am speaking of Christ being the Tree of Life and we are the branches when our life merges with His.
There are some things that cannot be discerned until a person’s spirit has been renewed in Christ—some things that simply will not make sense. But there are still many things that a person can experience and understand before that happens. I began to realize that I ought not to avoid writing about some of these things simply because they are not physical. Thus, I may from time to time begin to write more about spiritual things and the nature of our spirit even though I fully understand that many of you do not believe we have a spiritual side to our being.
9 comments:
1. The song is stuck in my head now. You will pay. ;-)
2. The receptor tentacles are at the end of their pony tails, so they must come out of their brain stem.
3. Eywa is biological and they can physically connect to her.
4. If YHWH was biological and we could physically connect with him there would be no atheists.
Hi Mike,
1. lol
2. Oh, I didn't realize that, I thought it was the tail.
3. They physically connected to the tree, but I think the movie showed that there was something more spiritual at work than just the physical connection. Eywa wasn't just the tree, she was depicted as having a divine nature. The ones who had died were said to be with her and yet there were no physical bodies filling the tree.
4. What if a spiritual connection is actually more real than a physical connection? And learning to see that with your spirit is something incredible and very much real?
As fascinating as the Pandoran eco-system is I never regarded it as 'spiritual' in any way. The Na'vi certainly regarded it as such but what they were experiencing was non-verbal communication with a planet-wide organism of which they were a part. It's straight out of Gaia Theory - but made physical by their ability to 'meld' with other lifeforms. Such melding has huge evolutionary advantages to those creatures with the mental abilities to control or influence others (the 'horses' for example) or give/recieve information (with the 'tree' being - a classical representation of nature/Gaia)
The spirituality of the relationship is a typical response of so-called primitive peoples. A more 'advanced' response would, I suggest, have a rather different interpretation of the underlying dynamic.....
Cyber, I guess it makes sense for you to see that as only physical as you see all things as only physical. I saw the movie as highly spiritual within the culture of the Na'vi. I thought that "Gaia" was a spiritual term akin to "Mother Earth."
Spirituality is certainly not confined to primitive societies as even great intellectuals of science are still proponents of a spiritual world. Though I think we do in the West often educate ourselves away from our knowledge of the spiritual. I would not say that is an advancement though.
karla said: Cyber, I guess it makes sense for you to see that as only physical as you see all things as only physical.
Correct. I am a materialist living in a material world [grin].
karla said: I thought that "Gaia" was a spiritual term akin to "Mother Earth."
Yes, it is. It was also used by the scientist James Lovelock as a word to describe the totality of life on Earth that appears to behave 'as if' it is a single organism.
karla said: Though I think we do in the West often educate ourselves away from our knowledge of the spiritual. I would not say that is an advancement though.
Which is one of the many points we disagree on.
GRACE
(to Selfridge)
"This is bad, Parker. Those trees were
sacred to the Omaticaya in a way you
can’t imagine."
SELFRIDGE
"You know what? You throw a stick in the air around here it falls on some sacred fern."
GRACE
"I’m not talking about pagan voodoo here -- I’m talking about something real and measurable in the biology of the forest."
Skip ahead a bit.
GRACE
"Alright, look -- I don’t have the answers yet, I’m just now starting to even frame the questions. What we think we know -- is that there’s some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora --"
SELFRIDGE
"That’s a lot I’m guessing."
GRACE
"That’s more connections than the human
brain. You get it? It’s a network -- a
global network. And the Na’vi can access it -- they can upload and download data -- memories -- at sites like the one you destroyed."
They were reverent towards a real, biological interaction with Eywa, not towards an immaterial spiritual one.
Fortunately now I've got James Taylor's Gaia in my head instead of the P&W song. ;-)
Thanks Cyber! :-)
@ Mike
"I want to see you high and lifted up / Shinin' in the light of Your glory /Pour out Your power and love/
As we sing holy, holy, holy. . ." (-:
re: Avatar: I did think it interesting that the "scientists" made what the Na'vi saw as spiritual into something solely natural. It doesn't mean their view was more correct or that it couldn't have been both natural and spiritual.
I think the Na'vi saw their relationship with Eywa as entirely natural, worshipful sure, but they had a biological, physical connection. I think they would be rather confused by the religions we have here on earth.
Mike said: I think they would be rather confused by the religions we have here on earth.
As am I..... [grin]
Post a Comment