SOMA-PSYCHE-PNEUMA & The Greatest of These is...? By now, most of you bright posters and readers of SAG0GO--note, I use 0 to O (from nothing to infinity)--know what I mean when I talk about SPP: The English words are BODY,MIND,SPIRIT (BMS). Interestingly, in French, the words (mots) are CORPS, ESPRIT, ESPRIT (for males) and AME (for females).
Of course I am an avid seeker of, and after, truth, wherever it is to be found--naturally, I seek it with the help of philosophy, the sciences and all the great and lively arts.
At this point, I readily admit: I do know nearly as much as I would like to know, need to know and ought to know about the interconnection between body, mind and spirit. Does such an interconnection exist? Because of the body component, I also ask:
IS THIS A QUESTION JUST FOR THE SCIENCES?
The sciences can now tell us a lot things about the physical body as a mechanism--about our brain and its extension, the nervous system.
But does science say anything to us about the way the body as a mechanism interacts with us as persons (minds and spirits)? About what it means to be, or not to be, a person?
BTW, I have discovered that, there is a lot of soul-searching and confusion going on in all modern languages about the kind of words we use when we talk about what is means to be a human being, a person.
Other than having animal-like physical bodies, in what ways do we share any of the following with members of what we call the animal kingdom?: The idea of person-hood, spirit, mind, soul, ego, the idea of ghosts, individuality, consciousness, conscience, intellect, character, memory, emotions, passions, the ability to be aware, to be consciously attentive, to have faith, hope, love, fear, hate and the power to will, and so on.
In my opinion, the more we integrate the categories we call body, mind and spirit into a oneness, the more we will discover what I like to call the TRI-unity of our being--le composant (component) extraordinaire, as the French put it.
As Thomas H. Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, put it in 1887, "The known is finite, the unknown infinite; we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to claim a little more land."
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A thread based on the book, THE UNIVERSE WITH WITHIN--From Quantum To Cosmos, by physicist, Neil Turok.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/book...article4623367/
