I went on a brief rant at the end of my last post on feelings & thoughts about our body, soul, & spirit. I was at OCIA, & I learned we are a combination of a body, soul, & mind—not spirit. Do we have a spirit? If you’re a born-again Christian, then yes. But it’s not ours. It’s God’s.
It’s quite weird to think of a different triad than the one I’ve always been used to. I remember specifically a pastor talking about it, & I suppose I didn’t give it another thought because it made sense. He was talking about how our spirit differentiates us from the animals, & our bodies differentiate us from angels.
I think this triad makes more sense. It’s funny how the answer to my question was literally staring me in the face, & I didn’t even notice. I used a quote from St. Augustine about how our soul houses our mind, & it just confused me. It makes a lot more sense now.
But then that would bring up my question from before. Do we feel our souls? Do we feel our mind? I think the answer to the former is still yes. Our mind, on the other hand, is our consciousness, & with consciousness, we get feeling & emotion—which our soul brings about. Now St. Augustine's quote makes a lot more sense.
But if we weren’t conscious, would we still have emotion? I don’t know, but if we still did have emotion without consciousness, I wouldn’t think it would be anything valuable. That’s debatable, especially when talking about animals, because we still don’t know how they experience emotion or consciousness or if they do at all. But to be frank, I don’t care whether they do or not. I would never abuse an animal, especially intentionally. God literally commanded us to take care of the animals (Genesis 1:28). But if/how animals have emotions or a conscious is not what sparks my interest.
But notice how that loops back into the question that started this whole enigma—if we didn’t have a conscience, but we had feelings, would we still have thoughts? What if we didn’t have either one? I think the latter is a no-brainer. If we didn’t have consciousness or feeling, we wouldn’t have thought.
This feels like a math equation.
(N = No, C = Consciousness, F = Feeling, T = Thought)
NC + NF = NT
NC + F = NT (?) I’ll have to test this one.
C + NF = NT (?) This one too, although I think it’s more probable that this one would cause thought than the former.
C + F = T
There are plenty more ways to switch this up & think about it too. It doesn’t only have to go C, F, T.
C + NT = F
F + NT = NC
You could go on longer with this, but I don’t want to. I think I’ve gotten my point across anyway.
To conclude this, I have no idea about any of this. I’m trying.
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