Facts relating to self consciousness
When we talk about self-consciousness, we are talking about mind, emotion, and will, traits of the soul. The mind is the faculty by which we gain knowledge. It is our intellect, our ability to reason and understand. It is with the mind that we understand or comprehend truth, facts, science, mathematics, history, geography, philosophy, logic, or any other fact that results from the reasoning of the mind. However, no rational human being will limit their scope of knowledge to only those things which the mind can comprehend without other facts of self-consciousness, namely emotion and will. Emotion and will do, of course, have either direct or indirect effect upon the mind.
The emotion is the part of us that feels things. You can’t see pain in a physical way, but you can discern with no difficulty when a person is in pain. You can’t see love, in the sense of it being an object or thing, but you can see the results of love in attitudes and states of being that all know to be without doubt part of reality. You can’t see hate, but when hate fills a person’s life the results of it will eventually manifest themselves in numerous acts, statements, and attitudes. You can’t see fear as some object that one could reach out and touch, but fear can paralyze the mind and body and cause the complete destruction of an individual’s personality. You can’t see joy, or happiness but even though they are abstract facts that describe different emotions, there is not a living human being on the face of the earth that does not fully understand every emotion, having experienced them all, and yet many would have a difficult time defining these emotions in what science would call a logical or factual way.
The will is the third part of self-consciousness that all know as an a priori truth. Everyone has a will to choose and choices are being made every day. No one would dispute these facts. They are a priori, facts known in the reasoning of every being and may or may not be facts that can be explained logically and yet they exist in the realm of reality which none will dispute.
We don’t need to discuss the five senses but they also make up part of what we call self-consciousness. Since these are physical characteristics, they exist in every living being unless there is some mutation or injury that has caused that particular physical process to fail to function normally. These senses are made up of sight, sound, taste, feeling, and smell. They are also a priori facts that no one would dispute since we all have them as part of our daily lives. These senses are not developed through reasoning or logic, they just are!
There is another part of the self-consciousness that is similar to emotions, but it is very different in its relation to us and to other beings in the universe. What I am talking about is the human spirit. In order to make a brief definition of the spirit, let me give you the traits of the human spirit in order that all may sense in their minds what we perceive. The first attribute of the spirit is the conscience. No one would deny that the conscience exists and that it has had a very real part in their lives even when they were young children. Did you ever try to steal a cookie from the cookie jar, or a piece of cake from the cake plate? Did you look to the right and then to the left because you had a sense that someone would catch you doing what you knew you should not do? That sense that made you perceive right and wrong is known as the conscience. Everyone has a conscience but few can give logical explanations as to what makes the conscience function or where it comes from. I have an explanation. It comes from the spirit, the part of you that is unseen but everyone knows exists.
There is a second part to the spirit of a person which is no less real and equally no less without logical explanation. That second part is what we will call communion. What we are speaking about is the ability of one human being to communicate with another without any words or logic. It is a sense that the other has heard or understood the thoughts of the one doing the thinking. These thoughts can be known without physical speaking or hearing. Two people in love can just look at each other and they have communion. A mother can be concerned for her child and the child who is at school can get a sense that mother is thinking about them and this is communion. In the same way, a person can speak to God in their spirit and it is called communion since they can neither see God nor feel nor smell Him and yet in a very real sense, the sense of the spirit, they can know a being that they have never seen. This defies logic, but so do emotions and conscience. This is another attribute of the spirit called communion. It is as real to the human self consciousness as are the things that we can see, touch, hear, and smell. It is as real as the mind, emotions, and will. It is an a priori truth that must be accepted by all with no need for explanation since all know it to exist in fact.
The third part of the spirit is what I would call intuition. That is the part of us which is opposite communion where we are communicating with another spirit. It is intuition where another spirit is communicating with us. This is well known in the annals of history and even in every day life. What mother is there that has not had a time when the baby was laying in bed in another room and the mother was startled by an intuition that something was wrong, only to arrive just as the baby was potentially choking its last breath and the mother gladly intervened just in the knick of time? How many are there who had a son or daughter in the military and right in the middle of the night or while on the job during a completely unrelated situation, they had a powerful sense that something was wrong? Then, perhaps quite a few days or months later, they found out that the son or daughter was in harms way at that very time. Since this happens so readily in daily human experience, then why is it that some try to make it illogical that God would speak to us through the same faculty of the spirit that we see evidenced in so many other parts of our lives? The truth is that the Bible says that God is a spirit and those that worship Him do so in spirit and in truth.
Some of the conclusions that a person comes to are as the result of logic and reasoning. At other times, they come to conclusions through emotions or spirit. The reality of the facts is no less genuine when these facts are developed through logic than when they are developed through the mind of the spirit. Either way, these are facts that all constitute truth that becomes part of life. Our weakness in this generation is that we have elected to only accept truths as explained by logic in reasoning of the mind and yet there are many in the whole of society that make decisions that are many times far more meaningful but they make them based upon what actually defies logic and yet the results are impossible to refute.
With what has been stated here to this point, we can now say that Theology is arranged under two main areas for discussion. The first is truths which need proof and the second is truths which need no proof.
