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Aug 31, 2023Liked by Daniel Whyte IV

2 questions here:

1) If our mind is so crucial, why did Paul few it so important to emphasise that we are not minds carried round in fleshy vehicles but rather fully embodied people. To quote John Mark Comer, “you are a body”. How does that play into this?

2) Would you include the books we call Classics with ancient literature in terms of understanding those who came before us?

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And to your second question: yes. Reading the works, experiencing the art, of prior generations will always help us understand them. Including the Classics.

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What passages from Paul would you be referring to?

I don't intend to elevate the mind above the body as a whole, except that all our perception of the body comes to us via the mind. We don't feel pain, love, or hate. Our mind *tells us* that we are feeling pain, love, or hate. Of course we are not aware enough to split such hairs while we are feeling the thing itself. (Thank God!)

We *are* bodies. But, for example when I talked about the aesthetic of space, and how certain environments impact our mental or emotional states, that only works because our minds are triggered to release calming hormones(?) when, say, we're in a room decorated to remind us of a forest. The mind is always the trigger.

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To acknowledge the power of the mind is not to denigrate the enfleshed experience, but to understand more fully how it works. That being said, I don't think we should go around hyper-analyzing how our minds work, but from time-to-time we should consider the input-output aspect of existence.

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I agree here - there needs to be balance. Otherwise we either spend our lives thinking but never doing or being OR being a slave to our impulses but not understanding why.

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1 Cor 6 though I think 1 Corinthians has a few bits in there generally.

The mind as part of the whole system makes sense - in the example you give it seems that the mind is part of the larger system that you could call the body.

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