Friday 29 June 2018

Terminator X Speaks with His Hands




There's been a lot of death as a prerequisite to the embodied form that you take. 

It’s taken all that trial and error to produce something, like you, that can interact with the complexity of the world well enough to last the relatively paltry 80 or so years that you can last.

This may be wrong, but I think, at least, it’s a useful hypothesis: I think the idea of God the Father is something like the birth of the idea that there has to be an internal structure, out of which consciousness itself rises, that gives form to things.

If that's the case—and perhaps it’s not—it’s certainly a reflection of the kind of factual truth that I’ve been describing. 

I also mentioned that I see the idea of both the Holy Spirit, and most specifically of Christ, in the form of The Word, as the active consciousness that that structure produces and uses, not only to formulate The World—because we formulate The World, at least The World that we experience—but also to change and modify That World.

There’s absolutely no doubt that we do that.


We do that partly with our bodies, which are optimally evolved to do that, and that is why we have hands, unlike dolphins, that have very large brains, like us, but can't really change the world.

We’re adapted and evolved to change the world. Our speech is really an extension of our ability to use our hands. 

The speech systems that we use are a very well-developed motor skill and, generally speaking, your dominant linguistic hemisphere is the same as your dominant hand.

People talk with their hands—like me, as you may have noticed—and we use sign language. There’s a tight relationship between the use of the hand and the use of language. 

That’s partly because language is a productive force, and the hand is part of what changes the world. 

All those things are tied together in a very, very complex way with this a priori structure, and also with the embodied structure.

I also think that's part of the reason why classical Christianity put such an emphasis not only on the divinity of the spirit, but also on the divinity of the body, which is a harder thing to grapple with. 

It’s easier for people to think—if you think in religious terms, at all—that you have some sort of transcendent spirit that is somehow detached from the body, and that it might have some life after death. 

But Christianity, in particular, really insists on the divinity of the body.

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