What does it mean to be indwelled, or anointed, by the Holy Spirit? In The Boundless Love of God: A Holy Spirit Story, I address this action. In the next blogs I will share my comments from this book, beginning with the indwelling of Jesus Christ, the God-Man, by the Holy Spirit of his Father. Recall that I refer to the soul as consisting of mind, will, emotion and conscience and heart as the soul.

Throughout his life Jesus lived and spoke in complete obedience to God’s counsel through his indwelling Holy Spirit. In John 15:9-15 Jesus teaches that he has obeyed his Father’s commands and that everything he has learned from his Father he has made known to his disciples. In the synagogue in Nazareth Jesus opened the scroll of Isaiah and read, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach the good news…,” confirming his identity with God the Father and fulfilling Scripture that identified him as the promised Messiah. To Thomas he said, “If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” Responding to a question from Phillip Jesus stated, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” These passages confirm Jesus’ indwelling by his Father through his Holy Spirit who descended to dwell in the human spirit of Jesus just after he was baptized by John the Baptist. He willfully lived in complete obedience to the Father all his life, even to his death. As Jesus was dying on the cross he cried out, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” That Jesus possessed a human spirit is indicated by these words he spoke on the cross. His very last words were, “‘It is finished.’ With that he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” These verses confirm that Jesus the Man possessed a spirit and submitted it in full obedience to the Spirit of the Father.

I now address the question if Man is a tripartite being. Spirit and soul can be confusing concepts since the words appear to be used interchangeably in Scripture. And where does spirit fit in?

For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword. It penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. Hebrews 4:12

From my first book, Nerve Endings of the Soul: Interaction Between the Mind of God and the Mind of Man Through Neural Synaptic Networks, I addressed this issue with comments that give support to Hebrews 4:12:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in our image, in my likeness” . . . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Genesis 1:26-27

God is a triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Only the Spirit knows the Mind of God. (1 Corinthians 2:11) Since man was created in the image of God (imago Dei) it is biblical that man is tripartite with body, soul and spirit. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 states, “May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” When God formed man from the dust of the ground, He breathed “the breath of life” into him. (Genesis 2:7) It is this life from God that constitutes the human spirit, and as it is with God only the human spirit truly knows the mind of man. It is the soul of man that is the vehicle through which the mind’s will operates, and if a repentant man’s soul wills to obey God, it will allow the spirit to rule over the man as ordered by the indwelling Holy Spirit. As spirit acts upon the soul of man, the soul in turn expresses itself through the brain and body.

With the Fall of man (Genesis 3) the image of God in humans was corrupted with the loss of intimate communion between the soul of man and the Holy Spirit since Man in sin experienced spiritual death, losing [the indwelling personal] communion between the Holy Spirit and his human spirit. Man’s mind became governed by his soul, the will of his own self-centered focus. The relationship between God and Man was and is designed to be a bidirectional, interactive one. Man’s capacity is to use all the communicable attributes of his Creator God, his mind being created in the image of the Mind of God. The restoration of this interaction depends upon Man’s repentance and the soul’s choice to follow the Counsel of the Holy Spirit through his human spirit.

I have identified several questions in my previous blog. I will begin addressing the term “heart.” In my second book, The Boundless Love of God: A Holy Spirit Story, I wrote the following comments:

To what the word “heart” refers can be confusing. It is a word used over 1000 times in the Bible and bears clarification . . . . “Heart” refers to the center of emotional, intellectual and moral activity, of will and of reasoning. “The heart in Scripture is variously used, sometimes for the mind and understanding, sometimes for the will, sometimes for the affections, sometimes for the conscience, sometimes for the whole soul. Generally, it denotes the whole soul of man and all the faculties of it, not absolutely, but as they are all one principle of moral operations, as they all concur in our doing of good and evil.” In this cited resource are listed a large number of verses from Scripture that include this word for further reference. For the purpose of this book “heart” will refer to the soul, which includes the mind, will and emotion, and the conscience interactive with the human spirit.

I have spent close to 20 years in research, written two books and now have a website and at least 20 pages of blogs that expand on the contents of my books. One can ask, “So what?” Why have I spent so much time and energy on this task? Let me answer.

I find that many people who consider themselves Christians, and this includes pastors, cannot differentiate between the spirit and the soul and their relation to the body and fail to give full explanation to the human spirit and its relation to the Holy Spirit. Reference is made to the “heart,” but no explanation is given to what constitutes the “heart.” Yes, the Bible refers to the heart, but what IS the heart in this context? And what does it mean when it is taught that the Holy Spirit indwells the body, the “heart?” OR, did the indwelling of the Holy Spirit cease at the closure of the Canon? Does the Holy Spirit indwell repentant mankind in our time? What exactly does it mean to be indwelled by the Holy Spirit? Can we only pray TO God, or can we yet hear FROM and receive Counsel FROM God through His indwelling Holy Spirit, sent as promised by Jesus Christ upon His resurrection, as documented in the Book of Acts? And how do we hear from God, or can we only pray TO Him? Is being “spiritual” merely signified by the raising of hands in song or by other physical actions? What IS worship anyway? Is it expressed only in song and when we “feel” the “moving of the Holy Spirit,” however that is expressed in an emotion?

In a very recent communication with a dear friend I made the following statement: “My research really does not deal with consciousness but rather with the cognitive, immaterial mind/soul of humanity and how it relates to the spirit both of Man and of God in dualist interaction with the material neural synaptic networks of the brain.” But the fair question is, “So what?” So many questions! IT HAS BEEN THE PURPOSE OF MY WRITING IN MY BOOKS AND IN MY BLOGS TO ADDRESS THESE SEVERAL VERY CRITICAL QUESTIONS. We are now living in an era when science is “king,” and we must ask if there is concordance between properly conducted and interpreted science, including of course, neuroscience, and properly interpreted Scripture in context. In my next blogs I will endeavor to succinctly address these questions. It is important to the Great Commission given to all mankind by Jesus Christ. Please stand by.

An article was published on April 3, 2014 entitled “Dissociating the Neural Correlates of Experiencing and Imagining Affective Touch.” The authors are Molly V. Lucas, Laura C. Anderson, Danielle A. Bolling, Kevin A. Pelphrey and Martha D. Kaiser. The investigators shared that “both experiencing and viewing affective . . . touch recruit similar neural mechanisms.” An observation from earlier studies suggests that “some components involved in touch perception do not require physical sensation. . . .The anterior insula of the brain is involved in subjective feeling states and affective learning.” The investigators “sought to characterize . . . stimulus-independent activations, which may be coding the affective aspects of gentle [imagined] touch.” Their hypothesis was “that some aspects of brain mechanisms for processing touch may reflect stimulus-independent, cognitive-based, responses, which code for the affective response to touch. . . . While the posterior insula showed activation only during the physical experience of touch, the anterior insula was responsive to both experienced and imagined touch, suggesting that this region plays a role in the interpretation of the affective meaning of the touch.”

I propose from my studies that the mere imagining of touch in the prefrontal cortex generates specific wave forms that stimulate spike trains of action potentials transmitting neural codes with meaning through synaptic networks. The cognitive mind is the interpreter of the codes. That the anterior insula “plays a role in the interpretation of the affective meaning of the touch” is explained by the synaptic transmission of neural codes within specific regions of the brain that the cognitive mind “reads” through a lifelong process of learning archived in memory. It is important for neuroscientists to account for the activity of the cognitive mind in such interpretation.

I have come across an interesting article that is relevant to research that supports dualist interaction between the immaterial mind and the material brain. It is entitled “Neural Encoding of Actual and Imagined Touch within Human Posterior Parietal Cortex,” authored by Srinivas Chivukula et al in eLife and published on March 1, 2021 (https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.61646) I am posting excerpts from that article along with my comments:

“Recent human neuroimaging studies suggest that the PPC [posterior parietal cortex] is also recruited during touch cognition in the absence of actual tactile input (e.g., seen touch or imagined touch), supporting a notion that both higher-level touch processing and tactile cognition share a neural substrate. . . . we found that a shared PPC neuronal population coded for overt movements as well as cognitive motor variables including imagery, observed actions, and action verbs. . . . The tactile imagery task evoked body part-specific responses that shared a neural substrate with actual touch. Our results demonstrate that PPC neurons that discriminate touch are partially reactivated during a tactile imagery task in a body part-specific manner. The latter represents a novel finding . . . and suggests PPC involvement in the cognitive processing of touch. . . . Recordings were made from a chronic implanted array, and thus neuronal waveform sorting resulted in both well-isolated neuronal waveforms and multi-neuron groupings.”

The authors asked the important question, “Are neurons that encode tactile sensations also recruited during tactile imagery?” Recall the comment above, “. . . and thus neuronal waveform sorting resulted in both well-isolated neuronal waveforms . . . .” Previous blog posts have identified the compelling possibility that the cognitive mind has the capacity to generate waveforms that interact with neural synaptic networks to transmit specified information through neural networks in the form of linguistic neural codes within spike trains of action potentials. It is important to note that “. . . during the imagery task, no stimulus was delivered to the participant.“

In previous blogs and as discussed in my books a nonclassical, immaterial energy generated by the immaterial mind may interact with material neural networks as waveforms with amplitude and frequency that are transmitted through neural synapses by quantum tunneling. Are we getting closer to at least a partial understanding of how the Mind of God communes with the mind of Man?

Researchers from The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published an article in 2020 that addresses information flow through the brain. The title is “Preservation and Changes in Oscillatory Dynamics across the Cortical Hierarchy.” and the authors are Mikael Lundqvist, Andre M. Bastos and Earl K. Miller. An excellent review of the article appeared in Science Daily on September 8, 2020 to which I now refer. To produce … thoughts and actions, [the] brain processes information in a hierarchy of regions along its surface, or cortex. … many studies have looked at how synchronized the phases of a particular frequency are between cortical regions. … [The authors found] a systematic shift in preferred frequencies across regions. [In their animal studies three regions were studied, the visual cortex, the parietal cortex and the prefrontal cortex, and the animals were given the task of correctly identifying an image they had just seen. The authors tracked the waves produced by this activity in the three regions.] In each region they found that when an image was either being encoded (when it was first presented) or recalled (when working memory was tested), the power of theta and gamma frequency bands of brain waves would increase in bursts and power in alpha and beta bands would decrease. When the information had to be held in mind, … theta and gamma power went down and alpha and beta power went up in bursts. … the bursts of theta and gamma power were closely associated with neural spikes that encoded information about the images. Alpha and beta power bursts … were anti-correlated with that same spiking activity. … As you move from the back of the brain to the front, all the frequencies get a little higher. … the inverse relationships between frequency bands … are consistent with a model in which alpha and beta alternatively inhibit, or release, gamma to control the encoding of information - a form of top-down control of sensory activity. … The increased frequency in the oscillatory rhythms may help sculpt information flow in the cortex.”

I cite this article because it shows how brain waves in different frequencies work in synchrony to provide the flow of information through different regions of the brain. As I stated in “Waves in Our Brains,” Part Two, energy in wave forms is transmitted through the brain’s synaptic networks linguistically encoded to convey semantic information, and this article elaborates on that point. My objective is to identify work that supports dualist interaction between the immaterial mind and the material neural networks of the brain involving wave forms generated by the intention or attention of the immaterial mind.

I am continuing my research into dualist interactionism as it applies to communion between the immaterial mind of Man and the Mind of God and the material neural synaptic networks of the human brain. As I come across scientific articles that are relevant to the interaction I will provide summaries in my blogs. But, the search for such articles will be difficult since materialist reductionism still dominates the perspectives of many published neuroscientists. For those who are following my blogs I first thank you and second ask for your patience. I am careful in my selections and summaries of them and require that they can reflect concordance between the neuroscience discussed and Scripture. sola Scriptura applies.

It is important to explain the relationship between the mind and the soul. In my writings I have defined the soul as consisting of the mind, the will and the emotion expressed by the living human being. Yes, there are “soulish” animals, such as dogs and horses. If you have ever ridden a horse (as I have on many occasions over 35 plus years) you have been exposed to its emotions and its will, such as when it has tried to rub you off its back against a fence or beneath a low limb! It is with its mind that it expresses its will or intention to get you off of its back! But, to the best of our theological knowledge “soulish” animals have no spirit, as does Man, and it is not known if “soulish” animals have immortal souls. But how about Man? Is the soul of Man immortal? Scripturally we have reason to believe that indeed the soul of Man IS immortal, as is his spirit.

Michael Egnor wrote an article on January 31, 2021 that speaks to this issue. It appeared in “Mind Matters.” (https://mindmatters.ai/2021/01/your-soul-has-no-off-switch/) Egnor states that “Man has a soul, and the mind is several powers of the soul - sensation, perception, sensus communis, imagination, memory, sensitive appetite, reason, and will.” He continues saying, “But there is no evidence - either philosophical or scientific - that the mind or the soul (of which the mind is an aspect) has an “on switch” or an “off switch.” The most reasonable scientific inference is that we are never “unconscious,” nor are we “conscious” in any meaningful sense. Our mental life is a composite of abilities - arousal, sensation, perception, locomotion, reason, etc., and these abilities appear to subsist in modified form despite dramatic changes in the body and brain….Even after death, we often seem to retain awareness that can be verified, and even have heightened awareness, as the massive literature on near death experiences demonstrates….Our minds are never off; we just have states in which one or more powers of the mind - sensation or perception or memory etc. - are temporarily inactive….Most egregiously, the concept of “consciousness” perpetuates the lie that we are extinguished at death. There is every reason - philosophical and scientific - to infer that man has an immortal soul.” Our mind is an immortal reality.

Throughout my writings I have referred to quantum wave functions and to wave forms that vary in frequency, amplitude and shape. In “Waves in Our Brains,” Part Two (to which I referred in a very recent blog on March 1, 2021) I have shared that wave forms now appear to be generated by the immaterial mind of Man (and by the Mind of God, I would add) that transmit specified information to and through neural synaptic networks. The term wave function consists of all the information wave forms can assume in a probabilistic manner. W. A. Dembski has referred to the “small probabilities” that describe the specification of information that can be transmitted between a sender and recipient. Wave forms, if you will, are expressions of “small probabilities” by which wave functions can be specifically manifested, for example within linguistic neural codes.

But are quantum wave functions real? Colbeck and Renner have addressed this question and have found that they are elements of reality in a one-to-one correspondence. (https://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/ColbeckRenner2012_2.pdf) The authors maintain that the wave function corresponds to an element of reality that objectively exists, and it does not depend on whether it is measured or not. Colbeck and Renner’s claim is that “…the wave function includes all information that is in principle available about the system….” So we can justifiably assume that wave forms correspond to specified elements of reality.