I conclude this series of blog posts by commenting on how the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in repentant believers is manifested. The Apostle Paul admonished believers to walk by the leading of the Holy Spirit, as did the God-Man Jesus Christ. In doing so they manifest the fruits of the Holy Spirit. These include love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The Source of these effects is the character and living presence of Jesus Christ. Desires of the flesh reflect an attitude of defiance to God. Believers who live in obedience to the leading of the Holy Spirit are “sealed,” signifying that God has ownership of them.

Paul also taught that spiritual gifts are given to believers for the benefit of the whole Church. The gifts are supernatural, Spirit-given abilities that are addressed in 1 Corinthians 12:1-11. The gifts are given by one Spirit for the common good, the Spirit of Jesus Christ. These include wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy. the discernment of spirits, tongues, interpretation of tongues, service, teaching, encouragement, sharing, leadership and showing mercy. We are designed to need each other and to serve one another. Communion and companionship vertically between the Christian and the Father will always include a horizontal relationship in love among the saints.

It is my hope that what I have shared in this series of blogs is helpful for an understanding of what it means to be indwelled by the Holy Spirit. How does the indwelling relate to the human spirit and soul, and how does communion occur in our time between the Holy Spirit and the human spirit and soul? It is a communion actualized by the transmission of meaning in neural codes through God’s created synaptic networks. It is a bidirectional dualist interaction between the immaterial Mind of God and mind of Man and the exquisite material mechanisms of the human brain.

The Book of Acts could be called The Acts of the Holy Spirit since there are fifty-six references to the Holy Spirit in the twenty-eight chapters of the book, more than in any other single book of the Bible. Huber L. Drumwright, Jr. stated that Jesus Christ continued his work through the lives and ministries of his disciples. In John 12:24 Jesus told his disciples, “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds.” Walter Thomas Conner said, “The Holy Spirit is the presence of the living Lord Jesus in spiritual power in the lives of men.”

This work was begun at Pentecost as recorded in Acts 2:14-36 when the Holy Spirit was given as an indwelling as Jesus had promised before his death on the cross. The Spirit was given to dwell permanently once again inside all repentant believers, making regeneration possible for all mankind. Regeneration refers to the restoration of the intimate, direct, personal interaction between the Holy Spirit and the human spirit and soul that was lost at the Fall. Though yet fallen in our time humanity in repentance has been granted salvation by the grace and love of God through the sacrifice of his Son, Jesus Christ, resurrected by the power of the Holy Spirit. The price for sin has been paid. Life is restored in the living Jesus Christ. Spirit-indwelled individuals are spokespersons for God, and their testimony is Spirit-originated and Spirit-empowered. The first Christian sermon was given by Peter at Pentecost, and the events demonstrated that Jesus who was raised from the dead had his authority extended beyond our time into eternity and beyond Earth into heaven. Jesus reigns by virtue of his resurrection. The presence and power of the Holy Spirit is the proof.

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.