Understanding the difference between brain and Intellect
What is Intellect? How is it different from the Brain itself?
What makes a Mozart different from any talented, youthful composer in a university music program?
What separates the ineffable talent of a Master Chef from an ordinary cook? Let’s see…
We can place material objects on a kitchen table and count them, weigh them, measure them, hack them into smaller parts. We still have the same material objects. (Same color, same name, same aroma and flavor.) Our understanding of those objects is the same understanding anybody would have walking into the room.
But, now, watch and observe what happens next.
Those objects are part of a recipe: vegetables, fruit, flour, seasonings, etc. The one counting, measuring, slicing into parts is now a Chef and the people watching are ordinary people standing in his kitchen.
What occurs will be a TRANSCENDENCE of mere objects into a delicious meal directed by the talented INTELLECT of a master Chef.
Something above and beyond the ingredients takes place when the imagination and experience of the cook operates to create a Gestalt : the whole being greater than its parts.
Now, observe a curious thing indeed.
The Chef writes his recipe down and he hands it to his audience of ordinary cooks.
Will they be able to duplicate the extraordinary meal by instructions only?
If we say "Yes" we've never eaten any ordinary cook's common failure at a dinner table.
Something is missing--even though evey single ingredient is there!
What is missing is the subject of this Topic: Transcendence .
If ordinary cooks watch a Master Chef and observe how he "thinks" as he performs the same mundane operations as they have, then-sometimes--not always--they will grasp the ineffable: what cannot be put in words. What makes the magic occur? Tasty is not what delicious is .
Meaning what?
It is the gulf between pretty and beautiful; between tasty and delicious; between the moment before and the moment during orgasm!
Transcendence
Now that we are on the same page, as it were, let's tackle the subject of GOD .
We are physical and material living things but we can think. We are a gestalt where our cells, atoms and processes are greater THAN material things. We have brains and can think.
When we talk about GOD we leave behind material, physical sensible "things". Our brain is of little use.
We cross a divide using our INTELLECT and not our brain’s knowledge of material reality.
Our vocabulary changes.
As we cross the divide between material to spiritual we leave this world and our nouns, verbs and adjectives lose contact with what we actually KNOW. They become immaterial as well. Poetry. Impressionism. We no longer communicate with what we know as real, palpable, measurable reality. Knowledge ceases to be. Artists and composers and Poets we become.
Transcendence into what we AREN'T requires constant reminding our brain (not our intellect) where we are. Is it a physical “place”? No. We are intellectualizing a concept. The brain is useless. i.e. The meat in our head and not the thoughts we now think.
People who imagine God anthropomorphize God, as the artists do, of course.
You have to think of God negatively — incorruptible, nontemporal, immaterial, immutable. You think of all of those negative words. Why? Because God is NOT what we are. And when you think of God positively, there are three positive things you can say about God: God lives, God knows and God wills.
A blinking warning light has to flicker on signaling Transcendence from what we know to what we intellectualize. The divide is crossed. The gulf is breached.
Whenever you say God exists, lives, wills, and knows, you have to immediately add, “but not as you and I exist, not as you and I live, not as you and I know, not as you and I will,” — that not comes in there because if you don’t do that, you are saying that the “lives” is applied univocally : i.e. in the same sense to God and you.
In other words, to speak about God is talk about what you do NOT know. It is the voice of Intellect not brain. The Music of Mozart, the delicious and not the tasty. The laughter and not the tickle.
Transcendance.
Does God make this voyage to us the way we make the journey toward "Him"?
The Scriptures of any religion are offered as proof positive that the answer is "yes".
What must we ask?
Would God have revealed anything to us that we could or would normally think byourselves ?
No, it would be a waste of time, wouldn’t it? Redundancy. Regurgitation. Art. Poetry. Myth.
So what He revealed is something we can’t really understand very well. If we did--it would be faked; trickery; already-stating the obvious with a sense of false discovery.
The invitation was ours. Was it to ourselves or to a transcendence of Intellect?
God reaches from immaterial divinity to mundane material humanity and it cannot produce WHAT WE would produce if we are FAKING it.
That is, the infinite talking to the finite is an interesting kind of jump across a bridge. We may imagine it as we create Martians and Bigfoot out of sliced vegetables and broth or we may fake it by trembling and uttering gibberish. But--what we cannot do is improve the human species with it--if it ends up consisting of our own imagination. Transformation of species is the only test.
And to what extent does this independent intellect, the mind over matter, to what extent is it critical for approaching revelation or understanding it? Well, beyond fakery, it is all we have!
A final point to be made and then we close.
Any of us--all of us--who cross the divide between the material world into Transcendence to touch the face of the God who lives, who knows and who wills--cannot return from this leap the same Person as we were before. If we do return the same-- all we possess is the Emotionally Overwrought inarticulate gibberish rather than transformation. Moses before Sinai cannot be Moses after Sinai if God was on that mountain.
An ordinary cook cannot fake a masterpiece meal.
An author of fiction cannot create characters smarter than himself. The proof is in the pudding.
The “voice” of God would not be man’s voice.
Intellect is our vehicle and it is not the atoms of a meat brain, nor vegetables nor poetry. Transcendence is our suspension bridge between imagination and the Divine. Do we return with mere “pretty” or with Beautiful? With “tasty” or with delicious? With the “tickle” or the laughter?
Jehovah's Witnesses always return with the moment before the orgasm...that...never....comes...
What have YOU returned with? Gibberish? Poetry? Doubt? Your LIFE is your proof of journey.
Our Prayers, otherwise, are merely the sound of our own voice.