A Mental Exercise and John

A brief and likely unnecessary introductory note: these aren't related subjects. They are just the topics of this post.

Now on to the post.

Okay, so I'm in Intro to Philosophy and we have to read a few excerpts from this large textbook throughout the year. However, the book affords a huge variety of passages in addition to what we have assigned, and I sometimes peruse them when I have other schoolwork I'm procrastinating.

The reading today was on one's identity, and so I was reading a number of essays on that subject and there were a lot of interesting ideas and analogies -- but one particular concept stuck out to me that I thought I'd share.

Alright. Everyone basically gets that we are not our bodies -- our arms and legs and torsos and hair. Our sensory perceptions are all just being interpreted through our brains. But for some reason I could never really picture this. The closest I could come was seeing a picture, like reading a textbook, of a cutaway head with a throbbing brain in it, absorbing signals and perceiving.

This didn't do much by way of visualization, so while I had the idea that my eyes and fingers and ears are simply objects communicating with my very complicated brain, I didn't really understand it.

On to the mental exercise!

Disclaimer -- This is too simple to justify my lead-up. All it consists of is this:

Instead of picturing your brain in your cranium, picture it in a tank of life-sustaining fluid on a desk in a lab. Now picture that your brain is wired up with a radio transceiver that is communicating directly with a little radio that is suspended inside of your skull, which is connected to all of your efferent and afferent nerves.

Now instead of being a brain so intimately acquainted with your body that every fluctuation in your blood affects your thinking, you are a brain in a tank receiving signals from the automaton that walks and smells and sees and looks like a normal person.

Somehow, this illustration disengaged the concept of my body as myself for me. It might take a second.

Flex your fingers. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. You're just running reconnaissance for that gray thing in a tank.

I don't know how impressive you'll find this mental exercise. I found it immensely entertaining.

But on to John.

For Intro to the New Testament, we are required to read through the whole New Testament in a quarter. This translates to a book every couple days, and most recently my task was the Gospel of John.

We had previously covered the other three Synoptic Gospels, and those were interesting. We learned about all of the subtle agendas and biases underlying the straightforward stories, and while I'm not sure how much of this talk to buy into, the stories definitely lost a lot of their flair.

At the same time, I learned to read critically and look for the little agendas or messages in the details, and to appreciate things unique to each Gospel.

John was chuck full of these.

John's doing things his own way. He's got the message that Jesus is offering eternal life and he doesn't slip it subtly into allusions Jesus makes, like the Synoptics. Every chapter, Jesus is hitting the Jews (and Gentiles) in the face with this. "I'm not just a miracle worker prophet. I'm not just John the Baptist's buddy. I'm God's Son, and I'm offering eternal life. Eternal life."

That's why John's so cool. He doesn't hide anything or act polite. His writing is so blunt. Part of this might just be my superior New Living Translation, but John is ridiculously direct. The Synoptics leave things up to interpretation. Not John.

I'll end this text-overload post with a quote from the end of John, showing his characteristic no-nonsense approach to Jesus' words.

     Jesus replied,  "If I want him [the beloved disciple] to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? As for you, follow me." So the rumor spread among the community of believers that the disciple wouldn't die. But that isn't what Jesus said at all.

Oh, John.