the person without and the prison within

The difference between animals and all else other than Man is that while they perceive, we not only perceive but we conceive. This means we act purposefully beyond the concrete into the abstract. Ancient writers have accepted the personalization of God from the earliest known times. The reason for this, it is being suggested, might be that since God is a Spirit, in order for us to relate at all to His Spirit He must be a Person like we are persons. Or, more to the natural order of appearances, we must be persons because He is a Person. The concept of a person transcends impersonal forces and exhibits qualities unable to be reflected in inanimate unbodied spirits such as love, justice, etc. As we reach the outer orbit of our experience the realization these essays are trials becomes more evident. An essay is by definition a trial, then as such it is more evident the ideas proffered here are not carved in stone but are living efforts to explain in order to better appreciate our conclusions. All this is in an abstract zone with threads to the spiritual realization of existence beyond the manifested world we deal with now. This may be too technically described for many but it serves the purpose of reasoning the things of God out for those of us who require it. In this way we can more clearly believe in God in order to make it, bodily as it were, successfully to the next stage, the spiritual. As Man becomes more aware of his environment and his own existence, then the laws of God become more scientifically understandable, and our abilities to relate to them become correspondingly more technically articulate and clear. Still, while the language dealing with this may become so, only the concrete symbols we use change, the spiritual truths describing the animate laws of existence cannot change. Only the concrete is relative. But the spiritual makes the concrete relative which is why the spiritual is absolute.