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Updated: June 13, 2025
According to the views, facts and guesses concerning human personality, as a body-mind complex dominated by the internal secretions, outlined in the preceding pages, biography, and human history as the interaction of biographies, become capable of interpretation from a new standpoint.
In both cases the test is this: Does the spiritual nature arise? Friends have chosen the way of subduing the body-mind, of excluding it from worship except insofar as it may act as an organ of expression of the risen spirit. Having chosen this way, we are called upon to do it effectively, creatively.
Only by effort, practice, repeated effort, regular practice. It requires life-long preparation and training. We cannot hope to make much progress if we attempt to stay the mind only on First-days during meeting. We must make effort throughout the week, daily, hourly. It is by stilling the body-mind that we center down. Put the other way, it is by centering down that we still the body-mind.
Apply the same kind of reasoning to brain-mind, body-mind relationship which anatomists and physiologists apply to other functions, and one can no longer separate body and mind. Interesting as is the relationship between mind and character and the brain, it is at the present overshadowed by the fascinating relationship between these psychical activities and the bodily organs.
Back of all his daily activities, behind the life of body-mind is the mysterious unique individuality, the Ego, the Psyche or the Soul. Lately, a competitor with these ancient and honorable terms has come upon the scene as the Subconscious. In that darkened No Man's Land is determined a man's destiny.
If we succeed and we sometimes do our inner life is resurrected, the whole man is regenerated, and a living worship connects man with God. But if we fail and we often do the spiritual nature remains as if dead, and, on top of this, we pile a deadened body-mind. What should be a meeting for worship, a place where man and God come together, becomes a void. There is no life, only a sterile quietism.
Recognition of these several facts will lead us to a position similar to that of the early Friends, and point us to the same needs as regards what we must do if we would truly pray and worship, and, indeed, truly live. We too must endeavor to subdue the body-mind and turn the mind Godwards. We too must try to overcome the separated self and re-connect with our spiritual natures.
I shall sometimes refer to it as the "body-mind" or the "separated self." The early Friends called the part of us that is related to God and in which God dwells the "spiritual man," the "new birth," the "new creation." I shall sometimes call it the "inner being," the "spiritual self." It is of course the separated self that presents the problem.
Friends are by no means the only ones who realize that the body-mind presents a problem; that, in its usual state, it is an obstacle to worship and to all forms of the religious life. Friends are not alone in recognizing that when the separated self is uppermost and active, the spiritual self is submerged and passive, and that we are called upon to reverse this.
It can know itself as something extended and intricately built up, burning away, moving, throbbing; it can also know itself as the seat of sensation, perceptions, feelings, wishes, thoughts. Cerebral control and mental activity are, on this view, different aspects of one natural occurrence. What we have to do with is the unified life of a psycho-physical being, a body-mind or mind-body."
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