in the image of God, he created them; male and female he created them.
The science of what is our personality made of
God created mankind in his image, and nobody ever asked him/herself what does that mean? Many times one can hear from nonbelievers when asking Catholics about the explanation of the holy Trinity, one God but three of them, what is that nonsense about? This all makes sense now. Our Lord is 100% logic or Logos.
If we are God’s children, it would make a lot of sense that we resemble our Father. Since our Father holds Logos, logic demands that we should be similar to God in our nature. After all the whole point of salvation is becoming a godlike, or Jesus-like person.
Word/ Logos became flesh so that we can become logoslike, or logical, or united in the Truth. Evil is what corrupted us like a bomb that exploded and shattered our parts beyond repair.
Our Creator is one person, but three coequal divine persons who share one essence called the Holy Trinity. Our Father, the mastermind behind all of the creation: God the Father is the Mind and the Truth. His only born Son is the Soul, Jesus Christ, or Gods’will. And God the Holy Spirit which is the Love.
Let us put this knowledge into a graphic: the Holy Trinity, represented by a triangle with 3 triangles, and the central triangle which is unity: one God. Remember the teaching of the Bible or Catholic Credo: Jesus sitting right next to the Father, and sending the Holy Spirit to the world. The Holy Spirit does not come empty-handed but gives us gifts as it pleases, seven of them.
“But in all these things one and the same Spirit is at work, distributing to each one individually just as he wishes.” (1 Corinthians 12:11)
These gifts can be recognized by the fruits, which are twelve. Jesus said: “You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? 17 Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 ……. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”
Now we, as God’s children, have the same structure within ourselves, the trinity of the soul, the mind, and the heart plus the body. Jesus is a bodily part of the Holy Trinity.
We can read this from the Law of Love Jesus left us with:
1. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.
2. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.
(This represents another triangle: God, You, and Neighbor, but this is for another post.)
Our triangle, if we apply the Holy Trinity structure, has the same position of each part within the one person with love being on the top pointing upwards to the sky. Since we have our free will, we can make a change and point our hearts in the other direction, towards the earthly matters, or in the upside-down position (“incurvatus in se”, i.e. turned inward on oneself, or upside down triangle).
One difference is here: the central part of the triangle represents Consciousness: God’s truth built in every single human being regardless of the origin and status or religion. So to become one, united in the Truth, all of the three parts should resemble our consciousness, God’s truth built within us, and we can not achieve that without light, on our own. We are like God’s plants that need sun, air, and earth but free to do whatever their hearts desire. We need the earth to ground our mind and soul, and the sun, to give birth to fruits.
So our triangle, when we are loving the truth, points upwards, with a base on the ground, and looks like this:
A humble heart is obedient to the Truth pointing upwards to the Light and directed by the Mind & Soul. Prideful heart, looks down to earth (Eve and snake scene? Snake comes from the ground and Eve bows down to investigate new possibility).
This structure of our personality is well documented in science, scientists have found neuron cells clustered apart from the brain, in the heart as well as in the gut too, calling them heart and gut brain.
1. Our first brain has around ninety billion neurons plus ninety billion glial cells that form hundreds of trillions of connections modulated by countless neurotransmitters, is the seat of our MIND, and thoughts, and some emotions. This is the seat of our FAITH, of our knowledge, and fear of God, gifts given by the Holy Spirit, or Spirit of the Truth. If there is no fear of God there are many other fears that are mostly useless and make the mind slave to those.
When our Soul comes back to the Mind, we come to our senses: like the Son (Soul) who came back to the Father (Mind & Truth). The light can come inside our triangle. When the mind is in the darkness (incurvatus in se, the heart is pointing to the ground) we can not discern between lies and truth, we simply can not reach the target blindly, and our mind is useless. Conversion is when the soul comes back to the Truth.
2. Gut-brain,
The gut brain is the seat of our SOUL. This is why we eat Jesus’ blood and flesh, for our soul. Soul to soul. Heart to heart, brain to brain. Our soul is the seat of our will i.e. HOPE. The soul is the suffering part, when we suffer it’s all in our will (St. Catherine of Sienna), not our body. The person who does her/his own will can not hope, but seeks certainty and wants to predict a future.
Jesus who is the soul of the Holy Trinity, made God’s will perfectly play out. We also know that he is the suffering part of God, who is uniting God’s soul and our Body.
“A big part of our emotions are probably influenced by the nerves in our gut," Mayer says.” All three parts are seats of different emotions, the brain is the seat of anger, the gut seat of sorrow, and the heart seat of love. So our emotions come from different places within ourselves.
The soul is our route back home: finding our purpose in life, the soul that executes his/her purpose in life: God’s will just like Jesus did, will save the Body, just like Jesus Christ demonstrated in the resurrection.
3. Our heart is the seat of desires, and above all LOVE.
“This "heart brain" is composed of approximately 40,000 neurons that are alike neurons in the brain, meaning that the heart has its own nervous system”. And again heart sends more signals to the brain than vice versa, the same is true for the gut.
Anecdotally, the heart as the seat of our desires is confirmed by the experiences of transplant surgery patients: “After her heart-lung transplant, she wrote that she felt as if "a second soul were sharing my body." She experienced new desires, including an appetite for beer, junk food and curvy blondes.”
The heart is like an engine to the system, it directs a person, either toward the Truth or lies. The heart gives the rhythm and is the seat of the desires. When it becomes cold, or sick it is the most serious illness of the three.
Jeremiah 17:9-10 (NKJV): “The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it? I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give every man according to his ways, According to the fruit of his doings.
But maybe even worse than being cold is a lukewarm heart: “So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3-17)
When our heart becomes in love with our Mind, and body that is called selfish heart or selfish love. A selfish heart is a cold heart and the seat of all sins. Why? Because the light of the Truth can not come into the person because points to the darkness, blocks the light in, and is not facing the light. The heart is our face, mind, and gut are our rear parts :). A selfish heart sacrifices its soul too, and brings it to death, out of love for its mind and opinions. If a heart can love just one soul, its own, it can love any other soul too, as it loves thyself. That is the essence of the second Love law. For the soul to be happy, it must feel it’s alive, while pleasures kill it, and selfish heart loves to indulge in its desires.
Something must pull the heart out of the earth and up towards the light to get light coming into the system again. When the mind is in the dark, and the heart looks delightful into her/his mind, put all the FAITH in yourself, and HOPE in your own hands, the soul becomes sick and lazy. The soul is made for suffering, it does not stay healthy if indulging in an easy way of life or too much food. A person cares only for her desires, like a person with one talent buried in the earth, a person buried her/himself while alive.
A wicked heart is a COLD heart pointing to the ground and not to the sky. This makes the soul lazy and not willing to suffer. Heart disinclined to exertion sets the tone for the whole person. This heart is described by a story of a person with one talent:
‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, 25 so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.’ 26 But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant!
Incurvatus in se description: A heart without light, buried in the ground, cold, with consciousness inflamed (YELLOW), can not keep the system warm: no other gifts can be accepted by a person who turned its back to the Truth, the source of all gifts. It is the consciousness that is the only link to the Truth in such a situation. Instead of faith, the Mind is flooded with suspicions/fears and opinions, and instead of hope the Soul relies on her own hands, strength, and money, seeking comfort instead of suffering. Truth is viewed as dangerous and harsh to bear. Mind & Soul look from above to the ground, and the heart obeys only orders from above: his/her opinion. This is a description of a prideful heart: instead of God looking up to oneself, incurvatus in se.
CONCLUSION:
Faith in the truth, hope in Jesus, and love towards the Truth: giving back to God and neighbor is how we are designed to live. Our heart is where light comes through or NOT. That is why the heart is crucial for salvation, one which is loving the TRUTH, not him/herself.
How else do we know this is true?
In the name of the Father: we point to our forehead, and the Son, we point to the belly button, and the Holy Spirit: we go from the left to the right shoulder across the heart. The cross is a place where our heart can choose to go left or right, there is just one right direction, to the Truth and not lies.
It takes some time to teach heart to love the truth all the time, and not fall for lies. But we could never do this on our own in the first place, where there is will there is meaning to it! We just need to show up with goodwill every day.
Picking up the cross means exactly that, every day we are at hundreds of crossroads, and we are picking the side. It is not an easy route all the time. But security is not what we should aim for, but truth. Our soul is built for tough tasks. Our brain is built to think logically, and our gut feeling to be wise, gutsy, and hope for providence all the time.
Everything we are depends on whether our heart is in love with ourselves or the Truth. And the old saying change of heart gets a more serious dimension.
Take a look at how our Soul is important to our Mind well-being or the peace of mind:
More science on three brains:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-3-d-map-illuminates-little-brain-nerve-cells-within-heart
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/