God is Spirit (John 4:24).
There are many concepts that frequently appear in Scripture and other religious texts which must be clarified for modern readers. One example is the word Spirit. What is spirit? Most of us can probably grasp an abstract sense of it. We have all experienced moments—perhaps in love, suffering, or religious experience—when something seems to transcend the purely material world: a silent inner voice, a profound awareness, or an invisible presence giving meaning to the moment. We have likely all sensed something beyond what can be seen or measured, something seemingly outside our direct control.
At the same time, we have probably experienced certain states of being which continually reflect themselves in our lives. This, too, can be understood in a spiritual sense. A person who feels consumed by misfortune may begin to see that feeling repeatedly confirmed in daily life, while someone who feels loved, hopeful, or abundant may notice life continually offering signs that reinforce those realities.
If we go to Luke 1:34 and the literal epistemic description of Spirit, we read that Mary conceives of her creative self without knowing a man, then this emotive example and analogy is a good way to understand the nature of Spirit. We can also explain it through the nature of God as Spirit. God, then, as the Bible shows is in all facets of life, in both villains and heroes, both antagonists and Hebrews.
We can take this even further and, for the sake of simplicity, conclude that God and the universe—this temple or body we inhabit—form an unbroken whole, a perfect and closed system. This would mean that God never references anything outside of Himself or beyond His grasp. Through His nature as Spirit, we may therefore understand spirit as something self-referential: something that informs itself and, through that continual act of self-communication, gives shape to its own reality.
In other words, when we experience joy while performing a task—whether playing, creating, or engaging in meaningful work—that joy is not necessarily produced by the act itself. Rather, the joy already existed within us, and the experience simply awakened or revealed it. The moment did not create the joy; it merely invited it to bloom.
The point we’re trying to make is that we live in Spirit, as Spirit, autonomously, unaware, sometimes observing ourselves away from ourselves and subsequently from the image of God as Spirit.
To make it simple: Mary conceives of herself giving birth to Immanuel, and Jesus is born without her informing herself of her potential through someone else. Eve is created by informing herself flesh from flesh. One precedes the fall; one precedes the redemption.
We now come to the second part of this deconstruction. For these divine stories are never not accompanied by the phenomenon of eating, implied in all its forms, and the presence of knowledge. If we then put on the goggles and optic system of Spirit, and remember that the predisposition of Spirit is something that always begins, begins in heaven, just as the Word predates flesh, and that:
the words I Speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life (John 6:63).
We come to find out that the words themselves in the Bible are to be considered Spirit too. Which, then, in what would take hundreds of pages to analyze, opens the Bible up for a new dimension of reading. Because if Spirit informs itself by referencing itself, the classical sentence “do not eat” (from the tree that provides knowledge) becomes infinitely more nuanced. It is now not just an imperative, “do not eat”, but a direct instruction that references itself: do not eat in this manner. In other words, do not eat from the tree of knowledge in a singular negative way, in a singular negation. The sentence, as Spirit, is saying “do not eat” in the form and manner of “do not eat”. Just as Mary’s singular negation “seeing I have not known a man”, is also altered through this lens. And this is where the promised Johannite key becomes relevant.
Early in the book of John, we get this message or instruction:
And he confessed, and denied not (John 1:20).
Meaning he not only affirmed but he also did not deny, in other words, he performed an affirmation and a double negation. And this, just as Mary did not attest to the formula of “not knowing a man”, or negating the flesh of a man to conceive, can then be applied to reading, for instance, the case of Eve and the apple. Because of the double negation of eating of knowledge, we actually follow the instruction “do not eat” as if it were Spirit. Which is the epigenetic instruction of God when applying our lens prior to not only reading but quantum-observing the world without reacting to its blasphemous system.
If we then keep this in mind and take a look at the themes of knowledge and eating, very relevant since Jesus commands us to eat of him and keep the Father as an indirect source of knowledge via him, we can then take a look at some things. First, creating and “eating” through our observation from flesh, from another human or thing, works if we do it through double negation. Because if all of substance is in the appearing flesh of something or someone else, then the effects of a singular negation would be akin to something like an ontological nothing or nothingness, and this is actually spelled out in John 6:63:
To pneuma estin to zōopoioun hē sarx ouk ōphelei ouden.
(The Spirit it is giving life; the flesh not profits nothing).
It is the spirit that quickened; the flesh profiteth nothing (King James Bible).
The latter which, sadly enough, seems to be a mistranslation in the English version, since there it says that the flesh “profits nothing”, while in Greek it says “…the flesh not profits nothing.”, which dramatically alters the meaning of the sentence. In other words, the flesh has not no profit, while the Spirit has profit. Meaning that flesh can be the initiation of a profitable state of being, that it doesn’t have to lead to a fall out of Eden, but only when it is related to and observed through a double negation. Just as the Johannite key, that which historically comes before the Christ that always was, makes clear: I confess it or affirm it, and I do not deny it or singularly negate it. The singular negation of the other, of someone else’s flesh, is, on the other hand, the opposite of what Mary does when she gives birth to Immanuel. Jesus is famously begotten in the nature and character of the Holy Spirit. A singular negation of someone else, implying that the agent or human is solely matter, is thus what the Bible and Jesus call blasphemous against the Holy Spirit. A sin – the only sin – that is not forgiven.
In a world stuck in philosophical materialism, with chunks of highly influential aspects initiating themselves through a singular negation and a tradition that observes something outside of itself as substance, and says, “eat me, I’ll be your substance”, Jesus comes around the boulder in front of the grave, into the shadow of death, and becomes a guiding star, a temporary antidote, our medicinal food. In other words, we can look at even a depiction of Jesus and eat his flesh with our observation, which is essentially what made Eve and Adam fall, but since the divine is reduced in him, since he is the Word in the flesh, God as man, we can nonetheless say “I am not him” and anchor our humanity in this dichotomy, and when the world falls around us we can hold on to him nonetheless, even if it feels abstract and weird.
Furthermore, if we complete the way of negation and not only say “I am not Jesus”, but realize that he is in fact in us, an aspect of us, then the double negation becomes “I am not-not Jesus”. But even if we didn’t observe him like that, even if we commit the original sin and conceive of ourselves from that point of substance reduction, Jesus, he has forgiven that sin by simply being the one that he is. In a sense, he has overcome the world for us. When the world went against the Holy Spirit when inquiring of knowledge, of informing itself about itself, and structured its relational premise around worldly flesh, Jesus went, “Sure, then just eat from me”.
Even when the world tried to structure itself, its emergence, around the original sin, God came into that system of observation and took upon Himself all of our sins. It was almost like the world said, “everything that is, is but flesh, separation and otherness,” and then God came into flesh, bore the sin of that interpretation, and drew heaven down here, to Him, in that form. Somebody said, “flesh is the only substance”, and altered the way Spirit informs itself, making people sustain their observation by unknowingly blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, and then Christ came into that culture and said, “Fine, then eat from me”. In a world where the substance of life had deviated from God and Spirit onto the flesh of man, he drew the substance of heaven onto the reduction of flesh that was him. And they killed him for that.
