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1. It caught my attention when you pointed out that death involves the separation of body and spirit, and if we are trying in our thoughts or actions to make a separation between physical and spiritual it is like pursuing death. I don’t have anything to add to that idea or ask about it; I just wanted note it’s poignancy.

   The idea that the spiritual exists inside and around the physical is also intriguing. It addresses, well, some things I don’t have other explanations for. I really like how it would solve the problem of the location of Christ’s human body. Since we can’t see Christ anymore, but we know He has a physical, human, resurrected body, I’ve often wondered where Jesus’ body is. Imagining him hiding in some remote corner of the known universe doesn’t befit His dignity. And if Heaven is invisible, but also physical, it makes more sense of the dead Christians being with Christ before the resurrection, since Christ’s body and Spirit can be in the same place, and the souls of the dead can go be in that place. And the visible and invisible, coexisting in the same place, also seems to me to fit better with the stories in Daniel 10:13 and other places where angels and demons are described as being at war and/or attached to a location. Speaking of which, if the idea of heaven and earth, or visible and invisible, being in the co-spatial is true it would make your article about demons inhabiting celestial objects more likely.

   From a science perspective, I appreciated the potential explanation for dark matter. I’ll add that things we can’t measure in the physical world are composed of mostly empty space. Oppenheimer, the movie, had a little section of dialogue about that. There is a lot of nothing between what we can measure, or perhaps a lot of the unobservable in between what can observe. This helps me imagine co-spatial heavenly and earthly reality, more easily.

   But now for some stuff that makes less sense to me: the explanation that we can’t perceive the unchanging doesn’t seem quite complete, or maybe I’m not understanding it rightly. Angels and demons fight battles and bring messages and sing praises and possess people and otherwise do a lot of action. Action is a type of change, and indeed, one of the changes that helps us see what we couldn’t see before is movement. The eye vein example helps a bit because blood is moving through that vein and it is still invisible to us. Still, I’m not sure that the kind of unchanging that can fool our senses into not noticing things is the same kind of unchanging that spiritual beings are. We don’t perceive decay either. Decay is a change. We can see it happen in time lapse, but we don’t perceive it if we look continuously at something like a rotting fruit. Growth, too, is something we notice, but only in discrete jumps, not as it happens. Time seems to be important here is a way that I can’t quite put together. We have to move through time and God is outside of time. I wonder how spiritual beings experience time, and whether that experience of time has more to do with what we’re able to perceive than change, action, or decay.

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   • Thanks for this, Lisa. I agree with you on all of this and I like the way you’re thinking.

     Possibly “unchanging” is only part of the invisibility of the spiritual. Since we know that spiritual beings do, as you said, do things, and that would seem to involve some movement in at least some sense, perhaps it would be better to speak of these movements as having no loss in exchange. Let me know if this line of thinking seems to make more sense of it. You say that we cannot see decay, but in a sense, that is all we are seeing. We sense only what escapes in incomplete exchanges of energy. For instance, a black hole is black only because no light escapes it. A black hole on its own terms (i.e., as it would “see” itself) is actually full of light and energy—the most energy-dense “object” in the universe. We just can’t see this because no energy escapes. All the light we see is reflected or lost in exchanges of energy that are not complete. Perhaps the spiritual involves exchanges that are complete, and in this sense, the total state of the being/place does not change and would not be sensible to an observer without a willed invitation to “see beyond” the accidental or involuntary. I’m still searching around in that idea, but there is definitely something there. Do any of these ideas start to move in a direction that makes more sense or draws anything else out for you?

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