gurugeorge

The Indian sage, Sri Ramana Maharshi often inveighed against the "I am the body idea":-

In Advaita praxis, the locus of the "I", the sense of self, is shifted from being (in) the body, to being consciousness itself.

It just struck me there, reading the Epistle to the Romans, that the references to "in the flesh/law" (constantly juxtaposed with being "in the Spirit - of God/Christ") might actually be referring to the same thing as Ramana Maharshi is referring to above. (Of course I am looking at this from the context of "similar physiology/psychology resulting in similar effects" across cultures.)

IOW, Paul is recommending a shift of sense of self from body to Spirit (specifically, the "Spirit of God/Christ") - whatever that means!

It appears that for "Paul" in Romans, "Christ is in" the Christian (actually in everyone, did they but know it), as if in a dwelling, a home, a temple. On the other hand, being obsessed by embodiment is constantly likened to being dead, or resulting in death. To be "in the Spirit" of Christ is to be alive. This seems to mean, fundamentally, to look at things from the point of view of Christ (as Son, yearning in the heart, crying Abba!) and/or God (as kindly forgiving ourselves and our sins, just as God does).

To be "in the spirit" - what does that mean? Taking the roots of pneuma/ruach as "breath", is it like "motivating force"? IOW, is Paul saying that one's motivating force ("the spirit in which one does one's actions", as we might say, retaining something of the ancient meaning) can be either the flesh and its fads and fancies, or it can be God's spirit, Jesus' spirit, which is above the fray and not subject to death? (Judging from the sense in which Paul speaks of it, it's "something ourselves which makes for righteousness", as Aleister Crowley corrected Matthew Arnold.)

Is this advocating the same kind of phenomenological turn (as one might say) as Advaita - i.e. one literally changes one's viewpoint from being an individual with petty, flesh-satisfying, selfish desires, to being an embodiment of Christ, literally "God made flesh" (which, in Advaita, is identified as "Consciousness", sc. the Divine's consciousness, or the consciousness of the Universe of its own appearance).

This case would be immensely strengthened if there were any mentions elsewhere of the opposite trope, the "body being in Christ" in some ultimate sense (that would duplicate a similar Advaita idea - i.e. consciousness isn't in the body, like a ghost in the machine, but rather consciousness contains the body, in the sense of being the thing that's aware of it, that grants it known existence). I do believe there are such references elsewhere in the Epistles, but I haven't gotten that far on this pass.

And, out of interest, if any who has the Greek would kindly oblige: what range of meaning could phronema tes sarkos have in linguistic context?

Contrast with pneumati theou agontai?

(Btw, none of this is meant to go against the idea that kata sarka was sometimes meant idiomatically in relation to Jesus - I have no problem with the idea that Paul thought Jesus had been embodied. I'm just looking at - what look like - Pauline "terms of art" that involve talk of the body. Sometimes it apperas that sarxy stuff not meant idiomatically, but with this theological meaning that contrasts it strongly with the spirit of God.)