17.1 Retaining life

In order for us humans to act when we want to, at a time of our choosing, we must keep our loves and our thinking partially separate, at least until they combine to produce the desired action. There are successive stages of the operations of our loves and our understanding in producing actions. When we act there must be the separate stages of (1) desiring, (2) thinking about what to do, (3) doing it.

Our ability to have separate stages of love and thought and action, means that we have to separately receive love and wisdom. Once received, they have to be separately retained until the chosen times of deciding and acting. If we have have these separate ‘stores’ of retained love and wisdom within us, we are composite in a very important way. Each of those parts of us must be a discrete component.

Our being composites is like God giving us the separate ingredients for cooking. We keep the ingredients dry and available and only mix them and cook the mixture when we want the results. In our minds we have loves persisting and thoughts occurring, but when our thinking decides in conjunction with some love, then we act.

The kinds of compositions needed in us are exactly the separate and discrete images of the love, wisdom and action in God. There is (ideally, at least) love in us because there is love in God; wisdom in us because there is wisdom in God; and effects in us because there is action in God. These are all united and continuous in God, but in us they have to be distributed over our composite parts and separated by a discreteness. Let us frame the generation of this separateness as a general postulate: