Lewis and Consciousness

Some neuroscientists today are at work trying to find the boundary between brain and consciousness. And Lewis wrote of this boundary decades ago in Miracles calling it a “frontier.”  He concluded that God and Nature “have, at the very least, a relation—almost, in one sense a common frontier—in every human mind … That spearhead of the Supernatural which I call my reason links up with all my natural contents—my sensations, emotions, and the like—so completely that I call the mixture by the single word ‘me’” (48).

What recent developments in neuroscience, Lewis, and every person who has had an NDE or an encounter with the Lord know is that what we call “me” is much greater than what the brain is doing. Consciousness may at times be only “a fitful spotlight resting on a small part of the cerebral motions,” as Lewis wrote in the Problem of Pain (78). But that inner light is less “fitful” when we allow Christ to bind “the strong man” (Mark 3:27) of the brain’s self-centered, instinctual behaviors. Yielding is everything.