Eternal life is the spirit

In Book Two of "The Spiritual Man", Watchman Nee deals with the three main functions of the spirit: intuition, communion with God, and conscience. As already discussed, the spirit is quite separate from the soul, whose faculties are reason, emotion and will, and which is identified with the mind or brain.

I have just finished the chapter on intuition, and light bulbs are going on all over the place. Here is part of what he says (page 83 in the 1968 CFP edition):

The new life which invades us at regeneration brings with it many inherent abilities, not the least of which is the intuitive power of knowing God.

Does it hence mean that man's mind or brain is totally useless? Of course not. It obviously has its part to play. But we need to remember that intellect is of secondary, not of primary, importance. We do not sense God and the realities of God by our intellect; else eternal life would be meaningless. This eternal life or new life is the spirit mentioned in John 3. We apprehend God through this newly obtained eternal life or spirit. The mind's role is to explain to our outward man what we know in our spirit and additionally to form it into words for others to understand. ... Although a believing man may have the best of minds, his teaching is nevertheless not to be derived from his thinking ... His mind merely cooperates with his spirit in communicating to others the revelation his intuition has received. The brain is but the transmitting, not the receiving, mechanism of spiritual knowledge.

God communes with us entirely in the spirit. Save by its intuition there is no way of knowing God. In his spirit man soars into the eternal unseen realm of God. Intuition may be characterized as the brain of the inner sanctuary.

So...eternal life is the spirit; the spirit is the eternal part of us. This is a message that can be discerned in many spiritual traditions. The part of us that survives death is not any part that we conventionally regard as "us": the body or the mind. Which means that if our spirits are dead or we have no awareness of this innermost component of ourselves, eternal life is effectively meaningless. In Nee's framework this all becomes almost obvious: the soul results from the breathing of spirit into the body (Gen 2:6) and as such is inescapably bound to the body. Which implies that when the body dies, and the brain dies with it, the soul dies too. And what is left is the eternal part, the spirit, which is the only part of us that can commune with God. So that eternal life is communion with God, and it therefore happens now as well as into eternity.

And so it is our task to identify with the spirit, not with the mind or soul. This shift in the centre of consciousness is again stressed in many traditions and is a lifetime's work. But it must have a definite starting point: we must be born again, because in our natural, fallen state, our spirits are dead, and none of these wonders can be realised. This is no mere moral transformation; it is a hidden miracle of resurrection that (eventually, if we let it) brings about a fundamental structural change. We are not who we once thought we were. Not at all.