Another aspect about the situational mind is that this mind sees patterns and that really is all that it is looking for. In the world in which we live patterns have a tendency to control everyday life from the stock market patterns of trading to the patterns that are to be apprehended in the material world and then used for our benefit. But speciation and pattern recognition are separated by a grand incommensurable gulf. Pattern recognition has much to do with the practice of deduction, induction, formal mathematical and equational attempts at understanding things. So when we look in the book of Daniel, we can see that there are those two mindsets clearly depicted. There is the mind that speciates and there is the mind that wants to operate on the basis of pattern recognition. Now if we are going to be controlled by pattern recognition, then something is going to have to be done with the scripture because the scripture violates pattern recognition regularly in its holding of the true nature of faith. That’s why the Lord has said to us what he has said to us in such passages as Matthew 6, "Don’t worry about what you will eat and drink or worry about all these other needs. I will give those to you." Such a faith is a speciation. Such a non-seeking after those material aspects is a speciation of the will of God.

Pattern recognition and speciation are not the same. The Lord has taught us about the requirements of operating on the logic of speciation instead of pattern recognition. For instance, as we have suggested in Matthew 6, when the Lord says, "Don’t worry about what you eat or drink or your physical necessities, but pursue the kingdom of God and all these things will be provided," that does not bear a resemblance to any recognized pattern. That is why the pagans were intent on pursuing mightily the things of material existence. They were not content to speciate the non-situational intelligence of God with the understanding that the Lord would provide all the necessities of life. It would be very difficult for us to maintain speciation as the logic of life if we continue seeking and operating based on pattern recognition.

Men who have lived without faith habitually operate on pattern recognition. When the spies came back to Kadesh Barnea from the 40-day reconnaissance mission in the land of promise, ten of them declared that because the fortifications were too high and there were giants in the land it would be impossible to realize the conquest promised by God. This error was due to their submitting to pattern recognition as the authority that ruled their decision making. That is because they couldn’t see going into battle as a speciation of the will of God. That’s why they failed and why they were sent back to the desert to die for the subsequent four decades.

Another thing about the situational mind is that it discounts a nuclear truth about the universe, the nuclear truth being that the universe is speciated. In many passages in the Old and New Testaments, there is a very clear indication that all of the celestial bodies, all of the material universe is a speciation of the will of God. In Colossians 1, we are told that all things were made by him and all things are held together by him and all things exist within him. They consist within him. That tells us that the universe is a speciated universe. Now our friends of the evolutionary persuasion such as Stephen Hawking, E. O. Wilson and the late Carl Sagan and some of the other men of scientific repute would deny that the universe is just such a speciated entity. However, in the book of Daniel 2:31-45, where he describes the unfolding of a series of kingdoms that will come after Nebuchadnezzar’s lifetime shows that history itself is speciated. In Chapters 7-12, all the instances that are explained somewhat to Daniel through the medium of vision since Gabriel arrives to give him some degree of interpretation of these events proves that time and history and life itself is speciated. Now the Christian life is a speciation. It is not simply the amalgamation or the assimilation of certain religious constructs or practices or rituals. It is not simply a way of developing a coping mechanism to deal with the other vagaries and realities of life. Our lives as individuals as represented in Daniel’s case are to be speciations of one thing, as the universe is a speciation of the non-situational intelligence that governs it. Those who act on the basis of faith understand that their lives obey the logic of speciation. Being undeterred is one of a class of actions under that general categorization.

Another thing about the situational mind is that it cannot comprehend the world situation as a peculiar environment for speciation. We often think that the world is the place where we need to exercise our talents and our capacities. We often speak about reaching our potential. That potential can come about in lots of different ways and lots of different avenues. However, the situational mind sees that and only that. The situational mind, one gripped by the vagaries of the situation, one that has opted to operate within the situational construct and cut itself assiduously from any exposure to the non-situational intelligence, does not want to be a pushed intelligence, and simply cannot comprehend the nature of the world.

Now we are going to pass through many world situations. There will be many, many crises in our lives. Some will be extraordinarily taxing and difficult. They may happen to us as individuals of a personal variety or it may include us in things that are of the global structure. Nevertheless, we know without having any empiric knowledge of the fact that we are going to pass through many difficulties as we live. Let’s call those circumstances "world situations." How is it that we are to perceive of the world situation? This pushed intelligence, this mind of the signal manifold comprehends the world situation in a very unique way. It understands the situation. It comprehends it as a peculiar environment. It is a peculiar environment because it is an environment in which speciation is to be exercised in the material world. We are not here to reach our potential. In fact it would be a rather unfortunate lie; and in fact, it would be an outright misrepresentation of the scripture, to say to our young people as they grow up that God is interested in them reaching their potential whatever that may be. We foolishly tell them to give themselves to the exercise of their potential and that God will be with them. That is not what scripture teaches. In fact, it is quite the opposite. God is not necessarily interested in our reaching our potential. He is interested in us exercising this speciation of his will and of his mind and of non-situational intelligence in the world in which we live. If it comes to a point of forfeiture of our potential for speciation, then there is no contest between the two.

In Romans 1:18-23, in Paul’s discussion there of the created order, he makes it very clear especially in verses 18-20 that the created order is a speciation of the non-situational intelligence and has to be respected as such. However, in Romans 1, in that same context in verses 21-23, he turns to the role of the human mind. He makes a very interesting statement there in that that collection of verses. He states, "For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. (This is the mental condition of a fallen universe). Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles." In Romans 1:18-23, you get a complete picture. The Lord says that the created order is nothing more nor less than a speciation of the non-situational intelligence of God. It is the Lord who created it, put it into motion, and maintains it.

Now about the mind that will view the created order. That too becomes a speciation of non-situational intelligence. Both of these together would produce a comprehension of the world in which we live. Now this is very different than what we have identified earlier in our studies of representational phenomenon as the "Cartesian partition" with the assumption that in order to understand the universe we have the objective part and then we have the subjective part, which is the mind of man. In Romans 1 and in the book of Daniel, what corresponds in their thinking to the objective world (created order) is a speciation of the non-situational intelligence. The order of mind that we are expected to have and in which we are to function is in itself to be a speciation of a non-situated intelligence.

In Romans 1, what humans opted for was something else. That’s why they rejected the knowledge of God. That is why their thinking became futile and their hearts were darkened and that is why instead of seeing the reality of the situation, they were actually fools. They thought they were wise. They were deceived by this. Then they opted for the worship of their own minds which is exactly what idolatry is when they decided to create images and then bow down to them. When we talk about understanding, the understanding of the world would be a speciation of the non-situational intelligence of God. In Daniel 1:17, when it is stated of him that he had been given wisdom, understanding and that especially he had the capacity to interpret dreams we are informed that understanding is itself not a product of the situational mind but it is a speciation of the non-situational intelligence. Now when we say to ourselves that we want wisdom, when we operate on the exercise of faith that is admonished to us in James 1 about pursuing wisdom (if we lack it we are to ask God and he will provide it), we are clearly able to distinguish the fact that understanding is itself a speciation of the non-situational intelligence.

Clearly it is the work of the Holy Spirit to speciate. Throughout the bible, in the Old Testament and in the New, the work of the Holy Spirit (standing between the two worlds) seems to be the task of speciation. What that means is that his presence, his power, his work causes non-situational intelligence, which if course, is the intelligence of God—it originates with him--to "show up" or "occur" in the temporal side of things in separate and yet identifiable forms. That is the meaning of the term speciation. So the mind of God, the thoughts of God, the interests of God, the interpretation of the things of the world from the Lord’s point of view, will show up here on the temporal side in separate and in identifiable forms. Or that is to say all that God "thinks" about the temporal will be speciated—will be given a specific and identifiable form. It shows up as the judgment that God brings to bear upon men and upon societies that have violated his will. Two glaring cases of that would be Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 4) when he was driven insane and forfeited control of his kingdom and also the case of Belshazzar (Daniel 5) who ignored the presence of the God and was slain. Judgment is a speciation. It was the Spirit of God who speciated the will of God to show up in a specific physical form or as specific material elements in time. Blessings are speciations that the Spirit of God brings about from the eternal father. Providence itself, as well as our willingness to depend upon the providence of God, is a speciation. The revelation is a speciation of the Spirit of God causing the thoughts of God to occur in human linguistic forms. These are some things that the Spirit of God causes to occur in our world in separation and identifiable forms. Therefore, faith is a speciation of the non-situational intelligence of God. Faith is the fruit of the work of the Holy Spirit linking the revelation to our minds. The Lord takes hold of the forms that he chooses through which to speciate his non-situational presence and his non-situational intelligence.

Language is one of those forms. The Lord is the creator of language. Human beings communicate with one another on the basis of language—written, spoken and/or otherwise. The Lord must reach out and take hold of human language as an apparatus, constrain it, shape it, use this linguistic apparatus, this linguistic mechanism or this linguistic tool for his purposes. So what he does is bring about a language speciation. What this means is that as the Lord would send, for instance, Moses into the world to proclaim the truth that he wants expressed, Moses will be using language. His language use, is going to be overtaken, words are going to be overtaken by the work of the Holy Spirit. In other words, language then will become an avenue of speciation and this specific set of words, this linguistic capacity that man has, once overtaken by the Spirit will produce something that we very much stand in need of it, which is a word from the Lord, which is revelation.

First comes the Lord’s control of words and linguistic relationships and meanings and terms. Once he has corralled, manipulated or taken captive these aspects of human language, then he can use it to produce revelation, which is the scripture that the Lord has given us as a speciation of the non-situational view of things, of the non-situational truth that governs the universe. So we begin with a language speciation. In the same way, if I am going to use language properly and to the glory of God, I must control how I am going to use it, what I am going to say, to shape it to become a speciation of what the Lord would want me to say.

The Holy Spirit certainly did the same thing. Many things could have been stated in the Hebrew language. Many things could have been stated in the Greek language. Many things can be stated in English. But when the Lord developed these texts, he had to control elements of the Greek and Hebrew languages in order for them to do what he expected them to do, which was to convey this specific understanding of his own mind about human experience. Language speciation would produce revelation. The presence of a revelation also constitutes yet another form of speciation. We have the text.

First the Lord controls and corrals human language, especially in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and he shapes specific books and specific texts out of that manipulation of the language, which becomes the revelation, the bible, the scripture. Now we have the scripture. What is it to us? Well we have no choice but to respect it as the revelation speciation. This book is a speciation of what the Lord thinks. Our proximity to the revelation speciation, our subordination to it, our connection to it, our surrendering of our mental powers to it produces an effect in us. Those of us who have yielded to the revelation of God are shaped by it. Our personalities will be transformed. They will be resurrected. They will be birthed anew. This produces another kind of speciation. Personalities, human individual personalities, that have been yielded to the Lord have been shaped by him, manipulated by him, controlled by him, elevated by him, transformed by him, brought into existence by him, certainly have to be viewed as another form of the speciation of the will of God. Our personalities will be sharply distinctive from all of the other personalities with which we have to deal, because one is a speciation of the non-situational intelligence of the Lord and the other has been created and spawned and is being maintained within the situation in which man finds himself. So human personalities then become yet another form of this expended speciation.

Marriages can become speciations of non-situational intelligence. This would put us on a higher track in dealing with marriage difficulties and what we usually think of as personality difficulties among us in the church instead of operating on what looks to be traditional fare in terms of therapeutic encounters and therapeutic interventions. Perhaps we need to think of personality as a speciation of the non-situational intelligence of God. That would be what we would want, what we would need and what we would pursue.

Once a personality takes that shape, it becomes a speciation. Then it produces something else. Here we refer to a response speciation. How would one respond to the world of surrounding situations? How does one respond as the Lord would have one respond? How does one think about the world situations and circumstances? How does one take action within the field of human lived situations? Well, those are responses. How would those responses come about? If someone were to ask the question, how can I respond non-situationally? How can my responses, in other words, become a speciation of the non-situational intelligence? Then we have something to tell them. First, we know it begins with a language speciation. The Lord has overtaken uses of the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek languages and out of that he has produced the revelation of God. Revelation then immediately becomes a revelation speciation, which produces different kinds of personalities, those that are shaped by God. These personalities then are to be considered yet another form of speciation. This personality speciation then, will supervise, manipulate and otherwise determine how one will respond. When the world looks upon us, living within the world situation and sees our responses, they know we are responding non-situationally and that our response is a speciation of something that did not begin upon the earth or within human lived experience. But our response began quite extraordinarily off the planet and in the environs of the eternal world. And that’s how we are then led to this concept of bringing the non-situational to bear on the world situations.

The mind is either speciated or it is situated. In terms of child rearing it appears that we would be interested not only in the socialization of these young people but we would be primarily interested in the speciation of their minds. The task of child rearing, the task that the parents face would be how to encourage the young person to become a speciation of the will of God in the world in which he or she lives. This would not be a small task and not necessarily an easy one. But it would frame for us the significance of what parenthood means and what it means to be a child growing up to stay in the kingdom of God. It’s a speciation of the mind. The mind is to be shaped in particularly this way. Perhaps we can draw a gap or we recognize that there is a gap that exists between speciation on the one hand and education and socialization on the other. The socialization, of course, has to do with patterns and we can even be subscribers to what we might refer to as religious patterns. For instance, in many churches, there are grand considerations about worship styles (which have to do with religious patterns). I submit that even in the local congregational life, we can operate on situated minds that are not speciated. Many of these arguments that we have experienced in the local congregational existence through the years have been really relative to situational thinking. If we were to pursue speciation in the ways that we have suggested before perhaps some of these problems might be obviated.

All responses it turns out within the world situation are unified. They are unified because all of them are separate and identifiable forms of one and the same thing. That identifiable thing that we are talking about here is the non-situational intelligence of God. Since all responses of that variety are unified. They are one whole because they come from one source, we also have an interesting model there for the way in which Christians are unified. If we were to think of individual minds within the world situation, just as responses are unified because they owe their existence to the same source, individual Christians would be unified because they themselves are individual and separate identifiable speciations of the same thing--the non-situational intellect, the non-situational mind of the Lord.

Now this is very different than simply trying to construct congregational structures on the business model or trying to pursue some sort of basis for unity on inherency or building it around things that we all have in common. This is a very different perception in our understanding of the role that scripture plays among us and what we are destined to become. Let us refer for a few moments to what we can call the "omega point for speciation." This omega point is when there is a complete merger in unity that exists between the individual in the situation and the Lord in the non-situational world. When all of the separate and identifiable forms merge as one. I have drawn it with a large box representing the world situation and smaller boxes within the larger one. Each of the smaller boxes represents the separate and identifiable forms of the same non-situational intelligence all merging together, all being superimposed one on top of another until they really all merge into one point. That becomes the "omega point" that seals the world horizon. When we come to that point, it would occur to me to think that within the particular posture we call the omega point we would see everything form the Lord’s point of view. The spontaneity that exists between the non-situational intelligence and the world order that we have discussed earlier is actually finalized and it’s finalized in our minds.

Now of course one of the problems that we experience is that we see speciation here and there. We perform an act of charity or do a kind deed or a generous act. We see speciations like this here and there. But there often is not enough density to bring the multiple manifestations into some sort of density that we can describe as the omega point. This would be a favorable reason for our existence and it would certainly be a favorable interpretation for our life upon the earth. Such a thing would bring about the demotion of patternization in terms of our recognition of patterns in the world situation. Truth is often anchored in logic, the logic of human intelligence and that shows up in patternization. A lot of times people will hear us preach in terms of representations. They conclude that this is just another pattern that they are hearing, perhaps somewhat different or stranger than other patterns. Some may not like this particular pattern in comparison to others. But it is understood as a patternization nonetheless.

The non-situational intelligence being expressed as a speciation rather than a pattern is very different. What we are expected to do is to express this non-situational intelligence into the universe. We are not interested in patternization. This seems to be a rather minimalist approach to the understanding of scripture and to the role of human existence. Speciation is often supremely intangible. That is to say that while certain actions can be witnessed the greater understanding of what those actions are is not always detectable from certain points of view. Certain things might be looked upon as altruism, as a kind of humanism (interested in our fellow man). But it doesn’t always appear as it really is and as it really ought to be as a speciation of the non-situational intelligence of God. Its essence is spiritual. It’s from a world that’s outside the parameters of the world situation. We are often gripped by a need to concentrate on tangibilities. That may be one of the reasons that we like patterns because tangibility can often be cast in patterns. We want to demote patternization in favor of speciation. Seems to me that we would be fundamentally advanced in our appreciation of speciation over simple and limited situational perspectives.

When we started this discussion we began with the statements in Chapter 6, where Daniel presented himself as one who would not be deterred by these outward maneuverings of his enemies or by the presence of the legal instrument of the bureaucracy and especially the edict that had been published in the empire. We discover that being undeterred is made up of more than one part. In fact, it is a manifold. But it is a specific kind of manifold—it is a signal manifold. There is a logic that is derived or is closely associated with the logic of the signal manifold. That logic we have tried to distill using the word "speciation." What we have tried to depict in this discussion is that our actions of a non-situational variety are responses within the horizon of the world situation are really and uniquely manifestations of this concept of speciation. And for us, that becomes the logic of life.