Don't worry. I haven't taken leave of my senses. I just want to address a common spiritual misunderstanding. Common, that is, for those who move a little way beyond conventional religion into the idea that God dwells within us and can be known directly, but not far enough to see how He dwells within us and in what way He can be known. This is all one with many forms of Eastern mysticism. I am God. You are God. We are all God. Everyone is God. Everything is God.
Actually, this is true but only up to a point. God is indeed within every bit of His creation which could not be unless He was so present, but He is also transcendent to it and His transcendence ontologically precedes His immanence. Put another way, He is immanent in part but transcendent in toto.
I want to keep this simple and not go into elaborate differences between pantheism and panentheism. I will leave that for the philosophers. But I will say this. God is in everything but at different degrees of closeness. For Christians He is fully in Jesus but He is in everyone. However, you can only know Him to the degree that a) you have opened up to Him - this is faith or acceptance, and b) that you are able to manifest Him. A pint pot cannot contain a gallon of liquid let alone a whole ocean full. And the ocean that is God is infinitely large.
Therefore, while I may be God if I am fully transparent to Him through faith and a wholly purified soul, even then I am not God as God is God. I don't even approach that. God may be in His creation but He stands outside it in His fullness and no created being can ever know the wholeness of God. What that being can do is become attuned to God and thereby become godlike, and from that initial stage become ever more aware of the unplumbable depths of God, but he can never be God.
The mystical forms of religion and esotericism, both East and West, that identify the soul with God are confused. They mistake a star for the source of light. It is, forgive me for saying this, the error of the spiritual beginner. Or else, and forgive those that succumb to this, Satanic inflation. I am God and you are God insofar as God dwells within us and can be known as the ground of our being. But I, William Wildblood, am not God and never will be in the whole of eternity. I may eventually grow so far into God as to be able to wield godlike powers, as may you, but that is an entirely different thing. The gap between created and Creator can be bridged but it can never be completely overcome.
That's what I think.
5 comments:
After a bit of an online search, it seems that the phrase "vale of tears" is popularized by the Catholic hymn Salve Regina.
Life on Earth needs to be understood as only one life. It had its beginning and comes to an end, which is most fitting for us isn't it? I can't discern where the source of the rebellion against one's life comes from, although I should certainly have been very ignorant about much of it several years into mine.
There is an irresistible desire for a kind of righteousness that is the superior desire, to accept, and to take action for and accord oneself the dignity required of someone who is ready to impart with themselves for another and to receive only what is just by the same kind.
One learns very well after having grown from being a child that they are alloted this life from the cause of a creation. That life ends in death is just, and any other perception is a rebellion, importantly, against the self and for what one is becoming in death. Though not to become too lost in fantasy, the life of a human revolves around this "vale of tears" but the desire for righteousness impels me to believe that I exist before my human birth, and will go on to something else after my death in no way requiring anything human and earthly to have preceded or come forth beyond. I should go beyond as I have come forth.
Being a part of the whole and the whole itself at once/ the same time, is a mental construct, similar to 'total freedom/ order'. In our realm it will remain as such, while unity can be approached and described as getting closer to God, it makes sense that it is inexpressible, and only partially an experiential possibility. That is where most 'inadequate mysticism' takes a wrong turn in my opinion; the assumption that everything can fit into a language we write or speak.
This is true. Trying to express multi-dimensional experience in 3 dimensional language is doomed to failure. But language can point the way and separate out truth from error to a certain extent.
I have not seen before such an excellent and succinct summary of our inter-relationship with our Creator. Thank you.
Thanks John.
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