Blatant Metaphysics
How transcendence and presence exist in one
person as Christ in the world.
I'm fairly satisfied that in the last nine or so
essays, I have put down what I really believe about the nature of God and
reality. That's blatant metaphysics. There's no turning back now. (Do you
suppose that even I will stop reading my own
blog?)
Today, I had a quasi-mystical
experience on US 44 between Grand and Kingshighway, and it was not by looking at
the hundreds of million dollar homes that are being built right north of that
spot. I got that we always have two views of the Universe. There is the "normal"
view of chain-of-causality in time and space. So, for example, I see houses
being built, fender benders, patrol cars, my dashboard, and I also have a fairly
strong set of predictions about what is going to happen to all those things. But
there is also my conscious awareness of all this. My plan for the day is not
like a patrol car, sitting on the side of the road. I know I'm going to the
doctor's office to get him to fax a prescription for me. No one, including me,
sees that plan. In some sense, I AM the plan, or maybe I should say that the
plan is a meaningful part of the person that I
am.
Also, we all of us have complex
ideas about what it is to be a good person. Almost all of us have some sort of
moral code which we try to follow, and some of us are better at following our
codes than others. Some of us have more than one set of moral rules depending on
the context, and probably most or all of us have a set of permissions that we
allow when we think we are alone. Maybe we modeled after this or that important
person. Maybe we have a book or two, like the Bible or the U.S. Constitution,
that we use to try to figure out what we should do. When people don't have such
a system, they get labeled
psychopath
or
sociopath.
Discussing the morality of these people will take us too far afield. Anyway, the
main point of writing this paragraph is that most of us occasionally check our
daily plans against our moral code.
Now
I am proposing that in society, these moral codes and these plans have the
potentiality to evolve into Christ consciousness. Many of you will scoff at
this. You will point to the world and the people in it—just as Bertrand
Russell did when he said that if this were the best of all possible worlds, we'd
never know it to look at it. You will bring up the holocaust, endless wars,
Katrina-type disasters and their incompetent handling, starvation by the
millions, the endless, unfathomable waste of a media-driven consumer society
gone wild. Others of you will basically be on board with me. You will think of
the moral leaders of the world, Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson, Moses,
Troy Perry, Gloria Steinem, Ghandi, Dag Hammarskjold, and how they influenced
events towards a better world.
I am
proposing that life, consciousness, and self-consciousness is God-in-the-world,
an emergent phenomenon (from the casual perspective) intended to rectify and
beautify the Universe. As such it is a reflection of God the Creator in the
Cosmos. Of course, lots of philosophers and theologians have proposed just such
an idea. More recently, thinkers have tried to expand some of the ideas of
quantum theory in a direction that might explain such an idea—although a
complete and satisfying such explanation is still far away. However, the
proposal that consciousness is or is like a Böse-Einstein condensate,
while not proven, is provocative. It would have consciousness emerging because
billions of electric particles in the brain were not free, but somehow
"in-sync." Since sub-atomic particles differ from the stones and trees of our
ordinary world by somehow being "connected to everything," a billion-particle
condensate (i.e. consciousness) would share this property to some extent. Point
being that in our conscious mode (reflecting back on consciousness instead of
using it to project an objective world) we would somehow be connected to
everything. And everything might be God, right?! Well you get the
idea.
Which is that from beyond time
and space (mental categories, anyway) the Creator-Conceptualizer of everything
(what was before the Big Bang in some sense) is always trying to shine through
our consciousness (the Creator's reflection in creation) to improve the world.
This would be the emergent Christ Consciousness.
Some Christians will be asking "What
about sin?" "Didn't Jesus Christ die to save us from our sins?" While I honor
your viewpoint as a sparkling jewel of consciousness, my particular sparkling
jewel is not at all sure about these claims. Well, I AM sure that there was no
Adam and Eve, as sure as I can ever get. So any story about Jesus Christ
rectifying the sins of Adam must be understood in a metaphorical sense only.
What you will get out of me is a confession that I am ignorant, willful and
careless and far more concerned with my own butt than yours, but I won't
escalate that in to a monster theory of the intrinsic sinfulness of the human
race. In fact, I am getting more and more convinced that the Deification of
Jesus Christ over all other incarnations of the spirit is an actual barrier to
the evolution of the Kingdom of God, just because it sorts the world out into
the sheep (Christians) and the goats (non-Christians), the "saved" and the
"non-saved." I frankly don't see how you can be "saved" and believe that those
who don't say the Nicene Creed and mean it are doomed to
destruction.
I think we need to take
the "only Son of God" out of the definition of Jesus Christ. I do think that the
way of forgiveness is the only way to self-realization, implying non-violence
and peaceful cohabitation as it does, but whether Jesus Christ the person was
the first or the only person to bring that to the Earth I think is irrelevant.
Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews who don't accept the way of non-violence and
peaceful cohabitation are all in the same boat, as far as I am concerned, and if
God is on their side, it is only because they are all sparkling jewels of
consciousness and meaningful action, not because their theories of right action
are correct. God (Christ) wants to shine through their individual and respective
consciousnesses and bring Peace on Earth.
Yeah!
Posted: Wed - April 19, 2006 at 12:24 PM
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