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!
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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