11-24-2007, 05:28 PM
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Religion: ALL
Title:Supporter
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Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: VA USA
Gender: 
Posts: 1,104
Frubals: 502137
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Quote:
Originally Posted by angellous_evangellous
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Greetings Angellous. Great references thank you. Refreshing memory on the highlights of the many concepts of God throughout history is very absorbing. Of course, many people teach one to read the original writings to understand a person fully, and this is very necessary with regard to these concepts about God. But the summaries are very useful as refreshers and introductions to different concepts.
For me, the most important consideration from many of these beings is not their thoughts and descriptions of concepts of God, but rather their experience of 'God.' It has been written, and I believe this to be true, that for many the a priori which directs the induction and the deduction is a type of mystical experience. As Tillich writes in his Systematic Theology, "Whether it is 'being-itself' (Scholastics) or the 'universal substance' (Spinoza), whether it is 'beyond subjectivity and objectivity' (James) or the 'identity of spirit and nature' (Schelling), whether it is 'universe' (Schleiermacher) or 'cosmic whole' (Hocking), whether it is 'value creating process' (Whitehead) or 'progressive integration' (Wieman), whether it is 'absolute spirit' (Hegel) or 'cosmic person' (Brightman) -- each of these concepts is based on an immediate experience of something ultimate in value and being of which one can become intuitively aware. .....the concepts are rooted in a 'mystical a priori,' an awareness of something that transcends the cleavage between subject and object." This a priori experience which I put into the category of awakening is the core from which the thoughts and systems flow; and this awakening is possible for us today.
Let me just choose Plotinus, one of the earliest written about, for example. The reference above indicates that the God of Plotinus is the source of the universe. To understand this statement, as well as those of the others, one must go to writings of Plotinus. This is particularly true if one wishes to understand the knowing and the experience of God. One can read of the experience in his Sixth Ennead IX on the last page. He writes, "....The man is changed, no longer himself nor self-belonging; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it: centre coincides with centre, for on this higher plane things that touch at all are one; only in separation is there duality; ....This is why the vision baffles telling; we cannot detach the Supreme to state it; if we have seen something thus detached we have failed of the Supreme which is to be known only as one with ourselves.....it was not a vision compassed but a unity apprehended."
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'Fullfilment within the Unity of Universal Fullfilment.' - Paul Tillich
Last edited by autonomous1one1; 11-25-2007 at 07:44 AM.
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