God About To Undergo Gender Reassignment Surgery

[Windwalker]

I believe the intellectual understanding of the Divine is complementary of the mystical experience. They work together to produce a greater understanding. True theological constructs will be informed by divine experience and authentic divine experience will confirm true theology. God is one, I don't know that I would add "thing", He can be known through many methods, but will always express Himself as Himself. As I've said before God is not the author of confusion. God is consistent, God is a rock that you can build your framework of life upon. The Divine is not shifting sand.

I'll agree in principle with this. But how someone might choose to apply this, can take it somewhere else, to the point that theological views, can limit experience to an image of itself. People see the image of God they have been exposed to, for instance. There's more to it than that, of course. But it's important to note the balance that needs to go both ways, where experience informs and modifies one's conceptual ideas about the experience, or one's theology.

It would be absurd to suggest that my knowledge or experience are the limits of the Divine, but I find it equally absurd to suggest that what God has imparted through our unifying experiences is not absolutely true.

Unifying experiences, being the operative phrase there. Yes, if you were to describe me characteristics or traits of the divine you have experienced, chances are rather high it will immediately resonate with me. "Like knows like", as they say. That's what makes it "Unitive Consciousness".

To simplify my stance somewhat extravagantly, to recognize the complexities of advanced mathematics doesn't mean the absolute truth of 2+2=4 is abrogated.

I'll stop right there to point out that this does not compare to perceptions of experiences. Those are not, absolutes. The experience may be absolutely real, but we can easily take our ideas about it as the truth of it itself, rather than recognizing them as perceptions themselves. As perceptions, they are influenced by an enormous number of factors. And we often fuse the idea of the experience, with the memory of the experience. And as we recall that experience, so along comes the idea of it as now connected with it.

There's more than that as well. Our level of overall consciousness at the time of the experience can add to the experience of the Absolute itself, with our current world views. If for instance, someone were a solid traditionalist believer, that their ideas of God was exclusivist in nature, that their God and theirs alone was the "One True God", in contrast with other religious traditions, they may walk away from that experience now absolutely convinced that what they believe has been confirmed absolutely, without doubt or question.

Someone at a latter stage of consciousness development, might see it as confirmation that our individual religion's perceptions and theologies are all relative. I personally fit much more into that latter category.

The experience of the divine I have had, and the idea of non-dualistic experience wherein one sees themselves as a part of the divine substance are fundamentally contradictory. Not just in the self/divine divide or lack thereof, but in the essential nature of God, that I need not doubt or worry about my current state with regard to some future revelation requiring a momentous paradigm shift. God has revealed the Truth at all times and in every way.

I do not see it as fundamentally contradictory. It is able to embrace that dualistic perspective you are seeing the Divine through. It "transcends and includes" it, so to speak. Nonduality recognizes the dualistic nature of perception, as a "metaphor" to point to the nondual. Our minds need to divide things up into this or that statements. That's a necessary thing for us to do. But it can also create a cognitive disconnect with reality, creating divisions where there is in reality interdependence and interrelationships of a gigantic whole.

All that nonduality is doing, is to be able to see all the bits and the whole as inseparable. It sees God as both the source of creation, and creation itself. It see that you are you and I am me, but it also sees that both of us are expression of God, or God as us. These are the mystical realizations of many from across multiple religious traditions, as mysticism is about Reality, not religions. Meister Eckhart is the first to come to mind in the Christian tradition.

What I hear when you say it appears as a contradiction, is simply due to seeing Reality in strictly dualistic terms. But as others have called it, and I agree, there are "depths of the divine" in which what is realized transcends that duality. Even intellectually, one cannot have an Infinite God be other to anything or anyone. That would mean is not infinite at all, but limited, finite, and outside creation itself, like a single creature moving about on the sands of history. Such views of God, are entirely conditioned by the dualistic mind.

I look forward to picking this up again. I'm sure some of my thoughts have changed since last we've spoken.

 

[Mister Emu]

@Windwalker
I want to take this moment to thank you for picking this back up. I have found that by and large, my discussions with you have sharpened my understanding of the experiences I have had. Even where I end up fundamentally disagreeing with you, it has been edifying and lead to a fuller and broader picture. Again, thank you.

But it's important to note the balance that needs to go both ways, where experience informs and modifies one's conceptual ideas about the experience, or one's theology.

As you may note, we agree. I'll add that I place more emphasis on the experience in influencing the theology (and ultimately, the experience is the source of the shared intellectual understanding that is theology).

I'll stop right there to point out that this does not compare to perceptions of experiences.

I was not speaking of perceptions, but of the direct transfer of knowledge from God to me, which has happened at least three times that I know with certainty. Maybe if I describe what I mean, it will make more sense to you, or maybe it won't resonate at all.

About ten years ago, I was in the throes of a crisis about how to respond to the evil of the world, and more specifically those who perpetuate it. I spent some time in contemplation and prayer, and bringing it to an end was the literal voice of God directing me to act towards all people with love and peace. Now, I know this is only tangential, as there was little mystical, though the, for lack of a better word, fingerprints, of the experience were confirmed in later mystical experience(the sensations/emotions/feelings/presence of the experience was/is the same one I have found in meditative, and other, divine experience).

Every experience I have had with God has included some imparting of actual knowledge. Not always verbally, and certainly not the entirety of the communion, but always some.

If for instance, someone were a solid traditionalist believer, that their ideas of God was exclusivist in nature, that their God and theirs alone was the "One True God", in contrast with other religious traditions, they may walk away from that experience now absolutely convinced that what they believe has been confirmed absolutely, without doubt or question.

And if God told you to be a Catholic, told you to believe as a Catholic, what choice but to so be and to so believe? If God told you He was the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Moses, of David, of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, of Peter, of Paul, and of you?

What I hear when you say it appears as a contradiction, is simply due to seeing Reality in strictly dualistic terms. But as others have called it, and I agree, there are "depths of the divine" in which what is realized transcends that duality.

I believe I was unclear. Let me see if I can express it better. The contradiction I spoke of wasn't that of duality and non-duality. In theory God could reveal Himself in such a progression and inspire different ideas of consciousness and "depths". The contradiction I see is that He would. That is the God I have experienced would not

I think there are ties back to two exchanges we had. The first in posts 38 and 39, where I asked how you could be confident in your current understanding/consciousness vis a vis a new paradigm shift, and you responded that you aren't. The second in post 41 and 49, specifically that you put "will" in relation to God in quotations and then identified God with reality. I think these two things tie together.

God is not passive reality, He is active love. God has personhood, has thoughts, desires, He moves, He directs us. The will of God is not a euphemism. He tells us what to do, where to go(I don't mean banally where to eat lunch), He guides and mentors. The He of God is true and real. Him. He's there. That's the confidence, the surety; I don't just experience reality and perceive it, I experience a person who experiences me back and influences that experience. There is a God, a person(three actually) that loves me, and when we meet He leads me. Not into illusion, but Truth. I am a convicted believer, without doubt and hesitation because He is.

Meister Eckhart is the first to come to mind in the Christian tradition.

I'm a fan of Meister Eckhart, who I believe understood a fullness of the truth I hope to one day attain. That the wonder of God's love can be found in the opposite of us being expressions of God. It isn't God loving Himself. We aren't divine returning to the source. We are broken, diseased, and flailing in the dark, and God so powerfully loves us that He breaks the rules of existence to make us, who are separate and sinful, one with Him in perfection.

Even intellectually, one cannot have an Infinite God be other to anything or anyone. That would mean is not infinite at all, but limited, finite, and outside creation itself, like a single creature moving about on the sands of history.

How very dualistic.

 

[Windwalker]

I want to take this moment to thank you for picking this back up. I have found that by and large, my discussions with you have sharpened my understanding of the experiences I have had. Even where I end up fundamentally disagreeing with you, it has been edifying and lead to a fuller and broader picture. Again, thank you.

I thank you as well. It is interesting to me to feel across the spaces of our perceptions, dancing as it were with the energies of our respective experiences of the divine.

As you may note, we agree. I'll add that I place more emphasis on the experience in influencing the theology (and ultimately, the experience is the source of the shared intellectual understanding that is theology).

This is good. Then we are on the same page. We should be flexible with our ideas of what God is to others.

I was not speaking of perceptions, but of the direct transfer of knowledge from God to me, which has happened at least three times that I know with certainty. Maybe if I describe what I mean, it will make more sense to you, or maybe it won't resonate at all.

About ten years ago, I was in the throes of a crisis about how to respond to the evil of the world, and more specifically those who perpetuate it. I spent some time in contemplation and prayer, and bringing it to an end was the literal voice of God directing me to act towards all people with love and peace. Now, I know this is only tangential, as there was little mystical, though the, for lack of a better word, fingerprints, of the experience were confirmed in later mystical experience(the sensations/emotions/feelings/presence of the experience was/is the same one I have found in meditative, and other, divine experience).

Every experience I have had with God has included some imparting of actual knowledge. Not always verbally, and certainly not the entirety of the communion, but always some.

I can say I understand what this is, in my own way. It's difficult to put into words. One can call it the higher conscious mind directing us. To understand what that really is, how it works, where it comes from in ways our minds might understand, is only understood by a more continual relationship with it. I'd like to see the culmination of that realized in that single Mind connection where one could say, "I and my Father are One." There is no more separate "I" mind, but the thoughts are uninterrupted by the separate egoic "I". "The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love."

It happens as a matter of course when one empties themselves continually of the ego mind. I find what Paul said about being transformed from "glory to glory", to be an apt description of this. And of course, his agony when tasting of the divine like this to have the habitual self fight to maintain its place in our minds, "Oh wretched man that I am, who shall save me from the body of death". It gets more agonizing the less you live there, to have it return. You become convinced there is no return path to the former self of self-inflicted misery.

And if God told you to be a Catholic, told you to believe as a Catholic, what choice but to so be and to so believe? If God told you He was the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Moses, of David, of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, of Peter, of Paul, and of you?

God wouldn't speak to me like that, exactly. I find the direction is more like what I intuitively know from a divine place to be true, acknowledging that and following that assurance. But there are many options to follow to that truth. Not a single or formulic path sort of thing, but flexible. God does not force itself upon us. There is no one single path, and it ultimately becomes our own choice, right or wrong, that takes us towards our intention of unity with God.

God is not passive reality, He is active love.

I absolutely agree with this.

God has personhood, has thoughts, desires, He moves, He directs us.

God can be experienced that way. Yes. But God is not limited to what our experience sees God as. How we see God, is a reflection of who were are and what we need. It's not that that makes that invalid. It makes important, but not an absolute. Believe me, I know the experience is of the Absolute. But be guarded not to make that experience define God to us. That's a mistake I made for many decades, reifying that experience as the absolute Truth of God.

It is an experience of the Absolute. But it does not define what the Absolute is. God can also be experienced Absolutely, as feminine, neuter gender, or non-personal as well. God is not limited to how we receive the divine. But in each of those "views" of God, it is Absolute.

The will of God is not a euphemism. He tells us what to do, where to go(I don't mean banally where to eat lunch), He guides and mentors.

I don't disagree with this. Being "led by the Spirit", has real meaning.

The He of God is true and real. Him. He's there.

From other's experiences, God is She. To others God is He. To others God is It. To others God is Self. That's all right. That is all Truth, shining through our experiences of God. Each are equally Absolute.

That's the confidence, the surety; I don't just experience reality and perceive it, I experience a person who experiences me back and influences that experience.

I can experience God truly this way. I can also experience God as feminine. I can also experience God as pure non-gendered Spirit. I can also experience God as non-personal. But all of them. all of them, are Love Absolute.

There is a God, a person(three actually) that loves me, and when we meet He leads me. Not into illusion, but Truth. I am a convicted believer, without doubt and hesitation because He is.

God is not an illusion. The experience of God, in whatever form that comes to us, is not an illusion. What is an illusion, is that our ideas of God, define what God is. That is the ego, confusing relative perceptual truth, with the Absolute. The Absolute, does not exclude perceptions. It Shines through them.

I'm a fan of Meister Eckhart, who I believe understood a fullness of the truth I hope to one day attain. That the wonder of God's love can be found in the opposite of us being expressions of God. It isn't God loving Himself.

But I ask you to listen to Eckhart's words. "The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love." This is a Mystery for the dualistic mind to see. But it is saying exactly what you say can't be so.

We aren't divine returning to the source. We are broken, diseased, and flailing in the dark, and God so powerfully loves us that He breaks the rules of existence to make us, who are separate and sinful, one with Him in perfection.

Both are true.

BTW, thank you for this conversation. I hope you are doing well in these trying times. Let us speak of Beauty together.

 

[Mister Emu]

I can say I understand what this is, in my own way. It's difficult to put into words. One can call it the higher conscious mind directing us. To understand what that really is, how it works, where it comes from in ways our minds might understand, is only understood by a more continual relationship with it.

I don't find any difficulty in putting it into words, not what I am speaking of here. It is the transfer of discrete knowledge from the divine mind to mine. Whether that is words spoken "from on high" or more of osmosis, I know things I did not previously.

God wouldn't speak to me like that, exactly.

This is an area where our experiences differ significantly then, because that is exactly how he speaks to me. He directly called me to the communion table of the Catholic Church. He doesn't just give experience and perception, vague and open to interpretation. He gives me secure knowledge and conviction.

I do not, and can not, speak to the experiences of anyone else, but God has made me a convicted Christian. That makes it very difficult to accede to the "many paths" theological construct. In my experience, God leads people. He doesn't leave them to wander. In my understanding of person God is, He also doesn't drive confusion, He doesn't lead some to Christ and others to Muhammad, Krishna, or Buddha.

God can be experienced that way. Yes.

No. It's not that God can be experienced that way, it's that God exists that way.

It is an experience of the Absolute. But it does not define what the Absolute is. God can also be experienced Absolutely, as feminine, neuter gender, or non-personal as well.

Again, He is an intellectual understanding relating to evoking the proper relational imagery, not a gender or masculinity/femininity issue. I say with full confidence in the God I know that you will never experience God as non-personal. All of God's attributes are absolute; God is absolute. God is always immanent and always personal and always loving and always etc. There are no characteristics that are not eternal.

You are wanting to parcel God out, some of God here, a bit of God there, but that isn't it. The nature experiences, the deity experiences, the seeming non-dualistic unifying experience, those are divisions that don't actually exist. God encompasses all of them all of the time. And you always get the fullness of the divine when you have an experience with/of Him.

To encounter God that way, utterly dissolves you. There is no more seeker and the sought. All that was an illusion where you can now say paradoxically, "I live, yet not I but Christ in me".

In post #33 focusing on the ego as illusion, I declared this felt wrong. Let me correct that. Absent that again I feel communion bolsters the ego (I would argue to the ends of the earth that I am most myself, have the truest sense of my ego when I say "I live, yet not I, but, Christ in me"), this is correct. Every communion with God does indeed completely consume and destroy, at least momentarily, the struggle between my consciousness of self and my unity with God. The struggle, not the ego.

In God I am unified with God and yet I am still I. I and God are other and one. We see, we move, we breathe together. We exist in unity. The "we" is not illusion, it is a fundamental reality.

But I ask you to listen to Eckhart's words. "The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love." This is a Mystery for the dualistic mind to see. But it is saying exactly what you say can't be so.

No, it isn't saying that. Meister Eckhart himself defended his words as not saying that.

 

[MNoBody]

then the invisible formless God Is a lower physical being....that is emanation ideology

 

[Windwalker]

I don't find any difficulty in putting it into words, not what I am speaking of here. It is the transfer of discrete knowledge from the divine mind to mine. Whether that is words spoken "from on high" or more of osmosis, I know things I did not previously.

Typically when someone says they know exactly what their experience was, and that they can define God concretely based upon that experience, they are not describing an experience of the Ineffable. They are describing their impressions or interpretations of God as absolutes, which is a mistake of the mind. "What I believe is fact, without any margin for any possible other understanding." However, the Ineffable by it's very construction as a word describes that which is, "too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words." The experience of the Divine, is an experience too great to be comprehended by the mind and put into words.

This is an area where our experiences differ significantly then, because that is exactly how he speaks to me. He directly called me to the communion table of the Catholic Church. He doesn't just give experience and perception, vague and open to interpretation. He gives me secure knowledge and conviction.

A lot of people in a lot of other religions claim the same for themselves. Do I doubt them? No. They hear what they need to hear in order to find God in the ways that works for them. God is not about the right magic code, but about finding Truth in however one is able to see it. You cannot force fit one solution, upon all. God does not force solutions. God invites us to find solutions for ourselves through Spirit. The Spirit of God invites, and inspires creative solutions to problems. There is only one Way, but many solutions to finding that Way.

I do not, and can not, speak to the experiences of anyone else, but God has made me a convicted Christian.

But yet you are speaking to them. You are invalidating others experiences based upon you seeing yours as you interpret them to be the absolute truth, and anything differing from that understanding is by default false. That is a mistake of the mind, as I've said. It is an illusion that how we think about things, is how they really are. It places our reasoning mind, as the measure of God and Truth. It is the voice of the mind, it is the voice of the ego, and not the voice of the Heart.

That makes it very difficult to accede to the "many paths" theological construct.

Knowledge of God is a matter of the heart. It's not a theological construct. People believe with the heart, while the mind struggles to comprehend. There are as many paths to God, as there are individuals. There may be similar patterns, depending on culture and environments, but each individual has a unique path. We stand before God alone, not as a group.

In my experience, God leads people. He doesn't leave them to wander. In my understanding of person God is, He also doesn't drive confusion, He doesn't lead some to Christ and others to Muhammad, Krishna, or Buddha.

I think you are removing yourself from the equation here. Everyone has to find God for themselves. If we wander, it is because it is our path to find our way to that Source of ourselves. We have many obstacles we let stand in the way of that. It's not that God hides from us. We hide ourselves from God.

God does not take away our will. God does not force God upon us. Our will and choice is central to our finding God. We have to get out of the way in order to let that Light in. We have to choose to surrender.

Now, to say he doesn't lead people to various religions, I would agree with that. He doesn't lead someone to convert to a religion. Our desire for God leads ourselves to choose a religion which we feel speaks to the divine for us. And in that sense, you could say God "led" you to join it. Because it's what you needed for where you were at. If you can find God in it, then that's where you are letting yourself explore. But we may find God through many means. And while you may have felt led to this or that when you were in your 20's for instance, you may feel led to some other discipline or path later in life as your needs have changed. And that too is being "led by God". It's really much more participatory, than passive.

But it is all God behind, and beyond the religions of choice for us. Some are more effective in some ways than others are, and vice versa. There is no "one true religion", except that of the heart. Eventually, religion itself must be let go of in order to see God more fully. "I pray God make me free of God that I may know God in God's unconditioned being". That means, being free of our ideas of God, or our own religions.

No. It's not that God can be experienced that way, it's that God exists that way.

This is the blind man an elephant parable. Each insisted their experience was the truth of God.

I.

IT was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

II.

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me!—but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"

III.

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried: "Ho!—what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 't is mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!"

IV.

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:

"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!"

V.

The Fourth reached out his eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he;
"'T is clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!"

VI.

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!"

VII.

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a rope!"

VIII.

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

MORAL.

So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!​

Again, He is an intellectual understanding relating to evoking the proper relational imagery, not a gender or masculinity/femininity issue.

What I hear here is a mistake that many Christians make about judging others experiences of God, based upon how they align or do not align with their own beliefs about things. The entire chapter of Romans 14 is devoted to this very thing. You call it the "proper relational imagery", yet that is entirely a theological construct.

You may very well be convinced that worship on Saturday is the Lord's will. You may be convinced God is a masculine entity. You may be convinced you must not eat shellfish, and you can cite a personal experience of God in your life as validation of your beliefs. Yet, another Christian can find none of those valid for himself. And according to Paul, they are both right, and both ultimately irrelevant. "Let each be convinced in his own mind", says Paul. It's not a matter of being right or wrong. It's about the end result, which is unity of the heart. If you don't listen with that. If you judge with your theology, you judge others in error.

(Continued in next post.....)

 

[Windwalker]

(Continued from previous post...)

I say with full confidence in the God I know that you will never experience God as non-personal.

Then you err with full confidence in your ideas. I have experienced God both as personal, and non-personal. At any given point in time, I can and do experience God in a multiplicity of ways, Source, Ground, Creator, Mother, Father, Sister, Brother, Child, Spirit, Life, Cosmos, a Leaf, a drop of water, air, Self.

All of God's attributes are absolute; God is absolute. God is always immanent and always personal and always loving and always etc. There are no characteristics that are not eternal.

The ways in which we experience the Divine, does not define the Divine. This illustration may help. God is the light on the left, and our experiences of God are the rays on the right. Our humanness is in the middle:

It sound to me you argue only red light is valid. That God is red light, and people who experience blue light are not really experiencing God. Do you see the fallacy of this?

You are wanting to parcel God out, some of God here, a bit of God there, but that isn't it. The nature experiences, the deity experiences, the seeming non-dualistic unifying experience, those are divisions that don't actually exist. God encompasses all of them all of the time. And you always get the fullness of the divine when you have an experience with/of Him.

I'm not parceling God out. I'm saying our experiences is not the true measure of what God really is. It is you however who is saying others experiences, unless they match with yours, is invalid. I am saying the experiences of nature mysticism, theistic mysticism (what you describe), and nondual mysticism, are like those rays of light split into different colors through the prism of our filtered experiences. You say, there is no blue light, because you experienced red light. I say there is an entire spectrum, and not one of those rays define the whole.

Now, I have said that even these filtered experiences of the absolute, are still experiences of the absolute, regardless of how they appear to our minds, whether that is red light, yellow light, green light, blue light, etc, or masculine, feminine, neutier, personal, impersonal, nature, wind, sun, rain, moon, stars, smiles, dreams, visions, and so forth.

If we can see God in all these, we have freed God from our ideas of God. "I pray God make me free of God that I may know God."

In post #33 focusing on the ego as illusion, I declared this felt wrong. Let me correct that. Absent that again I feel communion bolsters the ego (I would argue to the ends of the earth that I am most myself, have the truest sense of my ego when I say "I live, yet not I, but, Christ in me"), this is correct. Every communion with God does indeed completely consume and destroy, at least momentarily, the struggle between my consciousness of self and my unity with God. The struggle, not the ego.

In God I am unified with God and yet I am still I. I and God are other and one. We see, we move, we breathe together. We exist in unity. The "we" is not illusion, it is a fundamental reality.

I believe there is the true Self, and there is the illusory small "self". The small self is the separate egoic self that sees itself as limited and finite. It is bound to self-identifications with the objects of our minds; how we perceive ourselves, what we tell ourselves about who we are, seeing us as here and others and there, including God. These are all constructions of the mind. That's what is the illusion, those constructs mistaken as reality. While they are useful, they ultimately are not Truth. We are more than that.

Yes, I have a unique and individual form. And yes, there is a real and substantial reality to that form. That is not an illusion. That exists. The illusion is to stop with the identifications our mind's come up with which we tell ourselves and believe. As the Buddhists put it, "Emptiness is not other than form. Form is not other than Emptiness". The illusion is mistaking form as other to God, and God as other to form.

No, it isn't saying that. Meister Eckhart himself defended his words as not saying that.

I would like to see what you are referencing. I've read a lot of Echart, and he echos this same thing time and again in different ways. Now, that he may have "downplayed" it to the "Authorities" as he like to poke at them, is simply a matter of trying to not sound too beyond their theologies in order to not be killed by them. It's all there though, quite subversively I'll add.

He was truly a nondualist mystic, riding that fine line between heresy and death, and orthodoxy and life. They did after all, condemn his teachings to hell, rather than burn him at the stake.

 

[Mister Emu]

Forgive me, I hope you are doing well in this pandemic. That you and yours are safe and are well provisioned.

Typically when someone says they know exactly what their experience was, and that they can define God concretely based upon that experience, they are not describing an experience of the Ineffable. They are describing their impressions or interpretations of God as absolutes, which is a mistake of the mind. "What I believe is fact, without any margin for any possible other understanding." However, the Ineffable by it's very construction as a word describes that which is, "too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words." The experience of the Divine, is an experience too great to be comprehended by the mind and put into words.

You are not understanding what I said. I did not say I know with exactitude what the experience was in totality or that I can fully define God. I said God has given me concrete information, not complete information.

Are you telling me that in the entirety of your experience with the divine, mystical or otherwise, you have no once received a concrete, discrete piece of information? Never?

A lot of people in a lot of other religions claim the same for themselves. Do I doubt them?

I neither doubt nor accede to their validity. I do not address them. If your experiences make you unable to believe as I do, I will treat you with the fullness of love(to the best of my ability), express what my experiences have led to, and leave the rest between you and God.

But yet you are speaking to them. You are invalidating others experiences based upon you seeing yours as you interpret them to be the absolute truth, and anything differing from that understanding is by default false.

No. I am not. What I am doing is validating my own experiences in the best way I know how, through complete and utter surrender to and trust in the God that is and what He has shown and where He has led.

It is an illusion that how we think about things, is how they really are. It places our reasoning mind, as the measure of God and Truth. It is the voice of the mind, it is the voice of the ego, and not the voice of the Heart.

You couldn't be more incorrect here. This is entirely of the heart, I am as a child in my Father's arms, knowing only comfort and security. Nothing will, nothing can, be wrong as long as I rest here with Him.

What I hear here is a mistake that many Christians make about judging others experiences of God, based upon how they align or do not align with their own beliefs about things. The entire chapter of Romans 14 is devoted to this very thing. You call it the "proper relational imagery", yet that is entirely a theological construct.

I said it was an intellectual understanding. Yes, it is a theological construct to mentally orient ourselves. I was just explaining to you, since it's been a while, that when I say He, I'm not referring to masculinity or maleness in opposition to femininity/femaleness.

It's not a matter of being right or wrong. It's about the end result, which is unity of the heart. If you don't listen with that. If you judge with your theology, you judge others in error.

There is a difference between judgement and argumentation for the sake edification and clarity. I can disagree that using different analogy or imagery is right and we can have discourse on that disagreement without judgement coming in to play. Being of strong opinion doesn't imply condemnation.

 

[Mister Emu]

Then you err with full confidence in your ideas.

Or, you color your experiences with your ideas and shut off perception of the fullness of God in your experience. Or you err in what you are actually experiencing and name as divine that which is not.

This is the blind man an elephant parable. Each insisted their experience was the truth of God.

This illustration may help. God is the light on the left, and our experiences of God are the rays on the right

I think both of these are illustrative in ways that favor what I am saying. Whether the elephant or the Prism, the fullness of the experience is always there. It is only human failing, our mind getting in the way, that would cause the perception of difference.

It sound to me you argue only red light is valid. That God is red light, and people who experience blue light are not really experiencing God. Do you see the fallacy of this?

Specifically in what you quoted, I am arguing that the light on the left always has the red spectrum within it. When that white light hits you, even if you reject seeing it, you are still getting the red light.

I am saying the experiences of nature mysticism, theistic mysticism (what you describe), and nondual mysticism, are like those rays of light split into different colors through the prism of our filtered experiences. You say, there is no blue light, because you experienced red light.

I am arguing for the consistency of the absolute. That the characteristics of the divine are eternal. That God's love is constant. That if you experience God without one or more of His characteristics, you are at best causing a limitation on your connection through your flawed perceptions. If someone came to you and said they met an indifferent God, cold and unfeeling, who had no love for anyone or anything, would your response be the same? That's just part of the spectrum of experience? An evil God, who told them to vivisect children? I should hope not.

More fully, it is when you have the experience on the left, of the full and complete God that is both unifying and demonstrates the otherness, that is within nature and above it, that you have a valid experience of God. All of the parceled out spectrum is exactly what we need to discard as in the prayer "I pray for God to make me free of God, that I may know God." Knowing God only comes when we drop our preconceptions and move past the prism to the white light, which is the wholeness of Truth.

I would like to see what you are referencing. I've read a lot of Echart, and he echos this same thing time and again in different ways.

I don't have a copy of his Defensio handy for the particulars. But I recall that he thoroughly defended himself as an orthodox teacher, that his ideas were never intended to mean anything outside of further understanding the truth of the Catholic Church. He was a Thomistic scholar who intertwined his theological study with his mystic experiences, not heterodox or a heretic.

Now, that he may have "downplayed" it to the "Authorities" as he like to poke at them, is simply a matter of trying to not sound too beyond their theologies in order to not be killed by them.

I'd rather take him at his word. His ideas were never meant to be understood as so far beyond the traditional theologies (that included what he taught as Magister twice in Paris), they were meant to be synthesized with traditional theology.

 

[Windwalker]

Or, you color your experiences with your ideas and shut off perception of the fullness of God in your experience. Or you err in what you are actually experiencing and name as divine that which is not.

I said that you err, in that you said this, "I say with full confidence in the God I know that you will never experience God as non-personal." You are in error to say that I will never experience God as non-personal. I already have experienced Reality (or what I'd call the non-personal face of God). That non-personal I would best describe in all-caps as All That Is. It Radiates Infinite Spirit.

Now why I say this is non-personal, is simply because there is not a "personal" face attached to it. It is like seeing the sunset in its full, infinite glory. That's not a "person", yet it is absolutely full of Life. That Life, with a capital L, is divine Spirit. That Spirit is not a "person" in the sense of "personality", or the image of a man. It is Radiance, to give it a single word. It Radiates from God, as IS GOD. It is just the impersonal face, not dead, or unloving, or any such travesty of an idea.

The Nonpersonal, is not to say "Nothing", "Blank", "Zero", etc. That is not the case at all. It is as my profile states for religion, "Love, Light, and Life". God is seen in three essential ways by us. 1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd person. 2nd person is the "I-Thou" relationship of traditional theism. 3rd person, is the impersonal, yet Infinite Love of Spirit Radiating in All That Is.

The confrontation with the Infinite, is "other" to us, impersonal, yet full of Absolute Love and Life, and Light. That is 3rd person experience. The confrontation with the Infinite that is personal, where what is perceived is the Holy Other, is 2nd person experience. The confrontation of the Infinite in 1st person perspective, is that of one's very own self-identity. That is the mystical realization of God in 1st person.

I experience God from all these perspectives. And each is Absolute, Infinite Love, Light, and Life. To say only one is valid or true, means you have have to take all of our normal human experiences and negate 2/3rds of them. You don't need to have a 2nd person experience of Spirit, in order to know the Absolute. And if you only have had 2nd person experience, that does not mean you have not experienced the Absolute. Each experience is Absolute.

Think of the Trinity. Is each each 'person' fully Divine, or 1/3rd divine? If you only experienced "Spirit", does that mean you have not experienced the fullness of God in that experience?

I think both of these are illustrative in ways that favor what I am saying. Whether the elephant or the Prism, the fullness of the experience is always there. It is only human failing, our mind getting in the way, that would cause the perception of difference.

Yes, and our human mind continues to get in the way after the fact. That's what I'm trying to illustrate. We have perceptions that filter what Light we see from God. Even after a direct mystical experience. Do you disbelieve this?

Specifically in what you quoted, I am arguing that the light on the left always has the red spectrum within it. When that white light hits you, even if you reject seeing it, you are still getting the red light.

Yes, I have always said it is still an experience of the Absolute, filtered through our prism. Maybe you only see one band of light. Maybe you see three or four. But it's still filtered. You cannot define that White Light, as your experience and draw a boundary around it. That's just historical memory, not Truth.

I am arguing for the consistency of the absolute. That the characteristics of the divine are eternal. That God's love is constant. That if you experience God without one or more of His characteristics, you are at best causing a limitation on your connection through your flawed perceptions.

I do not disagree with this. The essence of the divine is Love, Light, and Spirit. But you can experience all of that in the nonpersonal experience of the Divine. Just because the Divine does not manifest as a personality, does not mean that Love is not full present and radiant.

I think you have been mistaking my saying nonpersonal as said essentially dead. Nothing could be further from the reality of it. A sunset is not dead. Only a heart that cannot hear its voice might perceive it that way. At which point, that is not a spiritual experience of the nonpersonal. Spirit doesn't need a human face to still radiate the Divine.

If someone came to you and said they met an indifferent God, cold and unfeeling, who had no love for anyone or anything, would your response be the same?

I'd say they haven't had an experience of the Divine. I'd say they are experiencing their own disconnect from Life.

But if they said they experienced the Divine, that Love, Light, and Life, and it was All That Is, not a separate personality, then I'd say that had a 3rd person experience of God.

If another said that what they experienced in the world as the Divine Reality, that very Love, Light, and Life became who they themselves were, and there was no divisions between all of existence and themselves, full of Love, Light, and Life, then I'd say they have a 1st person experience of the Divine.

If still another said that experienced the Divine, that Love, Light, and Life, in a Holy Other, a manifestation of the Divine is a "person", to whom they bowed low before in surrender, then I'd say they had a 2nd person experience of the Divine.

All of these are valid. But not unloving, cold, and indifferent. Not one of those words describe the Divine. They describe the lack of it.

That's just part of the spectrum of experience? An evil God, who told them to vivisect children? I should hope not.

It is part of the spectrum of experience, but at the lack end of the spectrum. At the fullness end of spectrum, you find Love, Light, and Life, manifest in a multitude of ways, Father, Son, Spirit, personal, impersonal, silence, joy, peace, theistic, pantheistic, panentheistic, non-theistic, etc.

Don't limit the experience of the divine to only one face of it. Don't reify our experiences of God. God manifests in many ways. Our job is to allow that, not to confine it to past experiences.

More fully, it is when you have the experience on the left, of the full and complete God that is both unifying and demonstrates the otherness, that is within nature and above it, that you have a valid experience of God.

In my first experience of God, it appeared to my mind that what I was witnessing, we absolute and infinite in nature. Yet, that Absolute and Infinite was but a slice of an "Infinity of Infinities", as the only way I can find to perceive it. Yet each "slice" was fully Infinite in itself. There is no way to describe this adequately.

To say you have experience that full spectrum light on the left of that prism, is to say you were fully absorbed into God and were no longer a person at all. That would be to say you ceased to exist, and became God, which is more along the lines of the 1st person experience of Spirit.

But what you have been describing is a I-Thou, 2nd person experience. In which case you were seeing that Light through your individual filters or primism. How God manifest to you, passed through these filters so the mind could try to find some ways to relate to it. It was "conditioned", but that is not to say it's nature was not Absolute. It is God nonetheless, but understood through a relative perspective.

To say because you experienced God as masculine, means that God is male and cannot be other than that, is a mistake of the mind. It is reifying an experience to a container of the mind in order to define and hold God. Literally, it is the making of God in our own image, as it were.

All of the parceled out spectrum is exactly what we need to discard as in the prayer "I pray for God to make me free of God, that I may know God." Knowing God only comes when we drop our preconceptions and move past the prism to the white light, which is the wholeness of Truth.

I would completely agree with this, if you include dropping the idea that because you experienced God as masculine, that that means God is masculine. I'd say if you allowed it, God might appear as feminine to you. Why not? Why couldn't Spirit appear that way, if it appeared as masculine? I say, from experience, that God can and does manifest in many ways. But the goal should be to not reify those, make them concrete realities in our minds. Doing that, disallows revelation.

I don't have a copy of his Defensio handy for the particulars. But I recall that he thoroughly defended himself as an orthodox teacher, that his ideas were never intended to mean anything outside of further understanding the truth of the Catholic Church. He was a Thomistic scholar who intertwined his theological study with his mystic experiences, not heterodox or a heretic.


I'd rather take him at his word. His ideas were never meant to be understood as so far beyond the traditional theologies (that included what he taught as Magister twice in Paris), they were meant to be synthesized with traditional theology.

It doesn't surprise me he would find his mystical understanding of God to be compatible with orthodoxy. I'd say my understanding of God is compatible too, but there are those who would consider me a heretic, and at another time in history seek to put me to death, such as during Eckhart's time.

The fact that Eckhart had to defend his teachings, shows that many seriously questioned him. He had to try to justify himself to them. Orthodoxy has a history of killing mystics, making most of them walk a fine line between acceptance and death. Such was the case with Eckhart as well.

 

[Mister Emu]

I said that you err, in that you said this, "I say with full confidence in the God I know that you will never experience God as non-personal." You are in error to say that I will never experience God as non-personal. I already have experienced Reality (or what I'd call the non-personal face of God).

I know what you said.

Let me try to word another way. What you call the "non-personal face of God" I would name the majestic expanse of God, omnipresence. The light, love, and life that permeates all of existence in God's presence. I think we both agree that it exists absolutely. Where we differ, apparently, is that I suggest that if you experience that expanse, that majesty, without the personhood of God as well, it is representative of a perceptional failing of the human mind. The perception of God without personhood is illusion.

Let me add, if this might help in understanding my position, that if you experience God the person without that expanse as well, you are just as much creating an illusion. Even when my experiences have heavily shaded "red" as when God has spoken to me, behind each word and in the presence of God I can viscerally feel all of the divine presence, I feel the unity, I feel the divine omnipresence. Conversely, when I have an experience that shades blue, that shades the divine spirit infused into every atomic unit, I still feel the personality of God. You should never, that is you do never, experience God absent some characteristic of His. Whether that be love, truth, personhood, expanse, unity, holiness, etc. they are a package, they are because He is.

Further, as an addendum, and to close out why I can assuredly say you have never experienced God without His personhood. There is no such thing as impersonal love. Love is passionate, love is directed and that requires an impassioned director. A person. To say God is active love, which we both agreed on, is to say God is an actor who loves. If you have experienced love, you have experienced someone in the act of loving. Even if you didn't directly perceive that personality, He was there

Yes, and our human mind continues to get in the way after the fact. That's what I'm trying to illustrate. We have perceptions that filter what Light we see from God. Even after a direct mystical experience. Do you disbelieve this?

Of course it does, but I think we can both agree that it is positive to move towards less filtering as best we can.

You cannot define that White Light, as your experience and draw a boundary around it. That's just historical memory, not Truth.

You seem to have a fear of definition, of potentially missing something thereby, that you cannot trust in the God you have seen to be that which He is. But, I say, "there is no fear in love" and He is "my God, in him I will trust."

I am not saying all of what God is can be found in my experience, but that my experience of God is a point from which to learn more in greater love. Not a boundary but a beginning.

But not unloving, cold, and indifferent. Not one of those words describe the Divine.

Precisely. God's love, as a characteristic of the divine, is absolute and eternal. I'm just applying that principle consistently. God's personhood is just as absolute and eternal as His love. Just as unloving does not describe the divine, neither does the word impersonal.

To say you have experience that full spectrum light on the left of that prism, is to say you were fully absorbed into God and were no longer a person at all.

I don't see that as true, God doesn't absorb, He fulfills. The more white the light I get, the fuller the spectrum, the more fully I am me, the more cognizant of my own real distinct personhood I am.

That would be to say you ceased to exist, and became God, which is more along the lines of the 1st person experience of Spirit.

You don't cease to exist, you perfect your existence, and certainly don't become God, you become the most perfect you in unity with God. Even at death in full unification with God, you aren't going to be omnipresent or omnipotent, you won't have intrinsic access to the minds of all living creatures. You aren't God and that's not what unity with God means.

I would completely agree with this, if you include dropping the idea that because you experienced God as masculine, that that means God is masculine.

Okay. I have said, several times throughout this thread that I don't believe God is masculine, I believe He is divine.

The fact that Eckhart had to defend his teachings, shows that many did not agree with him.

I find it unfortunate that you are one of them. Non-dualism, pantheism, panentheism, any idea that purports that the mundane is actually of divine essence is not orthodox.

 

[Windwalker]

I know what you said.

Let me try to word another way. What you call the "non-personal face of God" I would name the majestic expanse of God, omnipresence. The light, love, and life that permeates all of existence in God's presence.

I agree with this, except that I would say that the Light, Love, and Life that permeates all existence IS the Presence of God, rather than existing "in God's presence". There is subtle yet profound difference. "God IS love". God IS Light." God IS Spirit".

I think we both agree that it exists absolutely. Where we differ, apparently, is that I suggest that if you experience that expanse, that majesty, without the personhood of God as well, it is representative of a perceptional failing of the human mind. The perception of God without personhood is illusion.

No not at all. It's not a failing of the human mind. We experience everything in life from 3 basic perceptions, 1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd person perspectives. Anyone over the age of three generally speaking that is. That's normal, healthy, and necessary to function as a human being.

I gave you the example of experiencing Beauty as the sunset enraptures your soul. That sunset is not perceived as a "person", or that a "person" sent it out to you. One can imagine a personal God behind it, but what is being experienced is not a 2nd person, I-Thou experience. It's an I-It experience. This is normal and healthy and correct.

Let me add, if this might help in understanding my position, that if you experience God the person without that expanse as well, you are just as much creating an illusion. Even when my experiences have heavily shaded "red" as when God has spoken to me, behind each word and in the presence of God I can viscerally feel all of the divine presence, I feel the unity, I feel the divine omnipresence.

Of course, that Radiance of God, or the Divine, is felt equally in 1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd person experience of Spirit. It's not that one is true and the others are false. That is what is a failing of the human mind to rank the value of one experience over the other, invalidating what is otherwise 100% equally valid. God is fully God in a single flower, as God is God in the expanses of all of the heavens as a whole. That Whole is in every "part", fully Whole.

Conversely, when I have an experience that shades blue, that shades the divine spirit infused into every atomic unit, I still feel the personality of God. You should never, that is you do never, experience God absent some characteristic of His. Whether that be love, truth, personhood, expanse, unity, holiness, etc. they are a package, they are because He is.

They are God. Not characteristics or traits of God:

• "God IS Love" (not has love) 1 Jn. 4:7
• "God IS Light" (not has light) 1 Jn. 1:5
• "God IS Spirit" (not has a spirit) Jn. 4:24

Further, as an addendum, and to close out why I can assuredly say you have never experienced God without His personhood. There is no such thing as impersonal love. Love is passionate, love is directed and that requires an impassioned director. A person. To say God is active love, which we both agreed on, is to say God is an actor who loves. If you have experienced love, you have experienced someone in the act of loving. Even if you didn't directly perceive that personality, He was there

I see this paragraph here as most pertinent to our discussion. It is an interesting perspective you offer. I have to break this apart a little. I see a great deal of depth to explore here. Where to begin?

The Love that is God is unconditional. It permeates all of Creation. It permeates all of us. We are made in the image of God, and that means that that Love is fully present within us, as it is in all of the Creation of God. That Love, does not come to us from outside of us. But rather that Love is realized within us, when we remove the obstacles that block its realization within us.

And example of this is someone who says, "You make me happy", to their special friend. In reality, that other person does not make them happy. The don't give them happiness. Their presence in that person's life, allows that happiness within them to come out and be realized. But that happiness originates within the person themselves. They can experience that happiness whether that person is actually present or not, simply by finding that happiness in themselves and letting it be experienced.

The problem with the "normal" dualistic mind, is that it externalizes and projects what originates within themselves onto others. We externalize our happiness. We do this with "God" as well. "God save me from my misery", is a 2nd person prayer better prayed, "Help me to see what I already have from You by birth". It's not, "Give me what I lack", but rather, "Help me realize what I have already." Now that is an honest, and effective prayer that honors the Reality of God, IMHO.

Now to your points that love cannot be an "impersonal love", and that, "Love is passionate, love is directed and that requires an impassioned director." Can we start with a general agreement that the Love of God is not conditional, that that Love, is equally distributed to all, not rationed out to some and withheld from others by God? I think this is a crucial point to understand the rest.

I have and always continually do experienced that Love of God, as absolutely unconditional. It is not a reward that is withheld or granted from outside myself. It is fully accessible at all times, conditioned only upon my choosing it or turning away from it. Everytime one might wonder where did the Presence of God go, the answer is it went nowhere at all. It was just us who turned our gaze away from it, and when we return ourselves, we discover every time it was right where it was the whole time "waiting" for us to quit distracting ourselves from it. It didn't go anywhere. We did.

Assuming you'll agree with that (I hope so), then we can agree that the Divine Love is equally distributed to all. That makes it universal. Not selective. Is the light from the sun shining on all of the earth selective? Does it originate from an "impassioned director"? No. The sun just "is", and the rays of light is a manifestation of its "being". This is a non-impassioned director. It freely distributes its being to all, "impersonally". Think of it in the negative sense of the current viral pandemic. There is nothing personal about this. It is indiscriminate, and it matters not if you are a good person or a bad person.

So, let's extend that to God now. Is this scripturally supported?

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?

~Mt. 5:44-46​

I can of course find many passages that speak of God as this dispassionate player who does not discriminate between the good and the bad in the distribution of the Divine upon all. I think rather than defining God theologically as a distinct "person" apart from other persons, the nature and being of God is Infinite in all directions, the Fabric upon which all being is made manifest to us through our senses. God apart from this, creates a bubble around God and confines God to a place apart from Creation.

To remove God from a very literal theistic interpretation, but rather to understand theologically that "theism" is simply a metaphor for the 2nd Person perspective I've been talking about. That "I-Thou" that Martin Burber spoke about, makes that God as a separate being a symbolic way to touch into that Transcendent from the perspective of the separate self. That is absolutely appropriate and valid, but it is not the absolute Reality of God. God can also be experienced impersonally, distributing that Love to all of creation without having you as a separate "person" held in mind. "He sends rain upon the just and the unjust".

If I were to hold God strictly as an Almighty 2nd-person relationship who loves and protects his children (which is valid in some regards), when the impersonal comes at the door, then we wonder where was God and his love for us as Parent? If God truly loved us this way, why the suffering of the good in the world? It becomes a chase for an explanation that defies all emotional understanding.

If however, I hold that as an experience of a 2nd-person perspective in confrontation with the Divine, value that, draw from that, lean on that, etc., but not limit my knowledge and awareness of God to define God by that and through that experience, then the unsolvable paradox of Epicurus finds a far greater resolution in the letting go of our insistence that how we experience reality, defines reality.

I can stand underneath the sky, and feel Spirit move though all and to all, from within and without everywhere. Like the rays of the sun falling without a directed intent towards me as an individual from another individual thinking of me, this is just Love. It does not need to have a person behind it. It just IS. And it IS God. This is the 3rd-person, non-personal experience of God as Reality. It is equally and fully as much God as is the I-Thou 2nd person personal experience.

(continued in next post...)

 

[Windwalker]

(continued from previous post)

Of course it does, but I think we can both agree that it is positive to move towards less filtering as best we can.

I would agree, and that is why I'm sharing my perspectives and insights over the years of pursuing the path to the Realization of God. To help show where I got stuck for many years, decades, because of reifying my first experiences of God as the ultimate reality of God. That ultimately created conditions for God to meet on my behalf, which essentially ends up with you stuck and not truly growing.

In order to move beyond the constructs, recognizing them first as constructs is essential. Once we can identify the hidden areas where these exist, to see them for what they are, which is our ideas of truth based upon experiences or not, then we can not "believe in them" as much. Seeing them as mental constructs helps one to be open to Truth. There are many, many layers of the onion to work our ways down through.

You seem to have a fear of definition, of potentially missing something thereby, that you cannot trust in the God you have seen to be that which He is. But, I say, "there is no fear in love" and He is "my God, in him I will trust."

This not to say I do not trust that experience of God was real. What you experience in the deepest part of yourself will tell you that clearly. But to then take how that experience took shape, and then to say that "WAS" what God is, God IS a burning bush, for instance, is the mistake of taking a particular form that manifest through, as the reality of God itself. That is a mistake of the mind. But once we can recognize how experiences of the transcendent may take many forms, yet ALL be from the same Source, is to hold God a little more lightly in our hands, and allow it the Freedom to guide us into Truth.

In other words think of the Holy Spirit like a dove. Can that dove fly and guide you while you're gripping in in your hands, or worse yet putting it to living inside a theological cage, because it once appeared to you that way?

I am not saying all of what God is can be found in my experience, but that my experience of God is a point from which to learn more in greater love. Not a boundary but a beginning.

This is good. But you are limiting others understanding for yourself by saying they are invalid because they don't match how you experienced it, aren't you? You in essence placed a boundary around God, setting the conditions of experience to match yours or they aren't valid. You said to me I can't possibly experience God as feminine, as I recall from past memory. I could be mis-remembering, as that was a year or so ago. Isn't the limiting God? If it's invalid in your mind, you've closed that door.

Yet there are those on the other side of that door that see God too, just not in how you experienced it as a 2nd person experience. But Love is still Love there as well, with or without divine forms. It is the Unmanifest, impersonal Fabric, upon which the Personal manifests into form. But that Unmanifest impersonal is the Ground of Love, Light, and Life which emanates and radiates into all forms.

God manifests God, in other words. The Logos manifests the Divine Being, and is God itself. That can be experienced as both impersonal and personal, but that Ground Love is simply the Nature of the Divine, without 2nd-person personal intent, erupting into the personal, and beyond. It is the Nature of the Divine to be and become, or to just BE. Many ways to perceive and know God as, within form, and beyond form. God is limitless, without boundaries.

Precisely. God's love, as a characteristic of the divine, is absolute and eternal. I'm just applying that principle consistently. God's personhood is just as absolute and eternal as His love. Just as unloving does not describe the divine, neither does the word impersonal.

I think I've been illustrating how "impersonal" does not suggest unloving. The warmth of the sun's rays upon my skin is life-affirming and life-giving. They wrap me in in a sense of love and wonder and awe. Yet that is not personal in the sense of from the sun as a person to me as a person. I could in my mind hold it that way, and that adds something wonderful to it, but in reality, the sun rises on the just and the unjust, as Jesus taught.

I don't see that as true, God doesn't absorb, He fulfills. The more white the light I get, the fuller the spectrum, the more fully I am me, the more cognizant of my own real distinct personhood I am.

Absorb wasn't a good word choice. I think I meant to say we "dissolve into God". We let ourselves let go off all our clinging, so that our true Self is realized, beyond the separate egoic self. What begins to emerge after that surrendering of the separate self, is that the authentic self begins to be realized and who you are, and your "unique self" becomes that individual "Light" in the world, as a child, or son of God. When Jesus said, "I and my Father are One", there is the true Self and the unique self as One. "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father". The small egoic self is constrained. The authentic self is not, and is empowered by Truth itself, which is God.

You don't cease to exist, you perfect your existence, and certainly don't become God, you become the most perfect you in unity with God. Even at death in full unification with God, you aren't going to be omnipresent or omnipotent, you won't have intrinsic access to the minds of all living creatures. You aren't God and that's not what unity with God means.

God is within all of us, at all times, fully already. We don't become God. We already are, as his "children". We are dealing with nonduality here, so it's not an either/or, this/that dividing line. The Divine cannot be subdivided as it is Infinite, meaning everywhere at once, fully, and not partially. But we live in this dualistic framework of perception which divides this from that, and entire languages structures support and maintain this framework of perceptual reality.

It's a both/and reality, and a neither/nor reality. We are both God and not God. Nonduality is the breaking down of these divisions, and seeing them for what they are. They can be picked up and utilized, and set down and transcended. But to not have that option, is to live inside that dualistic framework. And that framework is a construction, not Reality itself. Yet, through that framework, we can still perceive and experience Truth.

Okay. I have said, several times throughout this thread that I don't believe God is masculine, I believe He is divine.

I think I'm still confused then. Wasn't what started our discussion your insistence that God is masculine and cannot be feminine? It's been a long time since that initial discussion and I don't recall everything clearly.

I find it unfortunate that you are one of them. Non-dualism, pantheism, panentheism, any idea that purports that the mundane is actually of divine essence is not orthodox.

I find agreement with Eckhart. Held nondually, what he says resonates clearly with me. Now, as far as panentheism not being compatible with orthodox understanding, I disagree completely. The Trinitarian formulation is very much about the transcendence and immanence of God. God is actively in the world, down to it smallest particle, while transcending it. This panentheism of the Trinity, embraces both the more radically dualitistic views of traditional theism, as well as the pantheism of the imminent God.

Echart speaks in paradoxes. A radical theism has no paradoxes, as it defines God as an object other to manifest reality. But that logically fails once you approach the Infinite. It serves a purpose, but it is an image of the divine, and not the divine itself. A map of the territory is not the terrain itself.

 

[Mister Emu]

I agree with this, except that I would say that the Light, Love, and Life that permeates all existence IS the Presence of God, rather than existing "in God's presence". There is subtle yet profound difference.

I agree with everything except that I'm not sure it is more than a semantic difference, what you say here and what I meant to convey are, at least facially, the same idea.

We experience everything in life from 3 basic perceptions, 1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd person perspectives. Anyone over the age of three generally speaking that is. That's normal, healthy, and necessary to function as a human being.

I wasn't saying perspectives don't exist. Though, I think you are creating a conflation of perspective and subject-object relationship. Everything you experience is 1st person, that's why you experience it. You can observe someone or a group from a limited third person. 2nd person perspective is a very narrow range, where someone would be describing your experience to you (maybe describing a visual scene to a blind person).

I gave you the example of experiencing Beauty as the sunset enraptures your soul. That sunset is not perceived as a "person", or that a "person" sent it out to you. One can imagine a personal God behind it

The sunset is not a person, but the presence of God in that sunset will include His personhood. You don't have to imagine it, it's there.

but what is being experienced is not a 2nd person, I-Thou experience. It's an I-It experience.

I-it is not a third person experience. Third person is a non-participating perspective, and I don't imagine you're saying you didn't participate in your experience of the sunset.

I apologize, but your use of language here is confusing me, and I have to ask you to expound further on what you mean when you say first person, second person and third person. I don't want to needlessly argue in the dark where I am most likely not understanding what you are saying.

God is fully God in a single flower, as God is God in the expanses of all of the heavens as a whole. That Whole is in every "part", fully Whole.

Exactly. And that whole includes His power, His majesty, His love, His support, and His person.

They are God. Not characteristics or traits of God:

No, they are not God. God is them. God is love, the fullness and perfection of love, love without absence, love indivisible.

God is love, God has love, God loves, they all mean the same thing. That the divine essence is love perfected in its fullness wherever and whenever God is (which is everywhere and everytime).

It is the same for every identifier of the divine. God is mercy, mercy perfected, in full everywhere at all times. God is justice, perfect and in full everywhere and at all times. God is three persons, everywhere and at all times. There is no difference between you declaring that God's personhood is a matter of human perception and an argument that God's love is simply a matter of human perception, and we may find ourselves experiencing the perception of God without it. I reject both arguments because of the eternal nature of the divine.

What I say, is that given that God is, never "was", and the I am. That all aspects of God are eternal. The Elephant always has a trunk, even if you only touch the tail.

The Love that is God is unconditional. It permeates all of Creation. It permeates all of us. We are made in the image of God, and that means that that Love is fully present within us, as it is in all of the Creation of God.

Preach it, brother!

That Love, does not come to us from outside of us.

And then...

It is not to say you should not generate your own love for yourself. Your relationship with your self should be loving. But, "no greater love has a man than this, that he lay down his life for another". That is to say, the perfection of love, the fullness of love, is found in the outporing from one to that which is fundamentally other. From God to us. From me to you. From us to God.

What you are saying is untrue is exactly the love we're looking for and the love that is found in saying "God is love". The love that comes from outside of us, the love we cast from ourselves to those outside of us.

And example of this is someone who says, "You make me happy", to their special friend. In reality, that other person does not make them happy. The don't give them happiness. Their presence in that person's life, allows that happiness within them to come out and be realized.

I disagree, which again is not to say that you should not have internal happiness, or that you should make your happiness reliant on human beings, quite the contrary, you will only be disappointed if you do that.

But, relationships generate additional happiness, just like they generate new love, not old love that you just happened to find laying about.

They can experience that happiness whether that person is actually present or not, simply by finding that happiness in themselves and letting it be experienced.

No, they can experience a different happiness of equal or greater intensity, but the happiness of say reuniting with a loved one is unique to that person and experience.

The problem with the "normal" dualistic mind, is that it externalizes and projects what originates within themselves onto others.

Apologies, but this dualistic mind you imply seems quite narcissistic, I generate the love I feel no need for anyone else, I generate the happiness I feel no need for anyone else, I am an expression of the divine essence.

Assuming you'll agree with that (I hope so), then we can agree that the Divine Love is equally distributed to all.

I'll note here, that yes. I do agree.

Is the light from the sun shining on all of the earth selective? Does it originate from an "impassioned director"? No. The sun just "is", and the rays of light is a manifestation of its "being".

Love is not a thing that just "is", it isn't a cosmic metaphysical resource waiting to be tapped. It is a relationship, a directed emotional connection. Every time a new relationship is formed, love that never existed before is created between the participants. I love you, you love me, we're a happy family. We can talk about you loving a flower, or the sunset, or cake; but, we can't talk about the flower loving you, the sunset loving you, or cake loving you because they have no personhood, they cannot direct an emotional tie to you, they cannot love.

I can of course find many passages that speak of God as this dispassionate player who does not discriminate between the good and the bad in the distribution of the Divine upon all

You can find many passages that speak of God as an unconditional lover, who is no respecter of man. To say that everyone gets loved by God is hardly to say He doesn't passionately love every individual.

We apparently have significantly differing ideas on what love actually is, to even think that it can be dispassionately distributed is anathema to what I know of love. It isn't love if it isn't passionate. Just as God is passionate, He calls on us to be so as well, "But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth."

It becomes a chase for an explanation that defies all emotional understanding.

Which is when you should realize to break off and trust as a child in the arms of their father the loving God who directs His passion to you. The concept of mystery, the knowledge that there are things beyond understanding. You don't have to have an answer, sometimes you have to have faith.

Though, the challenge of Epicurus particularly has at least a couple of answers.

-- continued

 

[Mister Emu]

Seeing them as mental constructs helps one to be open to Truth.

Unless you are labeling something a construct which isn't, in which case you are inhibiting your openness to the truth.

This not to say I do not trust that experience of God was real.

No, and that isn't what I said. It is that you don't trust God to be able to surpass your perceptual limitations. You don't trust that you won't have a paradigm shift from some new revelation because you don't trust that God is just as involved in the communion as you are.

You speak of communing with the divine more like it's seeing an inanimate force than a living entity, more like viewing a painting than reuniting with a loved one. All of you perceiving and none of God influencing.

This is a good time to ask again, as I'm drawing up a holistic response to patterns emerging over the course of the discussion. Have you never, in your experience with God, had God directly impart some bit of concrete information to you? Is there anything about which you can say, "God told me thus, it cannot be other than true"?

But to then take how that experience took shape, and then to say that "WAS" what God is, God IS a burning bush, for instance, is the mistake of taking a particular form that manifest through, as the reality of God itself.

We can't say the entirety of God is found in the burning bush, but we can safely say that what the burning bush fundamentally is, is definitively in God.

But you are limiting others understanding for yourself by saying they are invalid because they don't match how you experienced it, aren't you?

Insofar as some person expresses an understanding that is incompatible or fundamentally contradictory with the God I know, I cannot assent to both their validity and perceptual accuracy. If someone expresses that God is unloving, or that God is unjust, or, yes, impersonal.

You in essence placed a boundary around God, setting the conditions of experience to match yours or they aren't valid.

It isn't a boundary, it is trust. I trust the God that is. I trust the eternal one, the unchanging love that created everything. I trust that He will lead me to ever greater truths, to ever greater love. I trust in God to lead me. I trust in God to correct me. As He has done, so will He continue to do.

This is the Faith, not to know, but to surrender to God as He guides you through and to the unknowable.

You said to me I can't possibly experience God as feminine, as I recall from past memory.

Sounds accurate. Because God isn't feminine, He is divine.

Isn't the limiting God?

No more than saying that because God is love, you can't experience Him as unloving.

I think I've been illustrating how "impersonal" does not suggest unloving

I apologize for how this is going to come out, I can't think of better wording or a more tactful way to express this. What you've illustrated is that you seem to be confused about the nature of love itself and I can only doubt that you've ever actually experienced the love of God, because there is no possible path to reconciling that raging fire with indirect and dispassionate dispersal.

but in reality, the sun rises on the just and the unjust, as Jesus taught.

Yes, God's love shines on the just and unjust, because God's love is not conditioned. It is passionately directed at every individual; God passionately and directly loves every individual.

God is within all of us, at all times, fully already.

But, as you've noted, we are not mentally united with God in full or at all times. God is there, we are not.

We don't become God. We already are

No. God is wholly transcendental to creation, and immanent within it.

But to not have that option, is to live inside that dualistic framework.

We'll call that framework...

And that framework is a construction, not Reality itself.

Darn.

I think I'm still confused then. Wasn't what started our discussion your insistence that God is masculine and cannot be feminine?

No, that shouldn't quite be it. I do hold that masculine pronouns are more properly evocative of our relationship with God. But, I don't believe God is masculine, or feminine. He is divine.

I find agreement with Eckhart. Held nondually, what he says resonates clearly with me.

I find agreement with him dualistically in the truth of the Catholic faith

To be fair, there are some orthodox understandings of panentheism, that do not postulate that creation is of divine essence. God is a deity irradicably distinct from and wholly present within and united with creation.

 

[Windwalker]

I apologize, but your use of language here is confusing me, and I have to ask you to expound further on what you mean when you say first person, second person and third person. I don't want to needlessly argue in the dark where I am most likely not understanding what you are saying.

I'll take my time to finish reading everything you posted and reply later, but I thought it would be a helpful frame of reference for me to share this tonight as I saw the struggle of communication. I found an online article about this that I think will help you understand what I am drawing from. It should help to give us a common frame of reference:

The Three Faces of Spirit

 

[Mister Emu]

@Windwalker

Thanks, I'm reading it right now.

 

[Windwalker]

And then...

It is not to say you should not generate your own love for yourself. Your relationship with your self should be loving. But, "no greater love has a man than this, that he lay down his life for another". That is to say, the perfection of love, the fullness of love, is found in the outporing from one to that which is fundamentally other. From God to us. From me to you. From us to God.

What you are saying is untrue is exactly the love we're looking for and the love that is found in saying "God is love". The love that comes from outside of us, the love we cast from ourselves to those outside of us.

Hello again. Sorry for the prolonged gap in response. I hope all is well with you. I want to pick up here as a starting point again, and we'll circle around to the other areas hopefully, but I see a great deal of agreement there.

It may be a little confusing the way I said this, due to the way dualistic language of inside vs. outside confuses things. With a mystical realization, that "love of God" is discovered to arise from within us, and that it was in reality never was or is apart from us. It was only perceived as separate or apart from us, outside of us, because of our normal dualistic perceptions of subject and object relationships.

It is not as you say above, "generating" our own love for ourselves. That is of course not what I am speaking of. I'm speaking of Agape love. That is nothing that we generate. That is something that just IS. And when we experience that, that is something that just "unveils" as it were. But the experience of that is most definitely "within you, as well as surrounding you in all things. That has been my experience fully.

It's not "your" love, in the sense of something you that you identify with your unique and individual person. It's something that is in all Creation, experienced within you and all around you. So it's really not "other" external to you. It is inherent within you, all all living beings. It is nondual.

I disagree, which again is not to say that you should not have internal happiness, or that you should make your happiness reliant on human beings, quite the contrary, you will only be disappointed if you do that.

But, relationships generate additional happiness, just like they generate new love, not old love that you just happened to find laying about.

No, they can experience a different happiness of equal or greater intensity, but the happiness of say reuniting with a loved one is unique to that person and experience.

Of course I wouldn't disagree that how that happiness is experienced is uniquely tied to that other person or moment in time. But is it still happiness, which can be experience in a multitude of ways. But happiness in general, is something that does not come from outside ourselves. We can just be in a state of perfect happiness, without anyone or anything in particular as an object that happiness is tied to. Happiness is a state of being.

In fact, that's the goal. If we can just be happy from within ourselves, or within God as a state of our being, then it flows from within to without, rather than from outside to in. In fact, if you look at Jesus' Two Great Commandments, the order is "love God" and then "love your neighbor as yourself". That is that love flows from the Source (which is within us by divine creation being made in the image of God), filling our individual 'person' or 'self', overflowing out through us to others, loving them with that same Self-sustained Agape Love which fills us.

One could argue that Source is external to us, but I simply return to point out that is a dualistic perspective, which cannot reconcile the transcendent and the immanent. You cannot have an Infinite God stop at the doorstep of its creation, and still be considered Infinite. In how I hold it, God is vibrantly present in every molecule and every atom of our bodies and all of creation, radiating the Infinite within us. So why is it strange to say God is in us?

Apologies, but this dualistic mind you imply seems quite narcissistic, I generate the love I feel no need for anyone else, I generate the happiness I feel no need for anyone else, I am an expression of the divine essence.

No, it's hardly narcissistic. That word does not apply in this context. Dualism is how 99.9999% of humanity perceives the world. It is normal, everyday perception. You certainly speak in dualistic terms all the time. We all do. We speak in terms of subject/object duality. "I" is used speaking from the perception of seeing myself as other to you. We see ourselves as "Me" and others as "them", or "it".

When someone says "I am an expression of the divine", that is not the ego saying I am the divine. God forbid. Think of it in terms of what Paul said. "I live, yet not I, but Christ in me". Right there, you have that paradox of "I", but "Not I" in that one saying. It is "I" shining God, but not "I" in the sense of Paul, but God, but it is still Paul, yet "Not Paul". What I am saying, and what Paul was saying is the same thing. It's paradoxical. It's nondual, as opposed to dualism.

Love is not a thing that just "is", it isn't a cosmic metaphysical resource waiting to be tapped.

Yes it is. "God is Love". That could rightly be understood as a "cosmic metaphysical resource waiting to be tapped." There is never a point in which that Love, with a capital L, agape or divine Love, is not fully there and available just waiting to be tapped, so to speak.

Think of it in terms of oxygen. Just because we may be having trouble with our respiratory systems and have difficulting breathing, that oxygen is a resource that is alway there waiting to be tapped, metaphorically speaking. We just have to heal and exercise our lungs to increase our breathing capacity. We don't "generate" that oxygen with the lungs, we simply relax and breathe it in through them, and it heals the whole body which was suffering due to a lack of oxygen flow. Same thing with God's Love. It just IS, and is always available to us.

It is a relationship, a directed emotional connection.

I do not reduce it to human emotions. It's far more than that, and emotions are simply transitory responses to an unchangeable reality that is always there, fully at all times, available to everyone and everything. Yes, we in our human emotions have a relationship with that Source, but it's still there whether or not we "feel" it. It radiates constantly to, and through, all of creation.

Every time a new relationship is formed, love that never existed before is created between the participants.

No. It's not that that "love that never existed before is created." No. That love was already there as love (and I'm speaking in human terms here), it's just that it had not found expression through that other person, or in relation with that other person before. Now is it "our" love in exchange with each other. That's the only thing that is created new. Not love itself. How we love someone else, how we express that love that is in us with that other person, is obviously going to be unique. But that love was there in us already from the day we were born, by simple virtue of being a creation of God, a human being.

(continued...)

 

[Windwalker]

I love you, you love me, we're a happy family. We can talk about you loving a flower, or the sunset, or cake; but, we can't talk about the flower loving you, the sunset loving you, or cake loving you because they have no personhood, they cannot direct an emotional tie to you, they cannot love.

You are describing unique relational expressions of love. Not the creation of love where no love existed before. Think of this example of a "new love" you are using as the removal of obstacles that allow the flow of love between two participant to occur. That love was there already in each of the partners, and they each brought that with them. They didn't lack love in their souls, until they met that other person. You cannot love someone else, if you don't already have love to give.

Once the barriers to the exchange of their love between each other gets removed, then there is a "birth" of a "new love" so to speak, but that's not love that is born, but "their love together", a new mutual exchange between two people. And yes, you cannot speak easily about the flower "loving you", as in a directed sense. That's true, because we are not talking about human relationships. But that flower nonetheless radiates God's love, indiscriminately to all creation. It's not directed to "me". It is directed to all. And I as an individual receive and respond to that love expressed by that flower's existence, or sunset, or cool breeze.

To reduce the presence and existence of Love, to the fickleness of human relationships does a disservice the reality of divine Love. It is simply there and radiating forth at all times, regardless of relational statuses. While the sunset may not be "loving me", in that sense, it is still expressing Love, and in that sense, I experience its love in my person, regardless if it consciously recognizes my individual person as such.

You can find many passages that speak of God as an unconditional lover, who is no respecter of man. To say that everyone gets loved by God is hardly to say He doesn't passionately love every individual.

The word "passionately" is obviously an anthropomorphic expression. We can imagine God like a human with passions and desires, likes and dislikes, upsets and happinesses, etc, but I think we both know that can be misleading if taken too literally. God's Love is Limitless. I see it metaphorically like the background radiation seen from the Big Bang. It is equally the same no matter where you look in the universe. It's not more here and less there, but the same everywhere.

I would not use the word passion to describe that, as passion is, "showing or caused by strong feelings or a strong belief". Ascribing feelings to God, or emotions to God, is too anthropomorphic to really work. That does not mean it's not intense, but that intensity is the same everywhere equally. The sun's rays may be intense, but I would not describe them as passionate. And considering its intense rays are life-giving, they are experienced emotionally as "love". Love is life-giving, and life-affirming.

We apparently have significantly differing ideas on what love actually is, to even think that it can be dispassionately distributed is anathema to what I know of love. It isn't love if it isn't passionate. Just as God is passionate, He calls on us to be so as well, "But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth."

I think you have an idea of what Agape Love is, but that creates a conflict for you when you try to think of it in terms of human emotional love. When you take an anthropomorphism, such as imagining God with human emotional responses, that places limits upon that love such as you see in humans, "I don't love her anymore". That's not divine Love.

I'm going to retract my use of the term "dispassionate" to speak of the equal in all directions and intensity of God's love. I think intensity is a better term for both of us, versus passionate vs. dispassionate, caring vs. non-caring, etc. The thinking gets too caught up into the world of opposites. That word of opposites as just described, is what I mean when I am speaking of a dualistic perspective. Dualism is the world of opposites. And the language we use to speak of things from human experience is that dualistic world of opposites.

God transcends such language.


I'll complete my response the rest of your reply shortly.

 

[Windwalker]

Unless you are labeling something a construct which isn't, in which case you are inhibiting your openness to the truth.

The thing about constructs, is these are not something the average person even sees. It is assumed to simply be reality the way it is by them and they are unaware of the constructs. They are not seeing the eye through which they are seeing. To say we are labeling something a construct which isn't, doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If you are thinking about it rationally, you are using a construct. It's only in mystical states of awareness you are not.

Anything that we identify as "this" or "that" is done by drawing a boundary around it, and placing it within a framework of understanding and perceiving the world. In other words, this is normal fare for everything we think and understand about anything. It's all constructs.

This is why mystics the world over in all religions, including Christianity, seek to deconstruct these constructs in order to see Truth. These constructs are lenses we translate reality through to our human understandings, which are rooted in our dualistic language systems, and as such limit what can be seen. It closes us off from that which doesn't fit into that construct.

For instance, "No man comes to the Father but by me," some read through their ethnocentric frameworks as, "Only Christians go to heaven". But others looking through a pluralistic or universalist framework hear something different, that Jesus is speaking as Love incarnate, and that all who come to God, come through Love.

But even that is limited in understanding God. And that is why the apophatic approach is used in Christian mysticism. "I pray God make me free of God [the mental constructs I hold about God], so that I may know God in his unconditioned being [God beyond mental constructs]. Saying God is outside creation for instance, is a mental construct. Saying God is inside creation is a mental construct. Saying God is anything at all, is a construct. A mental construct defines what things are, and places them into a framework for interpretation by the mind. Transcending mind, is deconstructing that construct-based reality.

No, and that isn't what I said. It is that you don't trust God to be able to surpass your perceptual limitations. You don't trust that you won't have a paradigm shift from some new revelation because you don't trust that God is just as involved in the communion as you are.

I'm not sure what you are drawing from that gives you this impression. I certainly have no issue with a revelation that creates a paradigm shift. I've had several of these major shifts I could point to in my life. I'm preaching becoming construct-aware. The reason for this is simple. Growth. Trusting God, is central to everything on the mystical path. So is not defining God or setting expectations for God.

So if someone says, "I'm trusting God to bring me someone who will make me happy in my life," that actually is not trusting God. That is setting an expectation born out of a mental construct that happiness come from outside ourselves. If you get rid of that construct, let go of trying to control these things, then happiness comes directly as a result, and if someone comes or doesn't, becomes a secondary thing.

You speak of communing with the divine more like it's seeing an inanimate force than a living entity, more like viewing a painting than reuniting with a loved one. All of you perceiving and none of God influencing.

Not at all. I never would use the term inanimate. That means dead. It's anything but that! I will use the term Energy, yes. But that Energy is absolute "alive" in the sense that it is the energy of Life itself. Spirit, is exactly that Life, Love, and Light. It is Energy. It is God. "God is Spirit", Jn. 4:24.

And to add, it's not "all of you perceiving". Not at all. Rather, it's all of you participating. I wouldn't chose the term "God influencing", other than understood as an "attractor", like magnetism pulls metal filings to itself. It is not that magnetism specifically trying to get the cooperation of the metal filing, influencing it mentally. Rather the properties of the metal filing respond to the presence of magnetism.

Now while that may sound "impersonal", it's not meant to be a perfect analogy with God or humans. Humans are not dead metal filings, nor God nothing more than the laws of physics. It's a crude, and hardly adequate comparison, but for the purpose of how God "influences", it would be more along those lines, than influence in the sense of God trying to sell you on an idea, or persuade you to specific courses of actions. I have a hard time truly thinking of God in anthropomorphic terms, such as seeing God as an "entity", other than as a poetic expression.

This is a good time to ask again, as I'm drawing up a holistic response to patterns emerging over the course of the discussion. Have you never, in your experience with God, had God directly impart some bit of concrete information to you? Is there anything about which you can say, "God told me thus, it cannot be other than true"?

Yes, but I would not phrase it as "God told me". Rather, better stated I would put it as "revealed". Only one time was there any "audible" or 'verbal" component to it, and that was simply to hear my name spoken, followed by a life-review and the awareness that that which embraced me with Absolute Love, was always present in my life through everything, though I lived unaware of that. That was pretty specific and concrete, pointing to something that was historical for me.

That "revelation" aspect of it, is something that is a commonplace thing for anyone, once they step beyond the egoic self into awareness of the divine. When you look through the eyes of the divine, that is that paradigm shift you mentioned. That to me is revelation, not necessary some verbal instructions handed down to a prophet by God on a mountain, as seen in our cultural mythologies. It may take that form for some, but how God speaks to me, or rather what is revealed through the presence of God, is far less prophet of God like, versus the lover of God like. Truth, with a capital T, does not need words.

Insofar as some person expresses an understanding that is incompatible or fundamentally contradictory with the God I know, I cannot assent to both their validity and perceptual accuracy. If someone expresses that God is unloving, or that God is unjust, or, yes, impersonal.

Yes, but what we hear with the mind, and what we hear with the heart are often at odds with each other. Which is why hearing with the heart is better suited to discerning Truth, despite differences in languages.

It isn't a boundary, it is trust. I trust the God that is. I trust the eternal one, the unchanging love that created everything. I trust that He will lead me to ever greater truths, to ever greater love. I trust in God to lead me. I trust in God to correct me. As He has done, so will He continue to do.

I do too. Yet for you to say for instance God is an "entity", and unless you experience an entity the same way I did, your experience is not valid, is in fact placing a boundary around your experience and defining God based upon that as an absolute that cannot be broken.

This is the Faith, not to know, but to surrender to God as He guides you through and to the unknowable.

And that Unknowable, is the being of God. Why do we then insist we know it then because we've had a taste of it? To trust God, is to rest in the Unknowable. And to do that, we have to let go of thinking we know. I think that's one of first, as well as our final tests.

Sounds accurate. Because God isn't feminine, He is divine.

Correct, God isn't masculine either. But God can be experienced as both, or as neither. Our experiences of God, do not define what God is, other than to say it is beyond experiences.

No more than saying that because God is love, you can't experience Him as unloving.

Those two do not go together. There is actually no such thing as "unloving", realistically speaking. There is either love, or the absence of love. "Unloving" is actually used to describe a maliciousness.

BUT..... thought just came to me. Yes, someone could in fact experience God as malicious or vengeful, spiteful, hateful, jealous, etc. Just read the Bible in many places. Both images of God are found there Now, without getting caught up in the theology of God in the Bible (an entirely different discussion), people can experience meeting God as absolutely terrifying. God may appear as the devil to them. God appears as the Face of Death to them.

I can see this line of thought extending out quite a ways here, but as a quick thought, how we experience God is very much tied to our own state of being and mind. If we hold onto hate in our lives, spiteful, resentful, blaming of others, angry at how we have been dealt with in life, etc., when that person meeting God, or experiences a confrontation with the Void, or the Abyss, that Unknown you mentioned, they will encounter all of the weight of all of that pressing down upon them as they refuse to let go and surrender. God will appears as terror to them. Death. Nonexistence. Hell.

But is that what God is? Is God the devil? Not in my experience. But assuming that person surrenders all of that at death's door, or at the feet of the Door, to use a reference to Christ, what will they experience. Absolute release and freedom from fear. Fear is the face we put upon God, but once unmasked, it is Love. Release into God, is passing through the door of death. The door of death, becomes the Door of God.

I'm not sure where all I want to go with this, but these are some realizations we can go with. How we experience God on this side of the Door, speaks to our vessel and what it is holding and what its needs are. If someone is positively approaching the divine, and they need a motherly face, they will see one. If they relate to a father face, they will see one. But that is not what God is,, anymore that he is the devil because someone in the pits of sin and despair see God that way.


(continued....)