Made in God's Image?

[ZenFred]

Charlemagne III;:

if God were not a Person, how would it be possible to love God and communicate with God?

Indeed a perplexing question and is the mystery and koan. How can god be both transcendent and able to be communicated/in relationship with?

Based on my experience thru my meditative practice I would say that “God” is personal and compassionate and active, yet completely impersonal without discernment and passive, yet a total fiction and does not exist. All of these are true and not true.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Based on my experience thru my meditative practice I would say that “God” is personal and compassionate and active, yet completely impersonal without discernment and passive, yet a total fiction and does not exist. All of these are true and not true.

 

[ZenFred]

I realize that was completely unclear. Let me attempt to explain with an example.

I stand in the yard during a nice spring Easter Day with a gentle breeze blowing. The moment resonates within me and I get a clear sense of God’s presence, His love and compassion and calling me to Him; the same presence I’ve encountered in my Christian days growing up in the church.
Yet, at the same time I recognize that my mind is creating illusions of this category and that (Christian, loving, anthropomorphic deity, ect) and I perceive some transcendence beyond and greater than thought; a uniting and healing peace in which there is clinging and no suffering, everything is beautifully and perfectly as it is.
Yet at the same time I know that the breeze is creating a calming sensory reaction that is primed with memories of church retreats and previous “spiritual” moments that activate regions of my temporal lobes to create a semi-meditative state releasing endorphins and creating an illusion of a transcendent feeling. In reality I am just standing in a current of moving air particles and triggering conditioned associations.

All of these are true yet none of these levels of explanation can describe the human encounter with God. It just is.

 

[tonyrey]

…
All of these are true yet none of these levels of explanation can describe the human encounter with God. It just is.

If this is true it also applies to your explanation! If the human encounter with God eludes reasoning as well as perception a sceptic can reject it as a fantasy.

An abstract deity is in the same category as a fairy. Abstractions are notoriously misleading. There is no logical stopping place on the descent from a personal God to no God. That is the reason for the Incarnation. We can grasp the reality of love on the Cross…

 

[hazcompat]

ZenFred,
I think you would enjoy the writing style of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

"Certainly all have some kind of connection with God and bear a certain trace of God in themselves. “Yet God has no relation or essential likeness to creatures. For the disparity between his divine Being and theirs is infinite. Therefore it is also impossible that the intellect can comprehend God perfectly through the means of anything created, be it heavenly or earthly.”1

Even the angels and saints are so far removed from the divine Being that the intellect cannot attain to God through them. This is true of everything concerning “that which can be imagined or received and understood by the intellect in this life.”2 In the natural world, the intellect grasps objects through the forms and images that the senses perceive. These cannot serve to lead forward on the way to God. As well, whatever of the supernatural world is accessible to the intellect here cannot help it attain any certain knowledge of God. The intellect, therefore, in its own insights cannot construct an adequate concept of God. The memory out of all its fantasy cannot create a form or picture that could portray God; the will cannot taste any joy or delight that is at all similar to God himself. Therefore, in order to attain to God, one must “rather strive . . . not to understand as to understand . . . rather to be blind and transport oneself into darkness . . . than to open the eyes.” This is why the Areopagite calls contemplation mystical theology, that is, secret knowledge of God and a ray of darkness.3"

Stein, Edith (2011-03-17). The Science of the Cross (The Collected Works of Edith Stein Vol. 6) (Kindle Locations 1364-1373). ICS Publications. Kindle Edition.

Peace

 

[Charlemagne_III]

All of these are true yet none of these levels of explanation can describe the human encounter with God. It just is.

The human encounter with God does not require explaining. It only needs experiencing.

That is why St. Thomas Aquinas said near the end of his life, as the sense of his oncoming death began to be felt, that all the many and complex explanations found in his theology seemed as straw compared to the mystical vision of God he had experienced. I think the closer one gets to the intimate experience of God the more one is engulfed and alienated from the great darkness of the world, beyond which there is a greater Light beckoning us toward itself in the mergent experience of God. But that Light is in the person of God, not some vague philosophical abstraction called God. That Light shines, dimly or brightly, as the case may be, in our darkness. We can flee from it, but we cannot extinguish it any more than we can extinguish the light of the sun and the stars.

 

[fhansen]

God must transcend and be superior** in every respect **to everything we know - including persons with the capacity for truth, goodness, freedom, justice, beauty and love.

Peace be with you, Fred.

Yes, and personhood is simply superior to, well, nonpersonhood, whatever kind of reality that might be.

 

[tonyrey]

The human encounter with God does not require explaining. It only needs experiencing.

That is why St. Thomas Aquinas said near the end of his life, as the sense of his oncoming death began to be felt, that all the many and complex explanations found in his theology seemed as straw compared to the mystical vision of God he had experienced. I think the closer one gets to the intimate experience of God the more one is engulfed and alienated from the great darkness of the world, beyond which there is a greater Light beckoning us toward itself in the mergent experience of God. But that Light is in the person of God, not some vague philosophical abstraction called God. That Light shines, dimly or brightly, as the case may be, in our darkness. We can flee from it, but we cannot extinguish it any more than we can extinguish the light of the sun and the stars.

:clapping: That Light radiates from Love. It overwhelms the saints because they have developed their capacity for love - for God and everything He has created…

 

[tonyrey]

Yes, and personhood is simply superior to, well, nonpersonhood, whatever kind of reality that might be.

Indeed. Only persons are capable of universal love - although some animals manifest love for individuals of other species. Even the maternal and paternal instincts of animals reflect God’s love.

 

[jochoa]

When you say that we are made in God’s image, obviously that doesn’t mean that God has a physical body (apart from the incarnation).

I encourage you to consider that God does have a physical body, and here is a means to connect the two using the Bible:

1. God is Light.
2. Since a source of light has a center from which light rays spread in all directions, the body of God will be round in form (like the Consecrated Host of a lawful Catholic Mass ).
3. We, both male and female, are created in this same image, in that we each initially exist as a single cell that is round in appearance.

But does that mean that God has a human-like (though perfect) mind that has sensation, perception, volition/thinking/judgement something like ours? Is the will of God anything like the human will (again perfected)?

Yes, the perfection of human thinking, knowledge, and will is God’s, distinctly the Holy Spirit’s, thinking, knowledge, and will. It is wisely shared as the Greatest Commandment, which can be considered as “Always freely being and sharing the means to freely be patient and kind for the Greatest Being with all one’s feelings, remembrance of person, thoughts, and actions equally towards others as the self for the experience of unbreakable peace with unending joy for all.”

Obviously, I am having trouble wit the idea that God is some kind of supernatural “person”. Yet truth is truth, and perhaps He is that way.

I think I have had similar struggles, and here were my conclusions:
Bible-based: “…you are to be as perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect…”
“…(Father’s) will be done on earth as it is in heaven…”
Therefore, humans are capable of being as loving as God is loving, therefore, either His Love is supernatural, and we can grow to love supernaturally OR His Love is not necessarily supernatural.
Now two ways in which I know God is supernatural are:

1. God is the only being not created. All other beings, both living and non-living are created. 2. And being the only non-created being, God is the only being to possess infinite energy by nature of being the first physical being to exist.

Thank you very much for the excellent food for thought! I look forward to further discussion, and may the peace and joy of Christ be with you all the time!

 

[Sochi]

God must transcend and be superior** in every respect ****to everything we know **- including persons with the capacity for truth, goodness, freedom, justice, beauty and love.

So it follows God can’t be known. That is accurate.

 

[Sochi]

JOHN OF RUYSBROECK

The final state of the Christian mystic, then, is not annihilation in the Absolute. It is a condition wherein we dwell wholly in God, one life and truth with Him; yet still “feel God and ourselves,” as the lover feels his beloved, in a perfect union which depends for its joy on an invincible otherness. The soul, transfused and transfigured by the Divine Love as molten iron is by the fire, becomes, it is true, "one simple blessedness with God"35 yet ever retains its individuality: one with God beyond itself, yet other than God within itself.36
The “deified man” is fully human still, but spiritualised through and through; not by the destruction of his personality, but by the taking up of his manhood into God. There he finds, not a static beatitude, but a Height, a Depth, a Breadth of which he is made part, yet to which he can never attain: for the creature, even at its highest, remains finite, and is conscious that Infinity perpetually eludes its grasp and leads it on. So heaven itself is discovered to be no mere passive fulfillment, but rather a forward-moving life:37 an ever new loving and tasting, new exploring and enjoying of the Infinite Fulness of God, that inexhaustible Object of our knowledge and delight. It is the eternal voyage of the adventurous soul on the vast and stormy sea of the Divine.

“The path is the goal” Is this part of the citation?

Yes, this is a fascinating exposition. It differentiates between the vast majority of Christian mystics and Eastern mystics. To put it in short terms, from what I’ve read, is that for the most part, Christian mystics stop short of the last step of the mystical journey. This is so, or perhaps only appears so, due to the depth of intellectual inculcation, the fear of retribution to plain speech, (eg, the burning of some of the works of St. Teresa of Avila) or even the difficulty of expressing the ultimate mystical experience in words. Perhaps even a combination of those. The result is of these three together may be a great barrier to a totally honest Clarity.

What I’ve gathered, then, from my readings is that the belief in the sole Sonship of Jesus is a barrier to the analytically and intellectual embrace of the actual nature of the final transformation (in fact an inaccurate but oft used word) which mystical work leads to. In fact, a Catholic woman put it succinctly in one of her books: “As long as you believe you are a person, you will have a personal God.” Naturally, that then has a corollary, which may go to ZenFreds ultimate point.

 

[Amandil]

So it follows God can’t be known. That is accurate.

No its not.

People make decisions and perform actions. Those actions tell us something about the person who performed those acts. The person themselves transcend their actions, their is more to a person than what they do.

Your statement itself doesn’t follow at all.

 

[Sochi]

No its not.

People make decisions and perform actions. Those actions tell us something about the person who performed those acts. The person themselves transcend their actions, their [sic] is more to a person than what they do.

Yes, so you agree, as that part that is more cannot be known. It appears that we know someone from their actions, given certain assumptions. Have you never watched a movie with a plot twist, or where you knew something about a character another character in that film didn’t? You never changed your mind about what you thought someone was doing? Our interpretations of what someone is doing is most often a confession of what we ourselves are about. Or perhaps you are a very sheltered individual, as are the vast majority of us when it comes to knowing, never mind understanding, the sub texts of many behaviors.

And even if those actions tell us “something” about the person, that is not knowing the “person” as such, as an entity, from the inside, if you will. Our usual kind of “knowing” is a patchwork fabrication stitched from our perceptions based on our assumptions. Ultimately what you know is your thoughts about the person, not the person as such. On examination, a sincere one, at least, one finds they do not even know themselves. Or, one is naive, and that is satisfactory until there is a crisis that demands deeper examination.

In the mean time, beliefs are a phenomenally useful shield. Ask anyone who has found themselves in a radically different situation or environment fro their habituated one. The lack of thorough, critical, self examination is one of our greatest comforts. From that cushy ignorance we argue vehemently for our parochial world view. Until you look and find the crack. That is why mystics often discover that the world as they thought it was is a complete lie. But it wasn’t the world they were looking at. When they discovered that, there was the door to their freedom. It is also why mysticism is so often regarded as a dangerous path. But not for the reasons you might think.

 

[orang]

Its a common ground frame for association, and of a reflective nature-reasoning, reason is reflective in its nature.

One creature toward harmony or the becoming journey including ( all bridging values,
Soul
Unconscious mind
Conscious mind

One God , three distinct, perfect infinite harmony
God
Holy Spirit
Jesus.

If formal prayer didn’t work through to the soul by recognizing its potential and a difference in whole being for it, no one would say prayers or have an interior life. The meditating could be in some instance’s somewhat open to a different appreciative experience,

 

[tonyrey]

God must transcend and be superior* in every respect ***

God is not known by logic but by the highest form of knowledge: love…

The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing. We find this in a thousand instances. It is the heart which feels God, and not the reasoning powers. And this is faith made perfect : — God realized by feeling in the heart.

Pascal - Pensées

 

[orang]

don’t see where the actual content in that is.

 

[hazcompat]

Yes, this is a fascinating exposition. It differentiates between the vast majority of Christian mystics and Eastern mystics. To put it in short terms, from what I’ve read, is that for the most part, Christian mystics stop short of the last step of the mystical journey. This is so, or perhaps only appears so, due to the depth of intellectual inculcation, the fear of retribution to plain speech, (eg, the burning of some of the works of St. Teresa of Avila) or even the difficulty of expressing the ultimate mystical experience in words. Perhaps even a combination of those. The result is of these three together may be a great barrier to a totally honest Clarity.

What I’ve gathered, then, from my readings is that the belief in the sole Sonship of Jesus is a barrier to the analytically and intellectual embrace of the actual nature of the final transformation (in fact an inaccurate but oft used word) which mystical work leads to. In fact, a Catholic woman put it succinctly in one of her books: “As long as you believe you are a person, you will have a personal God.” Naturally, that then has a corollary, which may go to ZenFreds ultimate point.

The path is the goal is a Zen maxim that hung in the YMCA in the 70,s , not part of the quote.

"-What, then, do we experience of Thou
-Just nothing. For we do not experience it.
-What, then, do we know of Thou
-Just everything. For we know nothing isolated
about it any more.
*
The Thou meets me through grace-it is not found by seeking. But my speaking of the primary word to it is an act of my being, is indeed the title act of my being. The Thou meets me. But I step into direct relation with it. Hence the relation means being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one; just as any action of the whole being, which means the suspension of all partial actions and consequently of all sensations of actions grounded only in their particular limitation, is bound to resemble suffering.

The primary word I-Thou can be spoken only with the whole being. Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me. I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say · Thou:
AIl real living is meeting."

I AND THOU
BY
MARTIN BUBER

Jesus Is the only way,

Peace

 

[Amandil]

Yes, so you agree, as that part that is more cannot be known.
It appears that we know someone from their actions, given certain assumptions.

No. Because the way to bypass our assumptions is by actually having a relationship.

Have you never watched a movie with a plot twist, or where you knew something about a character another character in that film didn’t? You never changed your mind about what you thought someone was doing?

God is a Person, not a character in a movie contrived by an author to entertain.

Even if I did grant your analogy, it doesn’t prove your point. It only demonstrates that people are more than our assumptions, not that they cannot be known.

Our interpretations of what someone is doing is most often a confession of what we ourselves are about. Or perhaps you are a very sheltered individual, as are the vast majority of us when it comes to knowing, never mind understanding, the sub texts of many behaviors.

What you claim must be necessarily true about me must also be necessarily true about you. The above confession being essentially what you are “sheltered” in.

Your version seems rather a rather sophisticated but rather lazy way of saying that, “you can’t know anything so don’t bother.” The path of least resistance being the road most traveled.

And even if those actions tell us “something” about the person, that is not knowing the “person” as such, as an entity, from the inside, if you will.

So what. One way of knowing necessarily leads to deeper ways of knowing.

You claimed that God cannot be known at all. That in itself is a contradictory statement.

Our usual kind of “knowing” is a patchwork fabrication stitched from our perceptions based on our assumptions.

Circular.

Ultimately what you know is your thoughts about the person, not the person as such. On examination, a sincere one, at least, one finds they do not even know themselves. Or, one is naive, and that is satisfactory until there is a crisis that demands deeper examination.

Also circular. Just because one’s self-knowledge is incomplete by no means says that they cannot be known by another.

In the mean time, beliefs are a phenomenally useful shield.

Does that include the above belief that “beliefs are a phenomenally useful shield”?

Ask anyone who has found themselves in a radically different situation or environment fro their habituated one. The lack of thorough, critical, self examination is one of our greatest comforts.

It certainly seems a comfort to you because you surely haven’t adequately examined your own beliefs and how they are logically contradictory.

From that cushy ignorance we argue vehemently for our parochial world view. Until you look and find the crack. That is why mystics often discover that the world as they thought it was is a complete lie. But it wasn’t the world they were looking at. When they discovered that, there was the door to their freedom. It is also why mysticism is so often regarded as a dangerous path. But not for the reasons you might think.

What exactly do you regard as “mysticism” or “mystics”? I’ve read the works of real mystics and false ones, so without a frame a reference to go by these remarks is simply to vague and cryptic to even respond to.

 

[Amandil]

The path is the goal is a Zen maxim that hung in the YMCA in the 70,s , not part of the quote.

"-What, then, do we experience of Thou
-Just nothing. For we do not experience it.
-What, then, do we know of Thou
-Just everything. For we know nothing isolated
about it any more.
*
The Thou meets me through grace-it is not found by seeking. But my speaking of the primary word to it is an act of my being, is indeed the title act of my being. The Thou meets me. But I step into direct relation with it. Hence the relation means being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one; just as any action of the whole being, which means the suspension of all partial actions and consequently of all sensations of actions grounded only in their particular limitation, is bound to resemble suffering.

The primary word I-Thou can be spoken only with the whole being. Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me. I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say · Thou:
AIl real living is meeting."

I AND THOU
BY
MARTIN BUBER

Jesus Is the only way,

Peace

Where Buddhism falls short is that they think that the ultimate enlightenment is the utter denial of the self into “the One” where the person no longer exists. They claim that is the final journey of mysticism.

Christian mysticism says that to deny one’s self wholly to God is the only possible way to truly be the individual which God created you as. Christian mysticism was/is never about the annihilation of the person but the liberation of the person from sin. That when a person, by the subjection of his passions to his intellect and will, loves God and his neighbors as himself he will then be truly able to love himself as he loves God and his neighbors. That everything we give to God in order to deny ourselves, and which God takes with His left, He will return ten-fold with His right, and eternal life along with it.

That is why Buddhism is an inferior system. It may contain some lights, but it is nothing compared to the fullness of light and truth.