I must take exception to the “reason alone” postulate. Reason is, as seen from the multitude of failed “proofs of God,” Those being concocted by the need to fortify an unsustainable belief. Does that mean that God isn’t? Absolutely not. Only that the rational faculty is inadequate to the task. Who would ask a thimble to hold the ocean.
However, we can say that all men stem from the same Source, as manifestations of the organization of forms in Universe. All men have a commonality. then, in that they are aware. This awareness, whose contents is pertinent to the individual, yet whose nature might be attributed to a Principle called Consciousness, can be a door way to adoration. But it is my experiential means, not by the rational. The experiential means is introspective self knowledge, which yields a kind of knowledge different from the ordinary subject/object mode of perception. That knowledge is Knowledge, as it refers to the only indisputable thing that anyone can know, which is I am. No man or woman can say they are not. This then is the provable route to the root of Understanding.
Fortunately, unlike religion, which is contents, and therefore modifiable by circumstance an belief, Self knowledge is indisputably rooted in the very nature that we call God given. It is an exploration of the container as built, not of the contents put in it a belief. Religion, then,is about as useful for reading the makers mark on the vessel as deciphering the admixture of liquids and solids it might contain. That study of contents may derivatively be there by the agency of the maker, but is yet not the vessel itself, which is what religions claim to be attempting to “save” by putting more stuff in it.
That is very much like claiming that my computer and “Word” are one. I sitting in my chair, witness the patterns of electrons dancing on a screen and say, functionally, that that program “is” my computer. That is like saying Catholicism, or any belief system, ie program, “is” the Truth. That ignores a few things. Like DOS and hardwiring, the manufacture process and, ultimately, that both the computer and I are different modes of organizations of electrons , etc, that are at a sub atomic level known to be constantly flashing in and out of existence.
So, while religions argue the merits of various programs that allege to describe the workings of the computer, there is yet a way of experiencing what it is fundamentally made of. That is the Way of Self Knowledge, or the Perennial Philosophy, or the Path of Discrimination, or the Way of the Lonely Ones, or whatever you wish to call it. But that is the path of direct realization, and is what the Jesus story in its many forms has been a map for through all the ages.
So what is significant, fhansen, is that by the very Nature of Man there has always been a direct way to God. Now, because about 2000 years ago, it was attempted to be made popular, it was also degraded in to a prophylactic. That happened when the story of the Jesus figure, or Iusa, as He was know earlier, was made into a historic figure. That transmogrification allotted to a single fictitious figure the entire potential of humanity to understand themselves as Being primarily, and humans secondarily. Thus arrived the horrors and brakes put on civilization by the Church. Not that others weren’t horrible, but the Church, being a faction of humanity, did its own part in its own way.
So today we have a way of holding God at arms length, and because of the mind’s propensity to claim its minuscule and distorted contents as 1:1 equal to the World, we claim still that “ours” is the One, Holy, True, and Apostolic way. Of course, other humans who have their won equally believable Saviour figures make the same claim. But blessed be us, fhansen, if anyone looks at what the underlying pattern (a word derived from “Father”) might be. So, all the kids are arguing about whose daddy it is, who’s adopted and whose not, and who He likes better as every one of them pray for Him to win their war on reality for them. All the while He is all of theirs Always and Already. They are just so busy arguing that they don’t hear Him. Those who have heard Him have always, from time immemorial, said “I AM (is) the Way.” “Be still, and know that I AM (is) God” “I,(not “me!” and the Father is One.” But because it is Knowledge by Identity and not by reason, it has to be made as a statement of “amness” to be accurate.
But all that is why for all that time it has been said as well “Gnothi Seauton.” “Know thySelf.” It is emphatically not religious, or contentual knowledge. Religion is fine in the beginning stages, as you don’t give the same course to a kindergartener as you do to a grad student. But we are teaching our grammar school kids that there is no University. The one room school house of the Church is it? Then why did Jesus speak in parables with their intrinsic minimum of three levels, and then take His disciples aside and teach them separately. The Church, my friend, only deals with the external and exoteric presentation. You have to storm through that to find Soul.
When did Jesus come when he did? The Father always sends the Son unbidden and unexpected at the right time. It is always when you are ready, believe it or not.
