AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 3:11 pm
Simon - thanks for your comment. Please indulge me some more here and see if the following helps. If you, as an adult now, were to look upon your infant self right after birth, and then take a portal into the consciousness of your infant self, would you feel as though the two different modes of experience leave "too big of a gap" for you to claim both modes as belonging to the same Self? Similarly, ask the same question if you were to take a portal into the consciousness of ancient humans 'painting' on a cave wall tens of thousands of years ago. Of course the problem here is that we cannot simply do that in any normal cognitive state, but can we really doubt the massive qualitative gap exists?
Here is another angle - my final part will go into Steiner's PoF re: spiritual activity of thinking. I hope it will show clearly how we, as humans right now, at this very moment, are taking part in the co-creation of the phenomenal world around us. Now if we acknowledge that is what is occurring and take it seriously, we also must ask ourselves what it means to be fully conscious of that co-creation as it occurs. Ultimately, for most of us who accept Christ as savior and His revelation in scripture, the seeming "unbridgeable gap" likely comes down to the Creator-creature duality. We simply cannot imagine how we are participating in the literal creation of the world. I hope this point will become more clear from the next part.
For me personally, coming at the same claim of
theosis as literal (not just metaphorical or analogical) reintegration with the Divine from many different angles is what helped. Idealism was a great framework to start with but it simply was not satisfying re: deeper spiritual questions. Further, when contemplating the perspective of various philosophers, theologians, mystics, many of whom are referenced in these essays and quoted above, I was not satisfied with the idea that they are merely speaking of union with God as in a husband with his wife, at least not in the normal way we think about what such a marriage truly entails.
So, yes, there is a huge gap between where we are now and where we could potentially be, but is that not the case with
every aspect of our metamorphic progression? Within our daily progression from sleeping to awaking, from infancy to adulthood, from archaic to modern, etc.? Such progressions are marked by 'punctuated equilibriums' which also make them seem discontinuous from each other. Christianity asks us to take seriously the seeming discontinuity between being born and
born again in the Spirit, while also asking us to take seriously that, with God,
all things are possible and that we must have
faith in that simple fact. I do not take Paul's words below as anything less than literal:
"
There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."