Hedge90 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 1:38 pm Αν πεθαινεις πριν πεθαινεις,
δεν θα πεθαινεις οταν πεθαινεις.
That's the 2nd time I encounter this phrase in the past few days.
The way I understand this is, if your ego dies before you reach bodily death, you will know that your self will still remain after the ego's death.
It means that we must sacrifice our normal transitory Earthly perception-cognition to have it reborn into eternal life by the light of the Spirit. Of course that is just a crude abstract way of putting it - we should think of these things in terms of their living essence in our daily experience. Are we just trotting these feel-good phrases out without actually moving in the direction they are pointing us towards? Does it have any discernible effect on the way we live and think - does it prompt us towards a curiosity and longing for deeper knowledge of everything we encounter? Unfortunately it remains at the lowest possible resolution for most people, used as a crutch instead of a motivating impulse. That sort of superficial understanding and spiritual apathy is rife in the modern age, among secular and religious people alike.
Hedge90 wrote: Here's what I've been thinking about since I last posted.
Christians say God created man in his image. But man is also capable of sin. Therefore, the original "version", or state, of God also contains sin. So God decides to fragment itself into souls, the totality of which make up God itself, setting the rule that the end state should be only good, without the sin. So, the universe is basically a filter. Of course God wants all souls to reach salvation, because all souls are Him. But these souls (or well, the overwhelming majority of them) also contain sin. So, as a soul passes through the filter (=life), it's composition is "measured". In the end, the sinful parts are shed and only the good remain, thus meaning that if someone only consists of sin, they are basically annihilated (as only the good parts continue).
I'm not versed at all in theology and religious mythology, but I can imagine something like that, where the purpose of all Creation is for God to become a more pure and perfect version of itself.
The key is to take everything you say above and think of it in fluid spiritual terms, and also as nested within all layers of our experience, from daily temporal experience to eternal existence - not one or the other. What you are saying can be considered accurate, but there is a kind of "accuracy" which actually starts leading us in the wrong direction because it does not also call us towards much deeper understanding and appreciation. It tends to be reductive of spiritual reality into fixed categories i.e. dogmas, where spiritual essence is conceived in doctrinal formulations of "sin", "salvation", "annihilation", "purpose", etc. That is the merely abstract intellectual approach I am referring to, and it's very difficult for us to perceive this is happening in the modern age until someone points it out to us over and over and we start to internalize the critique. Spiritual mythology is calling us to something much, much higher; much more noble. And it is a nobility born of humility, because it only begins manifesting when we recognize that we know absolutely nothing of profound significance from the perspective of mere abstract intellect.