One of the main causes of today's problems is the expansion of human ego and self-assertion which is linked to the development of a more thought-based form of consciousness. This lies behind the male rebellion against God and the consequent female rebellion against the male, and then a whole host of other disruptions to the natural order of being. So, in one sense, all this is the result of a positive evolutionary development, of human beings becoming more conscious. The short-term consequences of it are certainly undesirable, but we may hope that, with time, these problems will be ironed out as we find ourselves going down numerous false paths and learning the lessons of wrong choices made when we have experienced the outcomes of those choices.
Today there can be no doubt that we live at a time of great spiritual danger. There are two ways of looking at this. One, this is a perfect environment for the destruction of human souls as they are separated from God and led astray by teachings that promote a totally false view of what human beings are. Truths that are real on a spiritual level such as the brotherhood of Man and the oneness of life are distorted and misinterpreted on a material, earthly level where they do not apply or not apply in the same way. Behaviour is regarded as natural merely because it exists in the fallen state. Human stupidity and selfishness combine with demonic interference to bring about a world and a state of consciousness that is ideal for our descent into spiritual darkness and maybe even damnation.
But there is another way of looking at things. In this scenario the spiritual powers are conducting a great experiment. Human beings are being opened up and exposed to spiritual forces which can either overwhelm them leading to an increase in egotism and sexual obsession among other things or, if they purify their lower natures, dedicate themselves to Christ and respond to true imagination, take them closer to the living God.
I have tried to project my mind forward to a time when humanity has moved on from the lower mind-centred state it now inhabits, in which unsupported thought (though strongly coloured by emotion and prejudice) is the directing principle, and intuition has developed to a certain degree. We would be returning to a spiritually focused way of being but with the bonus of greater self-consciousness and awareness of universal truths. We would be at the same time more self-conscious and less self-centred because the centre of our consciousness would be moving away from our egos and towards the divine. We would not all be struggling to express ourselves but to express the reality of God within the context of ourselves so individuality would still be present. In fact, it would be more present because it would be given the conditions in which to grow and flourish due to its locus being outside itself.
In this world, men and women would understand their true complementary roles, and neither would try to dominate the other unnaturally. That doesn't mean there would be equality. Equality is an illusion which when enforced, as now, leads to a massive distortion of reality. But there would be harmony as each sex took up its true vocation and genuinely respected the other for what it was without trying to imitate that other. Women would not seek to rival men and men would not seek to diminish women. Each sex would recognise how it needs the other.
At the moment we are like the sorcerer's apprentice. We have found a magical power, that of the self, but don't know how to use it or understand the right way to discipline it. But when we have mastered this power and submitted it to a higher one then we will be in a position to avail ourselves of its proper benefits. The question is, will we master it before it destroys us?
"I have tried to project my mind forward to a time when humanity has moved on from the lower mind-centred state it now inhabits, in which unsupported thought (though strongly coloured by emotion and prejudice)."
ReplyDeleteThis is the great mistake. You are trying to imagine a humanity that does not need the saving Grace of God. There was exactly one such human, ever, and He recognized that it was only through emotion and prejudice directed towards faith in Him that any other humans could be saved.
It is well that our emotional prejudice of Christ's absolute goodness should lead us to attempt to emulate Him. It is dangerous in the extreme to suppose that we may ever be able to accomplish such emulation through our own efforts rather than through His Grace.
Another way of putting it is that properly realizing and accepting our own limitations is the first step in overcoming the emotional prejudices that most separate us from God.
@CCL - "You are trying to imagine a humanity that does not need the saving Grace of God. "
ReplyDelete- That isn't correct, either of William or of myself. The motivations are quite different.
The difficulty is probably metaphysical, I infer you are arguing from a different set of assumptions regarding the basic nature of reality, the purpose of Men and the task we each confront.
My personal view is that traditional Christian philosophy has Not served us well in explaining the human condition - because it starts-out-with and makes foundational absolute and abstract terms (such as Grace). Such abtractions then structure and distort the whole argument henceforth.
Whereas it ought to be describing in terms of persons, and their motivations.
It is not easy to stick to persons as primary when making explanations, and (apparently) few (other than children and the simple) have suceeded in resisting the lapse back into primary abtractions; a metaphysic wrongly-built-into Christian theology in the mysterious era after the Apostles - but the whole nature of the Gospels would seem be be telling us that this is how we ought to proceed.
For me; it was the greatest achievement of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith to recover this original sense of understanding the Gospels, and to develop Christian theology on that basis.
Technically this can be described as a pluralist and evolutionary theology (as William James recognised) - but in fact that wasn't how it happened; it was instead (I think) an extraordinary and inspired directness and freshness of spirit that allowed Joseph to see what had always been there, on the surface, waiting to be seen.
CCL, I don’t understand what you are saying. Christ may have opened the door but we still have to walk through it. Do I not say that we have to dedicate ourselves to Christ if the scenario I envisaged is to come about? Faith in Christ and, more importantly, the inner reality of which Christ is the human face, will lead to the intuitive understanding of reality of which I speak here.
ReplyDeleteWhat I'm saying is that the situation exists now, or not at all, in any possible future.
ReplyDeleteYou are now walking towards (or crawling, or feeling about for) the door that Christ opened (or will open, depending on how one measures temporal affairs), or you will never do so. C.S. Lewis said that many a young man, by acknowledging his lack of faith, was making the first real strides towards genuine belief. It is a profound truth that many who do nothing more than passively follow the prevailing culture around them are damned...what makes such a truth profound is that it is true of those in deeply religious or even Christian prevailing cultures as well as those in depraved and degenerate cultures.
This is what I dislike most about this idea that there is some grand historical shift towards people becoming generally enlightened (or 'saved', though from what if they are in so little danger is unclear to me). Not merely that it is in fact objectively wrong, but that it tends so easily towards this collectivist idea of salvation.
When Christ offers salvation to our entire house if we believe, it is because we will act to help them take hold of salvation if we believe. It is not because they are not responsible for their own salvation.
Of course, I also regard the idea of "objective truth" as untrue...objectively speaking. For me, all truth is subjective, and that means that, if the idea of "objective truth" is subjectively valid in leading to predictive adaptation, when then it is subjectively true and the lack of any objective truth to it is immaterial (or rather, irrelevant, lest I be taken literally). So I see the utility (which is always subjective) of believing in "objective truth" as if that were not nonsense on the face of it.
But I have yet to see any evidence that the idea of some grand historical movement towards collective enlightenment has anything to offer but spiritually deadly complacence.
@CCL - If you think that either William or myself are suggesting some kind of inevitable movement towards collective enlightenment - you have completely misunderstood us!
ReplyDeleteThere is on one hand a matter of divine destny - what God wants us to do; and on the othe rhand, there is individual human agency - what we understand and believe, and how we think and live.
My conviction is that from here and now, nothing Good can happen without human agency consciously embracing and pursuing it.
By contrast; any idea of masses being swept along towards inevitable goals by unconsicous inevitability can only be in service of evil.
Yes, it's what Bruce says. The opportunity is there but we have to take it. There is certainly no inevitability about it. In fact, as I say in the post, it is a risk. The chance of a greater height to be gained means there might also be a greater fall, both individually and collectively. At the moment the latter looks more likely but perhaps we can't see the wood for the trees. After all we have been told that for God anything is possible (regarding the rich and their chances of going to heaven as being like that of a camel going through the eye of a needle)
ReplyDeleteWould it be heretical to think that God himself 'evolves' in some way and he does so through the historical process of time? In one respect he is the same,yesterday, today and tomorrow but in another he too can grow through his creation. Maybe that's why he creates. It's like the expanding universe. It's always as big as it can be given the strictures of time and space, but then it gets bigger. But that's not an analogy one can take too far.