It is hard to conceptualize Final Participation - not least because it is usually explained in terms of what it is not.
But just as Final Participation is the same thing as development of the individual person - but at the level of groups or societies - so Final Participation can be understood as what happens with an ideal marriage as the most mature form of human relationship.
The child is, to start with, in Original Participation - immersed in parental love and with his self not differentiated from this environment. Everything is conscious and alive in a delocalized, overlapping and undifferentiated way. He lives inside Love.
With maturation and especially adolescence, the child differentiates himself from this diffuse and unlocalized state. At some stage he reaches a point of inflexion when he is cut-off from love, loses all ties of relationship, and find himself a fully detached self, observing his environment - sometime the environment seems real and himself an illusion (positivism/ materialism), sometimes the opposite (solipsism). This adolescent phase of alienation may last a moment, or it may persist for the rest of his life (as - apparently - with so many modern people).
Marriage is (ideally) Final Participation: it is engaged objectivity. The spouse is seen not as a subject (about whom we can think whatever we choose, indifferent to the person), nor an object (to evaluate you spouse objectively - by checklist - is a failure of marriage) - but as a as a spiritual subject.
We do not see our husband or wife as we see other people: he or she is one-off and incomparable. The spouse is past, present and future all at once - and eternally. The spouse is always changing, yet his or her immaterial essence remains the same.
So it is Love which makes for Final Participation in marriage - and in everything else. Love is the primary reality.
Ideal marriage is the model for all human inter-relation with all things. And the further extension of Final Participation is itself therefore though Love - which is why no real work is ever done in science, art, crafts or anything else without Love.
2 comments:
I take it therefore by extension this would be the natural way we would relate to each other through love in the group state (but paradoxically more of a state of *oneness within a group of individuals* of final participation) of the kingdom of heaven or one of the post-mortal kingdoms prophesised by mormon doctrine? I sometimes wonder whether it is a misguided yearning for this state of final participation that leads so many secular people to attempt to model a socialist utopia as an end point or ideal for society without recognizing that this could never work on Earth and certainly not on the wrong side of a mass raising of spiritual consciousness/mass repentance and conversion. Clearly such ideologies will not work when there is still not a critical mass of sufficiently spiritually advanced people and if there are only a few charismatic but exploitative sociopaths or parasitic individuals that are unable to live with love as their primary motivation and will prevent a successful dynamc equilibrium of loving relationships within a brotherhood of man.
@David "I sometimes wonder whether it is a misguided yearning for this state of final participation that leads so many secular people to attempt to model a socialist utopia as an end point or ideal for society without recognizing that this could never work on Earth and certainly not on the wrong side of a mass raising of spiritual consciousness/mass repentance and conversion."
I'm pretty sure that is exactly what it is - the paradoxical and self-destroying (and all-too-easily manipulated) attempt to implement a non-spiritual spirituality.
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=steiner+prophecy
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