Reality is universal and accessible - ultimately, in the fullness of eternity - to every single person directly; but only to individual persons... So that if or when a person insists that they personally cannot do this, and that he must therefore get his knowledge secondhand and indirectly by means of communications... well, this is a species of self-damnation.
Such is all-too-often seen among 'traditionalist' Christians of this age; their primary intuition is that they cannot intuit the truth; and therefore must receive truth only by communication from external authority.
Of course, here and now we have at best only a sliver of direct truth; and in the meanwhile must get most of it secondhand - but we must subject all significant knowledge to the test of direct apprehension. And only when we can get the question boiled-down to that which can be held in mind and apprehended as a single and simple whole; then can clear knowledge be available... so long as the mind may (at least momentarily) be stilled and focused.
Thus direct knowing. Thus the knowledge of the Holy Ghost.
And the sin of the Holy Ghost is to deny it.
All too many Christians are in exactly this state of sin. How?
Having once known some-thing directly, clearly and with intuitive apprehension by the Holy Ghost; they then deny and over-rule this knowledge; by favouring some lesser, secondary, communicated, complex information - whether derived from church authority, secular scholarship or mores, tradition, logic, or scripture.
