If oneness is primary, why did oneness allow that oneness be fractured; only to permit or demand the restoration of primal oneness?
Contra-oneness: life is linear and the future is open. Therefore; what we need above all is a way forward; and the inner motivation to pursue it.
Most important in faith is that there is always - at every moment - a positive path ahead. This must be so; or else we would (by now) be dead.
Avoiding wrong paths (double-negative living) does not suffice, since wrong paths are limitless in number; and all living would be expended on error and repentance.
Our path forward is for each of us to find, because it is not, and cannot be, externally provided from any source in this world. It must be sought (which is our responsibility), and be discerned (by our-selves, as much as is possible).
There can be, and may be, divine rescue and the external imposition of a direction when our own efforts fail; but remember that this is seriously second-best.
God most wants us to do it, so that we will learn it. Divine rescue may be useless or counter-productive in terms of what we are here for - promoting passivity instead of creativity.
What is the bottom-line? Not one thing, because we are Beings, and Beings are complex (irreducible) by nature.
The true complexity of this world derives primarily from the hearts of Beings; secondly from the relationships of Beings.
In other words; the complexity of this world is rooted in extreme structural simplicity - therefore Not in complex theological-philosophical schemata.
Unconditional, universal love is a benign disposition towards abstract "thought forms"; whereas Christian love is for particular and personal Beings.
Personal and abstract are distinguishable, and vitally so; but are not completely separable.
...Thought forms become inhabited by personal spirit Beings; thus unconditional and abstract love gets personalized (willy nilly); while personal Love contains the expansile tendency to seek more of itself, pressing towards other and (as yet) unknown persons.
Jesus overcame the world*- but nobody else among Men has come near!
Including not the Saints (by their own accounts).
Neither you nor I can overcome the world.
It is a terrible, and terribly common, error to suppose that Men can overcome the world; or, even worse, that we should.
That was-not/ is-not how the world is set-up in God's creation. It is not how things work.
There is no such thing as enlightenment - we cannot overcome the world; but there is repentance, which (properly understood) is the path to eternal resurrected life.
Men are God-intended to know, acknowledge, and repent sin - to learn-from mortal life; that we may thereby become better Men in eternal resurrected life.
We should not strive to overcome this world, because Christ's "Kingdom" is not of this world.
Instead we should know and follow Jesus: out of this world and into Heaven.
*John 16:33 - These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.
1 comment:
In the quest for a positive path in my own life, I'm struck by (a) how hard it's been to find one or even to realize that one was needed, and (b) how my own positive path -- mostly family and kids -- ends up looking exactly like the path of innumerable generations before me, who didn't have to "choose" it consciously.
To expand a little:
(a) The double negative theology of my formative years -- "avoid X or Y to get into heaven" -- sounded like a deity I wanted no part of. And then the secular materialist version I pursued for decades -- "take action X or Y to minimize pain" -- offered only the dead-end of "Why?"
So to get myself onto a positive path, I had to be introduced (thanks to you, Bruce!) to Mormon theology and the primacy of intuition, to begin listening to the Spirit to understand how I could find my own positive path forward.
(b) Then at the end of the day sometimes I find myself laughing, thinking that a big part of my own positive path has been a wife and fairly large number of kids fairly late in life. A clan! -- a path that was so utterly commonplace to desire for all of history. And it took me so long, and down so many metaphysical / theological / psychological wrong paths. It's as if a mathematician invented whole new fields of number theory and algebraic geometry to assemble a grand proof that 2 + 2 = 4.
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