From: RFaussette@aol.com
Date: Fri Jun 27 2003 - 20:58:51 EDT
In a message dated 6/27/03 2:08:31 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
rjschn39@bellsouth.net writes:
> There are mystical traditions in
> Christian thought that use impersonal models of God, though even these do
> not reject the language of the personal. Impersonal terms (and models) of
> God such as "the Source" or "the Ground of Being" are characteristics of
> some modern theologies (e.g., Tillich').
Yes, but consider also that the impersonal becomes personal when the self is
sacrificed.
There is only self and other. Everything you experience is filtered through
the self. The practice of abandoning the self which is mysticism seeks to
eliminate the self which is the filter. when the filter is gone God is personally
experienced. consider the subject/object dichotomy. without the subject to
interfere, there is only object. with the self/subject sacrificed, there is only
object left. God who was formerly filtered through the self is experienced
directly and personally.
“It has been one of the chief aims of all religious teaching and
ceremonial… to suppress as much
as possible the sense of ego,” Joseph Campbell, Masks of God.
“What is sacred in science is truth; what is sacred in art is
beauty. Truth and beauty are
impersonal… If a child is doing a sum and does it wrong, the
mistake bears the stamp of his
personality. If he does the sum exactly right, his personality
does not enter into it at all… Perfection
is impersonal. Our personality is the part of us which belongs
to error and sin. The whole effort of
the mystic has always been to become such that there is no part
left in his soul to say ‘I’,” Simone
Weil's essay, Human Personality.
“The Gods… having created the Sacrifice, offered it of
themselves.” Antonio T. de Nicolas, in his
Meditations through the Rg Veda explains, “Agni is the Great
Sacrificer, gifted with the right
intention, the right intentionality, capable of piercing the
mysteries, through his measuring power,
through his concentrated thought, and through his wisdom. All
this is possible because he gathers in
himself the efficacy of the sacrificial science.”
The last words uttered by Job from the Book of Job in the Old
Testament are, “Now I see thee
(God) with my own eyes. Therefore I melt away (I despise
myself); I repent in dust and ashes.”
In John White’s essay, Jesus, Evolution, and the Future of
Humanity, he writes, “The very first
words Jesus spoke to humanity in his public ministry were, ‘The
time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom
of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel’ (Mark1: 14,
Matthew 4:17).” White writes,
“Notice that word: repent. Over the centuries it has become
misused and mistranslated. The
Aramaic word that Jesus used is tob, meaning, ‘to return,’ ‘to
flow back into God.’ The sense of
this concept comes through best in the Greek word first used to
translate it. That word is
metanoia and like tob, it means something far greater than
merely feeling sorry for misbehavior.
Meta means, “to go beyond,” “to go higher than.” And noia
comes from nous, meaning, “mind.”
So the original meaning of metanoia is literally “going beyond
or higher than the ordinary mental
state.” In modern terms, it means transcending self-centered ego
and becoming God-centered.”
Now Job’s final words assume a greater significance. When Job
despises his self and his self melts
away, he transcends his self-centered ego (repents) and sees
God.
Jesus says, “By gaining his life, a man will lose it; by losing
his life for my sake, he will gain it
(Matthew 10:39).” Jesus leads us to understand that by letting
go of the self the self is regained.
Holding onto the self ensures its loss! Remarkably, Jesus makes
very specific reference to the self
sacrifice when He says, “This is why the Father loves me,
because I lay down my life in order to
take it up again. No one takes it from me but I lay it down on
my own. I have power to lay it
down and power to take it up again. This command I have received
from my Father (John
10:17).”
***Note that Jesus only lays down his life at the Father's
command!
William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience quotes
E.D. Starbuck on the centrality of
self-surrender in pursuit of the religious experience: Starbuck
says, “that to exercise the personal
will is still to live in the region where the imperfect self is
the thing most emphasized.” Later
Starbuck adds, “the act of yielding, in this point of view, is
giving one’s self over to the new life,
making it the center of a new personality, and living, from
within, the truth of it which had before
been viewed objectively.”
The Catholic church calls gnosis heresy, but the definition of heaven looks
llike gnosis to me. Note the absence of subject/object dichotomy. God is the
IMMEDIATE OBJECT.
The Catholic Encyclopedia: “In heaven, however, no creature will stand
between God and the soul. He himself will be the immediate object of its vision.
Scripture and theology tell us that the blessed see God face to face.”
rich faussette
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