From: Don Winterstein (dfwinterstein@msn.com)
Date: Fri Aug 15 2003 - 04:20:13 EDT
Blake Nelson wrote in part:
"All communication from God, assuming He exists, is
necessarily mediated in *some* physical manner ...."
Some might call me a mystic, as I have had extended personal encounters with God. I disagree with Blake's statement here. None of my personal encounters with God involved physical mediation; all were purely spiritual. And at the best of those times there was no "mind-body duality": Mind and body rather merged to become in some sense spirit. Spirits can perceive one another apart from an exchange of photons or any other physical thing.
What might a purely spiritual encounter of a human with God be? I've spent much time and effort attempting to describe what happens. Probably my best efforts are in a book (unpublished) that I wrote on my personal theology. In a nutshell, one can have a purely spiritual encounter with God if one becomes spiritual. Becoming spiritual involves the brain, of course, but importantly it involves also all the other components of the body. Mind and body merge to become "a point of being." In other words, I assert from introspection on personal experience that knowing God optimally requires the whole person, not just the brain. I don't know what people mean by religious experience when they talk about something confined to a particular locus in the brain.
What follows are excerpts from my book on this topic:
From (book): Are the vessels worthy?
From (chapter): Knowledge of God and the purpose of life
The most elementary fact about knowledge of God is that God is a spirit, so to know him we must know him in spirit..
.True and profound knowledge of God has nothing to do with seeing signs and wonders with eyes or even seeing visions with eyes or hearing divine words with ears. Rather, to know God, our spirit, not our senses, must see him. To those who do not know God this kind of knowledge is not knowledge at all but delusion. Only one who, as a spiritual being, knows him as a spiritual being can understand what it is to know him.
.Whether we are on earth or in heaven we shall never behold him more clearly than our spirit can behold him. So to know him well we must abandon materialism. To know God we must be like him.
.
Atheists are fond of saying there is no evidence for God, so unbelief is the only justifiable response. What they mean is there is no man-made antenna or other device that can detect him. But there is an instrument not made by man that can detect him: our soul. We vessels made of matter not only detect him, but we know him as a person.
A second elementary fact about knowledge of God is a consequence of the first fact: Because God is spirit and not matter, knowing him is not an either/or proposition. With humans we either see them or we do not. With God it is not that we either know him or we do not, but there are different ways and levels of knowing him. How well we know him at a given moment depends less on whether he is present with us than on how spiritual we are. Because we are made of matter and are from below, our level of spirituality varies greatly.
What does it mean for beings made of matter to be spiritual? In part it means that we work to gather all the components of our body and mind into a unified being, our self, that can then interact as a unit, as a single point of existence, with spiritual beings outside our self. We do not reject or deny our component parts, but we bring them into submission so that we become a single point of being. We become a single point not in space but in our own unity.
.That is why the presence of God has to do with our level of spirituality and not with God's location in space.
In addition to unifying one's component parts into a point of being, spirituality also requires removing one's focus from details of the world and bringing it to bear on a spiritual person outside oneself. One perhaps may be able to accomplish the first step under one's own power, but this second step requires the other person's consent and involvement.
Spiritual beings outside us can increase our spirituality by drawing us into themselves, by engulfing us, so to speak. God can do this for us..
The opposite of being spiritual is being dead, a state in which our component parts disaggregate and decompose. Sleep spiritually speaking is like death. In sleep we disaggregate and present to the world not a single point of being but a collection of parts that has relaxed into separate entities loosely joined..
.
.A personal relationship with God involving mutual, conscious awareness is possible. It is this kind of knowledge that is of greatest interest, because it is the kind of knowledge that transforms religion from a burdensome set of rules and principles into life's loftiest reward and most serene pleasure.
Is it overkill to say "conscious awareness" of God? Wouldn't "awareness" suffice? Many Christians, myself included, are aware of God much of the time in that, if we stop to check, we can verify that God is with us, as it were, behind the scenes. "In him we live and move and have our being," but in this kind of awareness we become conscious of his presence only if we stop to check for it. Most of the time the awareness is latent and unconscious..
God is a person, and anyone who wants to know him as a person cannot do so simply by disciplining himself. By personal discipline one perhaps may reach "elevated states of consciousness" or a higher level of spirituality, but no such state or level is the same as God. To know God as a person always requires that God actively reveal himself..
Some writers have described the mystical experience as one involving deep relaxation. Perhaps what they call a mystical experience does involve relaxation. What I call knowledge of God at the highest level of conscious awareness requires a high level of mental alertness that is far from relaxation. In relaxation one allows the parts of one's body to do their own thing; in knowledge of God one brings all the parts of one's body into complete union, makes them into a single point of being. To exist as such a point of being requires high alertness and self control.
From (chapter): Towards corrected models of the world
An understanding of what enhances or diminishes our degree of consciousness should yield insight into what consciousness might be like for other [creatures].. My own level of self-awareness peaks when I am away from other humans and free of anything in the physical environment, including every component of my own mind and body, that demands or threatens to demand my attention. In other words, it peaks when I am as free as I can be. It peaks when my mental alertness peaks. It peaks when intimacy with God peaks. As I implied earlier, when I draw all the parts of my body spiritually into a single point of being, all these conditions may be satisfied.
The implication is that high consciousness requires the high unification of disparate but relatively free components. All the various specialized organs and cells of the body must submit to overriding unification. It is clear that the human brain has something to do with the ability to unify the human person, but at its peak, consciousness involves the whole body. The brain, marvelous as it is, functions as a helper.
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