| The Christian "self" can say this:
"Who I truly am includes, yet transcends, my mind/brain unity or any of it's activities, including the emergence of my self-referential, self-reflective loop, called my ego. I HAVE a human mind. However, the totality of who I am isn't exhausted by my mental, psychological, or emotional activity. Moreover, that aspect of me that transcends (yet finds embodiment in) my mind/brain unity is in a continuous dependent, transparent, and reciprocal love relationship with the personal Source of my being, the Uncreated Creator Spirit, also the Holy Spirit of the Risen God-man Jesus."
But we cannot know that we are more than our self-referential self-narration going on in our MINDS...unless we experience STILLNESS. It is in stillness in God's Presence, living in our union with God, that we can experience our self-transcendence on a sustained, non-despairing level. When the mind is still in the heart, only "felt presence" exists in the human heart. Presence-in-presence. presence-in-Presence. In this, we discover the Personal Creator Spirit at the core of who we truly are...and the core of all particular things and/or systems in existence.
I think that this is what separates humans from every other animal: the capacity to self-reflectively experience one's own unique, incommunicable self-transcendence (particularity) and simulateneously, oneness with all things and be-ings (universality) through that self-transcendence. (Love the neighbor [universality] as oneself [particularity] )
IMO, this is why asceticism (hesychasm) is so important to Christianity...or spirituality in general. If the human being can't break enough away from biological hypostasis to understand that they TRULY ARE spiritual beings AND WHAT THAT MEANS...then we can never find out who we really are, and in so doing, find the rest and peace God want to give us: our FULL humanity in Christ-the-Logos.
Make sense?
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am. God is my life."
"God in Christ by His Spirit empowers, enables, energizes and enacts all Christian behavior and ministry as the dynamic expression of the life of Jesus Christ. Christianity is Christ. Christian living is the life and character of Jesus Christ lived out through the Christian." -James Fowler Post Edited (One Love) : 6/24/2009 2:06:43 AM (GMT-5) |