Posted 8/4/2010 1:24 PM (GMT -5)

Brandon: Isn't all art or all endeavor in some sense doxological? Tom: Yes. Creation is doxology. Brandon: I'm kinda floating around the idea (again) that when I create or have sex or eat or shower or enjoy time out on the town with friends or watch a movie I do so doxologically... Tom: I can't escape doing life this way now. God is everywhere. All I can do is recognize him at work here, there, and then say to myself, "Yes, I'm in your presence." Tom KIXYTΘEMTA

How about you ARE God's Presence "at work"? 

Post Edited (One Love) : 8/7/2010 12:36:04 AM (GMT-5)

--Paul

Here's my thinking:

I'm tempted to think that God requires glorification from His volitional creatures not because He is primarily motivated that way, but because it is rational to glorify God. And to not glorify God is to be irrational and, hence, unloving. And I think God requires glorification of the Son for at least that same reason. But there's a difference. God created for the Son. The reciprocal is not true. For the Son does not create for the Father in that same sense, else we lose the distinction of how all things are out of the Father but through the Son.

So there is a sense in which we exist because of the Father's love for the Son. But it turns out that all that we are to do is love because of how it's all related. Whether creature to Father, Father to creature, creature to Son, Son to creature, creature to creature, etc, it's all love because of how the relationality works out in terms of the fact that the Father created for Himself by virtue of creating for the Son. Perfect sympathy just works that way. And perfect sympathy will therefore result in perfect divine love of the creature as an inevitable effect of the act of creation, which was originally intended as a gift to the Son.

IOW, the relationality all ends up being about love because of the nature of perfect, divine sympathy. But it is not the case, IMO, that creation is for the creature. Divine love for the creature is an inevitable effect of the Father's love for the Son acted out by creating for the Son.

In summary, whether or not divine love sans creation can accurately be considered doxological, all creaturely love is necessarily doxological because of how the relationality of this creation works.

Imagine the person viewing the painting in the print gallery talking about himself as separate from the painting because he's looking at it and sees it as an object in his subjective perception.  However, the truth is the person viewing the painting is an aspect of the painting.  Imagine his saying: "The painting is all everywhere around me."  It's the same thing that allows humans to say "The universe is all around me."  Technically speaking, humans are an aspect of the universe's reality.  But acting self-referentially in the perception of the universe creates a discontinuity which allows for the ILLUSION of genuine separateness from one's environment.  It's the grounding of the fallacy of the autonomous "individual" who can actually believe "It's just me against the world!"

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"Maya" is now explained. The immanent world is not maya; not even the ego is maya. The real maya is the separateness. Feeling and thinking that we are really separate from the whole is the illusion. We have attained the final objective of quantum functionalism--finding an explanation of our separate self. With it's classical learned programs forming an apparent simple hierarchy, consciousness acquires ego (an I-am-this-ness) that identifies with the learned programs and the individual experiences of a particular brain-mind. Such a separate self has aspects of an emergent phenomenon, as Sperry suspected. It emerges out of the introspective interaction of our learned programs that result from our experience in the world, but there is a twist. The separate self has no free will apart from that of the quantum self and, ultimately, that of unitive consciousness.

Amit Goswami
The Self-Aware Universe
"The 'I' of Consciousness"
Page 195

Post Edited (One Love) : 8/7/2010 11:13:00 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Tom) : 8/7/2010 11:11:16 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 8/7/2010 11:20:37 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 8/7/2010 11:48:16 AM (GMT-5)

But it's neither the mind/brain's programs or the individual experiences (nor any amalgam of either) that ground awareness OR choice within it.  It's the one NON-LOCAL consciousness that truly grounds that process, while USING the programs and individual experiences.

Self-reference veils this WHOLE PROCESS from us.  Which is why the nature-bound "prospon" often "merges with the individual" instead of becoming a true hypostasis, whose personhood is integrated in Christ, the Adam Kadmon.

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Evdokimov quote...

Every human being possesses a rudimentary person, a psychological center of integration which makes the whole gravitate around the metaphysical Self, and constitutes self-awareness; this is the prosopon, a natural element of the human substance. By contrast, on a deeper level, while all are invited, few of the chosen succeed in becoming a hypostasis. The hypostasis is this advanced stage of the imago Dei (image of God), the organ and place of communion with God which confirms our theandric structure in the image of Christ. In the age to come, "we shall be like him," as St. John says (1 Jn 3:2)

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"Man," St. Basil said, "is a creature who has received the command to become god," to become a deified hypostasis. This concept is clarified with great precision in St. Maximus the Confessor. In order to become a hypostasis, the person (prosopon) is called upon "to unify, though love, created nature with uncreated nature (...) by the acquisition of grace (kata ten exin tes charitos)." As we can see, the human being, by grace, unites in his created hypostasis the divine and the human in the image of Christ, and thust becomes a created god, God according to grace. The hypostasis is precisely specified; it is the person of the deified human being. In Christ, deified human nature is enhypostasized in a divine Person. In the deified human being, the created person sees how, in this divinization, his nature is united with the divine deifying energy. Thus, the hypostasis is the personal, unique, incomparable mode of the theandric existence of every Christian. Here is where the radical, mystical, and trans-essential demarcation between the old man and the new creation is to be made. But at this point, any phenomenological analysis changes into trans-phenomenology to reach a state which transcends the primary human state: holiness. The "individual" is a sociological and biological category that belongs entirely to nature. The individual is part of the natural whole, and is separate from it either by a contrast, by a demarcation, or through isolation. In the natural state, the prosopon merges with the individual; it is but a "potentiality" of the person. But once actualized, it demands maturing into a hypostasis, which is a spiritual category. It is not a part, but contains the whole, which explains its ability to be enhypostasized.

The individual to whom one ascribes "a strong personality" merely presents a particular mixture of natural elements, with certain prominent traits. Despite these salient traits, such a person ultimately creates only the impression of deja vu. A saint is striking because of a countenance unique in the world, because of a light that is always ultimately person. He or she has never seen before.

Post Edited (One Love) : 8/7/2010 12:26:14 PM (GMT-5)

It is interesting to me that Father Sophrony, in his writings, takes this idea of kenosis and applies it as well to the “not-I-but-the-Father” sayings: “I live by the Father” (Jn. 6:57; cf 5:30, 7:18, 15:15).

Fr. Nicholas Sakharov says of Father Sophrony’s point:

Christ, though the incarnate God, avoids any “divine action” of his own, so much so that the Father’s hypostasis [Person] is manifest absolutely through the absolutely “transparent screen” of Christ’s self-emptied hypostasis. Through this kenosis it becomes the “express image of the Father” (Heb. 1:3).

but what's also a possibility?

When St. Paul speaks of conformity to the image of Christ it is always clear that this is not something we accomplish, but something that is accomplished within us by God. In particular he says:

I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. And the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me (Gal. 2:20).

Here is our own kenosis or emptying. “Not-I-but-Christ.” And thus we become transparent and finally transparent such that we are His image. This is not an effort of moralism, but a self-offering to God. And so St. Paul writes:

I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12:1-2).

Post Edited (One Love) : 8/8/2010 12:32:01 AM (GMT-5)