Open Theism Discussion Board

Whoever knows and recognizes how near God’s Kingdom is to him may say with Jacob, “God is in this place, and I knew it not.”
Meister Eckhart, "The Nearness of the Kingdom"

Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the Kingdom of God is within you.

Whoever knows and recognizes how near God’s Kingdom is to him may say with Jacob, “God is in this place, and I knew it not.”
Meister Eckhart, "The Nearness of the Kingdom"

The Knight's Move: The Relational Logic of the Spirit in Theology and Science, there is a section called "The Spiritual Recentering of Human Development." Here, he discusses his model of spirtual growth. All parentheses and emphases are mine.

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This model further suggests that human development, currently being studied almost exclusively at the level of ego function and formation, is to be reinterpreted as centering not on the ego (Note: The self-understandings of "Tom", "Dwayne", "Brandon" are EGO-FORMATIONS...mental constructs that our brains have garnered because of our EMBODIED experiences between the "Self" and "Lived World"! This is extremely important to understand!) but on intensification as a bipolarity that extends between the ego and the Absolute Unity of Being. This bipolarity may be seen as the spiritual axis for human development, which intersects the arc of ego-development as one of it's polarities, and Absolute Unity at the center, as the other. Ego development (Erikson, Piaget, Kohlberg, etc) may be seen as circumnambulation around the center, the Absolute Unity of Being, but left to itself ego development is inextricably rooted in negation and eventual death. (Note: The mental formation of the ego CANNOT maintain it's self-relational integrity by itself. It needs a transcendent ground to do that. SK was RIGHT!) Spiritual development consists in increased access between the ego and the Divine center, not in ego development per se. Thus, the immature ego of the child may have greater access to the Center and be more spiritually mature than an adult ego with less access. (Note: Remember AKIANE, the artist child of God?) However, the adult ego may be more articulate with less access than the child and so effectively confuse the issue, making it appear incorrectly that ego development is definitive of spiritual development.

Although it cannot be fully spelled out here, this model suggests that the classic fourfold pattern of spiritual development is parallel to the phases of intensification. This pattern moves from awakening to purgation to illumination to unification, and at each stage access to the Divine center is enhanced as ego anxiety and strategies of defense subside. Thus, if the Christological nature of the model pertains as described above, then spiritual development may be conceived as a way of life in which one increasingly appropriates the bipolar coherence of Christ into one's own nature. It should be evident that this in no way represents ego inflation or egoistic striving: it is precisely the opposite;

but the "I" who says "I, not I, but Christ" is not lost, only recentered from the ego ("Tom", "Dwayne", Brandon", etc) to the One who holds in his nature the full and complete account of the mutual indwelling of the Divine and the human. (Christ-the-Logos)

Whoever knows and recognizes how near God’s Kingdom is to him may say with Jacob, “God is in this place, and I knew it not.”
Meister Eckhart, "The Nearness of the Kingdom"

"I, not I, but Christ-the-Logos"
-- I am-in-I Am

Whoever knows and recognizes how near God’s Kingdom is to him may say with Jacob, “God is in this place, and I knew it not.”
Meister Eckhart, "The Nearness of the Kingdom"