Sister Wildcucumber raises a very good point:
We’re told by many a guru that we must meditate ourselves away and out of this physical realm, daily, if we seek enlightenment. This world is illusion — you know the drill. But as these Eastern understandings are translated into Western thought, the whole thing becomes a mess. Western thought obscures even the original illusion. You can’t “rise above” something you haven’t been immersed in, in the first place.
Even if this physical plane is illusion, it is important to remember that it is really all we have to work with right now. It is cursed, on the one hand, and a blessing on the other. Why are we here? I’m not wise enough to say. I am wise enough to know that squandering this life by embracing the distractions we invent will never lead to understanding.
I keep hammering the necessity of striving to understand the difference between Western and Ancient Near Eastern epistemology. Most of what we as Westerners know of Eastern thought is a trashy false rendition. Our problem is not the words we use, but what we make of words in the first place. This is the reason I push the notion of parabolic language or the the use of parables. Western thought is an illusion of an illusion because we have that burned-in habit of mind that starts off with a literal rendering of everything. And when we begin to understand how that’s a problem, we literalize every attempt to build something better. To be Western is to be twice damned.
So there’s a good chance you’ll get this wrong, but that won’t relieve me or Wildcucumber of the divine duty to participate in revelation. I added a comment to her post that quotes the end of the Creation Narrative. At every step, God was pleased with the results; the narrative tells us He “saw it was good.” When it was finished, He saw that “it was very good.” But then we go and ruin it all in the Fall. Paul then tells us that Creation longs for our redemption from the Fall.
So why is God going to then someday destroy it all? There you go again, getting literal with ineffable truth in parables. Does it not occur to you that said coming destruction applies only to the fallen human element in things? Are we so tightly bound to our conceptual “purity” that we cannot grasp the idea that there is a whole lot more to Creation than just the portion we experience as our universe? Are not angels created, too? The coming destruction applies to our plane of existence; we don’t have language to express how that does not include everything God ever created. It might well seem that way since we are so horribly blinded about what He has created.
Get a clue folks: The notion of “propositional truth” is a heresy the Church learned from Pharisees (“the Judaizers”), not something Christ and His Apostles taught.
This is not some advanced, super-intelligent gobbledygook. It’s like everything else in God’s revelation that really matters; it’s ineffable — it can’t be told in human language. So when we stand on one side of this truth far above our intellects, it feels like one thing. When you move around to another side, it feels like something else. Keep moving and you’ll find different ways to indicate something about this thing way too big to fully explore and far beyond the limits of our human perception. When Paul writes in Ephesians about tasting to powers of the age to come, that’s what Sister Wildcucumber is talking about when she encourages you to experience life around you on some level above the intellect. You can’t get there as long as you remain trapped in your Western limitations.
About the most literal statement we can make is that our blindness will be removed when we experience that final redemption because our very humanity will be transformed into something we could never imagine.
First, move out your Western thought patterns into ANE epistemology. Then you will be standing on firm ground to rise up and touch the heavens.
