Monday, June 11, 2007

God Or You?

The Rev. Msgr. Ken Madden+ of the AJC posed the following question in an email discussion group, and I thought it was interesting enough to share with you. I'd be very interesting in hearing other people's answers to this, and I will post my own sometime during the week:

"If we are already One within the Divine, who is having the experience [of gnosis]?"

2 comments:

OSSRD said...

Yes, I found that question very interesting as well. It reinforced the *experience* as a communal one by its nature, and not an individual perception - per se.

I can only use the metaphor of the sun. Its rays are not separate from it, though they are dispersed. They are it; it is them.

Brian said...

Neti, neti. "Not this, not that". "God" and "You" are symbols used to indicate poles of the tension of existence. "The whole realm of the spiritual is halfway indeed between (metaxy) god and man’(Plato, Symposium, 202a).

"We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul…And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one" - Ralph Waldo Emerson