Tag Archive for 'holy spirit'

Calories Schmalories

Published
by
Ken
on December 5, 2008
in holy spirit
. 0 Comments

My wife has started to help me count calories. She has a nifty computer program that she has used for a while. Today was the first day following “the plan” and all I can say is, “I’m Starving!”

I did not eat poorly before but I never thought about calories. What I thought was a reasonable day’s food turned out to be 2700 calories! Not an ideal situation for losing the 13 pounds I’m shooting for.

Basically, to lose weight, you need to be hungry All The Time!

This got me thinking about being “filled with the Spirit.” Should we really be filled or is that a final goal to be realized in the future? If we get filled with food, we get lazy and fat and go to sleep. Is it the same with the Spirit?

What do you think?

The downside of anthropomorphism?

Published
by
Ken
on May 11, 2008
in christianity, god, holy spirit and jesus
. 5 Comments

Reading this post, from Inspirations and Creative Thoughts, about Islamic reaction to the doctrine of the Trinity got me thinking. What are the downsides of thinking about God in anthropomorphic ways?

Along the lines of this post from Exploring Our Matrix, I was also thinking about how the OT God is most often conceptualized as having a location. He was with the Israelites either as the pillar of fire or in the Ark or he was located on Mount Sinai. In all these cases, you could point to one spot be say, “God is there.” At times, God is seen as locating himself, temporarily, in one spot — as with Moses and the burning bush — which de-emphasises his human characterization. The implicit idea is that God was there to communicate with Moses whereas in the previous examples he was more firmly implanted for a longer time frame.

From the NT, we think of Jesus mostly in his incarnated form and as the son of god. We think of him as an historical person (indeed, some Christians fight tooth and nail for an historical Jesus and claim that Christianity is nothing without it) located in a particular place at a particular time. Even now, after his ascension, he is sitting sitting at the right hand of God — an image which restricts both God and Jesus to a particular space.

There is very little in Christianity that focuses our attention away from the human characteristics attributed to God. Sure we talk about his omnipresence but right behind the words is the image of a father. Even in the end, our souls - the numinous part of ourselves - end up located in space, in heaven, where we will be with God and Jesus. You know, I’ve never thought about seeing the Holy Spirit in heaven. Nor have I heard a sermon preached on what role the Holy Spirit will play in heaven. The one part of the Godhead which retains some non-human characteristic is blatantly missing!

The Trinity could be a medium for concentrating on the non-human characteristics of God yet even here we’ve named them God the father and God the son. We force the divine into a human-shaped mold.

Perhaps it’s not all that surprising given the strong anthropomorphic nature of the OT which is Christianity’s heritage. But I think that it is also one reason we react so negatively to other religions. We call the atheistic because they do not have a God that is a father figure. We call them nihilistic because they do not end up in a specific place when they die.

God is more than our anthropomorphic conceptions of him. We can’t even refer to god without assigning a human gender to … him. I think most Christians would be offended if we called God “It.” God is more than our human conceptions otherwise he would not be God; he’d be understood by us. So why do we insist that everyone hold the same limited conceptions as we? Can’t the ineffable be reduced to more than one subset of ideas and still be the same?

The Creation of Consiousness: III

Published
by
Ken
on April 3, 2008
in books, carl jung, edward edinger and the creation of consciousness
. 2 Comments

[ Finally getting back to this book. I actually lost it for a while in the black hole residing in the center of my office. But I've managed to rescue it from the event horizon and now we'll continue... ]

It is the union of opposites that is the essential feature:

Consciousness is the third thing that emerges out of the conflict of twoness. Out of the ego as subject versus the ego as object; out of the ego as active agent versus the ego as passive victim; out of the ego as praiseworthy and good versus the ego as damnable and bad; out of a conflict of mutually exclusive duties — out of all such paralyzing conflicts can emerge the third, transcendent condition which is a new quantum of consciousness.

It is in “paralyzing conflicts” that we grow, learn, and mature. It is the no-win situation that makes us confront our passive, un-examined beliefs and prejudices and figure out what we truly believe. Being in a rut — physically, emotionally, mentally — simply atrophies our being. Nothing new comes from one-track thinking and avoiding to actually make the tough decisions.

Edinger then goes on to talk about the Trinity and how the Holy Spirit could only come after Jesus’ death in which the opposites of the Father and the Son collided on the cross. In this respect, the Holy Spirit embodies the creation of consciousness and thus the indwelling of the Parachlete “thus anticipates the new myth which sees each individual ego as potentially a vessel to carry transpersonal consciousness.”

As two archetypal figures who both represent the idea of a carrier of consciousness, Christ and Buddha give us the opportunity for comparison and objectivity.

As long as there is but one figure embodying supreme value he can only be worshipped but not understood. With the presence of two we can discover the separate third thing which they both share; understanding and greater consciousness then become possible.

I think this is exactly the situation of the Old Testament God versus the new Testament God. In the Old Testament, there was only the one God and so he could only be worshiped; there was no point of comparison from which he could be understood. It took Jesus, as the wrathful, jealous God’s opposite in order for us to be able to put them both in perspective.

The new myth suggests that man is an experiment in the process of creating consciousness; “that the sum total of consciousness created by each individual in his lifetime is deposited as a permanent addition in the collective treasury of the archetypal psyche.” There are many mythical images that talk about the transfer from the personal life of the ego to the eternal realm: the early Egyptian idea of the dead being turned into stars and the translation of dead kings to the heavenly realm; Christian symbolism of the righteous ascending into Heaven; the promise in Revelation that the victorious will be a pillar in the temple of God.

This new myth gives meaning to our mundane life:

Every human experience, to the extent that it is lived in awareness, augments the sum total of consciousness in the universe. This face provides the meaning for every experience and gives each individual a role in the on-going world-drama of creation.