[davidsun]

Originally Posted by Busby

Just because, davidsun, my Q assumes, on the surface, using a singular and all powerful creator in this case seemed the only a way to pose the question in an easy manner. (A Biblical way if you like). No matter what thoughts I have (or any of us have) the ego will play not only a part but the greatest part. We are - what all life is - a collection of continuingly aware empirical moments projected into matter.

As you may have seen between the lines, I am not a supporter of the 'we are here to learn/grow' philosophy. If I say that the so-called moral laws and their dependence not upon the universe (which has its own laws), but upon rules and regulations which are seemingly man-made throws any understand on the universe's behalf as to what is say 'good' or 'bad' out with the bath water.
What the universe says is 'here's your chance' make of it what you will it's up to you how it turns out. We are similar to little balls of electric energy and we flash and dim according to how we act - maybe even dependent to our nearness to the source.

Now I've unwittingly said something over which I'll have to ponder . never thought about that before!!!

Hi-ho, Busy:

I very much appreciate your more nuanced speculation, Busby, which I think explains (i.e. 'answers' the Q you posed) why you think a Biblical kind of 'God' does not 'show' 'Himself'.

Here's my hypothesis (from the treatise I am now writing) which explains how and why we (as souls) are here to learn and grow (so as to maximize the experience of Love and Joy) philosophy makes sense (to me, that is ) :

"As propositionally presented in the preceding chapter, The Entity of Life (which is The Flow of Creation), of which you and I and everyone else ‘in’*existence is a ‘vibrant’ part, is the outworking and feedback-infusing dynamism of the omnipresent, Love and Joy focused dynamic of The Essence of Life (which is Creativity Itself, a/k/a 'God'), such that said Essence and Entity are conjointly geared to express and (thereby) experience Love and Joy (which is the ‘core’ nature of said Essence) in every possible way to the utmost possible degree. Here now, in order to explicate the meanings of Jesus’ above-quoted statements, I articulate and expound upon the corollary implications of said proposition, to wit:

Every aspect of Life’s Presence is an emanation of and so, by virtue of the Power of said Essence (d/b/a our ‘Source’), is internally endowed with (1)*the capacity to be conscious to some degree, which capacity for consciousness, or ‘presence’ of mind, is what enables ‘it’ to experience whatever vibrations (occurrences, data-packets, etc.) ‘it’ is therefore capable of experiencing and so possibly responding to, and (2)*the motive‧ation, or spirit, to express ‘itself*’ by way of ‘causing’ (generating, transmitting, propagating, etc.) whatever vibrations (occurrences, data-packets, etc.) ‘it’ is thereby motivated to ‘make’ in response thereto. In full-zoom perspective, every nodal and multi-nodal feature of Life may be ‘seen’ to be a subsidiary soul, or gestalt of Life, which is facultatively imbued with mind and spirit by, and consequently both experiences and expresses ‘itself’ in relationship to and with other nodes of Life ‘in’ the matrixial framework* of, the supra-nodal SOUL (i.e. THE Mind·n·Spirit constellation, which many regard and relate to as having personal** attributes, though personal attributes actually derive therefrom) of THAT which is All That Is (a/k/a ‘Brahman’ or ‘God*’).

[Footnotes:
*“In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28)
**As channel-spoken and recorded in Ch.10 of The Bhagavad Gita: “I am the Seed of all being, … no creature moving or unmoving can live without Me.”]

Orthodox materialists dismiss this idea as being no more than an expression of wishful‑thinking because they believe that consciousness (i.e. mind), and motivation (i.e. intention, will, or spirit), must just be an epiphenomenon arising out of electro-chemical activity in molecular-chain linked ‘brain’ circuits, and that any differential discernment and directional movement must therefore simply be the result of innately unconscious and involitional matter-energy configurations (such as photons, atoms, molecules, DNA gene sequences and amalgams thereof) all essentially auto-mechanistically responding to the influence of equally mindless and innately purposeless tempero-spatial (nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational) power-‘fields’. They therefore ‘see’ what we know as Life as being no more than the cause-effect composite result of everything and everyone in the Universe just ‘acting out’ an essentially soulless, completely mathematics-governed script. Embedded in the above-articulated soul‧full☺ model of Life, however, is the possibility that, when and as the fantastically complex aggregation of associated beings which constitute the vehicular platform for one’s earthly experience and expression eventually disintegrates (in other words, when one’s body ‘dies’), the gestalt of one’s mind-and-spirit characterized soul may nevertheless continue to function as a disembodied psychospiritual entity which ‘lives on’ in the ‘bosom’ (idiomatically speaking☺) of THE superordinate, eternally ongoing because supra-physical, Mind·n·Spirit composed Matrix of All That Is. This is the logic that underlies otherwise nonsensical Biblical exhortations such as “Labor not for the ‘meat’ which perisheth, but for that ‘meat’ which endureth unto everlasting life.” (John 6:27), for instance.

[material referencing out of body and life after death experience omitted here to make this presentation 'short(er)' ]

The truth (which I present as a hypothesis to anyone who is presently agnostic in this regard) that one may potentially either integrally actualize the condition that Jesus referenced as ‘everlasting life’ as a coherent soul or irretrievably ‘lose’ one’s beingness and potential to do so as such, as a result of what one believes and so thinks, feels and does or doesn’t think, feel and do (as suggested in statements such as “He that believeth on me hath everlasting life,” and “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it,” for instance) may, I think, be functionally comprehended and profitably applied if and as one thoughtfully considers and contemplates the implications of the following reincarnational-possibility related propositions:

Unlike those soul configurations which inhabit and pursue Life’s objectives using more physiologically ‘hard-wired’ (and therefore less capable of elective information processing) ‘bodies’, we (‘we’, in this case, referencing souls ensconsed in relatively advanced kinds of physiological platforms, ‘advanced’, in this case, referencing greater ‘bandwidth’ accommodating information-reception, -processing and -transmission capabilities) can and so may cognitively apprehend the functional significance(s) of and operation*ally elect to relate to the constellational configurations of our own and others’ existential gestalts (or sub-aspects thereof) in ways of our own choosing (hence the phenomenon known as ‘free will’).

We have the potential to learn from and choose to change the patterns of our thoughts, feelings and behaviors based on the ‘feedback’ of personal experience so as to become more knowing and adept at creatively executing Life’s Love and Joy maximization aimed Source-code which (as postulated and argued in Chapter 1, at least) is the imperative that ubiquitously operates within all Being. Hence the development of greater power of discernment and capacity for discrimination (I don’t mean the stereotype-based meaning of the word, of course!) and, consequently, the increasingly selective execution of derivative choices such as ‘acceptance’, ‘trust’, ‘devotion’, ‘wariness’, ‘rejection’ and ‘banishment’,* for example, as well as increasing degrees of wisdom in terms of the ways in which souls choose to deploy their ‘will’ in such regards.

[Footnote:
* Note: This is just a boiled down categorical list of conceptually black-and-white thought-feeling-and-behavioral options which I have compiled to illustrate the point I am making. The ways which Mind and Spirit may choose to flow in are actually spectrumatically infinite, both in terms of variety and admixtural combination.]

The learning and consequent wisdom-development I speak of is in the direction of more fully appreciating the functional commonalities and connections between one’s ‘self’ and other ‘selves’ and so relationally engaging with them in ways which, more and more so in the long term, synergically augment and improve the quality of both one’s own and others’ experiences and expressions of Love and Joy, increasing the likelihood that not just one’s own but others’ wishes and desires to experience and express Love and Joy will be optimally fulfilled as well in the process. (Except if, when and as said others are so other-exploitive and self-aggrandizing that they sully and degrade the potential for the communal experience and expression of Love and Joy, in which case alternate kinds of relational responses, such as non-cooperation, counteraction and, when and to whatever degree this may be feasible, the unilateral imposition of possibly educational behavior-modifying constraints may be called for – for the same aiming-to-maximize-experience-and-expression-of-Love-and-Joy in Life’s Flow 'reason', of course!)

All of which explains our gradual progression (albeit, as a result of their selfishly biased calculus in the foregoing regards, not in every soul’s case, and, even in the cases of those who do progress in this regard, often in periodically regressive, learning-the-‘hard’-way fashion!) from totally selfish to familial to clannish to tribal to national to global to universal and, finally, to cosmically self-transcendent psychospiritual ‘i’dentifications and corollary choices and behaviors, meaning that folks increasingly think, feel and believe and so conscientiously act knowing that, though each and every individual and group is unique and so differs from others in significant ways, one’s ‘self*’ and all other ‘selves’ are really integral expressions of Life Itself – in other words, ultimately knowing that, despite apparent differences, we are all relationally connected aspects of the same (pertaining to the Universe we are in, at least) Cosmic Being-Doing!

[more digressive material omitted here]

It is the process of soul growth (development, expansion, evolution, remembering – there are any number of ways of conceptualizing the phenomenon) which I have just sketched out that the saying “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” aphoristically references. The Life that is thereby ‘found’ (i.e. experientially realized) is of the cosmically omnipresent, transcend*entally expansive kind (as differentiated from the selfish, hence transitorily ‘mortal’, kind which materialists mistakenly believe to be the only meaning of the word). It is one’s selfishness which must be subordinated – one might therefore say it has to be voluntarily given and thereby, in some sense, ‘lost’ – in service of said time-space-and-matter-transcending Life for a soul to psychospiritually splice into and dovetail its existential expression with our Entity’s (i.e. some label/call said Entity Christ) Being-n-Doing and live on as a fully integrated aspect thereof thereafter.

Functionally grokking just how coherently individuating souls may learn and eventually develop to the point where they fully align their existential expressions with and devote themselves to further augmenting The Flow of (all!) Life and so become ‘everlasting’ components of Its Being-n-Doing, as well as how they may irretrievably ‘lose’ the possibility of ever doing and becoming so, requires that the entire process be placed and viewed in the context of a reincarnational idea-scheme, however (as suggested earlier)."