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Thus, the best description of God is “is-ness” without any limit: “I am” without any other pronoun. The Buddhists have done well in establishing an attitude towards the uncreated God as distinct from the God of creation or the creator God. It’s the same God, of course, but God as I will use the term here is simply a label. It is the one I’m used to in my tradition. Maybe someone can invent a better one. God is everything. Call him “Butch” if you’d like!
Theology needs a solid cosmology on which to build a theology that will appeal to people of our time.
isn’t anybody you can think of, that’s for sure. Thus, one of the main breakthroughs of the spiritual journey is to perceive that God is manifesting in us and inviting us to become fully human because that is the way to become as fully divine as humans can be in this evolutionary process. We don’t know the end, but there’s no reason that the process should stop. We’ve been evolving from amoebas for several billions of years and we haven’t stopped. The brain is still evolving, without question. RA: I have a friend who likes to refer to us as sense organs of the Infinite. By that token, and if we consider God to be omnipresent, then not only are we sense organs of the Infinite but dogs and mosquitoes are, and even rocks, we could say. Everything expresses or reflects that to the best of its ability in terms of its physical structure.
The world that we see, and that we are judging all the time, is very prejudiced. We see it through our tinted glasses. In that sense, the world is unreal—not because it is unreal, but because our view of it is. It is built on our desires of what we want it to be and our appetite for control, pleasure, and security. The spiritual life involves recognizing these appetites as illusions of our false self and detaching ourselves from them, without expecting that these problems are going to go away or that suffering is going to disappear. The spiritual life is precisely to lead this divine life in human circumstances that involve both suffering and great joy, and which is continuing to evolve. We don’t know where it’s going. We have to learn to take responsibility for the world that we are in. And this we are reluctant to do because it limits some of our desired freedoms.
The promise is that we are developing our capacity as human beings to do the things that God does with the greatest of ease: to forgive, to show compassion, to respect everyone, and to experience oneness with everyone.
God seems to adjust himself to every creature at its level of consciousness, however primitive. What Jesus has done is to integrate the human condition with all its limitations. He completely identified with us as a human being. He threw away all the divine privileges and showed us how to be human in a divine way, which involves the realization of being called to unity with God and oneness with each other.
I don’t know if that was clear. But if you imagine the Big Bang and the manifestation of the universe, it almost seems that God necessarily has to play a hide-and-seek game with himself, where he creates these parts and appears to get lost in them, even though he essentially is the parts.
TK: What do you do if you are infinite and enjoy infinite happiness and don’t need anything? What do you do to occupy yourself?
RA: You get bored. You say, “Hey, let’s have some fun.” TK: Then what do you do? RA: “Let’s play. Let’s create something.” TK: You play. In other words, there is a playful character to God. He wants to see what these creatures can do in different circumstances, and this enables him, by his identification with us, to experience what it’s like to be human with our limitations: to love us in our weakness and spiritual poverty, and to enjoy healing and forgiving us. The things we find hard to do are what make God happiest. RA: I came across a quote from Teresa of Avila. She said, “It appears that even God is on the journey.” In other words, this whole process of the universe is one big evolutionary machine, which is God’s spiritual practice.
designed for us to enjoy fun, not to accomplish something. As soon as you want to win, you’ve lost the pleasure of playing. A certain amount of competition is not bad, but the fun is over once you make the game a career. There are lots of games that God plays and another one he seems to like very much is, “Let’s pretend.” Or, “Let’s do it again,” like a child who finds great joy in knocking down a stack of blocks and then cries out, “Oh Daddy, let’s do it again!” God also can play rough. He wants to see if we are willing to join him in the game. The most serious of games is that of healing the wounds of the world and becoming whole, which is the same idea as salvation or redemption. We are aware of having a capacity for boundless happiness. That may be the greatest proof of God’s presence in us. Even in strange ways, people are always looking for happiness. If they are malicious, that’s their idea of happiness.
AI Summary
Reflections on the Unknowable by Thomas Keating presents key insights from the Taoism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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