Q: Can you lay out your position distinctly? I had trouble following your rather long and rambling post on the matter.
A: Sure. I am basically a Neoplatonist, a Vedantin, and a Daoist on the topic of the mind, the rational spirit or soul, or whatever one wants to call the highest principle of the individual. I think the mind and the soul are both eternal, I think that they preexist in God in a state of immanence (Grk: monē), like children in a womb, that they go out from God (Grk: prohodos; Lat: exitus) and they return to God (epistrophē; reditus), but they return to God as the gods that they always potentially were, actively realized, or better yet, as having become God. But because the qualitative distance between God, the infinite One, and the quantitatively infinite Many is itself infinite, there is some sense in which both the exodus from the Godhead and the return to the Godhead transcend time. There is no “point” at which the innermost I began to manifest in this world and there is no “point” at which I will be fully complete in my process of deification. Likewise for the world: there is no “point” at which God began to create it and no “point” at which God will be finished with it. Instead, both I and the world are emanations of God: the true, innermost I, the atman, simply is brahman, the “infinite” God, and is identical in me and in all other beings and therefore in the world. God is the world, but the world is not God; or, if you prefer, the world is God, but God is not the world. That core of my being is in fact the “still point of nothingness” where God speaks me into being moment by moment. It is all that manifests this atman, the psychocorporeal “person” (Grk: prosopon; Lat: persona), the world of persons, that is the creature who proceeds from nothing into being, well-being, and eternal well-being. The atman always already is God; the creature, though, progresses in a never-ending auxesis of grace, “from glory to glory,” in conformity to God’s image. But this is assuming that the creature is able, in this life, to be liberated from ignorance (avidya) concerning its true nature, to repent of sin, and to cultivate virtue and its experience of unity with God. If it cannot do so in this life, then it will experience, in the death of the body, and potentially in the punishment and, in extreme cases, unmaking of the lower soul, the necessary purification to profitably start over in another life.
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