Essay #7:  Tapestries of Creation:  The Emergence of Christologic Ontology

In one arena of our lives after another, God shows us, beyond our own reckoning, how he has crafted a life, a texture, a weaving of possibilities together with realizations.  Where have these tapestries come from?  We could make the mistake of looking at the threads of our lives and concluding that one thread of possibility supported the next of realization, all strung together by our own efforts in tiny increments over time.  This is indeed, how it looks, at one level of inspection, from a certain distance, as it were.  However, upon closer inspection, one draws nearer and nearer to the threads expecting to land and discovers that there is really more space between the threads than threads themselves.  What comes of the idea that these threads support each other when they rather seem to float through space in a kind of open weave or loose mesh?  What looks like support from a distance becomes merely placement upon closer vigilance, everything dissolving into a kind of mystifying juxtaposition.

An awareness of this is closer to us than we think.  We train ourselves and our progeny to trust in a kind of “seamless” approach to life.  “Do this and you will achieve that.”  Go to college and you will get a better job.  Work hard and you will succeed.  Make lots of money and you will take control of your future.  Marry such and such a person and you will be happy.  Buy a big house and your needs will be met.  The problem with all these formulas is that their premises do not always or even often lead to their conclusions.  We all know many individuals, for instance, who go to college and do not land dream jobs.  And we know many who wed just the “right” type of person and end up in miserable marriages and divorces.  There are countless ways that our own lives can and do “fall apart.”  The very phrase beckons us to look more closely at the threads of our lives.  In times of distress we are more likely to admit that the “glue” we thought was there wasn’t there at all.  It sometimes takes trauma to show us that the threads are not glued together and that whatever effort we might put in to weaving a certain outcome or a certain future does not inevitably “tie it tight”.  There is always a “gap” between effort and outcome, between one thread and the next.  And if that is so, it becomes startlingly questionable what it is that can ever fill that gap.  In times of distress, when things have truly fallen apart, we tend to glimpse that there is still “something there” for us to rely on, but we are very unused to sensing it or naming it. Our training keeps our attention focused on our premises and the efforts we put into them.  And it allows attention to be paid to a select set of outcomes–typically happy ones involving successes with money and material goods, reputation, and relationships.  But it tends to cause us to keep out of focus the gap between premise and outcome, effort and achievement, possibility and realization, and to miss entirely what it is that fills that gap.

The more we do stop and focus on the gap between possibility and realization the more the space around the threads of our lives takes on new meaning, new interest.  No longer expendable, ignorable, or at best secondary, the space itself assumes focus.  We become aware of having been unaware.  Our former “knowledge” of so-called “cause and effect” yields to an awareness that both “cause” and “effect” float in something which actually precludes their being either cause or effect.  The most that we can say is that events are correlated. Correlation, however, does not imply causation.  The idea that any two events are locked together by “causality” is seen to be a fiction once the role of space is understood.  If we name these events “effort” and “outcome,” then it becomes clear that there is no causality contained in any effort, which results inevitably in any outcome. Similarly, we could describe these events as “past” and “present,” or “present” and “future.”  In any case, they at best stand in mysterious juxtaposition, while the discovery of any distance at all between them separates them just as would the largest chasm or the farthest reach across the universe.  Even the smallest distance between an event we call “past” and an event we call “present” breaks the causal connection we imagine is there and leaves the two events disconcertingly disconnected.  Space so understood becomes the ultimate solvent which dissolves all histories and futures into a timeless, floating present.  Here any assumed difference between time and space collapses because time is just the abstract expression of changes in spatial relationships.  (Even the clock in our heads is nothing other than the abstract expression of changes between our thoughts rising and falling in a kind of mental space.)  Causal connection is neither to be found in spatial relationships nor in temporal succession. Hence, we could as well say that intervals of time separating events paradoxically cannot keep them from falling out of history into a timeless present.

Said differently, nothing contained within any event we might call “past” reaches forward to touch and determine any event we designate as “present.”  Anything can literally follow anything, and try as we might, we cannot discover in any past event or occurrence the germ or source of anything present.  Evidence for this is shockingly abundant not only in the macrocosm of our daily lives but also in the microcosm which chemistry and physics explore.  For example, there are no properties in chlorine–a toxic gas,–and sodium–a highly flammable metal,–that could lead one to predict that the combination of the two results in harmless table salt.  Or again, there is nothing within a flame itself that dictates or determines that water should boil or food should cook under its influence.  Surely, this is something we observe again and again in daily life.  On an atomic level, however, there is a vast distance between the atoms of burning gas in a flame and vast distances also between the atoms of water in a pan.  It is not understood how the movement of the atoms of gas can traverse and bridge this space to produce the effect we see in the water.  The causal connection we imagine is just a projection of the reliability of past experience upon certain of its elements.  The philosopher, David Hume, called this a “custom” but not a “cause.”

Another example from school science class reveals just how conditioned–if not arbitrary–such customs can be.  Most persons believe that cold temperatures cause everything to contract.  The personal experience of drawing the body’s limbs in against a biting cold probably fosters this belief.  That is why it comes as a rude shock in science class when water locked in a thick steel vessel “causes” that vessel to crack apart when the water is frozen.  Contrary to our custom or belief, we witness that water indeed expands when it is cooled.  Our belief is conditioned by what we observe, not by any causative factor inherent in an element or an event.  In fact, water very well might have contracted when cooled and it might have frozen solid when placed in a pan above a roaring fire.  This is not what we observe.  It is not what we are accustomed to, but it might be.  There is no “germ of necessity” in the thing or event we are designating as the “cause” that prevents the outcome from being otherwise than we normally observe it to be.

Refocusing on the macrocosm, the notion that we are products of our past histories falls apart with the demise of causality.  We can look exhaustively for causes in our lives and find none, if we are truly honest.  Everything could have turned out differently for us given the same parentage, nurturing, and environment of our lives.  Take any seminal or defining event, and its influence upon us could have been the exact opposite of what it was.  Often the tilt of something one degree this way or that could have altered its effect upon us by 180 degrees.  And if that is true, it is also true that the very same event with no tilt could have had an opposite effect.  This state of affairs runs counter both to materialistic determinism and to an ethic of free will.  Determinism says that the events of the universe are exhaustively determined by the actions of material processes that preceded them.  But we are seeing that there is no demonstrable causal connection between any such events or processes.  An ethic of free will declares that the events of our lives are not predetermined but are outcomes of our free will acting upon the material world and other human beings and living things.  However, we are also seeing that no event of the will–call it “effort”–is causally and inevitably connected to any other event–call it an “outcome.”

As a matter of fact, material determinism and free will are commonly said by philosophers to be mutually exclusive.  In a world where everything was materially predetermined there would be no room for human free will.  Likewise, a world shaped and molded by free will could not be said to be predetermined.  As we have seen, what these views have in common is their implicit or explicit reliance on a principle of causality. Yet it is the very emptiness of that principle upon close inspection that has been leading us toward a new ontology.  We will see that the Christologic ontology emerging here gives prominence neither to a free will ethic nor to materialism.  It avoids the ontological mistake of both of them by not positing causality and by acknowledging space instead.  We will see that it posits a wholly different principle beneath the unfolding of the universe.  However, before we go there, it will be worth taking time to further explore the dilemma generated by material determinism and free will.  Against the backdrop of the fundamental moral dilemma generated by these two opposing paths, the Christologic ontology will here, too, show itself to be a truly worthy alternative.  This will begin to flesh out for us what we said earlier, that Christologic ontology is the basis of Christology proper, that is, of the moral and spiritual practices that Christ came to reveal.  The link between ontology and morality will become clearer as we progress.

Let us take a closer look, then, at the implications of both material or historical determinism and free will.  Suppose for a moment that everyone were strictly a product of his or her past history.  Then these histories, by definition, would extend infinitely backwards into the past.  However, this amounts to having no ultimate foundation, or being utterly groundless and baseless, which is absurd.  The fact is, each of our lives does exist now, and it does have definite shapes.  But we cannot get to something definite from something indefinite, that is, from a projection out of an infinite past, unknown except in the vagaries of conjecture.  This thought experiment once again shows us the ontological difficulty of determinism.  It may be said to be morally objectionable also just for how it excludes any possibility of “learning from the past.”  For if our past histories strictly give rise to our present lives, there would seem to be no way for us to intervene and change the course of events.  For that we might think the intrusion of the human will would be necessary at least to avoid “repeating history.”  Is it not actually our moral duty to rise above the foibles not only of our own histories but also of the history of the race?  Must we not do everything we can to avoid so-called “mistakes from the past” especially the most grievous errors with catastrophic results?  Unless we allow the interposition of the human will do we not risk allowing a wealth of historical “lessons” to dissolve into a jumble of meaningless and unrelated coincidences arising out of the abyss of historical determinism?  This defines the first prong of the moral dilemma as generated by determinism.

Suppose then that we allow the human will to play a role.  For we do wish to assert that we can learn from the past.  We at least want to set down on a matrix of causes and effects whose mastery we can come to with sufficient effort.  If the past brought me to where I am, then perhaps I can jump onto a better train and get to a better place in the future.  If I can learn to “count cards”, as it were, then perhaps I can work the system and cash in before the story ends.  If life consists of the march of history, analogous to a machine, then it is the machine’s operator whom we aspire to become.  We need not learn all of its laws or mechanisms, only enough to exert sufficient control to get us where we think we’d like to be.

Of course, assuming for a moment that one does or can rise above history in this way, we would have to answer the question why sometimes one does and sometimes one doesn’t repeat her mistakes.  We might try to argue that if someone makes a mistake once and faces it’s awful consequences, one wouldn’t ever repeat it.  Actually, one often does repeat even the worst of mistakes.  So-called “learning from the past” is at best a tortuous affair and is less related to the nature of the events themselves than we would like to think.  Even anecdotally, then, the interposition of the human will would not seem to sufficiently answer the call of moral duty.

But there is something still more curious about the scheme of the will.  Most of us are quick to assign the missteps of our past to the mechanical unfolding of the events which shaped us, which were “beyond our control.”  This is actually quite plausible.  It would seem unduly harsh and also untruthful to claim, for example,  that all the evils that befell us as children even including all of our bad choices were the products of our own will.  The very fact that we are wont to say these things “befell” us implies instead that they were not of our own making.  It is plausible indeed that children–and at least in many instances adults–should not be held morally accountable for even their most awful actions.

At the same time, however, as we defer or deny moral responsibility for many of our past actions, we are quick to take credit for the ways we have remolded ourselves into better persons and for the actions we have performed since.  With respect to our history, this amounts to claiming credit for the secrets we happen to discover about how the history-shaping machine can be controlled or averted so that our future turns out better than our past.  We claim moral credit for outcomes that supposedly show we have “turned the tide of history.” In essence, we want to sort things out so that moral responsibility becomes ours only when the outcomes flatter us, but not when they have betrayed us. We want to reserve the right to “rise above our past” with airs of self-forgiveness–as if we had no hand in shaping it–while still claiming credit for all of our good deeds.

Would that it were feasible to apply the principle of historical determinism only to our sordid past and to leave our present, and especially our future, untouched and under the control of our good will.  However duplicitous we might try to remain in making any such assertion, logic finds us out and hangs the will upon the second prong of our moral dilemma.  For we cannot logically assert that the deterministic principle only frees us from moral responsibility for our past.  By definition, a deterministic universe does not just operate in the past.  If it did, then any time we supposedly broke the chain of determined events in order to assert our will would mark the end of determinism.  The chain could never again be “started up” to be made responsible for bad actions and outcomes.  And since anyone could have “broken the chain” at any time in the past, it is difficult to see how we could plausibly claim the operation of determinism at any particular point in our history.  In other words, determinism is an “all or nothing” principle of history.  By definition, it takes complete control of our present and future, as well as our past.  There are simply no toeholds of moral responsibility for us in a deterministic universe.  Of course, this is just why we felt moved to assert the power of the human will in the first place.  What we are seeing, however, is that once we do assert its power, we are left with no alternative but to take moral responsibility for everything–past, present, and future.  Determinism, as it were, leaves no room for the operation of the will, and the operation of the will leaves no place to hide from responsibility for its effects good or bad.  In our advocacy of the will, we are at last made to be fully morally responsible for every action and outcome that ever has or will come from it.  But this seems as absurd as that we have no responsibility.  It is the second prong of our moral dilemma as generated by free will.

What began as an attempt to free ourselves from a checkered past and to reclaim moral responsibility, thus ends in a scheme where we remain fettered to the very same forces that shaped our history.  Or it ends in the wild-eyed conclusion that we have been willfully responsible for all of our actions all along.  We would seem to be stuck in a dilemma both moral and ontological.  If we take historical determinism as the organizing principle of the universe, this offers no room for moral responsibility.  It leads directly to fatalism, hopelessness, and a complete disregard for history as a teacher.  On the other hand, if we claim control over our lives and a tall measure of self-sufficiency, we make ourselves responsible for pasts we would plausibly prefer to disown and futures which seem to continually elude our ability to shape. Spoken differently, we are seeing that it does not make sense to assume that although we could not exercise any control over our past, we should be able to control our future sufficiently to claim moral responsibility for it just by saying so.  There would seem to be something profoundly missing here in the way that our past, present, and future are connected.

Could the ontological relationship between the threads of possibility and realization, of past and present, of present and future–if we could grasp it–also offer a moral ethic caught neither on the horn of historical determinism nor on that of radical self-determinism?  Could the Christologic ontology answer our moral dilemma even as it addresses the problem earlier exposed with causality?  To begin to see how it does this, let us circle back to our original question.

If not by the warp and woof of a purely material causality nor by the stalwart application of our will to extricate us from the same, then how did we get here?  The underlying issues throughout this investigation have been those of power and control. We have become aware of ourselves trying to extract space from between the threads of our historical unfolding, as one would drain a swamp in an effort to reclaim solid ground.  In other words, we have been trying to claim sufficient predictive power to enable us to exert sufficient control to get us where we think we’d like to be.

We circle back ultimately to allow space to reenter the equation.  Our attempt to drain the swamp, to draw the universe down to the level of our own power and control, did not in the end put us on solid ground.  At most it may have gotten us caught up in the vanity of an attempt to look like masters and makers.  It may have secured for us a kind of pretense to knowledge, but not knowledge itself.  Curiously, when Eve and Adam eat from the Tree of Knowledge their lives contract; they do not expand.  They are expelled from the Garden of Eden, that is, from unconscious spaciousness to an existence bounded on all sides by constrictions of space.  Henceforth they must toil against the soil (whereas before they just ate what God provided).  They must shield themselves from weather (whereas before they went naked).  Eve must endure the very constrictions of her womb and all her progeny with her (whereas before God had just breathed life into them).  And worst of all, they must endure death, preceded by the ultimate constriction of the soul within the body, at least insofar as the body is hence after known to be something different from the soul (whereas before they seemed to be unaware of even having bodies per se, more like animals).

This sort of knowledge entails contraction.  It is the knowledge of individual things, not of being. It is the knowledge of analysis, not of synthesis, of separation, not of oneness.  The apple had to be separated from the Tree of Knowledge before it could be eaten.  Paradoxically, Adam and Eve had no hunger before taking the apple, only afterwards, and then they had a hunger which would never be fully satisfied.  Once it is separated from the whole, from oneness, the apple, as a thing, shows up very differently in our awareness.  Or we could just as well say that it is met by a very different kind of awareness in us.  Prior to the arising of this awareness, Adam and Eve did not even know that they were naked.  We are quick to assume that they must have been naïve and wanting, but actually the exact opposite is true.  Prior to realizing that they were naked, they wanted for nothing, and there were no liabilities to their awareness.  God provided for them in every way.  However, once they did realize they were naked, all their troubles arose at once.  Once the apple became separated from the tree, a new awareness arose in them whose function it was to reveal separation everywhere and to attempt to discover the relationships of individual things.  Their awareness changed from a state of perpetual synthesis where everything was seen in its oneness with everything else, to an ongoing process of analysis.

The word “analysis” comes from roots meaning “to loosen up.”  It denotes a process of understanding that seeks to attain to a sense of the whole through careful consideration of the parts.  Understanding discovers the behavior of the parts but always falls short of comprehending the whole. This spells its downfall.  For whereas grasping the behavior of the parts does allow for certain (typically local) functional inferences–for example, how to grow crops, or how to fix a machine or launch a rocket–it falls short of the Principle of Expansion which is the very basis of the creation and sustenance of life.  This is the esoteric meaning behind the banning of Adam and Eve from the Tree of Life. God placed there cherubim and a sword that turned in every direction to keep Adam and Eve from eating its fruit.  Cherubim are enlightened beings that stand at the doorways to unitive states of consciousness.  The rotating sword is the blade of the analytical mind which turns every which way to create the illusion of separation and thus block access to the cerubim within.  The description is a metaphor for a state of mind that blocks access to eternal life rather than a literal description of a particular place.  (Ironically, the state of mind that would constrict its metaphorical universality into an historical or literal account is the very one that the myth itself depicts and excludes.)

Once Adam and Eve begin to nurture analytical understanding in themselves by pulling the apple from the tree and eating it, they perforce exclude themselves from that unitive state of consciousness and sharing in eternal life depicted by the Tree of Life. It is strikingly ironic that before they ate from the Tree of Knowledge Adam and Eve did share in eternal life.  Prior to that, there was no mention of their mortality or of their ever leaving the Garden of Eden.  It only became apparent after they had entered into the consciousness of separation that they were unable to eat from the Tree of Life. The irony is that before they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they had no need to eat from the Tree of Life and afterwards they were unable to eat from it.  In other words, access to unitive consciousness became a stumbling block for them only after they had succumbed to a different mind state, that is, to understanding. This story teaches us that there is a direct relationship between our state of mind and the ontology we have access to.  It says in very few words what we have been laboring paragraph after paragraph to explain.

Earlier in our discussion we were actually following the premises of analytical understanding and discovered that they run aground on the empty concept of causality. Understanding, however, continues to serve us well.  The behaviors of things and their parts can be grasped in ways that do allow us to predict and control.  Without fully knowing or even knowing at all how this can be so in the absence of causality, we are nevertheless hungry for understanding.  We enjoy its benefits.  We could even say that ever since Adam and Eve tasted the apple, we have been enamored of the level of power and control that analytical understanding has afforded us.  What a seduction it must have seemed to them to taste the power of this different mind-state, so much so that they were willing to disobey God and risk their stay in Heaven for it.  And to us, too, understanding has been and is a great seduction.  History is filled with praise for its benefits and claims that the technology which is its offspring contains the seeds of eternal life.  The story of Genesis would have it otherwise.  For we are specifically told that once the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge has been eaten, we cannot progress to the Tree of Life and eat that fruit, too.  Not from the seeds or fruit of analytical understanding can unitive consciousness be born.  That must spring from a wholly different part of ourselves, a different soil, as it were.  It is a different mind-state from understanding–a different kind of knowledge–and as such gives us access to the nature of the universe at a different level and point of view.

Thus the transition from analytical understanding and its supposed “causative ontology” to the new Christologic ontology involves more than just a shift or refocusing of a familiar way of understanding the world.  We had to digress into Genesis to begin to see this. Essentially, we are shown there that “we cannot pour new wine into old wineskins.”  If Christ came to bring new wine to the wedding and teach us new ways of being in the world, they could hardly be poured into old understandings of the nature of the universe based on analysis and separation.  They could only be contained and flourish in a new mind state and the new ontology that it reveals.  The mind-state is unitive consciousness or true knowledge. The ontology is the Christologic ontology based not on the principle of contraction or reduction of materials or events through an assumed causality down to our own ability to predict and control. Rather, it is based on the Principle of Expansion. 

The Principle of Expansion allows for a universe that is permeated by space as by breath.  Not through a causal connection between parts but by the breath of God’s very intention is the universe created and sustained.  As Meister Eckhart noted, “God is perpetually creating the universe.”¹ For in the spaciousness into which creation has expanded, the threads of our world and lives hang much too loosely to be bound against one another scraping and entangled.  Rather, God did not will it that anything should thus escape his care.  Instead, everything unfolds in his perpetual outbreath and by the flow of “grace after grace.”  It is true that we are given freedom to affect this flow and that we often do it badly.  But even that freedom and its ill effects are sustained by his compassion and his grace.

The Principle of Expansion is reflected St. Paul’s question, “What have I that I haven’t received?”² While we can make the mistake of seeing in the threads of our lives only our own well-worn efforts, we can also settle on the incredible spaciousness there.  Then we begin to see an unaccountable texture.  It is unaccountable because it is simply there, placed for us in a way that is entirely beyond our own making.  On a more superficial level of looking, it seems to us that we have been there and done much of it ourselves.  At the level of space, of pure breath, the various tapestries of our lives hang like constellations, having entered our lives by a much more mysterious process than our own stepwise construction or the blind unfoldings of a purely material universe.  Do we see the threads as strung one at a time through tunnels of our own laborious crafting?  Or do we see them hung like jewelry fashioned from beads of light cast outward from a central Source? There is no time needed, no history, to creation of this sort.  It is accomplished in the spaciousness of God’s eternal present, himself expanded into creation by love and by grace.  He is just fully himself but to us love and grace, insofar as we know him.

The Christologic ontology thus unfolds in the arms of a new mind-state which gets behind the assumptions of analytical understanding and opens up to take in the incredible breadth and spaciousness of creation.  And also and especially the perpetual state of grace we find ourselves in.  In this state of mind we “drop through” our assumptions about the self-sustaining nature of the universe as well as those about the primacy of our will.  We essentially discover that nothing can account for the creation that we experience around us except for the will of the Creator.  This would seem to be an unprovable assumption, and from the point of view of analytical understanding that is precisely what it is.  For analytical understanding seeks proof of one part by evidence from the next.  It jumps from stepping stone to stepping stone extracting and predicting from that experience what the next stepping stone will be like.  The stepping stones themselves–whatever they are–form a kind of closed system with understanding in orbit around it.  But in Christologic ontology we are talking about the structure of creation as a whole embraced by true knowledge. We come to it–just as we have here–more by drawing closer and closer to the absolute edge and limits of understanding and its causative ontology than by using understanding to get us there.  In fact, understanding cannot grasp true knowledge.  Yet it is at the limit border of understanding that true knowledge can and does spring up in us.  Sometimes, as we said earlier, it is when our lives “fall apart” and former understandings and ways of coping are lost to us that we are unexpectedly catapulted into another way of seeing the world.  Then and there we may find ourselves secretly surprised that “things are better than they seem.”  We may even feel relieved and curious about the new universe we are unexpectedly inhabiting.  Without any language for it, we may perceive in the interstices of our newfound calamity a calm and unshakable spaciousness, a breath that meets us and says, as it were, “I am” and “You are.”  It is in this simple re-awareness of being that true knowledge is found.  Such a unitive state of consciousness cannot be proved because there is nothing to prove it by.  There is no stepping stone which lies outside of it and predicts it.  Rather in true knowledge we meet the whole of creation all at once, not in perfect clarity to be sure, but through a compelling awareness of the role and presence of the Creator.  In this awareness, the Principle of Expansion replaces the Principle of Causality. And God’s grace becomes the answer to the dilemma surrounding our moral responsibility for actions in the world.

“You cannot pour new wine into old wineskins,” was Jesus’s way of telling us that the practices he came to teach must occur within the framework of a new understanding of being in the world.  Following Jesus is not just a matter of doing this and that practice in order to arrive at a certain outcome within the context of the old framework.  Otherwise those practices would “leak out,” as it were, and not bring about transformation. (Comprehension of the new ontology can nevertheless be strengthened by the new practices, even as the new framework contains and supports the practices.  Theory and practice are not separate from one another but complimentary.)

It is instructive to view the two prongs of our earlier moral dilemma as “leaks” or “holes” in unitive awareness, which lead us to dry ruts on the thinning flow of our own understanding.  In unitive awareness we see that we both are and are not responsible for unsavory acts of the past.  And we see, too, that others who have acted unkindly toward us likewise are and are not responsible for the acts they committed.  We do not need to posit a deterministic universe to free us from responsibility.  That is achieved by God’s grace and forgiveness.  Nor do we need to suffer under the weight of our own will.  In unitive awareness we see the effects of our will as something granted to us by our Creator and moral responsibility as a gift of grace, not an inevitable consequence of the operation of our will.  Are we responsible for everything that we do?  Yes and no.  If we view our lives as a timeline of efforts and outcomes, it is possible to isolate segments and to argue for moral responsibility for certain acts–good or bad.  However, in unitive consciousness time and space are grasped all at once in an eternal present.  By grace the person that we have become once we are closer to the Lord is transformed and forgiven and as such is no longer responsible for bad acts.  This is not something which understanding can grasp because it sees each frame of our lives, as it were, as separate and discrete.  Frames that come later may be different, but they cannot cancel out the earlier frames.  In unitive awareness, however, we are only what we become.  In the eternal present of fulfillment in the Lord we are only the fullness we have become.  This is why the Way of Return is ultimately the perfection of ourselves and all things. For the return of all things to God could not be any less than the perfection He is.

However, the moral concepts and spiritual practices that we are just at the beginning of addressing here will take a good deal longer to elucidate.  Of particular importance is how the new ontology enhances our awareness of the small scale textures of our interpretations, assumptions, and projections–the ones that keep us tied to the old separative framework or understanding.  As we examine these more closely, we will see that the rubbing ways by which we try to return to God under the old framework refract his presence, as though his light were bent and splintered through the prisms of our own small minds and concerns.  Our minds work the opposite of the way we think they do, most of their energy devoted to the ever-spinning sorcery of illusion crafting.  (We observe that in his recent book, Proof of Heaven,³ the neurosurgeon, Eben Alexander, reports that his understanding of the human brain changed from a source of consciousness to a distorting filter through which universal consciousness is compressed and limited.)  We will see, for example, that our typical Western concepts of power and control are distortions of true power. And we will see that even our notions of prayer and good works are typically distorted by a swelled belief in the efficacy and importance of our own ego.

When we truly stop and take stock from a higher vantage point, if we can find one, we may observe that we have paid and are paying a hefty price for all the additional “creature comforts” our analytical intelligence has provided.  Christ counseled us to “put first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added to you.”  But we have taken the approach of the builders of the Tower of Babel, preferring to return to God by the cleverness of our own stepwise efforts rather than through the quiet realization of his love for us.  That very cleverness, by refracting God’s light, actually lengthens our journey.  It fogs our path leading us into blind alleys and divided understories.  We wander like ships following ghost lights instead of coming together toward one bright guiding beacon.  Were we to do as Christ counseled and put first the Kingdom, the synergy of our resources conjoined by God’s love would abound for us many thousand fold, and that Kingdom would flourish on earth.   Were we truly to live according to the Principle of Expansion rather than the Principle of Causality, then we would rediscover God’s universal caring.  Were we to come from unitive consciousness rather than analytical understanding, we would shed our perceptions of separation and of want and rediscover oneness and immeasurable plenty.  These will all mark our re-turn to God under the new framework of Christologic ontology.  And the practices that Christ came to teach to assist us in making these turns will define what we are calling the Way of Return or Christology proper.

As we said, it is the small scale textures of our interpretations of life’s events that either wed us to the old framework or free us to embark upon the Way of Return and proceed to the Kingdom. Let us then follow Christologic ontology more intimately into those textures, where the Way of Return can be discerned more clearly.  Let us see if we might “drop through” the well-worn cloth of old assumptions and discover a wholly new fabric enfolding creation.

Notes:

1. See, for example, Sermon DW 30, w 18:

     “I have already said on a number of

occasions that God created the whole world perfectly and entirely

in the Now. God still creates now everything he made six

thousand years ago or more, when he created the world.”

2. See 1 Corinthians 4:7.
3. Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven, Simon & Schuster, 2012.