Our minds simply aren't large enough to comprehend

Kelly said... One of the real problems with the practice of Christianity (and possibly the other Abrahamic branches) is that our minds simply aren't large enough to comprehend both the mercy of God and the holiness of God at the same time. If one, then it's hard to work out how the other could possibly be true. So we choose to emphasize one or the other, as individuals or confessions or societies (or bounce back and forth between them) and that choice has very real consequences for our devotions and our theology and our sense of self and the way we try to live our faith. I'm coming to believe that this isn't resolvable in this life, due to limitations in our consciousness or capacity or something. We just have to make our choice, follow that path, and find out when we get there what we missed on the way.

It seems to me that immanence/transcendence is another irreconcilable pair, and the dream of a Hegelian synthesis of the two is and will remain just that – a dream. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Even if somebody “gets it” in one of those out-of-time moments, it doesn't survive intact when you try to bring it back. Force of gravity, or atmospheric pressure, causes it to collapse into itself, and that collapse is deeply built into the nature of things here on this plane of existence. A question for your Brahmanic readers: are there irreconcilables like this in the Vedic stream as well? And is it possible that the attempt to synthesize opposites within a stream trains us in the skills needed to bring the two together? 11:17 AM

Gagdad Bob said...As a matter of fact, this is exactly the problem Sri Aurobindo attempted to resolve with his Integral Yoga: how to be transformed by the experience of the transcendent God but to bring it down into the material world. He felt that this was the next stage in mankind's evolution, but it's not something that's going to happen tomorrow. It would represent a leap as epochal as when matter came to life or when monkeys started talking and entered a linguistic world space. It's a big jump. 12:29 PM