For me this also involves the relationship between free will and awareness, one that Phil has written about at length. But in that instant of time in which awareness was contracted into a separate self identity, Christ's sacrifice had already been made.

To actually have genuine fee will beyond the slower conscious responses that inhibit behavior, such as Benjamin Libet's experiments illustrate, one's entire physical being has to be conscious, or much more of it than the tiny bit of awareness that blinks off and on while most everything else runs automatically. If driving to work depended on our typical level of conscious awareness, it would take hours to get to work for the mass number of accidents occuring daily and the thousands of times we'd have to break for how often we fall out of the present moment. We can drive to work in a fantasy, having nothing to do with the present moment and arrive safely, and we do this every single day. The consciousness responsible for our safe arrival is, IMO, what is under the control of the kundalini, and I believe the tree and fruit metaphors in the Eden story have to do with this trance state, primarily.

And the confusion between kundalini and the Holy Spirit which we discuss here at Shalom rather frequently is also a good way to talk about original sin, for me. Seeking kundalini without understanding and experiencing its difference from the Holy Spirit is the plight of many, including myself for many years. IMO, this kind of seeking is itself a distortion of the will and represents a trance state or contraction/withdrawal from the present moment; it is an attempt to live forever by not dying, rather than the narrow gate of surrender to God, the death of separation, and the gift of eternal life.

Aren't we all frightened of this? Complete surrender to God scares me in no small amount; it feels like the same thing as dying. I can do neither of my own will, but I can allow that fear to make my prayer honest.

Anyone read "The Original of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes? Not recommended for toilet material, unless stimulating existential feelings . . . Anyway, Jaynes suggests there was huge shift in consciousness over several centuries in many parts of the world around 1500-1800 B.C. His reductionistic notions of consciousness have taken a beating lately with the discovery of complex self-awareness in apes and dolphins (not to mention the findings of parapsychology), but his historical treatment still seems to have some consensus.

The kundalini appears frequently in Egyptian iconography, but I've never read an anthropologist willing to collude with such an idea. In any case, the story of Egypt, at least as Egyptian historian R.T. Rundle Clark tells it in "Myth and Symbol In Ancient Egypt," is one of attempting to recover or reawaken the gods as internal realities, perhaps discoverying the archetypes within individual consciousness that were once only known as features of the collective mentality. The early Egyptians appear to have been profoundly psychic, which may have been the case of many ancient civilizations, but functional mainly in the collective sense. Jayne's notion of ancient cultural upheavals threatening this preconscious mentality (where the larger part of awareness that drives us to work each day was almost the only way of relating) suggests that these early people were rather like psychic zombies, with only a minimal sense of separateness, perhaps hallucinatory as Jaynes' suggests, but intimately connected with each other in very cohesive societies.

As this cohesion was lost due to major conflict and warfare, a sense of self emerged as the greater sense of belonging waned and collapsed. In Egyptian stories, there seems to be an intense struggle to regain this sense of connectedness with the soul (often metaphored as the serpent, the falcon, the all-seeing eye) while struggling with the meaning of the new self-identity, which could be viewed as the common plight of humanity since that time. This apparent struggle to regain unity through the kundalini could be viewed, historically and personally, as the post-Fall dilemma requiring the sacrifice of Christ, wherein all powers and principalities are finally reordered from the top down.

I don't know where that places the Eden story . . . as an historical narrative it fits closely with this notion of the evolution of consciousness, but only if you view pre-Fall Eden as the Bicameral period Jaynes describes in Egypt prior to 1800 B.C. And of course, historical allusions are not the point of a theological treatise on the story; but one can imagine Adam and Eve as the father and mother of all civilizations, where the Fall is a fall out of the intimacy of the Holy Spirit and into a psychic awareness that has yet to be limited by the emergence of a stable self-consciousness.

Man, am I starting to write like JB . . . . . . ?

Don't worry. I won't post again on this thread . . . . . . When you click "Add Reply" the server tells you "Sit Tight. We're Taking You Back to Original Sin."

Sheesh . . . .

Father, I don't know if I'm doing your will or not but I desire to do your will.

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Thomas Merton

Somewhere in that meditation are some implicit presuppositions about original sin, sin and finitude, about alienation of all types. Also, there is the trust and refusal to fear. I think this quote makes for a rich meditation on the evocative questions that Wanda raised. I will stop my musing and let this speak to each heart in its own way ... ...

pax,
amor et
bonum
JB

Seeking kundalini without understanding and experiencing its difference from the Holy Spirit is the plight of many, including myself for many years. IMO, this kind of seeking is itself a distortion of the will and represents a trance state or contraction/withdrawal from the present moment; it is an attempt to live forever by not dying, rather than the narrow gate of surrender to God, the death of separation, and the gift of eternal life.

Man alive, that's really good! We might add to this that the awakening of this energy process--however one accounts for it--in a vessel that has been disordered by Original Sin can account for many psychological maladies.

I've read in several places an attempt to relate the story of the Fall to the beginnings of rational, egoic consciousness. Paradise is the state of undifferentiated unity, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is equated with the new consciousness, which is more attuned to duality, as rational consciousness in fact is. In eating of the fruit (read: breaking with the collective, asserting one's individuality), there is a forfeiting of the sense of unity that came before. Etc. Jungians seem to be strongly drawn to this.

There are numerous strong objections one could make to this theory:
1. The state of original justice and innocence attributed to the first parents didn't necessarily imply an absence of individual awareness and consciousness of individual power.
2. The movement to a more rational, egoic consciousness is not a sinful situation.
3. The "Fall" itself is presented as a disobedience to God with consequences for our relationship with God and, hence, one another and creation.

-------

Sit tight . . . (We've really got to watch out for those thread topics, don't we? Don't anyone start one entitled "The Torture Chambers of Saddam Hussein.")

Seeking ____________ without understanding and experiencing its difference from the Holy Spirit is the plight of many ... IMO, this kind of seeking is itself a distortion of the will

The stuff that could fill THAT blank!

I've got a question for y'all. How do you reconcile the idea of Original Sin with free will? It seems to me that being burdened with the mistakes of another is hardly free, let alone fair. Why should each of us not have a chance to start our lives fresh and not fall until we make the choices that propel us downward?

We could all ask our parents that question, couldn't we? You might extapolate from teachings about a dysfunctional family to a dynsfunctional race.

And that's kind of what the doctrine is point to: how sin produces consequences, not just for the one who commits it, but for others connected to the sinner. The Aristotle/Aquinas school also emphasizes the unity of the human race at a deep ontological level and that's how Aquinas in particular understood how the fall of the first parents affected the entire race as it damaged our relationship with God. The same principle also helps us to understand Christ in his humanity joins the race to God.

Follow-ups welcomed.

quote:

We could all ask our parents that question, couldn't we? You might extapolate from teachings about a dysfunctional family to a dynsfunctional race.

Holy smokes, does that mean we're "enablers" for God?

[Edit: darn contraction's - just never seem to get them right]

Enablers for God?

Me no comprendre. How would that work?

Me no comprendre. How would that work?

It just seems to me that God sets up the universe, creates people, people fall and fail, and to justify this whole system we have to view ourselves as imperfect and deserving of the crap we get when it is not a system of our creation. We enable the idea of a God who is perfect and benevolent by putting all this crud back on ourselves. He escapes all culpability and WE are the fallen ones. Well, if you design a building and it falls down...

quote:

Well, if you design a building and it falls down...

. . . you fix it. Done.

Brad, I do get where you're coming from, but it seems to me that the realities of our possession of free-will and misuse of this power are obvious enough. I don't think this implies a deficiency in what has been created, especially when it's also obvious that we can use the power of freedom more and more in the service of love, justice, etc. The doctrine of Original Sin is an attempt to account for the reason why we misuse our freedom so badly moreso than an attempt to defend an idea about God's perfection. The only way God's perfection could be implicated is if we were to say that God gave people free-will but in such a manner as they could not use it for goodness, love, etc. or could not really grow in that direction. We know that's not true, however, hence we can infer that the kind of freedom we were created with isn't intrinsically disordered, but has been *inflicted* with disorder. That infliction is original sin, or at least the consequences thereof.

Does this make sense? If not, ask JB to clarify.

The existence of evil is difficult to understand. Most accept the idea that moral evil is necessitated by the reality of free will. The origin of physical evil is then moral evil.

There are many efficacies that can be identified for physical evil and they are mostly tied to soul-making and character development.

All moral evil has consequences. This is easy enough to see. Those consequences extend, even intergenerationally, to others beside the perpetrators. This is our common experience. One important element of this common human experience is a deep solidarity. We experience this solidarity in many ways but certainly in sin and suffering.

We also universally experience a neediness, an emptiness, an incompleteness, a pervasive lack of fulfillment and we all share the experience of seeking completeness and fulfillment to no avail. It is a common human experience to be looking for love in all the wrong places. Our hearts are restless, says St. Augustine, until they rest in God. The positive aspect of the doctrine of original sin is that, somehow, we recognize the truth in what St. Augustine says and we can best describe this truth as an experience of paradise lost. Another positive expression of the doctrine would be to say that life very much is experienced as a homebound journey, which is the converse side of being lost, of being separated. Our longings are too deep and the meaning we seek is too profound to be realized in this world. Are these longings and these meanings a reflection of another type of existence? Are they a collective remembrance or even a foreknowledge? The doctrine of original sin can then be conceived as a reasoning backwards based moreso on an explanation of our deepest human aspirations and not so much based on an explanation of our pervasive shortcomings and frustrations.

One truth about the question of suffering and the paradox of the human condition is that there is no totally satisfactory answer. It remains immersed in mystery.

Another thing we come to recognize is that it is one thing to attempt to explain the existence of evil, both physical (natural) and moral, but it is an altogether different and much more difficult problem to explain its distribution . As we journey toward solidarity, compassion ensues and this problem of distribution begins to dissolve as we mysteriously enter into the suffering of all humanity, including that of Jesus. We also share one another's joys and victories and are promised glorification.

In summary, the key to these questions is solidarity . It opens the door of understanding to original sin, to all common human experiences of joy and suffering, to all human aspirations, to all human evil and suffering, to all human longings for such a home as we all seem to badly miss and deeply desire. Solidarity is the recognition of the truth that we are all in this together, that we invoke only because we have been convoked, the we don't journey alone but as a pilgrim people.

an aside re: heredity

Some approach the doctrine of original sin by asserting not just physical heredity but also a metaphysical heredity, recognizing our psychosomatic unity as integral human beings with body and soul and spirit.

There is a physicalistic account I can conceive of that relies on Baldwinian evolution, which suggests that the emergence of our linguistic capacities was influenced by selection pressures exerted by cultural forces. Some of the shaping of human psychology by various cultural selection pressures could have been deformative. Interestingly, the materialists who claim that the space-time-matter-energy plenum was uncreated have a problem explaining how, with the infinite amount of time available retrospectively, things are not already much more nearly perfect given cosmic evolution's inexorable march toward order.

quote:

From relatively undifferentiated matter ("star stuff") emerge galaxies, solar systems, and life-supporting planets, and on these planets emerge increasingly complex and increasingly conscious forms of life until self-conscious, rational entities appear. Then, within the history of these entities, which we know firsthand on this planet as ourselves, there is further progress from, barbarism, ignorance, and animal-like violence to enlightenment and peace.

Most atheists accept both these premises. But if both are true, why have we not yet reached perfection? The history of time is a history of progress, and there has been an infinite amount of time already; so why has progress reached only a finite level? Another way of posing this is: Why is there still evil? According to the atheistic premises, there should be no more evil already. But there is. Therefore one or both of these premises must be false.

Of course the atheist, faced with this argument, will probably modify his second premise, the one about progress, in order to save the first premise, the one about infinite time and no act of creation. So it is not an argument that refutes atheism as such, only "progressive atheism" � that is, atheism plus the idea of progress.

Problem Of Suffering Reconsidered by Peter Kreeft

It would seem that a secular humanism cannot coherently and consistently maintain that progress can be assured without God.

At any rate, in this aside we aren't relying on a Lamarckian evolution of the inheritance of acquired traits (like sinfulness) or on a strictly Darwinian evolution bereft of formative telic influences, but on such a Baldwinian evolution that affirms the role of human culture in exerting selection pressures on human linguistic innovations, such pressures as would comport with the tooth and claw survival of the fittest but which could be considered morally deformative and in need of more transcendence than any noble sociobiological doctrine could conceive of vis a vis the dignity of each individual human, notwithstanding a rather narrow conceptualization of the common good.

I suppose I am just suggesting that humankind is more in need of redemption than the secular humanists can either admit to or provide for, whatever one thinks of original sin or of human evolution.

"Our longings are too deep and the meaning we seek is too profound to be realized in this world. Are these longings and these meanings a reflection of another type of existence? Are they a collective remembrance or even a foreknowledge? The doctrine of original sin can then be conceived as a reasoning backwards based moreso on an explanation of our deepest human aspirations and not so much based on an explanation of our pervasive shortcomings and frustrations."

Your whole post was penetrating on this topic, but this bit stood out most for me. Most of the time, it seems, we fight our longings, or seek their satiation as soon as possible, and never get to see the grace hidden inside them.

Also, on the subject of Lamarckianism, if your interested, you might check out the research by Michael Meaney. He's a psychiatrist and animal researcher in Canada, and has replicated a study several times showing the transfer of acquired characteristics in a rat model. The experiment involves a control group of mother rats left to tend to their pups as they would normally do, or as normally as they might in a lab. The experimental group was distinguished by the mothers' extra licking/grooming of their pups prompted by the researchers gentle handling of the litters. The mother rats in this group would lick their pups in response to the handling, which was done several times a day. The control group was not interfered with in this way.

Once full grown, the pups in both groups were tested on numerous stress challenges and had their blood assayed. Consistently, the grown pups having received the additional nurturing were in every way more hardy and resilient in response to stress. But this bit of data had already been observed in previous research. The purpose of the current study was to observe future generations of pups for any differences between the groups.

And so the mature pups in both groups were bred, but in the next litters there were no human handling of either groups. Both groups were left to themselves, and the new mothers in the experimental group were not observed to lick their pups more often than the control bitches (sorry, had to say it . . . ).

Anyway, the astounding discovery the researchers were testing for actually emerged. The second generation of pups, who'd not been given extra licking/grooming by their mothers, exhibited the same extra robustness and resiliency. The second generation control group pups, like their own mothers did in the first stage of the experiment, showed no measurable gains. This transfer of maternal nurturing occured for one more generation,perhaps two, without being further kindled or prompted in the mothers by the researchers.

JB, if you fish around on the National Library of Medicine website, under say "Pubmed" as a search engine, with an entry for Meaney, M you would eventually pull up the citations and abstracts to his papers. Other scientists may have gone on by now and tested his theory.

And, conversely, one can postulate, as the researchers may already have tested, the transfer of stress from generation to generation. So in a sense, the dynamic of Original Sin, as you say JB, works both ways.

" . . . control bitches . . . 'Sit tight, we're taking you back to Original Sin . . . "

Somebody stop the madness !!!!!!!!!!

Somebody stop the madness !!!!!!!!!!

Someone will.
Someone always does.
But, rest assured, it won't be me!

What's with this goofy thread title . . .

I think the nature-nurture arguments have grown more complicated through the years. E.g, the development of traits like the mice w.c. mentioned can be accounted for genetically and without invoking neo-Lamarckianism. What if the stroking and extra pampering helped to activate certain genes that were already there? That's what happens when we eat certain foods, exercise, etc. And what if the activation of those genes in a different kind of transmission of them during the reproductive process. That would explain it.

I've mentioned before that people with multiple personality disorders show different allergies in the different personalities. Obviously, they have the same genome, but the personalities activate the DNA differently.

There are implications here for the transmission of Original Sin, don't you think? Human consciousness was drastically altered with the Fall and this in turn affected how the DNA is vibrated/activated by consciousness. It's not too far a stretch to see how the children of the first parents passed on a more debilitated state to their offspring--sort of opposite what the rat experiment points up.

"What if the stroking and extra pampering helped to activate certain genes that were already there?"

Phil:

I'm not sure Michael Meaney would resort to Lamarckianism for an explanation either. But this bit of research is pointing to one hotly contested area in science, which of course is consistent with intuition and theology otherwise.

The idea of experience changing neuronal wiring is well-established. And in the past 10 year the mainstream has also accepted the findings that these interactions affect gene expression. The sacred cow that is most fiercely protected in molecular biology is the transmission of such affects during embryogenesis. The conventional thinking has been that in animals, when germ cell and somatic cell lines are sequestered from each other, any exchange of environmental effects are erased from the chromosones.

In Meaney's rat model, the changes in gene expression violate this notion, being preserved over several generations. It's interesting to talk to molecular biologists about this. Those not closely allied to the Human Genome Project through funding have told me that this project actually has an epigenetic component meant to explore the cell biology of these sort of effects, but the funding simply isn't funneled in that direction, nor is the popularity of the HGP enhanced by these considerations of complexity.

Closely related to our ideas of human origins and original sin is the problem of consciousness.

When it comes to the problems of consciousness, David Chalmers inhabits a niche called naturalistic dualism . To oversimplify his position, he basically distinguishes two aspects of information, those being 1) the physical and 2) the phenomenal. For the most part, these two aspects correspond to 1) simple awareness and to 2) experience and respectively result in the 1) easy and 2) hard problems of consciousness. This approach differs from Penrose's search for a new fundamental property of reality to explain consciousness, which itself differs from Bohm's quantum consciousness . It is also different from the objectivism of Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff , which rejects both idealist and materialist ontologies. All of the above approaches differ from the materialist monism of Deacon, Goodenough and Dennett , with its emergentistic explanations (or eliminativism = what problem?), and from that of Samuel Avery , whose dimensional structure of consciousness sounds like an idealist monism . All of these can be distinguished from Whitehead 's panpsychism . Interestingly, the Thomistic explications and amendments of the Aristotelean notion of the soul still seem to most comprehensively address the problem of consciousness.

I came across a quote recently that captures what I am trying to convey regarding the versatility and catholicity of this Thomistic perspective:

quote:

Such is the Catholic doctrine on the nature, unity, substantiality, spirituality, and origin of the soul. It is the only system consistent with Christian faith , and, we may add, morals, for both Materialism and Monism logically cut away the foundations of these. The foregoing historical sketch will have served also to show another advantage it possesses -- namely, that it is by far the most comprehensive, and at the same time discriminating, syntheseis of whatever is best in rival systems. It recognizes the physical conditions of the soul's activity with the Materialist, and its spiritual aspect with the Idealist, while with the Monist it insists on the vital unity of human life. It enshrines the principles of ancient speculation, and is ready to receive and assimilate the fruits of modern research.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14153a.htm

I am discussing all of this within the context of The Christian Mysteries being prepared by Jim & Trya Arraj and by Phil. Their texts and discussions and media presentations have great spiritual depth as well as a great interdisciplinary breadth. It is a real challenge to do philosophy and religion and science and metaphysics and phenomenology and theology all well at the same time, but this is exactly what their Christian Mysteries project has been about. In this quote by David Chalmers, below, I think of what Phil, Jim & Tyra are about. It reminds me of my own journey to try to come to grips with a good synthesis of these many facets of the human experience.

quote:

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with. I found myself thinking about it more and more, until I decided that I wanted to work on it full time. The sort of work I wanted to do couldn't really be done in psychology or neuroscience, where experimental details are what really count and the rest is incidental. So I threw myself into learning philosophy. At first I was very impatient with the kind of nit-picky detail that philosophers go into, and I felt that they often missed the forest for the trees. I just wanted to paint bold ideas. But I eventually came to see that this sort of rigorous detail is vital for getting clear on the issues. And I found that the foundational issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of language that I had initially neglected were crucial to understanding consciousness, and also beautiful in their own right. I hope my younger self doesn't see me as having been brainwashed!

Some part of me still self-identifies as a scientist. And while doing philosophical work, I've also wanted to engage the issues at a level that people outside philosophy can understand, and in particular in a way that resonates with people in science. So I've ended up pursuing these issues on two fronts. Some of the things I write are technical and aimed mostly at philosophers, and other things are much more general. It can be awkward when the two audiences mix. A philosopher might find the general work unsophisticated, and scientists are often bemused by esoteric talk of zombies, supervenience, and possible worlds. But I think working at both levels helps keep you honest. As Kant said, big ideas without details are empty; details without big ideas are blind.
http://www.ditext.com/chalmers/chalm.html

Far from empty and certainly not blind, Jim & Tyra and Phil have been wonderful guides across a vast expanse. Along the way, in studying philosophy, metaphysics, psychology and science with them, I have learned answers to many of my questions. Most importantly, although it wasn't easy, I can recognize, looking back, that I learned a lot of the questions, too. All of the mundane questions and answers and rigorous philosophical nitpicking, from metaphysical and scientific perspectives, seem to have prepared the way for a sublime theological vision. In particular, reading Mind Aflame:The Theological Vision of One of the World's Great Theologians: Emile Mersch by Jim Arraj for the second time, I can see and feel all of the philosophy, metaphysics, psychology, phenomenology and science coming together. If combining essentialistic and existentialistic perspectives, for instance when doing moral theology, was a good academic exercise before, and if distinguishing between the immanent and transcendent was useful in East-West dialogue before, then now, with Jim's articulation and expansion of Mersch's vision, I can resonate from the core of my being with not just an academic exercise but with an existential experience and intuitive grasping of what he calls a natural beatitude. I can better understand the earnest, the first fruits, the down payment, the first installment of the glory yet to be revealed. Jim expands on Mersch:

quote:

I think there is an interesting possibility of applying Mersch's ideas on our natural end to an area he never considered. If in death we enter into the full self-possession of ourselves, an intuition of our own essences, this is a knowledge that doesn't come from concepts, but is more akin to the knowledge we have in this life through self-awareness even though that kind of self-consciousness is very limited and fragmented. In death, however, this kind of knowledge blossoms, and we grasp the fullness of our natures, but to grasp this fullness we must grasp our deepest center, which is that point at which our very being comes to us from the creative power of God, a power that is continually operative so that we can continue to exist. Is it not logical that in this state of natural beatitude we would see that very center where God grants us existence? It would not be a matter of seeing God as He is in Himself. That is reserved for grace. We cannot have a direct contact with God that would not demand a supernatural elevation. But we can have an experience of God in and through the very existence of the human soul by which we come in contact, somewhat improperly speaking, with the very creative power of God. In this hypothesis we can imagine seeing the deepest center of the human soul aflame with the creative influx of existence. We don't see God directly, but we see Him in an improperly immediate way as He illuminates the innermost fibers of our being by giving us our very existence, an existence which is at once our personal being, our communion with all human beings, and with the universe. This would be a natural counterpart to the beatific vision, and in it we would be dazzled by the immense reality of what it means to be a human being, and we would be led to a great love for the creator of such a marvelous mystery.
If such an exposition of the nature of natural beatitude is correct, we can see that our metaphysical knowledge of God that we can have in this life is but a dim foretaste of it. But perhaps there is another kind of knowledge that is also a foretaste of this vision that comes in natural beatitude, and I think it should be looked for in Eastern forms of enlightenment and natural mystical experience that are to be found in Hinduism and Buddhism. In such cases there is no intuition of the essence of the soul, which is a state reserved for death, but there is a profound knowledge of the soul that goes beyond all conceptual knowledge and in which there is an experience of the existence of the soul as it comes forth from the creative power of God, and God as the author of existence.

CHAPTER 3: THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE

Well, I don't know if I said any of this too well but, thankfully, there are those who have already done the spade work for us.

I am still learning new questions.

pax, amor et bonum,
jb

w.c., I'm not speaking directly to the Meaney experiments here, but once we recognize the role of consciousness in activating the DNA, then we can see how this can come into play most powerfully during the reproductive process. What difference, for example, does it make to reproduce in a context of love versus anger and lust? Or how about embryonic development outside the womb? One consistency in the Catholic Church's teaching about sexual morality is that by tying the unitive and procreative aspects together and saying you can't have one without the other, they ended up affirming the importance of the unitive, loving environment for a truly human beginning.

Let's think of what the teaching on the Fall is saying. Human beings lost their intimacy with God and fell into a lower, more selfish kind of consciousness. Think of what that initial state might have done to DNA. Is it really so difficult to imagine a physical body capable of immortality given a perfect unitive state? Think of what happens to DNA when that is lost. There are probably major segments that aren't activated, or else this happens in a disordered or imbalanced kind of way.

Just a few more marbles to throw into the circle, here.

And thanks for the kinds words, JB. Some of those resources by Jim that you've cited have been enormously helpful to me as well.

And now a word for Jim Arraj on this topic:

http://www.innerexplorations.c...mortext/original.htm

I haven't read it yet . . . started to print it out, but when I saw my print queue going over 30 pages I cancelled and saved it as a pdf. I know most of what it will say, however, as we discussed this at some length on a recent visit by him. It's a really important essay, imo.