Youtube video I just posted on my new channel.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Phil,

That's very good, Phil. In my experience, it takes a LOT of work to compose one's thoughts enough to make a 10-minute video. Which is why I don't make very many!

Thanks, Derek, and for the old embed code as well. They apparently don't have that as an option with new videos.

I do teaching all the time, but it's different to just sit and talk in front of a camera. I did have quite a few mess ups (stalls, poor examples, "uhh"s and so forth), so I used iMovie to edit them out and add titles and transitions. Time consuming!

I enjoyed that. A very relaxed, concise presentation.

I find little mannerisms of speech interesting when I listen to people teaching. My dad used to say, "you know?". I heard Merton repeat, "see?", when he taught his students. I think yours is, "ok?". It's all very cute

That sounds a little too much like my wife, Stephen.

Glad you enjoyed the presentation. More to come!

Moved Reply:

Here is Thomas Keating in The Mystery of Christ, p. 57.

quote:

The death of Jesus on the cross was the death of his personal self, which in his case was a deified self. Christ's resurrection and ascension is his passage into the Ultimate Reality: the sacrifice and loss of his deified self to become one with the Godhead. Since all reality is the manifestation of the Godhead and Christ has passed into identification with It, Christ is present everywhere and in everything. The cosmos is now the Body of the glorified Christ who dwells in every part of it.

Union with Christ on the cross -- our entrance into his experience -- leads to the death of our separate-self sense. To embrace the cross of Christ is to be willing to leave behind the self as a fixed point of reference. It is to die to all separation, even to a self that has been transformed. It is to be one with God, not just to experience it.

Jesus' invitation to "take up your cross every day and follow me" is a call to do what he actually did. As the Way, Jesus invites us to follow his example step-by-step into the bosom of the Father. As the Truth, he shares with us, through participation in his death on the cross, the experience of the transpersonal aspect of the Father. As the Life, he leads us to unity with the Godhead beyond personal and impersonal relationships. On the Christian path, God is known first as the personal God, then as the transpersonal God, and finally as the Ultimate Reality beyond all personal and impersonal categories. Since God's existence knowledge and activity are one, Ultimate Reality is discovered to be That-which-is.

I have a few problems with this quote, how about you?

Moved Reply:

To be honest, I really quite like it.

The cross works at different levels for different stages of growth, and this seems to me to be the furthest one can take it in relation to us. Ok I can see where it becomes a problem when speaking of Christ's person, but, in all honesty, I'm inclined to go with Father K on this.

For me, right now, there is fluidity and movement between God in beingness and God in relation. I don't see why one has to have priority. This has been the way for a while, and even in the course of an hour's prayer, I can move between the two. Why can't it be so? God seems to have emptied himself into my soul at creation, while maintaining his transcendence. My soul is a piece of God, but not God. It's both.

Moved Reply:

Right, Stephen, it's not either-or. As I noted above, the problem St. John is addressing is that of an attachment to being-ness and a conflating of this experience of inner resting in one's own inner spirit with that of contemplation and the Being-ness of God. There were some pretty bizarre teachings that came out of this movement, which was eventually condemned in the 17th C.

I'll get back to you about the Keating quote and some of the problems I'm having with it.

Moved Reply:

Note, here, the parallel between the quote by Keating above (1994 book) and one by Bernadette Roberts from her first edition of The Experience of No-Self (1993). In an endorsement of BR's book, Thomas Keating wrote: "An amazing book, it clarifies the higher regions of the spiritual path." (back cover of book).

In this book, BR, reflecting back on her journey, wrote that the journey begins "with the Christian experience of self's union with God... But when the self disappears forever into this Great Silence, we come upon the Buddhist discovery of no-self..." (p. 109) "Then finally, we come upon the peak of Hindu discovery, namely: "that" which remains when there is no self is identical with "that" which Is, the one Existent that is all that Is." (p. 109)

Compare this quote with Keating's above and you will see that he had (at least at that time) endorsed this perspective of a personal, unitive self giving way to a no-self giving way to the Hindu experience of God as all that is (including oneself, presumably).

The problem with this is that it just doesn't jive with what we see in the risen Christ, nor with NDEs, nor with traditional Catholic teaching. A few brief points, here:

1. Depending on what Keating means by "personal self," here, it's certain that Jesus did not lose his individual human identity with the resurrection. He still knows and relates to his disciples and friends, and they recognize him as Jesus, even though he has been changed.

2. What's the point of theosis (sanctification) if, in the end, even this deified self falls away? A better life on earth? The traditional understanding is that it is the beginning of accommodation to eternal life in God.

3. The traditional teaching is that the human soul is immortal and is the principle of life for the body and psyche. Also traditional teaching is that grace builds on nature without destroying it. The Roberts/Keating scenario suggests not transformation, but annihilation of identity and a pantheistic enlightenment.

4. Jesus did not have to "sacrifice his deified self to become one with the Godhead." The Word is already one with the Godhead, and Jesus, as the incarnation of the Word, subsisted in the Word as its human agent. He already was one with the Godhead by nature.

5. There is an unusual way of speaking of Godhead, here -- as an It, rather than a Who. While Godhead can refer to the divine nature in a metaphysical sense, Christian theology makes no distinction between Godhead and Trinity, as though you can have one without the other. So Jesus' ascension brings him into full, cosmic union with the Word, but we may presume that his immortal human soul continues to exist in the same manner as other human souls do in eternity.

6. ". . . to be one with God, not just experience it." What's the point of that statement?

7. There is no Godhead "beyond personal and impersonal relationships," as though Godhead were something other than Trinity. Granted, we have to be careful that we do not project our human understanding of "persons" onto the relationships in the Trinity. But Trinity is the deepest revelation into the nature of God that we have been given -- that God is essentially Personal and innately loving. "Personal," here, is not simply a "category," but an indication that God is Some-one moreso than Some-thing, a Who, not simply a That.

8. Why be a Christian if it's just a warmup to the Buddhist and Hindu experiences? Why not just be a Hindu and get it over with?

Moved Reply:

quote:

Why not just be a Hindu and get it over with?

Brilliant. You tell 'em, Phil.

Good points, though. Truth is, I don't know. I'm not intelligent enough to work it all out. I just like a good slanging match .

Ok, to be serious for a second. I wonder if Jesus' identity, intact after resurrection, is distilled, refined, subsumed back into Sonship, Wordness, which he never left, as he ascends deeper into the Father and his own divinity, although still able to reveal himself mystically and Eucharistically as Jesus. Again, both. His personal identity and Ultimate Reality, That which Is, manifest or hidden accordingly.

Moved Reply:

- correction to my post above; The Experience of No-Self, by Bernadette Roberts, was published in 1984. It included the glowing endorsement by Fr. Keating quoted above.

- - -

Glad you dropped the facetious tone, Stephen. I wasn't going to respond to that.

The status of the sacred humanity of Christ is a mystery beyond our comprehension. But if we say that Jesus had an immortal human soul, then we need to also affirm that his soul lives on, even as his localized presence in a physical body becomes fully immersed in the Word through the Ascension. Thus is he "present everywhere and in everything," as Fr. Keating notes -- the cosmic Christ. But what does not follow is that he has thus lost his personal, deified self to such an extent that there is nothing left of the identity and memory of the earthly, pre-ascension Jesus. What would be point of the resurrection if that were the case? The resurrection is Jesus' victory over sin and death, and he makes it clear in the appearances that the one who is risen is the same one who was crucified (and who will return to judge the living and the dead).

To your speculation, now . . . Jesus doesn't ascend "deeper into the Father" but into the Word. Maybe that's what you meant. Ascending into "Godhead" would also be accurate enough. His immortal human soul becomes cosmically diffused, so that whereever the Word is giving rise to creation, there, too, is Jesus present. I think you're onto something in pointing out that he could, even in this state, manifest to us personally and Eucharistically. The resurrected Jesus (prior to Ascension) demonstrated that he could come and go as he pleased, and I'm sure that still must be the case. So he can be cosmically present, Sacramentally present and even personally present to us as he so chooses to be, the ascension giving him unlimited modes of expression without annihilating his soul and its innately subjective human consciousness (which, in his case, is still united with his resurrected body).

Moved Reply:

Sorry about the tone. A bit overtired here.