Knowing the Unknowable

Theosis > Apotheosis: The Evolution of Divine Consciousness via Human Beings

This post is built on a few comments from recent posts, in a dialogue with Roger That, after the recent Courtenay Turner podcast, “Being vs. Becoming.”

“They who received it (the light) could reveal themselves as children of God.” John 1:12.

The implication of this seems clear: Christ was the firstborn Son of God, but not the last.

Those who receive the light are the “enlightened” (or en-Logo-ed) humans, though they seem quite far off; just as “Johannine Christianity” seems far off.

There is a sort of Christian humility I find difficult to distinguish from abject servility and a denial of the Logos-light within. It is also complemented by a sort of “pride in humility.”

Can anyone really fully receive the light of God while down on his knees?

Enlightenment as Natural State

For Dave Oshana, enlightenment was the natural state that few seemed to ever get to experience, even though they were in it, zero distance from it. It entails the soul fully landing in the body. That seems somewhat consistent with Pauline doctrine, which certainly indicates different levels of human beings, though not pertaining to their “worth.” The higher serves the lower, being dependent on it, just as the animals depend on plants that depend on minerals.

It’s possible, therefore, that the very idea of “enlightenment” being “high status” is an unenlightened perspective. Jesus never asked to be worshiped. He washed the apostles’ feet. He became sin.

Following Steiner (and the thesis of both my latest and next book), there are two “curves” of consciousness-evolution: long-term evolution (the past millennia), and short-term devolution (the past few centuries), and they are inextricably bound up together.

This may be mirrored by how, in an individual human life, we move from “pure” infant consciousness, through adolescence, to maturity and old age, and there is the possibility, both of individuation and wisdom, and of being increasingly “stuck” in materiality and socialization. Ditto, collectively speaking.

As the human race-consciousness evolves from infancy (group soul) to adulthood, the Christ-I, there is the shadow of an Ahrimanic, calcified ego identity (complemented by a dissociative Luciferic super-ego), in which the “individual” (non-individualized but separate) consciousness is lower, not higher, than the animal/group soul, because it is part of a machine-created hive-mind.

This is the “matrix” womb out of which it must push to be born. “To he who has awareness, will be given; to him who has not, will be taken even the little that he has.”

The evolution of consciousness reverberates through the entire Bible, from OT to NT, to the final cry of Jesus on the cross, rejected by the (self-cursed) Hebrew tribal identity, “forsaken” by an external God as the necessary prerequisite for the inner God to be born: “Tetelestai,” it is finished. The Jews then take the blood of Christ’s death onto their own heads.

Both salvation and damnation is “of the Jews.”

This lens (that of evolution of consciousness) makes the whole Bible cohere in new ways.

Meeting Adam

Do we really think if we met Adam in the Garden, as we are, we would share the same modality of (self-) awareness or be perceiving reality in an even remotely similar way? (Or Neanderthal man, if you prefer a more scientific view.) I confess to being confounded by the insistence of certain Christians that consciousness has not evolved, when the evidence is so irrefutable that it has. But I also confess to not understanding the resistance, which is clearly more ideological than logical, because I don’t fully understand the ideological reasons.

It seems to have something to do with a fear that belief in human consciousness evolving inevitably leads to the Gnostic, transhumanist conceit or hubris, of humans evolving themselves into gods—or worse still, God.

Perhaps the most pernicious effect of these distorted practices and philosophies is that they have effectively rendered our true “human potential” as a form of idolatry and pathology? Because the knowledge came prematurely, the inevitable contraction against it has rendered the knowledge itself impure or “heretical.”

Consciousness does not wish to evolve and so it either regresses or digs in its heels and refuses to move.

If angels are “mere” extensions of God and fundamentally interchangeable (as in OT texts), why not men? The notion of an eternal, unbridgeable gulf between God and the creation, and God’s creatures, seems unnecessary and faintly punitive. It is on the same spectrum as the idea of “eternal damnation”—it wishes not only to assert a schism in consciousness but to make it permanent and unhealable.

I suspect the abuse of “gnostic” ideas has been particularly effective in causing Christians to become unbalanced towards the passive-worship/faith side of things—humble but also rather spineless. Both gulfs, however (that of Hell and that of a creation separate from God) are 100% neutralized by the Pauline promise that “God will become all in all” (Corinthians 15:28).

What is Consciousness Anyway? (God’s Plan for Man)

There is admittedly an epistemological problem with the term consciousness, since it requires a certain “hubris” even to talk of it at all, because to do so assumes we have defined it—and how can consciousness define itself? Compared to what?

Consciousness in its highest sense is the basis for everything, and so it cannot really be defined, or define itself; it can only express itself and its expression then become pointers towards itself. But not necessarily limits; and definitions always require limits.

Death is the defining limit of “life,” shadow the defining limit of light, and unconsciousness our only means to recognize consciousness. Yet unconsciousness, like death, like darkness—and paradoxically, like objective reality—is a known unknowable.

If our only way to define consciousness is through its expressions, we can deduce the reality of consciousness evolution by the evolving forms of human expression that, obviously, pertain to human culture, and thus to human consciousness.

If consciousness is the fundamental quality and quantity of all existence, and hence is eternal and pre-existent, like the Trinity, then human beings (who are not pre-existent, at least not in their biological form) are a form of expression of primary consciousness.

Gnosticism (becoming) has creation as an emanation/extension of God; Judaism and Christianity and Islam (being) regard this as heresy, because they insist on a fundamental and final, unbridgeable separation or distinction between the Creator and the creation.

The notion that the truth might be both-and, and not either-or, is unacceptable to the latter group, though I suspect that the former, the “becoming” gnostic, at least insofar as they are disorganized and more individuated, can more often allow for the both-and perspective, and thus are closer to the truth—though ironically, this is a kind of agnostic truth of knowing that such things are unknowable.

Yet there are further paradoxes, because the gnostic perspective is closer to Steiner and occultism, which does aim to know the unknowables, by systematizing truth into a kind of hierarchical arrangement, while Christianity and the others do assert a kind of humility before God, i.e., that mere humans cannot ever pretend to know, much less have, the Mind of God.

Steiner’s occultist (i.e., literalized) model of the evolution of consciousness sees human beings as the means for God (“divine consciousness”) to develop self- or ego-awareness. Hence the Christ-event pertains to God becoming (a) man, so Man (individual men) can become God (the consciousness of divine to human become a continuum). Yet this is entirely “kosher” with conventional Christian perspective! So what’s the problem?

Is there an actual school of study that argues that human consciousness is not evolving, I wonder? Or is it just an ideological reaction against something? Or just a case of people not having thought about it enough? Because, once I started thinking about it, it quickly seemed to me a self-evident proposition.

(The only way in which I do understand confusion is that we appear in many ways to be devolving, but I addressed this at the start.)

Does God Need Humans?

My recent conversation with James True ended with his summary about the evolution of consciousness. Ironically, this is where we fully agree, yet so many of the ways in which James applied this framework to justify things I think should not be justifiable does give me pause, regarding whether the idea of consciousness evolving might, in some sense, be a bad idea?

Yet is it valid to judge the truth of a theory based on the ways in which it can be misapplied, or lead to questionable extrapolations? Isn’t this the same as condemning knowledge because it led to sin, or fire because we got burned?

Aren’t all profoundly true ideas potentially dangerous, in precise proportion to their profundity?