by Doug Esse

The following is my response to a friend and fellow spiritual seeker who reacted to something I had said in my interview on BATGAP with Rick Archer. Warning for readers who prefer (as I do, actually) clearer and simpler prose. My bottomline point, in case you’d rather just skip my response, is that I am arguing for a kind of relative-absolutist lens to think about things such as awareness, consciousness, being, and becoming.  Becoming begets being, as it were.

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Friend: Speaking of God. In the video, you mentioned a popular understanding of why Creation/God created, and it is to experience Itself through our eyes and ears and thus have the experience of learning new things and thus growing in stature. This implies that the purpose in being created is to serve as God’s eyes and ears. I always had a problem with this understanding. To me, God is so incomprehensible that to believe God needs us in order to grow diminishes the nature of God. Why can’t God be everything, know everything, be everywhere, be all powerful and at the same time experience everything we experience, without the caveat that God needs these experiences? So then, what does God need us for? God can’t have a relationship without another party. God needs us for relationship. So God created creation in order to experience relationship. God knows what relationship is, but to experience it, engage in it, there has to be another party. And underlining that relationship is a Love that is totally unconditional and incomprehensible.

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Doug: You lay it out clearly.

I love speculating about these things, too. My best way of grappling with the themes you lay out are informed by process thought (ie A. N. Whitehead), Law of One material, and Catholic and Protestant theological scholarship that critique the platonic (ie Greek philosophical) architecture that structures Augustine, Aquinas, and indeed the prevailing Western substance interpretation. And of course, my own experience. 

To begin, I recall Richard Rohr’s story of the very last day of his academic preparation. His brilliant Franciscan professor who had taught them philosophy and theology for years walked out of the door, then stopped and turned to his class and said, “And just so you are clear, Christian theology has more to do with Plato than with Jesus.” 

Pre-Modern and Modernity’s worldview, including Newton, DeCarte, and the two theological giants mentioned above understood God and creation from a substance position. They reasoned that God and creation consisted of two different substances; the latter as derivative of the former. In this worldview, God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and needs nothing. God’s immanent nature is conscious without the need of creation. God’s economic nature is pure gift—though not necessary. 

However, as process theology developed in order to grapple with quantum discoveries in science, an important nuance emerged to the conventional substance worldview. 

That nuance was this: consciousness is the crowning jewel of cosmogenesis that arises posteriori —that is, subsequent to an initial instinct to know the self—rather than a priori , prior to creative expression. 

Consciousness is a novel arising, the reconciling force as the first fruit of the cosmic law of three, that reconciles a contrast between the affirming force and the negating force. Said succinctly:

–first the instinct to create,

–then the expression of that instinct which is creation-that-creates,

–then the instinct to relate,

–then the instinct to figure out what is occurring,

–then thinking-together (con-scious) emerges.

Without the process, there is no withness, thus there is no consciousness. There is no knowing without the movement from unfocused pure awareness (that is literally not conscious ) to an instinct to focus awareness into a singular desire to experience.  God doesn’t know and can’t know Godself without contrast between unmoved pure awareness and movement. Thus, God needs contrast (relationality) in order to become being, itself. In this way, becoming is being; process precedes substance. 

I’d say that the purpose of the creative evolutionary advance is not to grow in stature, but rather, to: live, live well, and live better.

To live is to bid for freedom, as Whitehead said. Freedom from what? Freedom from pure awareness that cannot experience to freedom for the capacity to know (gnosis)–and knowing only happens when there is and knowing with, or consciousness. Relationality is it.

Also, it seems to me that the initial thrust of the living instinct (God’s Original Thought, according to Ra) is asymmetrical by nature.  One doesn’t grow, nor can experience. Two is too stable… no growth. Three–yes, three. This is the eternal foundational catalyst that gets life and the evolution of gnosis rolling. This is the Law of Three, and all that. 

To live well is to momentarily bring the asymmetry into a balance and harmony both internally and externally. This is when what is always and everywhere true–God’s eternal unity–is brought into an omega point somewhere, sometime, by someone(s) in spacetime. As Whitehead said, “The many become one and are increased by one.” This notion echoes Ra’s statement that the Original Desire (of the Creator) is that all entities seek and become one. As harmony and balance are achieved, the lessons on how this occurred, and what was learned, are distilled and applied, metanoia-ing (expanding gnosis through the process of transformation) the nature of the Original Thought, as it were. The affective result of this onening is joy. Period.

To live better is to pulsate once again the Original Thought—the instinct to create, which is now more complexified and intense.  God’s conscious awareness is the gestalt of all of the fractals of God experiencing themselves and co-creating their own creative advances.  Here, the asymmetry of the Law of Three punctures through balance and harmony to create the catalyst for further wholeness-making.

God’s transcendence is not a priori consciousness.  God’s transcendence is the instinct to focus pure potential into a focusing of will to experience the self–or as Ra calls it, “the focusing principle.”  The first focus of pure potential is the Primal Logos.  The Primal Logos is the “first fruit” (ref 1 Corinthians 15:20) of the Creator’s focusing principle.  The Primal Logos is the Creator’s means through which the Creator eternal experiences the Creatorself.  The Primal Logos is the creative principle.  What is created is the means through which the Creator knows the Creatorself.  Thus, the experience of a created thing’s arising is both the experience of that created thing and that of the Creator as that thing, yet transcendent to that thing. So we see that God does depend upon creation to experience Godself, to know Godself. 

For fun, I’ve been playing with this definition of God: The Creator is the What, the How, and the Who of Eternal Becoming.

• Cosmic Christ