Reflections in Italy

I always find holiday breaks a good time for the reception of key insights.

Intuition - especially of the most passive holistic kind - is aided by a relaxed frame of mind. Also material that had been incubating in the unconscious for some time can often be released through the welcome change of environmental context that a holiday can bring.

While sitting in a tour bus on route to Venice watching the fields everywhere seemigly planted with vines, I received a particularly clear and extended intuition of the nature of our true relationship to God.

Unfortunately in many traditions the master/servant kind of treatment has been over emphasised (certainly in my own Catholic faith). God is thereby set apart - literally as the almighty - to which we human beings, as undeserving creatures, owe everything (and always fall short in terms of our gratitude). In a certain sense this is correct. However our true relationship with God is much more intimate than this for quite simply our essential being is God. So ultimately God is not in any way apart or superior to us for this mysterious reality is our true ever present being (as it essentially exists).

Of course in practice we face severe limitations in attaining proper realisation of essential reality. Phenomenal experience - which enjoys a merely relative and ultimately paradoxical existence - exercises considerable hold over our minds.

Though ultimate reality - in what we might refer to as God - is of an ineffable spiritual nature that is always simply present, to a considerable extent we tend to identify meaning with merely secondary expressions conditioned by phenomenal spacetime.

Indeed in the deepest sense, sin really represents a restricting of perspective so that meaning is unduly identified with merely limited secondary phenomena. This thereby blots out the simple light of spirit ever present (as the very source and end of all such phenomena).

In the simple realisation of God (as one's very nature) is based true equality because one's own essential identity (as God) is inseparable from the corresponding realisation of the same identity of every living thing in creation likewise essentially as God. In the full realisation of this mystery (phenomenal) creation would thereby pass away, revealing all that is as simply present in spirit (i.e. God).

However it is the very nature of creation that this ultimate clear vision cannot be fully attained (while conditioned by phenomenal experience). So everything in creation must die giving way to continual rebirth (as this endless quest for God realisation in evolution continues).

I find it truly wonderful given that we are still in all probability at a very early stage in evolution here on Earth that the capacity has already developed in the human species to realise (however faintly) that experience of an ultimate destiny in God - indeed as God. Although truly incomprehensible as pure mystery to mind, yet it is a meaning that readily resonates with the deepest core of our being.