World of Love Sess4 - Our Job is to Become the God-self Within Us

The seed of God is in us. ... God himself has sown this seed and inserted it and bourne it. Thus while this seed may be crowded, hidden away, and never cultivated, it will still never be obliterated. It glows and shines, gives off light, burns, and is unceasingly inclined toward God. -Meister Eckhardt ²

Put in Jungian terms I might ask: When I go beyond the personal unconscious, beyond the collective unconscious, beyond the archetypes, what do I find? And in answer to this all the great religions speak of a mystery which they call by various names: the Buddha nature, Brahman and Atman, the divine spark, the ground of being, the the centre of the soul, the Kingdom of God, the image of God, and so on. They use different terms but all, I believe, are pointing to a single reality. -William Johnston ³

In this session we explore what it means to say salvation is, ultimately and in its essence, becoming like God. I know this seems to leap over prior questions of faith and justification. But this takes off from the obvious to deal with the neglected area of sanctification, that is, god's ultimate purposes and ends for us.

The shape of this godlikeness which God wishes us to become is the pattern of the four-fold structure of God's kind of wholistic over-flowing love (agape):

These are the four basic polarities in our life. Where these cross we are crucified daily. They are knit up into unity only within the wholistic core we can call the god-self.

The word polarity means, for example, that freedom and relatedness are opposites which seemingly can never be brought into harmony. How can one be truly free from people and at the same time bound by covenants to them?

The same is true of the other polarity formed by expansion into greater and greater complexity, which seems inevitably to defeat our efforts to be unified and harmonious within.

The god-self does not just work out limited compromises among these two sets of opposites. It unites them in a harmonious unity. This harmony does not eliminate painful choices, but it sets them into a new hierarchy of values.

Mature Love

An example of the fusion of the opposite poles at a higher level would be the way truly mature love between two persons works. A mature lover is related but independent. She does not depend on her lover nor seek to dominate him. She has more facets to her life than this relationship. Her love seeks what is best and highest for the lover as she does for herself, and this the greatest joy of the relationship for her. Seeing the other grow and achieve is a joy as great as that taken in her own growth and creativity. If the relationship ends she grieves but is not devastated, again because there is much more to her life as a whole.

We will return to this chart of polarities repeatedly to show how the god-self is also the god-pattern; it is the center within which human beings incarnate the innermost being of God. We have within us, by the grace of God and other people, the structure of God without possessing or needing to possess God's infinite power and knowledge.

Plateaus of Rest

One aspect of this godlike self is the expansion of the boundaries of the self to take in all people and eventually all of time and space. But salvation also involves a deepening and strengthening of the other three poles of our wholeness: empathy and compassion, freedom, and inner unity.

Expanding the boundaries of the personality requires a constant incorporation of threatening strangeness, what Paul Tillich called non-being. The movement from one stage to the next is often like a leap into nothingness. This in-pouring of the unknown at each new stage attacks our inner unity. It sometimes seems to threaten our very existence.

One reason why it is necessary for us to expand by stages is that we must periodically stop and rest and find a new centering at the higher level before we can expand further. Like the chambered nautilus which moves successively to larger and larger chambers of its shell, each stage becomes for us a new home and eventually also a prison.

The God-self

The god-self is what holds us together throughout these recurring disruptions. This is a wholistic core self, a heavy gravitational center which helps prevent us from flying apart.

Historically, this inner spiritual self has been called different names, depending on who was speaking.

For theology, it starts as the image of God within us. To some psychologists it is the true self, the core self, the wholistic self. Philosophers speak of the ground of being. Quakers and mystics have called it the Inner Light, the Seed, or “that of God in us.” It is reflected in the Hindu concept Atman-Brahman and the Buddhist idea of the Buddha self.

I do not include the word "soul" because it is used more to describe the whole personality while the god-self is seen as the wholistic part of the total self and its systems.

I am not suggesting that all of these views define the inner reality the same way I do. They reflect an intuition common to many people in history. And each of them defines it according to his world view, scientific, religious, mystical, or whatever.

The god-self is not a soul in the traditional sense. There doesn't seem to be any ectoplasmic self which survives the death of the brain. It seems better to think of ourselves as a psycho-physical unity of body, mind and spirit. When the body dies, our consciousness and memories die. This does not mean the individual ceases to be. We all swim in the sea of God's being. We cannot by any means fall out of it. A modern understanding of hell would be to have to exist within God without being able to understand or experience the divine love.

Eternal life does not depend on some indestructible kernel within us. We continue to exist beyond physical death as personal centers within the divine being. It would be better to say we will exist as interpersonal centers within God, centers open fully to and in continual intimate communication with other beings.

The god-self is the inner reality through which we find and express our likeness to God. It is simultaneously the fulfillment of our humanity in freedom, inner coherence, compassion, and universal perspective.

To be like God is to become free of all inner and outer constraints and pressures except agape; it is to be related to all beings and to nature in compassion, caring and nurture; it is to extend across the cosmos in consciousness and concern; and it is to be unified and harmonious within oneself.

Note how similar this is to Berdyaev's statement:

Here we meet the fundamental paradox in the existence of personality. Personality must construct itself, enrich itself, fill itself with universal content, achieve unity in wholeness in the whole extent of its life. But for this, it must already exist. There must already exist that subject which is called upon to construct itself. Personality is at the beginning of the road and it is only at the end of the road. Personality is not made up of parts, it is not an aggregate, not a composition, it is a primary whole, which is not brought out of anything and not put together from anything. The form of personality is integral, it is present as a while in all the acts of personality, personality has a unique, and unrepeatable form, gestalt. ⁴

Berdyaev uses the word personality to mean that within human beings which makes us free persons rather than sub-humans in bondage to cultural brain-washing. He is referring to that spiritual center which he elsewhere calls the God-man. This is person-ality in contrast to all the objectivized, socialized parts of the complex self.

The god-self is center and salvation.

The Image of God

We are created, the author of one of the Creation stories tells us, in the image of God.

Traditionally, the image of God includes our intelligence, our ability to reason. Most theologians have seen it as a kind of ability to receive God's love and respond to it. Emil Brunner spoke of it as "addressibility," a capacity for relationship with God. ⁵

Within this complex bundle of conflicting drives, desires and voices we call the self, where does the image of God reside and in what language does it speak? If it is, as Brunner suggests, a capacity for relationship, who or what is capable of such relating?

I am suggesting that in order for us to hear and relate to God, there has to be within each of us already a self-system which fits into God because it is, at least in its shape or pattern, an incarnation of God's inner nature.

Kohlberg's system helps us understand scientifically the process of expansion. In a similar way, the pattern-forming function of the brain helps us see a scientific basis for the formation of the god-self within us and how it is distinct from the other self-systems.

Properly understood, the god-self has roots in the Bible, in philosophy, in theology and philosophy and in modern psychology. It is an idea whose time has come.

Buried Not Damaged

First off, we need to get rid of some historic prejudices about the image of God. I suggest that we try thinking of it not as lost in the Fall (as some Protestants have suggested), or even as defaced (as some Catholic theology maintains), but rather as buried under the clutter of other internal self-systems which operate according to immature and fragmenting values.

It is refreshing then to hear 14th century mystic and preacher, Meister Eckhardt, quoted at the head of this session, speak of the Seed of God within which can be covered up but not eliminated.

Sources of the God-self

The god-self is formed by God in history through people and events.

Much error in theology arises from a misunderstanding of the nature of general revelation, that knowledge of God which is common to all peoples everywhere.

The Bible, from Abraham through Hosea to Jesus, is packed with very human life histories which connect marriage and parent-child relationships to God's revelation. From these love relationships comes the very possibility of thinking of God as loving Parent.

Theology has tended to underemphasize this underground stream of grace, which has constantly fed the forces humanizing us in a powerful yet gentle counter movement to greed and violence.

God put in history from the beginning relationships which speak indirectly but effectively of the inner divine nature.

In addition to this relational compassion side of our godlikeness, there are universal experiences which feed into the other dimensions of wholeness. Peak experiences of ecstasy of joy, mystical experiences of oneness with all reality, children’s laughter in play, and the awesome immensity of the heavens above. These experiences of transcendence and ecstasy feed into the wholistic core self. All of these experiences become magic doorways by which in later years we access the wholistic self and draw, intuitively and even unconsciously, strength and motivation, new revelations, inspirations, creative impulses and ideas.

Nicholas Berdyaev says in several places that the god-self within each of us, which he calls the God-man, has nothing to do with the naturalistic process of evolution.

Evolution, he maintained, is determined, not free. But the god-self is the very center from which our true freedom emerges and is the source, he says, of all the creativity which is genuinely new and not just repetition. It is beyond influence and control by the idolatrous values of the societies around us.

The god-self is unique, it has its own creative sources, different from the demonic self-systems. It is begotten in the wholistic pattern of the divine love. It is God and yet not God. Berdyaev also called it God’s “other self’ and wrote, “(Man) contains within himself a divine element. This element is the divine otherness.” ⁶

It is created by God and yet only with human permission, cooperation, action, and sacrifice. The god-self is the one self which can enter into close communion with God. It is truly divine and truly human, the perfect melding of both.

Because of its unique insulation, the god-self does not absorb the evil, idolatrous values of the societies around it.

The other self-systems within us, on the other hand, incarnate the personality dynamics and patterns which arise from fear and anxiety. They are formed around the value systems of the lower Kohlberg stages, through which we have passed but which we have not left behind.

Out of these sub-selves come hatred, lust for security and power of being, envy, greed and violence. This is an anthropomorphic way of putting it, but the demonic self-systems "lust" after security and being.

Definitions

The divine love can only appear in history with any purity in the form of human personality which is wholistic in the sense of being a unity to the fullest degree of: (1) freedom (autonomy); (2) inner unity; (3) expanded awareness and varied content; and (4) ability to give oneself, spontaneously, in unselfish caring.

This inner wholistic self is begotten from the love of God acting in history through human beings. It is the structure of a kind of being, the only kind which is capable of relating to God, others and self in terms of this divine love. It is the only kind of personality capable of producing this love in others.

I use the term "demonic self-systems" for those organized but fragmentary parts of the total self outside of the wholistic god-self. These are not fallen angels or imps under the control of the devil. These are quasi-personal parts of the self which are formed under the impact of alienation, fear, anxiety, or abuse, and they are the locus of evil within us. This is true not only because they represent immaturity, but because these "persona" of undigested earlier stages of our development are soured and twisted by subsequent experience. Sessions 5 and 6 describe in detail how this takes place. This is admitedly a set of hypotheses, but the author urges the reader to test them against other alternative possibilities.

In the following descriptions I have deliberately put word pictures side by side which come from Bible and theology, philosophy, psychology and everyday experience in order to help bridge across these battling disciplines and make the riches in each available to all.

Locating the True Self

The god-self is not something we can observe directly.

sychologists might perhaps say that since we are immature and fragmented, it is not open to us fully to understand what a wholistic or mature self looks like.

The theologian would say that we are alienated from our true being, in that we live by illusions, partial images and images distorted by sin. Therefore, we can never see this reality which Berdyaev speaks of as "wholly other" until in a very real sense we become it.

The philosopher might say that since the ground of being is that in which all the parts are planted, that in which they find their unity and deeper meaning, it is then rather like the fish which swims in the sea but is unaware of being in water.

All three might agree that since the self is split into parts, we are in various ways and to various degrees unable to see clearly any underlying unity of being or purpose, and doubt therefore that any such thing exists.

Finding the god-self is like locating a planet which we suspect exists only because we can see other planets being pulled by an unseen force. We can intuit a center of gravity within ourselves which must exist because of the health and unity which cannot be otherwise explained.

Why a Self?

Why call the image of God a self? Isn't the self the totality of our being?

Self, personality and ego are used quite differently in various systems. I use self-system to indicate an organized, structured pattern of purpose, meaning and values which exists as a part of our more complex total self. Each self-system has distinctive ways of perceiving, thinking, deciding and sparks its own strong emotions.

Persons have a number of these systems as parts of the total self, each of which has power over us when activated and lived in. The god-self is the one sub-self which is wholistic, healthy. The other parts of the personality are organized also as self-systems, but as fragmentary ones.

Their inner structure or logos does not have a place for all the forms of reality and experience which belong to the healthy self. Their telos, or targeting, is toward ends that are frustrating and abortive.

Each of the fragment self-systems represents values and purposes which arise from wholistic and healthy values and ends, but which have become twisted and soured because of being split off from the whole and from the process of growth and change,. This is why we can define evil as a distorting of something originally good.

How Wholistic Good Prevails

The fragment sub-selves root in the core self and draw power of being from it, while being organized around different values. Ultimate victory over evil takes place because the core self has the structure of being required to endure, while the demonic self-systems do not have power of being sufficient to exist apart from their roots in the core self. The demonic self-systems shrivel away leaving the god-self as the totality.

The demonic sub-selves are rooted in the core self in that they intersect with its wholistic pattern at the point in which their value systems contain fragments of a wholistic good. Nothing good is ever lost.

One example: the death of the demonic self-systems is a shrinking away of the anxious, defensive childishness while the god-self has nourished and kept safe our playful childlikeness all the way along.

In the psychodynamics of the total self, the sub-selves experience all that we go through. But, and this is an important point, each of them has a different filtering system and interpretive framework for evaluating those experiences.

The voices and powers in the self overlap, shift, merge and support or oppose one another. The theological term wrath of God symbolizes, in part, the way forms of evil are often in conflict with one another and frequently cancel each other out.

Two Brain Functions

There is now a scientific basis for formulating hypotheses as to how the patterned self-systems develop, beginning from our earliest experiences. The brain engages in two parallel but different forms of functioning. It processes perceptions in bits and pieces in linear fashion. At the same time, it apparently, processes all the same perceptions in another way. It has the ability to fit material into various patterns in a process which is largely unconscious.

Developmental psychologists puzzle as to how the child is able to move from the simpler to the more complex unless, somehow, the pattern of the more complex structure is already there for the child to land on psychologically.

Dual brain function suggests an answer to this question: the higher cognitive stage had been taking shape for years through the brain's unconscious pattern-forming function. It evidently files all that more complex stuff in another place on the brain’s hard disk with a code for access which pops up when the need arises.

“Another place” doesn't indicate a location in the physical brain, but rather that it is an organizing of material into structures which the conscious mind cannot yet use. By the time the child is ready to move, the next cognitive stage is formed, at least in outline form. At the same time later stages are also being prepared.

This is not as revolutionary an idea as first appears. The child is constantly receiving input from the environment which it cannot yet fit into its linguistic-cultural framework. These ideas/values have connections to one another which the brain intuitively recognizes, so it puts them together into wholes and files them for future reference.

The sub-selves reflect, to a considerable extent the age-related value systems which precede us in our future and remain behind us as we move on, rather like the stepping stones in a garden path.

Wholeness Breeds Wholeness

The god-self is that most mature sub-self, formed in its structure by the input of the god-selves of others around us. It appears to me that it always breeds true. It is transmitted as a total pattern or not at all.

By wholistic structure I mean that its elements fit together harmoniously, reinforcing the strength of the whole, rather like a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome.

The polarities which normally pull apart have their poles reversed, to use the example of magnets, so that they attract rather than repel. The ultimate of personal freedom reinforces the ultimate in ability to be compassionate, and vice versa. The ultimate in expansion of perspective and concern reinforces inner unity and harmony, and vice versa. No matter how far the psyche expands the structural strength of the elements remains because the parts fit together and sustain one another.

There is a place within the god-pattern for every form of reality. It is the one self which has no inner need to shut out any part of reality because of anxiety, not even knowledge of evil.

Berdyaev says we are microcosmos and microtheos. We may not have the brain capacity for infinity but we have a filing system in the core self which can handle all its varieties. This is the logos of the god-self.

Communication and Frequency

How is it that good holds together in the core self and how does it manage to be separate from the other self-systems?

All the self-systems share the same reservoir of biological energy. All of them have access to the computer-like bank of information and experience. What gives the various self-systems their their boundaries is their selectivity as to what is remembered and with what emotional drive.

Each of the sub-selves in a sense receives and broadcasts on a different frequency. Each selects from experience and interprets according to different needs, anxieties, dreams and ambitions.

Or we could compare the process to an audio filter system which entirely eliminates some frequencies of sound and admits others.

The boundaries separating these sub-selves are drawn by the patterns of their quite different value systems and targeted ends. They become operationally separate embryonic self-systems on the basis of the likes, dislikes, prejudices, anxieties and desires of that persona.

Read again the valentines in Session 2 for a practical example of this kind of difference, or the value gaps separating the various gods in the Introduction.

Voices and Filters

For a moment let's not think of these systems as sub-selves. Think of them as filtering systems. Imagine the operational ego, that "I" floating in the stream of consciousness, putting on and taking off earphones which shut out some data and distort some of the rest.

The true self has the ability to hear the intrinsic goodness hidden in events and voices. In this respect the core self is qualitatively different from the demonic self-systems. The fragment selves are limited to receiving and broadcasting on only a few frequencies and often hearing only in squeaks and squawks. The god-self receives on all frequencies. It alone has the ability to understand the truth behind a deception, to re-code or translate these messages wholistically. It broadcasts, however, on only its own wholistic frequency, and only the recoded wholistic truth.

Philosopher John Locke thought the infant is born into the world a totally blank tablet on which, from birth, writings are inscribed. We know now that some patterning has already taken place. Perhaps 15% of our personality makeup comes from inhereted genetic influences. ⁷ Some additional minor patterning takes place within the womb. The embryo feels and hears and experiences rushes of emotion-related chemicals.

It is in the earliest experiences of cuddling and care in the womb and just after birth that the unique outline of the god-self begins to be formed. To what extent the wholistic self-system has a genetically prerecorded pocket we are as yet too ignorant to judge.

This first recordings we might call the Garden of Eden experience. Along with these warm and loving experiences come shocks of fear and anxiety and betrayal, but these are recorded elsewhere. These jangling notes go to the demonic self-systems and start them on the way to their soured and fragmented value systems.

Of the Logos which is Christ, the Gospel of John says, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot understand it at all.” (John 1:5)

The same can be said for the logos of the god-self. It cannot be understood by the fragmented self-systems, but remains a mystery to them. Or, as in the other translation of this passage, neither can their darkness overcome it.

Mixed Messages

When people speak they are often sending on several frequencies simultaneously. A number of inner voices are joining to say the same thing but out of different motivations. We often send messages and then contradict them on another frequency. Or one sub-self sends a message and some gesture we make expresses the opposite opinion of another sub-self. The famous yes which really means no is a case of different sub-selves with different opinions, desires, or motivations.

Messages are received the same way. When we say that a person has a mixed reaction or mixed feelings, it often means that different sub-selves are receiving the same message but reacting to it with characteristically different emotions.

A rough example: the reaction of the inner sub-selves of an adult male to the news of his mother's death:

-3-year-old: Terror! Wail!
-5-year-old: How will I survive now? Who will hold the family together? Anxiety!
-10-year-old: Thank God the tyrant is dead! Triumph!
-16-year-old: My God, did I say that? Guilt!
-45-year-old: In spite of her faults she really cared about me and I'll miss her. Weep!

Putting on and taking off different self-systems has been described as a clicking in and clicking out. Both the person making the shift and observers are often aware of a distinct, sudden shift, as though one person had left the room and another come in.

Gestalt psychologists speak of this as moving one thing to the foreground and shifting others to the back. The Transactional Analysis people speak of it as playing old tapes. I remember reading the account of a 30-year-old women who complained that whenever she visited her sister they both started acting and sounding like teenagers, fighting the same fights. Even their voices became higher pitched.

When we speak of age-determined voices within us, we do not mean that it is the original 2-year-old or 5-year-old who speaks. A sub-self is formed around a value system and may be supported by a number of age levels. When the 40-year-old hears the voice of his 5-year-old it is enhanced and changed by subsequent experiences. It has been reinforced in its fragment values many times, exercised in imagination and day-dreams, built into a system of rationalizations over the years. The 60-year-old man who threw a 2-year-old's tantrum had done this often enough that, even though it made him look foolish, the ecstasy of a binge of rage outweighed the shame.

The woman who heard her husband criticizing her even when he was trying to be complimentary was still fighting her 13-year-old's battle to salvage her self-esteem against parents and older siblings. The 13-year-old's hurts and angers have been rationalized over the intervening years of re-fighting those inner battles. It is this elaborated filtering system which hears innocuous comments as put-downs.

Often compliments do have put-downs in them. We say that a person's comment was half-sincere. Underneath a genuine compliment another sub-self was getting in a dig. The woman's filtering system was trained to hear the dig, but not the compliment.

Grandpa Sam says, "The world is a jungle. Look out for yourself first." But the child who hears this philosophy is also getting a hug and seeing a smile. In the child's filter system, the jungle message goes to the sub-self organizing around that kind of cynicism. The hug and smile go straight to the god-self.

Cell vs. Virus

There is another metaphor which is helpful. A virus is a bit of genetic material akin to that in the nucleus of a cell. It has no cell wall. It can exist outside a cell only in semi-crystallized form. It can reproduce only by invading a whole, healthy cell and drawing on the nutrients and protective structure of that cell.

The normal cell reproduces true to its kind and fulfills its creative purpose. It has logos, orderly structure, and telos, a natural function in a larger whole.

The virus is a fragment, so its communications system, based also on DNA, transmits garbled messages. Viruses appear to have no purpose beyond producing another destructive virus. The virus is a sneak-thief with a passkey to enter a healthy cell and steal its substance.

Because they are fragment parasites viruses can never become whole in the same way a cell has power to exist in harmony with and support of the whole body.

Evil in us is like that. It is nonbeing. It is parasitic on the whole, the good, the loving. The demonic self-systems often hear love as hate so generally get things wrong. They can put nothing right except by accident. This is the sense in which the Bible speaks of sin as blindness, foolishness, stupidity.

Demons

Traditionally, demons lust. Their hungers can never be satisfied. The demonic self-systems, which are perhaps the source of demon mythology, also lust. For example, a child who has been deprived of basic love may grow up to be a person who turns off and drives away one friend after another. Friends sense that she is trying to fill a void within herself which cannot be filled, that she would eat them up and devour a dozen more in one day.

The demonic self-systems lust because they express kinds of hungers which cannot be satisfied. In a biological analogy, they are unable to digest food. They can take in genuine love and their psychic gastric juices turn it into envy, hate, or some other form of poisonous junk.

In communications terms, we could say that whenever we put on the earphones of a particular sub-self, we become that sub-self for as long as we wear that persona. We enter into its interpretation of the world which becomes for that time our way of life. While we are beguiled by its illusions, seduced by its neurotic nonsolutions, we also experience its lust for being as if that self were our total being.

And we restlessly sense its inadequacy. So long as we are jumping from one demonic self-system to another like Little Eva escaping over cakes of ice in the river, we are victimized by these lusts and their attendant anxieties.

Second Death

The god-self is born of the god-selves of other people. It breeds true as a pattern or not at all.

What if the god-self is never formed in a person? What if a child's treatment is so severe that at an early age the god-self is crushed out? Simone Weil suggested at one point that in some people evil becomes so powerful that they cease to be human. If the god-self did cease to exist that person would indeed no longer be human.

I suppose that's what the New Testament calls the second death. The second death is a symbol for what is at the end of the road in traveling away from God, should anyone ever reach the end of that road. To travel away from God is simultaneously to run from our god-selves, to bury them more deeply. If it were possible to become wholly evil, the god-self would presumably simply be crushed out of existence by the weight of the other self-systems. The image of God would have shriveled away and died of neglect. The person would fall into fragments and disintegrate. Having lost its anchor the self would smash to pieces on the rocks.

Are there those who reach the second death and pass out of existence? If so, what can we say about the completeness of God's victory?

The "wolf boy" who was raised in the wilds experienced no human communication until he was half-grown. His humanity, his god-self, was not conferred until he received touch, kindness, attention and other evidences of love.

As with the wolf boy, it is long-term self-giving love expressed in patient attention on the part of parent-surrogates which can bring to birth or rebirth this basic humanity. His god-self was held in trust for him by other people until he was ready and able to receive it. This may have something to say about the long-term prospects of autistic children, the mentally retarded, the sociopath, and the seemingly hopelessly insane.

This is also, I assume, a clue to what we will be doing during all those eons of life beyond this one to keep from being bored and to develop further our own ability to love and be creative as God is. We will continue the conferring of love and power of being upon one another in the same stream of grace which has brought humanity this far. What you and I lack another will give.

We cannot escape from God anywhere because we carry the divine logos within us. It is the personal Hound of Heaven for each of us. Often, our most frenzied and genocidal evil, as in the case of Paul and the stoning of Stephen, is the final desperate resistance to that inexorable inner tug of our true being.

The Issue

Many psychologists and theologians believe in a wholistic self. They do not believe it exists from the beginning. They see it as the mature self which emerges, not perfectly but with increasing strength, as experience is gained. Its wholeness and strength are a culmination of the process of growth.

It is of course true that the god-self is filled with its rich content with the passage of the years, but I believe the outline pattern begins to be formed from the earliest days, perhaps even within the warmth and security of the womb.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to believe that the god-self is with us from soon after birth. Most of the important points in this book still stand if it turns out that the god-self is gradually formed in us as we mature.

To those behaviorists, linguistic analysts, and other latter day nominalists, who consider us all a bundle of knee-jerks anyway, I would only suggest that they listen more carefully to their own inner voices. There is one that is different from all the rest.

A Revolution

Salvation is in the end to become like God. This is the basis for the revolution in theology which we need in our age. It opens the way to the best answers to the question, "What must I do to be saved?" It gives the best guidance to what the church should be and a revolutionary style of life appropriate to the problems of our day.

The elements of this faith are not really new. They appear through the Bible wherever the familial and interpersonal prevail over the magical, mechanical, organic and control-oriented metaphors. We see them in the intuitions of the great sages such as Eckhardt and Julian of Norwich. We find them especially in the thought of the spiritual reformers of the 16th and 17th centuries, as detailed in chapter 16. What is new is the way the pieces are fitted together, and the way they are related to the Kohlberg system of expansion by stages and the unconscious pattern-forming brain function.

The process of salvation is to share as a community of believers with one another the power to overcome and put to death the demonic self-systems and let the god-self be “all in all.”

After examining the nature of evil, we'll come back to the god-self again and its relation to the stages of development. We'll see that it is because we stand on, or within view of, higher levels of moral development today that we are able more clearly to identify and define the god-self and the way to activate it. And that is very much a part of God's eventual success. The gates of hell do not prevail against the pattern of the kingdom of God within us.

Questions for Thought

When you get angry do you act like a seven year old? Do you detect levels of morality and emotional response in yourself? Consider or discuss: how one can in a single day inhabit various sub-selves: The man goes to the office and behaves in an orderly stage 4 manner. On the way home a car cut him off and he goes into the kind of rage he used to experience as a two year old and entering the door he kicks the dog.. At home, he demands in a teenage stage 3 fashion that wife and children serve him like a potentate.

Contact the author : vjross22@hotmail.com

1. Freedom and the Spirit, page 118
2. Quoted in Breakthrough: Meister Eckhardt's Creation Spirituality in New Translation, op. cit., page 118
3. The Inner Eye of Love, Mysticism and Religion, Collins, NY, 1978, page 32
See also:
We are God's Thou and our spiritual self is at the deepest core of our being. ... On a principle similar to that of a percolator coffee pot, the spiritual self bubbles up and transforms the personality. Because each ego state is useful and necessary, the core of being -- which is the loving spiritual self -- can permeate all ego states, he entire person, body and mind. -Muriel M. James, Born to Love, Bantam Books, New York, 1973, page 219
4. Slavery and Freedom, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944, page 23
5. Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption , Systematics, Vol. II, The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1952, pages 77-9
6. The Realm of the Spirit, page 29
7. Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden, Ballantine Books, NY, 1977, page

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