Harry Baird wrote: ↑Mon Mar 13, 2023 4:55 amI've always been puzzled by this about you, that you are in a way both a theist and an atheist. You have had, and in a way endorse the divine implications of, mystical or spiritual experiences, yet at the same time you more or less explicitly reject the objective existence of a deity or deities, preferring to see deity or deities as (mere[1]) "inner", human constructs.
What you are puzzled by is, I think, that we have a severe designation and description problem that we cannot resolve. As a side-note I have been reading
On the Nature of the Gods by Cicero (while simultaneously realizing, though others seem to be blocked in this, for reasons incomprehensible to me, that it is highly likely
I am a later incarnation of Cicero, but let's leave that aside for the moment ...) But let me jump ahead and say that any description of god or gods will immediately bog one down into the problem of description.
So for example you say you are a dualist in something of the Gnostic sense. God might wish to but god cannot intervene in this world -- he does not have the power. My view? You are describing a sentimental and lyrical sense of things, perhaps even emotional. But try to describe
what, where, who and
how that god you define (the 'pole' of the duality) and you will bog down within an impossible explanation problem. If you review a few pages of my former essay [when I was Cicero) you will note that the 'description problem' is quite acute.
So, yes, I am a theist in some sense: I have had experiences of the solipsistic nature you accurately described which make it largely impossible that I would deny 'divinity' in the actual, and original, sense of the world going back to Indo-European designations that are at the root of our language. But what is language? A set of assignments and designations. The way one's sense of 'what is' is described. Our language is a graveyard in a sense, or a 'living garden' if you are in a more positive mood, that expresses our perceptual system.
Does 'god' operate in Nature? Say in a world where no men are? How? Why? There is no need of a god who intervenes in Nature. Nature carries on in its biological and mechanical way and animal-cunning is the brightest light that
shines in it. Do you agree or disagree?
Cunning intelligence is actually a Greek category (and once I went into this on that other forum you participated in).
My categories are pragmatic: I can define the effect of something I sense to be 'divine' that operates within my consciousness. But if that is so everything depends on 'honing my relationship to that'. It is internal, not external.
I fully agree that The World and life's manifestation is absolutely beyond comprehension. Existence and 'that things exist' is the thing that we do not seem to examine squarely. So who does? Mystics do. And then they jibber-jabber about what they believe they are seeing or experiencing and try to apply categories and designations which are romantic and poetic (or simply mystic).
I don't have the time to go into it but I have come to realize that -- for me in any case -- a good way to appreciate the Christian mythology is to see that Christ is best understood as the disembodied Osiris, and Mary as Isis who collects and assembles the scattered pieces of the (divine) body. The figure of Isis is 'the goddess' and the goddess is Nature (as in De Rerum Nature: see the opening to Lucretius). The goddess is feminine as nature is corporeal and feminine.
Masculinity, and the mind, and the conceptual mind, is what I think we are dealing on essentially here. That which
sees, that which organizes perception, that which
designates.
This is sort of an aside but if there is power in iconographic representations, and I think there is, the Christian/Catholic imago of Mary pining over the dead Christ (and much of the latent symbolism in the entire iconographic set) has deep resonance in our Occidental consciousness. The issue arises through literalism -- taking it all literally.
Once one begins to see through Story one can actually see what the story is representing. But as I say, and I think it true, the only field that has relevance is our
inner field. And the reference to interject here is, again, that of Plato's Cave. What are we seeing? How do we see? And what does our seeing induce in us.
When I was Cicero other business drew my attention away from these issues and, alas! I could not develop my ideas. But now, finally, I have put all of this into my
Ten Week Email Isis-Osirus Revelation Course.
nest — or rile the Hornet — but Lacewing doesn’t actually know what she means. She seeks to dissolve designation. They pain her, they bother her, because of the nature of implicationi. 
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