subject: Reology and Identity [print this page] Reology and Identity Reology and Identity
As physical creatures, it is difficult for us to visualize identity that does not have physical form. We just do not relate well to perceiving identity that has no relationship with our five physical senses. The greatest challenge for this is visualizing God. Instead, when we picture God, we think of Him in our image and likeness, as all our art of God shows. Our reasoning for this is since He stated He made us in His Image and Likeness, we think it must be reciprocal. Besides, how do you paint the Image of God if He is not physical?
What really is the Image of God? Biblically, it is that of an incomprehensible intelligence that created everything that exists by merely thinking it into existence. Genesis clearly depicts this. His Image and Likeness is the ability to make whatever He wishes to appear physical, as well as all the relationships, limitations, and physical laws that govern all these creations and their relationships with each other.
When He created the heavens and the earth, and every living creature, it automatically included all the structures each of these are composed of from the sub atomic to the molecular, and included the limitations each have with each other. In other words He created everything that is in all its entirety and complexity.
Last, but not least He created Man, male and female. He created us, and only us, in His Image and Likeness. That means He gave us the ability to create just as He created. We are His co-creators therefore. And this is exactly what we've been doing from the beginning. When we rejected God in Eden and choose to go our own way rather then allow Him to provide for us, we've taken this ability and added to what He created all the creations that have ever originated from mankind. While everything He created is perfect, we fall considerably short of incorporating this in our own creations. This is to let us know Who is perfect, and who just wishes they were.
How does this help us understand His Image and Likeness and how it is incorporated in our own identity?
We must refer back to Reology and The Three Grand Illusions to understand this.
As we have already realized, matter and energy, and space and time are illusions, but with definite real appearance as physical reality. This of course must include the matter and energy of our own physical form, and the space and time we use to give it physical appearing function. It also must include the process with which we have perceptive reality; the seeming ability to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell that confirms the reality of matter and energy in space and time. This is all only possible because of this present instant of observation. Even though all of physical reality is an illusion, in this present instant of observing it, it is real and valid appearing, and conforms to all the ideas we have of physical reality. But only in the right now.
Everything we think about or are aware of that does not appear as a physical event in the present instant is not valid physical reality. Instead it is the ideas we have of physical reality that we refer to as we memory or imagination. There simply is no other time but the present moment of observation, regardless if we are observing what we perceive as real or if it is remembered or imagined experience. What makes this so difficult to comprehend is the fact that the only time we can try to comprehend this is in this present instant of observation, which is also the instant we are physically focused. It is a conflict in which we are trying to deny physical identity while we are convinced we are physical identity in the same instant. We can't even imagine something without seeing ourselves as physically real. We can't have any experience, real or otherwise, without it including the conviction we are each physical creatures in a physical reality.
Our individual identity and reality is something we each co-create with God, through the ability He gave us; through His Image and Likeness. While this may not be easy to understand, we have no difficulty understanding how we create new experience as physical identity operating in a physical reality. We know our discoveries and inventions and how we devised them. It is no different then our creative ability as God's co-creators. What makes it seem difficult to understand is we are not used to seeing ourselves as who we each are without physical form. Like God, our true identity is not physical. The physical forms we so endear ourselves to are actually just the ideas we have of ourselves as physical creatures, just as all of physical reality is just God's idea of how it should appear to us.
While we can create new experience, it can only be within the limitations God established for us. This includes God's limitations on the laws of nature, physical ability, heredity, genetics, etc. We must first discover these limitations before we can use them in our creations. This occurs based upon our own understanding of reality and our own ideas of our ingenuity. God tells us that taking this path is not in our best interests, that relying on His Word is the wisest choice to make, but He doesn't prevent us from defying Him either. He allows us the free will that also is part of His Image and Likeness.
If it were not for our conviction that it is our objective experience that is absolute, we would easily understand our non physical identity as being our true identity, and that our physical form originates from it. Reology has clearly shown how there is no objective reality. It is just illusion we co-create with God to make it seem unquestionably real. What value would a physical reality have if it did not appear as real and absolute? It would be just imaginative, like a game, and there would be no motivation to take it seriously.
We have direct evidence of this in the make believe games we play as children. We know we are pretending to make the game true, yet most of all we know we are pretending. We make extra effort to "act" out our role in such games as if they were real, yet we know we are acting. While we may play the game seriously, we also know it is not real. We know it is make believe and do not take it as seriously as we do when we are not pretending. On the adult level, we have theater where actors make their best efforts to make us believe what we are watching is real, but despite how real the theater may seem, we know it is just acting, we know it isn't real.
The only real experience we can have is completely subjective. No experience can be perceived in any other way. Despite how real the physical senses appear to us, they each only represent ideas we have about physical reality. It is spiritual being, the ability to have conscious awareness, that is the core of our identity. This is the identity in which God made us and it is in His Image and Likeness.
