The tension between the transcendant God with his laundry-list of omni-properties and the personal God with His practical rationality, volitions, actions, and capacity for regret, has been troubling me lately. To will any action, to have a regret, to have anything but complete satisfaction, is to will that the world be transformed. Such a will is only coherent from within a world whose nature is impermanence. So it seems a personal God must be bound to the endless impermanent present like the rest of us. But how are we supposed to square this with the promised transcendant Omniman? Are they related to each other as parent and child? Or has God, in His personal manifestation, only forgotten Himself?
Thought Number 2:
Impermanence is a necessary condition of the will to action, but is dissatisfaction? Our will is often accompanied by desire and aversion, by dukkha, but must it be? Does an enlighetened person 'will'? My intuition is that, like a plant we may be whole, healthy, free of defect, complete in our satisfation, yet still grow. Our nature is to reconstitute ourselves through time and space, and when these give us room to grow, if we are indeed free of defect, we transform to fill it. Such transformation recruits the will -- all transformation recruits the will -- but seems empty of dukkha.
Thought number 1:
The tension between the transcendant God with his laundry-list of omni-properties and the personal God with His practical rationality, volitions, actions, and capacity for regret, has been troubling me lately. To will any action, to have a regret, to have anything but complete satisfaction, is to will that the world be transformed. Such a will is only coherent from within a world whose nature is impermanence. So it seems a personal God must be bound to the endless impermanent present like the rest of us. But how are we supposed to square this with the promised transcendant Omniman? Are they related to each other as parent and child? Or has God, in His personal manifestation, only forgotten Himself?
Thought Number 2:
Impermanence is a necessary condition of the will to action, but is dissatisfaction? Our will is often accompanied by desire and aversion, by dukkha, but must it be? Does an enlighetened person 'will'? My intuition is that, like a plant we may be whole, healthy, free of defect, complete in our satisfation, yet still grow. Our nature is to reconstitute ourselves through time and space, and when these give us room to grow, if we are indeed free of defect, we transform to fill it. Such transformation recruits the will -- all transformation recruits the will -- but seems empty of dukkha.