Francis Berger
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God Does Not Know the (Primary) Thoughts of Man

2/8/2022

6 Comments

 
Nearly two years ago, I wrote a post in which I addressed God’s unresponsiveness to human communication, a topic I had encountered occasionally on blogs and comments back then.

In that post, I put forth the notion that God’s perceived unresponsiveness was likely a matter of miscommunication -- that we, as Christians, were the likely source of the miscommunication. I argued that God’s unresponsiveness boiled down to a lack of co-respondence:

By co-respondence, I am not referring to an exchange of letters, but rather to the notion that perhaps God's seeming unresponsiveness to us has a great deal to do with our unresponsiveness to Him.

I cannot believe God has ceased communicating with us. What I can believe is the notion that perhaps our communications with God - those tried and true, good, solid Christian methods of communication that served so well in earlier times - have become inadequate and insufficient in the here and now. By the same token, our adherence to these tried and true methods of communication might very well be making us deaf and blind to God's communication. Simply put, perhaps God does not appear to be responding to us because we are not properly responding to Him.

I believe God is our loving father, and that he desires what is best for his children. Like all loving fathers, God wants his children to grow up and mature. This entails different approaches to and different levels of communication. God has taken this step forward; we in turn, have not. Put another way, God is trying to talk to us like adults, but we continue to talk and listen to him like adolescents (and fairly apathetic adolescents at that). 

Respondence is both a reply and a reaction to stimulus. I am increasingly convinced that God is responding to us, but we are simply not reacting to the stimulus of these responses.

Similarly, God rarely responds to the stimulus of our tried-and-true, conventional communications – not out of callousness or disregard – but because he yearns for us to go beyond these conventional forms of communication and respond in a different way.

I have heard many Christians argue that we do not and cannot know the thoughts of God.

At the same time, I have heard very few Christians suggest that God does not and cannot know the thoughts of man.

Yet that might just be where the root of the problem lies today, especially in terms of communication between man and God.

Dr. Charlton has written extensively about primary thinking -- his own term for what Owen Barfield called Final Participation and Rudolf Steiner called the Imaginative Soul – which he explains in the following way:

I regard the attainment of primary thinking to be the main task of modern Man - but clearly, since the state has been so widely noticed, and is experienced by so many people - merely experiencing primary thinking is ineffectual.

This is because primary thinking is firstly nearly-always brief and very intermittent, and secondly the experience of primary thinking nearly-always misunderstood by normal every day consciousness when that state resumes.

Primary thinking ought to be understood as an experience of the divine way of thinking, intrinsically Good and valid - and superior to other and lower types of normal existence. In primary thinking, we know - and we know directly - truth, beauty and virtue; and in this state we are intrinsically creative; because primary thinking is that which is divine in us, active within the realm of universal knowledge.

Although I have been reading Dr. Charlton’s posts on primary thinking with keen interest over the years, I have struggled to grasp the profundity of primary thinking. In fact, Dr. Charlton’s posts on primary thinking have been similar to my experiences with Berdyaev’s ideas about creativity and the creative act.

On the one hand, I am thoroughly convinced by the percipience of the idea. On the other hand, I find it difficult to comprehend how primary thinking can be accomplished consistently. Furthermore, I often waver when it comes to the “usefulness” and “applicability” of primary thinking in the “real world”.

One of Dr. Charlton’s recent posts on the subject was a bit of an epiphany for me in this regard. Concerning the “usefulness” of primary thinking, Dr. Charlton states:

Thinking is potentially our most complete and valid form of knowing. Therefore, the big question becomes: How this knowing is related to 'reality' - to divine creation?

If thinking turns-out to be in a direct relationship with reality - and not merely having some kind of indirect, 'translated', representational or linguistic 'communication' with reality - then this is of the greatest possible significance.
. . . 

Most thinking is in words, it is language - therefore secondary; therefore either a means to an end, or perhaps illusion.

(This is the level of all public discourse and most private conversation: language responding to language - and nothing more. Our secondary thinking is no better than this.)

But some thinking may be primary, and not in words or any other symbolism; but thinking 'in' the primary creative essence of reality.

This kind of primary thinking is indeed itself reality.

Thus we can come to know reality.
 
I connected Dr. Charlton’s distinction between primary and secondary thinking to my post about miscommunication and the perceived unresponsiveness of God. The second I did, the “usefulness” of primary thinking became undeniably clear.

Christians continue to communicate with God almost exclusively at the level of secondary thinking --which is symbolic, ritualistic, representational and, most significantly, language-based. At the same time, God appears to be communicating with us almost exclusively at the level of primary thinking, but we cannot perceive the communication, let alone respond to it.

To return to my earlier point about God not knowing the thoughts of man, I am certain God understands and knows all the thoughts we have at the level of secondary thinking, but He does not know and cannot know our thoughts at the level of primary thinking for the simple reason that so few of us have engaged in it.

God does not know and cannot know the thoughts of man the primary thinker . . . yet! 

God and Creation is reality and reality exists at the level of primary thinking. When people engage in primary thinking, they are relating to God and Creation in a direct way, without the need for symbols, language, and all the rest of it. More significantly, primary thinking provides God the opportunity to relate to the “reality” of the primary thinker.

In terms of communication, primary thinking offers the potential for reality to meet with, engage in, and relate to reality. God no longer wishes to communicate with us at the level of secondary thinking. He is waiting for us in reality, but our connection to that reality depends solely on our ability to become primary thinkers.

In this sense, primary thinking is akin to a revelation, but man cannot look to God to supply the revelation. It very much appears that God is patiently waiting for to us to supply the revelation ourselves.

6 Comments
bruce charlton
2/8/2022 23:53:17

@Frank - That's a very good insight, which I hadn't formulated explicitly but seems to be entailed.

Having seen your point - I think the reason for the 'breakdown in communication' with God may be even more fundamental and intrinsic than God wanting a new kind of communication. There seems to have been an inevitability about the dwindling power of indirect communication - in the power of symbol, ritual, language etc.

This has affected prayer (transmitting communications to God); and also revelation (receiving communications from God).

Because many people look for a divine revelation in words, visions or some other perceptual mode. Yet our modern alienated consciousness is hardly capable of this, and even when it happens we find such communication ambiguous - and/or doubt its authenticity.

It may be that we are constituted such that the direct knowing of primary thinking is not just desirable, but also the only way we can relate to God.

As prayers in words lose power and revelations in words are rare and confusing - we are called upon to recognize that we may simultaneously enable God to know us and we to know him - by the alignment of motivation and harmony of purpose which makes primary thinking happen.

Thus God may be telling us many things, all the time directly - yet we cannot, or refuse to, notice them; because we continue to demand voices, visions, and other communications which - even if we got them - we would mistrust or misinterpret.

Reply
Francis Berger
2/9/2022 11:27:11

@ Bruce - Yes, those are excellent points. When I re-read my post this morning, I realized my observations about secondary thinking in relation to God were too extreme. Perhaps it's not a case of no longer valid, but more a case of somewhat inadequate because it is no longer supported by primary thinking.

To use Barfield's terms, Original Participation was the state in which man was completely absorbed in and part of reality. Secondary thinking was all but absent. As we emerged from that form of consciousness, symbols and language began to dominate, but that representational "world" was still infused with and supported by some semblance or vestige of primary thinking. Put another way, the subject still permeated the object -- or the internal was still visible in the external.

The alienation of modern man marks the virtual obliteration of the internal in favor of the external, to the point that most religious thinking resides at the secondary level of thinking.

This is clearly inadequate. Especially when we consider that leftism dominates the secondary level of thinking.

This ties in well with what you have expressed. God is telling us many things, but we cannot, or refuse to, notice them because we are looking outside rather than within.

Reply
bruce charlton
2/9/2022 12:14:17

@Frank - That's it! Or, at any rate - that's exactly how *I* see it too.

Reply
Jeffrey Cantrell
2/10/2022 00:46:20

Interesting thread deserving of much reflection on my part. The following is nowhere near a final analysis but more of a stream of consciousness on my part and constantly being refined.

At this point, I see primary thinking in terms of someone who at one time was deeply involved in training horses at a very high level of sophistication. When working a horse at this level, the trainer’s mind becomes very and immediately involved with the world here and now. By that, I mean that one is aware of the horse, its gait and the rhythm of that gait, and impulsion of its movement, the horse’s level of relaxation, cadence, and ultimately its balance at not only every stride, but every part of that stride. There is no self-reflection, no viewing one’s self from the third person, no internal dialogue.

The trainer is not only training the horse, but also giving the horse something more than just a new skill. The trainer is actually making the horse a “better” animal. CS Lewis has written about how man was appointed dominion over the animals and that a close relationship with animals raises them up from their “wild” station. I believe he wrote about this concept in The Problem of Pain.

Sooooo, it seems to me that this process is intimately tied up in co-creation. It is this creation of something better in the universe that is the direct result of the mental state of the (horse trainer) person. I will admit that this is something I have “noodled” around a bit over the years and is not fixed in stone, but subject to change.

Reply
David Earle link
2/10/2022 02:19:20

Thanks, you two. This is something I've been giving a lot of thought to lately, and these discussions have been helpful

Reply
Charles
2/11/2022 04:45:22

God by virtue of being God hears and loves mankind. Mankind being fundamentally flesh facing death is always miserable. After death takes us on a vacation filled with anguish. There is no "thing" this side of death to save us from death. There only is a man overcoming death named Jesus Christ. As Donne wrote If poysonous minerals, and if that tree,

Whose fruit threw death on else—immortal us,

If lecherous goats, if serpents envious

Cannot be damn’d; Alas! why should I bee?

Why should intent or reason, borne in mee,

Make sinnes, else equal, in mee, more heinous?

And mercy being easie, and glorious

To God, in his sterne wrath, why threatens hee?

But who am I, that dare dispute with thee?

O God, Oh! of thine onely worthy blood,

And my teares, make a heavenly Lethean flood,

And drown in it my sinnes blacke memorie.

That thou remember them, some claime as debt,

I thinke it mercy, if thou wilt forget.

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