God and me: a like-minded pair?
Part 4: Who is it that exists if we attain union with God?
Clearly, in this case, there are still two minds: the believer’s and God’s and they are in complete agreement. When this “new thought” first occurred to me, I sensed that there may be more to it than this. That God has either taken control of the person, so that their separate individuality had ceased, or that it could suddenly be seen that God has ceased to exist, in that God is nothing more than a state of mind existing within us, so it is God who is shown to have no separate existence. It may be that this conundrum is solved by some sense of union with God – perhaps familiar with the mystics – whereby talk of one or the other party ceasing to exist is mistaken, for what is really happening is that the two persons are merging into a full union. In this case, both continue to exist – and, I think, both still exist as individuals, but they also, perhaps, take on a corporate existence, where the two truly have become one – even though both persons of the union maintain their separate individuality – though, in practice, neither party ever chooses to act contrary to what the other party also desires.
I note that I have started talking about the will as the central aspect of explaining how two might become one, and I did not initially expect this. I was thinking in ontological terms – about the nature of being – as to “what” it is that is existing if the believer’s mind “became one with God”. Have we shown that the ultimately important part of the human person is a mind that must “be lost in God” if it is to attain complete wholeness – and thereby attain eternity, such that, in the end, the individual ceases to exist and all there is is God? Or have we shown that all our thoughts about God as a separate, independent personal agent are mistaken, and, all along, God is the word we use when we attain a state of mind whereby all that we conceive God to be (as that personal agent) has been fully integrated into the person we actually are (as opposed to simply desiring to attain in principle)?
Spiritual Devotion 