The Cosmos, and everything in it, was created for Theosis.
I can accept this, but do you think it is not the actual state of all things already? Do you think Theosis is a happening, or merely a remembering of what you already were?
The problem for you is you're now going to make statements about a part of a jigsaw, if you will, whilst you have no idea of the overall image.
Inaccurate, I use pieces from various jigsaws because you are familiar with them, but what I convey is not a jigsaw at all, it is the original painting.
Yes. By becoming man, God opens the way for hum,an nature to transcend itself and become one with the Transcendent. The point is man cannot transcend himself by musclepower, or technique, or trick ... only by invitation.
I disagree, it is mans natural state, we have only forgotten. There are techniques which allow us to remember what we have forgotten, but our very birth is the invitation, the very fact we exist is an invitation to discover the nature of existence - and the Transcendent is exactly that nature.
The 'problem' with the analogy is that the drop ceases to exist in the ocean, it is as it were extinguished, whereas the soul does not cease to exist in God. The ocean is not made up of countless drops, nor can you extract the drop once it is in the ocean, nor can the drop identify itself as a drop.
No, the problem with the analogy is that the drop doesn't actually exist separate from the ocean at all in the first place. It is better to call the soul a wave but then it seems too significant, this is why people call it the drop - it expresses more effectively how puny the soul is. It is as a ripple in the divine, but without the divine it is not possible at all. Has the wave been lost when it returns to the ocean? No, only its momentum has ceased as something distinct, yet it was the ocean before the momentum started too.
Quite ... but then that highlights the limitation of the 'drop in the ocean' analogy, because, if you have experienced such ... who, what and how 'came back' as it were to this world, the entity having entered the ocean having ceased to exist?
I have never left the ocean, I have only returned to duality because it makes interaction easier. Always I am in remembrance now of what I am, but if you cannot tell where you end and the oven begins, cooking a meal is troublesome.
Theosis, by the way, is not an individual condition, it is an eschatalogical finality, which will not be realised, in its fulness, until the end of time. Theosis is the deification of the cosmos, not of the individual.
This is a nonsense, there will be no end of time as you intend, because in that state time does not exist. Time is a perception of the mind, and what I speak about is a transcending of mind. At the same time, in this is exactly an end of time, time is no longer perceived, so in a way you are correct as well.
Christianity is not, as Plotinus was to say, 'the flight of the alone to the Alone' — that is not what Christianity is about. The personal quest goes on within it, but the true Christian seeks the realisation of 'all in all', not 'all in me'.
It is an individual searching, but when you find you realize what is meant by "all in all", you understand what Jesus means by saying we are all as different organs of the one body. If "me" is retained as before the realization, you have missed. You are not there when the all "comes in", you are the all inside all.
So I rather dispense with the drop/ocean analogy as being incomplete in relation to the Mystery of God in Christ ... the greater mystery is that the soul is open to the infinite, not as a speculative notion, but as an ontological way of being, and as such participates in the Infinite because, in its own ground of being, it is infinite ...
I simply say the soul is the Holy Spirit too much in love with its current identity - what I call the ego. It is the part of God that is within each living thing as the Bible tells us, yet it is this identification with the body which separates outer and inner - the whole is the divine, but we all want to make something of this puny existence instead of realizing it is a gift to play with.
... the City of God or the 'many mansions' (cf John 14;2) is not a place the deified soul inhabits, rather it is the union of souls, each its own viewpoint, each its own creation, by, through, in and with God.
In a way I agree here, we are all unique expressions, and that expression will not be lost. Then, consider different viewpoints of the human mind, they can all exist together, and yet they all emanate from one brain. Your analogy seems to say that either God has lost some of himself in giving us life, or that God gains something when we return - God is unchanging though. We have never left, we are as an idea God is curious about, and so we manifest as a character in a dream to experience the idea - yet we don't actually exist as something individual, just as characters in a dream do you exist except in your head.
To experience bliss is to experience something, and certainly something profound and wonderful, but it points to a greater mystery, the Mystery of God, for God is not a thing that can be experienced (cf 1 Corinthians 3:2).
Indeed, I have experienced 3-5 seconds of an encounter that lasted more than 6 hours, I understand fully well that God cannot be experienced, that what I recognize as the experience was merely an attempt of my mind to make sense of what has happened. It is certainly only a pointer, albeit a very profound one.
There's the rub ... is it an illusion, or is it a reason, a purpose?
We can say that it is for us to realize our own nature again, it seems to be a fascination for the divine to realize himself repeatedly in different ways. It is certainly an illusion though, we already are the divine, we have always been searching for ourselves.
In (roughly) the words of St Francis of Assasi "eventually you realize that the one you were searching for is the one who has been doing the searching." It is all as a grand game of Hide and Seek, only you are hiding from yourself and looking for yourself... it is a strange thing that throughout time we have been obsessed with this topic, and yet it is a very simply thing. You have spent your whole life developing this character you see in the mirror, but eventually something clicks "there has to be more", and that is when the true seeking starts... one day you realize you have been doing an absurd thing, searching high and low for what has never been lost - you simply forgot where you put it.
We're back to the old neo-gnostic notion of fleeing the world to arrive at some other, spirit realm ... that's not how it works. Seeing the materiality of the world, and the physicality of the person, as an illusion, is part of the problem, not the solution.
You have jumped to a biased assumption, I am absolutely against people that flee the world because for one it is not even possible. You have merely been unable to maintain your bliss in the market so you have ran from it, it is a very cheap bliss if it can be so easily broken. For another, what will you find in the caves that is not present in the market? You have not ran from the world, you have ran from people, and each person is an expression of the divine. For me, it is all a very idiotic exercise...
That said, Jesus has not lived in the market, he has been a wanderer, a dervish to use the words of the Sufi's. He was almost certainly an Essene based on his life style, and John the Baptist seems to have been one as well.
