As I have said before, I am not schooled in nor capable of the discussions we participate in. I engage you guys out of total respect and with the anticipation of learning as I go. So far, it has been working extremely well for me. I thank you for disagreeing with me. My thoughts are intuition with little reliable knowledge to support them. They are just my thoughts.
I direct many of my replies to you because your pontifications are exactly what I intuitively believe. I seek your response whether it is favorable or in disagreement. All of it benefits me.
As far as the vertical and horizontal realms go, and God operating in the vertical, all is polarity in God’s creation. He operates inside and outside it all.
The only confusion is our attempt to understand using our limited knowledge and communication skills.
Dear MNR, I wasn't "disagreeing" with you, just trying to draw out your thoughts. Certainly I wasn't criticizing you. I'm no expert at anything, and sure do hope I'm not pontificating....
Your "just my thoughts" are not to be denigrated, especially since they are intuitions. As such, they are based on "reliable knowledge" — but it's the reliable knowledge of instinctive feeling rather than of conscious reasoning.
The word intuition first appeared in late Middle English, denoting spiritual insight or immediate spiritual communication. (I sense you have this gift.) Later on, it has come to mean "the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning."
Yet in order to articulate and communicate such knowledge in language, it has to be "sifted through" conscious reasoning processes.
And that is not easy, since instinctive knowledge does not just pop up and accrue along the horizontal timeline: It is something innate in man, something prior to actual experience; and thus must involve the vertical extension we've been talking about on this thread....
When you boil it all down intuition, instinctive feeling, is not a directly verifiable "fact." Yet it enables us to see through the eye, not just with the eye — the latter being the modus operandi of science.
It can motivate fides quaerens intellectum, faith in search of understanding, or faith on a quest for its reason....
Or so it seems to me, FWIW, in working through these problems.
I sense you and I are both searchers in this sense, dear brother in Christ.
Which is why I enjoy your essay-posts so much! Thank you ever so much for writing!