Adam Blatner

I assume, first, that there are innumerable ways to apprehend the Greater Wholeness of Being, the Everything that Includes the Dimensions of Mind and Realms-as-yet-Inconceivable, and That Which No Mind Can Begin to Imagine. There are bunch of other words or phrases that could be used.

Second, I grant myself a unique viewpoint that reflects my background, temperament, interests, abilities, and other elements. My angle is not necessarily better than many other people’s angle, nor does it compete with those views. “It works for me” is the best I can say.

I envision God mainly as what the philosopher Whitehead called the “Creative Advance,” a growing, evolving frontier of both differentiation and integration in many dimensions. This image invites me to participate and contribute, and then to die into the unfolding process. It’s so very glorious that I need not concern myself with whether my sense of self within conventional boundaries will be immortal in any sense. It doesn’t need to be; “I” don’t need to be. It suffices that I can feel I’ve made a contribution.

Nor does this image require that my contribution be grand or in only one way. I live a very diversified life, enjoying family and community, many interests and activities, celebrating my own self-expression in many channels. That’s good enough. I also enjoy witnessing to a goodly number of other people and causes to which I can perhaps lend a hand, write a supporting article, maybe even add a bit of originality. That’s a plus that adds a little extra zest. Still, it isn’t the only thing—that’s the point here.

My mantra is “Helping God be Born.” By “be born,” I don’t presume that God is as vulnerable as a pre-birth human, but rather that I envision our existence—the aforementioned Creative Advance—as involving a type of evolution that isn’t just a gradual increase, but more “punctuated,” shifts of degrees of complexity and integration that come when, for example, one-celled life figures out how to live as not just multi-celled but also differentiated celled and tissues within a single organism. What if there are a thousand “births” yet to come for God, for the Cosmos, as it travels towards ever-grander and truly inconceivable futures? So within this image, again, I surrender my efforts at helping to lay down a foundation of concepts, methods, and experiences. It may be that my life is near-insignificant, analogous to the role of, say, a tiny red blood corpuscle in the bloodstream of a far larger and more complex organism. That’s okay, because I enjoy knowing that I’m helping that organism—in this case, the Creative Advance, which is perhaps a part of the Divine, to become ever more fully. That’s my angle.