To Commune With You Must Become As

Excuse me I’m going to make a story.

Suppose we have a new scientific revolution.  These people figure out how to commune with stuff.  I mean they meditate and suddenly they are inside the rock or the tree.  Deep down there they learn stuff about rocks or trees no one could know by experiments.

Their institute is really cool.  They can basically melt rocks with their minds so the institute is all this one giant piece of fairy rock curving all over like a wedding cake.

There is a new employee.  On orientation day they meet with the director.  He’s an old guy who is pretty cool.  You know those guys who get really excited about things and talk fast with their hands?  That’s him.  He’s telling the new guy lots of things but one point he makes is that most of their discoveries don’t come from actually communing.  They discover stuff *trying* to commune.   They always say “to commune with, you must become as.”  To commune with something you have to become like it.  They keep adjusting how they think until they reach communion so all the adjustments along the way are amazing discoveries.  To commune with you become as.

They start him off with rock.  They know rock very well, everyone starts with that.  Afterwards he gets to pick his own communion research once he knows how.

He communes with rock.  Just getting the rock mind right is hard even though the people there tell him exactly how to do it.  Rock thinks of itself as a liquid it turns out just with a very slow beat of time.  He stills his mind, he closes his eyes and cuts off every sense except pressure and temperature.  He slows.  He casts his mind out into the dark and eventually one day he becomes rock.  He sings to the rock and the rock sings to him.  He can accelerate the tune and the rock flows.

The director calls him in again.  Congratulations, he says.  What do you want to do with your first research project?  The man says, I want to commune with God.

To commune with you become as.

Some friends gave me the idea.  A quote started the chat.

We were not designed just to live in mystic communion with our Maker, as so often suggested. Rather, we were created to govern the earth with all its living things—and to that specific end we were made in the divine likeness.

— Dallas Willard

>Interesting suggestion

>Its both.  Rule is the mystic nature of your maker.

> Very first words God speaks to man in Genesis 1 are “be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it, have dominion.”

> These things are all images or reflections of God.

Create

Sustain

Rule

> To commune with you must become as