NO ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE

Man can have a relative knowledge of God, but he cannot know or experience God personally. He can come to the conclusion, through careful logical reasonings, that God would be the ultimate spiritual globe when all separate globes of pure spirit, from whichever part of the Universe, had converged towards one another in the future post-millennial Beyond, but he cannot know what it would actually be like to be a part of that ultimate globe himself - what the condition of supreme being would actually be like to the experiencing mind. In fact, there would be no 'part' of God, because one great indivisible transcendence. No man can get anywhere near fathoming exactly what the condition of such an ultimate globe of transcendent spirit would actually be like. Man has but a small, relatively humble spirit which, in any case, is polluted by the flesh and dependent on the flesh for its survival. He can only acquire, at the best of times, a vague intimation of what that supreme condition of being would actually be like. Yet he has often mistaken his vague intimation for absolute knowledge of God in the past! Such exaggerations were perhaps a form of compensation for his earthly shortcomings.

Relative knowledge of God takes the form of logical reasonings concerning the outcome of evolution, and should not be confused with those vague intimations of supreme being which saints and other fortunate human beings have occasionally experienced in the past. Such intimations appertain to a stronger influx of human spirit upon a person, and are at a considerable remove from what God would literally be like in the post-millennial Beyond. The experience of infused contemplation would not have led the recipient to apperceive God, but, on the contrary, to apperceive his own quota of spirit more clearly and intensely than would ordinarily have been the case. One might define this experience as an indirect, rather partial glimpse of Heaven.

Is it possible, I wonder, that Spiritual Globes already exist in the heavenly Beyond? Relative knowledge of God, based on cogent reasoning, should enable one to answer this question affirmatively. Yes, I believe that such globes could exist in the heavenly Beyond, which is to say in space considered as a setting for a more advanced absolute than the stars.... Though their existence there would not constitute God but globes of pure spirit en route, as it were, to the possibility of an ultimate Spiritual Globe, which could only come to pass with the fusion, following convergence, of all such globes into ultimate unity, the unity of what Teilhard de Chardin calls the Omega Point. Since we haven't got anywhere near transcendence yet, we can be confident that an ultimate Spiritual Globe, comprised of all spiritual contributions throughout the Universe, doesn't exist.

Nevertheless we would be mistaken, I believe, to assume that such individual globes of transcendent spirit as may exist there, by dint of the possible spiritual contributions made by more advanced planets than our own elsewhere in the Universe, exert no beneficial influence upon ourselves. There is no reason why those nearest to us, which may yet be millions of miles away, shouldn't to some extent draw our spirit slightly towards them. For if they attract and converge towards one another in the heavenly Beyond, they must surely have some tangential attractive influence on what is best in us - namely our spirit. This proposition doesn't, however, discount the part played by human struggle in the evolutionary journey. A pulling teleological argument would not have much credence on its own. We must bear in mind the pushing evolutionary one as well, though we may be excused, in this day and age, for turning against astrological determinism, which is really the opposite of teleological freedom.