Stumbled upon a fascinating part in ‘The Flip’ and thought it deserved a spotlight. I’m starting this thread to share that insight and open up a conversation about how different beliefs view the divine.
This belief system can be summarized as:
‘Kastrup’s Spiritual Idealism: A Synthesis of Mystical Christianity and Eastern Philosophy’
"Kastrup explains, we are embodied forms of cosmic mind, split off “alters” in some vast multiple personality order. These alters have entered God’s dream through sexual reproduction and evolutionary biology in order to wake up within the dream, look around the physical universe as the interior of God’s brain and reflect on our own cosmic nature within this same neural galactic network. Kastrup summarizes our cosmic condition this way: “Put in another way, the universe is a scan of God’s brain; except that you don’t need the scanner: you’re already inside God’s brain so all you have to do is look around. Your perceptions of the sun, rainbows, thunderstorms, etc., are as inaccessible to God as the patterns of firing neurons in your brain–with all their beauty and complexity–are inaccessible to you in any direct way.” We are the universe becoming self-aware. We know what God does not know, since we are “inside” God. But–and here is the even more astonishing thing --we have access to what God knows, since we are, in fact, embodied, particularized forms of this same cosmic mind. We exist in, and so can know, both levels of the real.
Here is where the Christian myth comes in. Kastrup’s realization of the idealist truth of the same took place in one of the oldest and largest cathedrals of Europe, Cologne Cathedral in Cologne, Germany, with its Shrine of the Three Kings (perhaps not accidentally, the three famous “magicians” who were “from the East” in the Gospel story). “At once something flipped inside me, like a sudden shift of perspective: I had gotten it.”
This radical turnabout involved a meditation on the crucified Christ in which Kastrup suddenly realized that we are all Christs, crucified on the cross of space and time: “we are all hanging from the self-conceptualized cross of space-time, impermanence and confinement. His divine nature is our true nature as timeless mind taking particular, seemingly limited perspectives within its own dream.”
