Christianity teaches us that the Son is co-eternal with the Father and that He is of the same essence as the Father. In this sense, Christ is the only “begotten” Son of God, as C. S. Lewis explains in “Mere Christianity.” The rest of us are created, not begotten, because again according to Christian thought, we are not of the same “essence” as the Father and the Son. In this formulation, a being of one essence can “beget” another being of the same essence, but can only “create” a being of another essence. That is, a man can beget a human baby, as we know from all the “begets” in the Book of Genesis, but he can only create a painting, while God begets Christ but only creates man. It is intriguing to think that atheist existentialists such as Albert Camus came to more or less the same conclusion with their philosophical premise that in all things, essence precedes existence except in man, where existence precedes essence. For example, the idea “chair” preceded the fabrication of the world’s first chair, but man had no idea who he was when he was first born.
In the Christian doctrine, the concept that we are created of a separate essence, not begotten of God’s essence, explains how we could fall way from God after Adam and Eve took a bite from the apple. The purpose of our fallen life thus becomes to find a way back to God. When Christians are “born again,” their souls take on a little part of God’s essence and I believe it is theologically correct to say that they then become for the first time true sons of God, in the example of Christ, if not in His full essence.
This formulation explains the hostility of traditional Christian thinkers to pantheism. In their view, if the universe was a pantheist one, then we all of us would already be the “begotten” sons and daughters of God, rather than merely His creations. Nonetheless, if I examine my own heart, it seems closer to the Truth to stipulate that we are all in fact part of God’s essence; we have simply forgotten it. In other words, our sense of separation from God is more a form of amnesia than the built-in separation that results from distinguishing us as ‘created’ rather than ‘begotten’ beings. In one of his readings, the famous psychic Edgar Cayce speaks of the condition of human life as being analogous to a deep-sea diver in an old-fashioned metal bell helmet who is thrown over the side of a ship to perform a specific mission deep in the ocean. On deck, the sun is out and the waves are calm but down below on the ocean floor, light is all but blocked and the waters are murky with flying silt and dust. After a time, the diver has to struggle to remember why he is down in the ocean and what first he set about to do there.
In this parable, the ship’s deck and sunny ocean surface represent heaven or God’s Light—our true home—while the diving suit represents the human body and the ocean floor is symbolic of the physical plane we only inhabit for a short time. Hence, in Cayce’s reading, it is the diver’s amnesia, caused by the murky illusions in the watery depths, that chases him away from his sense of belonging to God, not the fact that he is a diver instead of, say, an angel.
In the traditional monotheist Christian view, our purpose in life is to transcend our mortal identities as beings of clay created by God. On the other hand, in the mystical vision of Cayce as well as in the pantheist Hindu tradition, our purpose is more directly to remember who we really are: that we are already divine beings, but we suffer from forgetting our divinity. The parallel conclusions of both religions are striking, as evidenced by these two quotations, one from C.S. Lewis in “Mere Christianity,” and one from Paramahansa Yogananda in “Autobiography of a Yogi:”
“Will they, or will they not, turn to Him and thus fulfil the only purpose for which they were created? Their free will is trembling inside them like the needle of a compass. But this is a needle that can choose. It can point to its true North; but it need not. Will the needle swing round, and settle, and point to God?” -C.S. Lewis (Book 4, Chapter 10)
“Man’s forgetfulness of his divine resources (the result of his mis-use of free will) is the root cause of all other forms of suffering.” -Paramahansa Yogananda (Chapter 49).
Bird of Spirit 