Willed Participation—Highest Order Of Expressed Freedom

The Big Picture—God’s Civilizing Attribute
Meditation For The 21st Century Continues

In our pursuit to free ourselves from our own limiting conditions, we not only experience a degree of permanence in the midst of constant flux (temporality), we also experience the forward movement of an implied knowledge of our environment. Being-what-is-not-while-not-being-what-is, in addition to establishing our “I”, — an awareness of being aware of our own non-being, also implies (as a consequence of b~b~bb) an environment of factual events; thus knowledge expands as a consequence of an awareness of being aware of our own non-being, i.e., temporality.

We are born into a world of knowledge and knowing, but the throttle of this knowing process–the actualization of what is unique in human freedom, lies in our capacity to actualize our own non-being. Simply put, every time we ask a question we actualize in the question our own non-being. Whether we like it or not our knowledge expands, but when we ask questions we accelerate that expansion by detaching ourselves from being in our capacity as non-being in order to more fully appropriate the world around us. Our passive experience of time does not produce a great deal of knowledge, but because we bring the logical relationships implicit in God’s freedom to bear on an event, we are free to create judgments (and the values which arise from those judgments) concerning the significance and probable cause of an event. These judgments, concerning the nature of an event, are determined valid across a continuum that ranges from sensation divorced from theory, at one end, to sensation reinforced by the most advanced and respected scientific theory available.

There are no guarantees that the answers we propose in response to our questions will match up with corresponding events, yet scientists have a pretty good track record when it comes to the discovery and confirmation of these answers. In experience that is not accountable to scientific confirmation, however, we determine, via our judgments and emotions, appropriate behavior. It is at this level of preferred behavior, this level of “willed consciousness participation” (as it is called by Owen Barfield), that we encounter our potential for the highest order of expressed freedom.