The concept of God as a Contemplative: cosmological, anthropological, and ethical-soteriological aspects

Chekrygin Oleg ORCID: 0009-0007-4393-1445 PhD in Philosophy Independent researcher 24 Serpukhov val str., Moscow, 115419, Russia ochek@bk.ru Other publications by this author     Nadeina Dar'ya ORCID: 0009-0006-6063-8171 Postgraduate student; Institute of Philosophy of St. Petersburg State University; St. Petersburg State University 115682, Russia, Moscow, Orekhovy str., 59 Bogoslovblog@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Mezentsev Ivan Valer'evich ORCID: 0009-0008-8723-5641 PhD in Philosophy Independent researcher 690025, Russia, Primorsky Krai, Vladivostok, Dzhambula str., 7, sq. 1 mezivan@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

1. Introduction.

Paradigmatic limitations of philosophical understanding of God

Before proposing a new theological-cosmological concept along with the existing ones, it should be noted that at the heart of any of the most breakthrough, original new and even fantastic ideas, including abstract scientific ones, the mind still relies on imagination based on sensory experience.

The human mind acts on the basic basis of sensory perceptions, which are interpreted by the imagination of the perceived senses into an image. Even the most complex abstract constructions and logical constructions require some visual images associated with them and preceding them: first there is an imaginary visual image of an object perceived by the senses, and only then there is a verbal description of what is "seen" in the imagination based on a complex system of imaginative memory. The reverse movement from a word to a visual image is also the basis of cognition: in order to understand its meaning, one must imagine what one has read, that is, connect words with existing imaginative impressions of their meanings in their entirety, resulting in a representation, perhaps unique, but based on visual images already available in memory. Knowledge that has no basis in sensory experience memory is not mastered by the mind, and will remain misunderstood and not accepted into the figurative-verbal memory system. "It is impossible to separate sensation and thinking in the proper sense, as if they were the acts of two essentially different abilities, two different modes of consciousness. Human thinking, immersed in bodily sensuality, gets access to reality only in and through the senses" ^{[1, p. 211]}. I. Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason said: "Without sensuality, no object would be given to us, and without reason, none could be conceived" ^{[2, p. 69]}.

Thus, in order to understand the origins of scientific and religious-philosophical ideas, it is necessary to trace their reverse development back to the original sensory experience and related emotional experiences that formed the basis of mental images of these ideas and their verbal description.

An example in this case is the idea of God. According to the classical version of the ontological argument in favor of the existence of God, the presence of the idea of God in the human mind testifies to the reality of his existence. However, this "proof", while fundamentally true in relation to finite things (it is impossible to invent something non-existent beyond experience), is an example of vicious erroneous logic in relation to God. In this case, it makes no sense to retell the criticism of the ontological argument known in the history of philosophy: it is enough to recall within the framework of the topic we are interested in, since the original idea of God was quite worldly and anthropomorphic (despite the fact that there are two "levels" of divinity – the highest, remote from the human, and the lowest, in which well-known anthropomorphic deities are present They are close to the needs of people, dates back to ancient times and is present in the pre-philosophical period of the development of religious ideas). The fact is that human thinking in the ancient period was mythological.

The question of the origin of gods in human culture is quite complex from the point of view of modern religious studies, but in any case, it is obvious that the first theological ideas arose and developed under the influence of the ability to build human-like analogies and assimilate human qualities to deities. In this case, we are dealing with the classical concept that man creates gods in his own image (which in this context is not related to the question of whether they have objective correlates beyond the limits of human consciousness).

Therefore, in order to understand the origins of the brilliant insights of ancient philosophy, along with recognizing the significance of revelations and inspirations, it is necessary to find a reference sensory experience on which imaginary associations were based, which allowed these insights to be mastered and made available to the mind. An important role in this regard is played by the natural philosophical context in which the philosopher of a certain epoch worked and which filled the thinker's consciousness with cosmological images. Obviously, a concept that takes into account historical and cultural paradigmatic constraints will be much more reasonable and robust.

We can identify three constraints that are present in the formation of a certain doctrine.:

1) the natural philosophical context of the epoch, which many philosophers of the past perceived by default as the pinnacle of a true understanding of reality for all time (as well as their culture, language, etc.), without taking into account the dynamics and cultural diversity of scientific knowledge in the future;

2) personal experience, which activates a certain interest in the mind of a philosopher and which can create bias in solving certain philosophical issues based on certain unmet needs.;

3) cognitive and, in general, mental mechanisms that are triggered by default when thinking about religious and philosophical problems.

We cannot work outside of these determinants, but we have the opportunity to see them and take them into account in our theoretical developments, as well as to identify those situations when the thinker did not understand the objective limitations of his discourse imposed by the ideological and personal context surrounding him.

It is noteworthy that the above–mentioned anthropomorphism and the "bending" of higher reality to the habits and convenience of human perception persists not only at the level of primitive archaic ideas about deities, but even at a higher level - the philosophically processed abstract idea of the Original. This problem is present in religious philosophy, despite its formal rejection of mythological thinking and its claims that anthropomorphism is finally comprehended and overcome in a conversation about God. The anthropomorphism and "grounding" of God persists in metaphysics, only on a more subtle and transparent level, invisible to a superficial observer.

The assimilation of higher principles to earthly everyday realities is evident, for example, from the doctrine of ideas in Platonism, which formed the basis of church dogma and determined the fate of centuries-old European thought. Starting with Plato, his world of ideas, which opposes the world of low-quality matter, is based on an analogy common to human consciousness. This analogy can be represented as an idea-product pair: any creative work of a person is preceded by the appearance of an idea in his mind, and even a visible figurative representation of the final result of the creative process in the form of an image that appears before the inner eye in the imagination. This is followed by the choice of the material from which the material embodiment of an imaginary object into a thing is developed. At the same time, it is impossible to penetrate into the world of another person's ideas from the outside, just as it is impossible for a person to directly show another what he imagines. It is appropriate to recall the problems of "qualia" here. A feature of classical qualia is that they are irreducible neither to the physical nor to the functional properties of mental states. The assumption of the existence of qualia as intrinsic properties of mental states that cannot be reduced to any natural properties really confronts us with a difficult problem of consciousness. This problem lies in the fact that we either have to admit that there is no naturalistic explanation of consciousness, or else we have to transform the natural scientific picture of the world, writing mental properties into it as fundamental characteristics of reality.

Hence, by extrapolating these human qualities to the scale of the universe, the concept of the divine world of ideas arises, which either sink into the world of matter, "clothe" themselves with materiality and become visible and felt, or are reflected from the world of ideas onto the world of matter in the form of direct embodiment of ideas into material objects and phenomena of the world of things. Thus, the primacy of spirit and the secondary nature of matter are confirmed, as well as their transcendence, the impossibility of direct interaction of ideas and things due to the absolute mutual "non-existence" of the natures of spirit and matter for each other. Plato never explained the reasons why ideas embody themselves in matter, as well as the method or mechanism of such an idea's embodiment in matter, provided the transcendence of ideas and their material embodiments. "According to Plato's description, when true being is reflected in matter, a multitude of triangles, equilateral and rectangular isosceles, arise, which are then arranged into five types of regular polyhedra; each of the five types corresponds to one of the primary elements: tetrahedron – fire, octahedron – air, icosahedron – water, cube – earth, and dodecahedron – element of the sky. (subsequently, the fifth element, quinta essentia, was called "ether" and was considered a particularly subtle living fire, which consists of the celestial sphere and all celestial bodies). The matter in which these geometric shapes and bodies exist is called "space" by Plato, but it is not thought of as a real empty space, but rather as a mathematical continuum. Its main characteristic is "boundlessness" (τὸ ἄπειρον), not in the sense of infinite extent, but in the sense of absolute uncertainty and infinite divisibility. Such matter acts primarily as the principle of multiplicity, opposing a single being. Plato is not concerned with the obvious difficulty: how to explain the transition from purely mathematical constructions to bodies with mass and elasticity" ^{[3, p. 510]} Plato's mention of the Demiurge as a creator who embodies ideas into matter by his will is not recognized by his real faith in a creative deity, but rather has the form of an example. "Let us pay attention to the fact that the main categories of the Timaeus (archetype, demiurge, idea, god and gods, cosmos, matter) are interpreted in the dialogue exclusively conceptually or mathematically, but not in a personalistic way. It can be said that Plato reached monotheism purely formally, having neither the experience nor the stable terminology of later monotheism, based on the doctrine of the absolute personality. Otherwise, at the end of the sixth book of the State, it would be necessary to recognize an even more striking monotheism based on Plato's use of the term "presupposed principle," which he deciphers for good reason either as a good (a purely conceptual term) or as a single (mathematical term). However, it is also impossible to see the doctrine of an absolute personality here, because there is neither the living name of any absolute living being, nor any sacred history associated with it with the concepts of the fall, incarnation, redemption, salvation, etc. Here we have the purest pagan pantheism" ^{[4, p. 600]}. It should also be borne in mind that Plato does not always give a positive teaching.: As befits a true philosopher, he often poses a question and invites discussion based on specific examples. And the absence of a Creator brings back the question of the reasons that cause ideas to be embodied in the world of matter, and the ways to realize this embodiment, which neither Plato himself nor his followers gave an answer to.

Thus, in the example of the Demiurge and the world of ideas, we are faced with a manifestation of anthropomorphic thinking, which forms a concept based on an unsolved problem that has not been solved for centuries, but this does not prevent it from being authoritative and leading in the historical and philosophical process.

2. The problem of typical solutions to the cosmological question in European philosophy

The main solutions to the cosmological question in connection with a certain understanding of the essence of the Absolute can be reduced to the following options:

1) The Absolute in the sense of the uniqueness of God: only God himself is "beyond" transcendence, without which he will immediately become matter when interacting with matter.;

2) the boundary beyond which God either emanates (overflows) into the world, or creates a world outside of himself, limits its absoluteness, and turns it into a particularity complemented by the world;

3) the attempt to assign the essence of Nothing and explain the world by the presence of God in Nothing resembles a logical substitution that assigns existence to something that does not exist, that is, the transformation of Nothing into something.

The Absolute in the sense of self-sufficiency leads to a complete stasis of the Deity, who, if he wants something, means that he lacks something, and he is no longer an Absolute, but in the ontological sense, a particular who lacks what he desires. This also applies to the idea, which is confirmed in church dogma, that God created the world because of his excessive goodness: it means that either he did not have enough space in himself to contain his goodness, or there is dissatisfaction with the fact that there is nowhere to put this goodness, and there is no one to share it with. In this case, there is a statement of the non-absolute divinity, and the excess of goodness turns out to be a lack of something else that God lacks (for example, those who praise his excessive goodness) and thereby deprives him of absoluteness. "The central problem of Neoplatonism, like any monistic system ... is the difficulty ... that a transcendent and self-sufficient nature has no need to generate anything else in relation to itself... When Plotinus for the first time in the Platonic tradition identified the Root Cause of all things with the one of the 1st hypothesis of "Parmenides", thus marking the beginning of Neoplatonism, he inherited the aporia of the transcendent principle.… The beginning of everything should be different from everything, free and separate from everything, i.e. it should represent the Absolute. According to Plotinus, "even when we call him the cause, we express something inherent not to him, but to us, since we possess something that comes from him, he also exists in himself." But if the One is not the cause and the beginning in itself, but only in terms of its effects, then the question arises why these effects exist and how to explain the origin of the world from the Absolute.… Despite the different approaches to solving the aporia of the transcendent principle, all Neoplatonists, without exception, explain the origin of the multitude from the One by the abundance of the power and perfection of the Original: "... being perfect, it seems to overflow, so that its abundance creates something else" ... Finally, Damasky shows the fundamental insolubility of the aporia of the transcendent principle. He considers it inevitable to describe the Absolute in contradictory terms as both "one" and "not-one", and "beginning" and "non-beginning", seeing in such antinomies a natural consequence of attempts to think of something that transcends all thought and word ..." ^{[5, pp. 660-662]}. Plotinus does not explain what the "edge" of the Absolute is and where the One "overflows", if nothing but the Absolute exists, including the edges and the "place" where the outpouring would take place, as do his followers. Modern theological trends have a similar problem, in which God is understood in the context of the ontology of love, when classical "cumbersome" ideas about God as the Absolute and fullness of goodness are combined with personalistic New European attitudes, as well as with existentialism. In this context, God is thought of in a procedural-kenotic way and as a being who eternally needs the phenomenon of the "other" in order to realize the fullness of his eternal divine love, and at the same time is perceived statically as an all-perfect, all-satisfied Absolute in accordance with the patterns of medieval philosophy. In this case, we observe not only the lack of proper coordination of two different paradigms, but also the following of theological and philosophical thought for the ideological fashion of different eras without proper reflection on the above limitations.

Attempts to build a model of God without attributing absoluteness to him (which very often represents a mechanistic multiplication of the positive properties of earthly experience by infinity, followed by their a priori assimilation to God) lead to the problem of the pre-existence of primordial primordial matter (the primordial chaos from which the world was built by the Logos God in Greek philosophy, and in various pre-biblical pagan traditions and in Jewish The primordial water element), which generates a material god, or at least the beginningless coexistence of God and primordial matter (chaos, elements), from which God creates the world, which can lead to the affirmation of the primacy of matter, that is, to materialism, which does not need God, which is vividly demonstrated by the history of later European philosophy.

Gnostic constructions of a certain hierarchy of "impoverishment" of divinity, grace, spirit, light, etc. From top to bottom, from the transcendent "non-god" (super-God) down to the creation of matter by the lower Demiurge, they again incline to materialism in its various forms.

Attempts to somehow disconnect God and matter with the help of transcendence run into the inability of God to influence the material world due to it. In particular, this issue has never been resolved in the Christian theological and philosophical paradigm, where the Holy Spirit is "everywhere and fulfills everything," but not by itself, since spirit and matter do not mutually exist for each other, but with the help of "divine energies" from the teachings of Gregory Palamas, which again inevitably they run into the same problem of the transcendence of the divine to the material. The assumption of an additional intermediary link between God and the world in the form of "energy" in order to build a "bridge" between the uncreated and the created does not solve the problem, but only creates the appearance of a solution by complicating the design. "If God in His energies is equal to God in His essence, then communion with energies is no different from communion with the essence, the nature of God, because in this case it is impossible to separate nature from energies — where is the line separating one from the other? — and such a difference acquires a purely rhetorical meaning" ^{[6, p. 48]}. The same applies to the paradigmatic complications of the "construction" by the late Neoplatonists, who first doubled and then tripled the original Plotinian essences of Mind, Soul and Cosmos in their constructions of Neoplatonic cosmology (for more details, see "The Ontological and Cosmological System of Neoplatonism" ^{[5, pp. 664-666.]}). Also, upon careful analysis of Palamism, it becomes obvious that its problematic of the ontological transition from God to the world is a particular manifestation of the difficulty common to Platonism: why and how does an idea become a non-idea, as well as how to think about their actual relationship with each other? Also, the problems of Palamism in this context are the question of the possibility of contemplation of uncreated light by creation and the tendency of God to split into the essential-unknowable and given in energies.

The well-known criticism that Aristotle gave to the Platonic doctrine of ideas is applicable to Palamism: if a thing has an idea, then why not admit an idea to an idea, etc.; if there is uncreated energy as a necessary ontological "bridge" between God and the world, then why not think of energy as energy, etc. is there only one link, considering the hierarchy of the cosmos, conceived by God, and the gradation of levels of sanctification, which is affirmed in Christian orthodoxy? Either the divine energy mediating between God and the world must be some kind of mixture of the divine and the world in order to be ontologically akin to both divine and created nature. The situation is aggravated by the fact that in the Palamite doctrine, the concept of energy simultaneously retains both dynamic and static aspects, without solving the problem of their reconciliation (energies are conceptualized as the "thought-wills" of the Deity). Palamism does not solve, but rather plays out in a new way the Platonic dilemma of the transition of the ideal into the non-ideal, and fully preserves the relevant problematic of Platonic teaching, that is, the same insolubility of the aporia of transcendence.

In the end, the declared divine transcendence-immanence, explained by the incomprehensibility of the miracle of divine omnipotence, has a fundamental problem at its core, and is capable of convincing confessional-oriented and church-oriented people of its impeccability, but it does not satisfy the scientific philosophical approach to the problem. The idea of God's immanence in the world on a par with transcendence on the grounds that he is omnipotent and absolutely free seems incorrect and, moreover, immature and extremely helpless precisely from a philosophical point of view.

The models of Meister Eckhart and Nikolai Kuzansky, as well as Schelling and subsequent ones – let's call this philosophical branch "mystical pantheism" – ultimately run into the problem of transcendence -the immanence of God and creation. From our point of view, the unity-the identity of God and man - indicated by Schelling is logically erroneous: unity does not equal identity, but only means a community of natures. And transcendence appears as the mutual "non–existence" of God and creation, while immanence, in turn, appears as a single natural ability to interact. As soon as reasoning takes this path, then, excluding logical tricks and semantic substitutions, it necessarily runs into the wall of the same impasse: the immanence of God and creation inevitably leads either to the materiality of God, or to the existence of the world as a separate part of his divinity from God, thereby nullifying the divine absoluteness and uniqueness.

Here it is worth mentioning L. Karsavin, who was looking for a way out of the impasse of the classical concept of the Absolute in the "dynamic reflection" of God into nothing and vice versa. In this case, Nothing appears as a kind of mirror located in Nothing (that is, it does not exist anywhere), reflecting and returning God to itself instantly and innumerably, and the material world as a reflection that is "late" to return to God. However, even this model, for all its revolutionary nature, is not able to explain the transformation of Nothing into something, that is, something that does not exist into something that exists, nor to propose a "mechanism" for the interaction of the "non-existent" God with the "non-existent" material world for him, which is absolute Nothing. The advantages of the Karsavin model include his intuitive insight into the "reflection" of God in the mirror of "nothing," which, however, was not brought to logical certainty by the author.

3. The experience of building a consistent model of the coexistence of God as the Absolute and the worlds generated by him, including material ones, similar to the observable universe

After a brief review of typical problems of classical cosmological concepts, the authors are ready to offer an experience in building a new model of the relationship between God and the world, which, from our point of view, is free from unsolvable difficulties for centuries.

The essential provisions of the proposed concept are the following points:

1. The main property of the "non-existent" Super-Existent Absolute, the First Principle of everything, is the generation of Oneself into One's Super-Existence.

2. The Absolute in the Superbeing is the divine Mind.

3. The main property of the Super-Existent God-Mind, His being and "occupation", which does not violate His Absoluteness, is self-awareness, self-contemplation, self-knowledge and self-naming.

4. The mind is characterized by imagery, literature, and memorability.

5. God, contemplating Himself, goes over His Names, looks into the mirrors of the worlds they have created and sees Himself in them.

6. Ideas or monads are generated in the depths of the Divine Mind by his Names and are called to realization, which manifests itself in the form of their images.

7. An image is a reflection of God in the mirror of an idea and returns Itself to God in its development.

The first two points, in fact, repeat the Plato-Plotinus model: The Absolute Single Superbeing generates itself in Superbeing, that is, the Mind, from which the Cosmos is further built by moving from one to many: "According to the teachings of the Neoplatonists, each new level of reality is a circular motion involving 3 moments: 1. The presence of the effect in the cause (μονή). 2. Exodus from it (πρόοδος). 3. Return to her (ἐπιστροφή). In particular, intelligible existence corresponds to staying in the Mind, life corresponds to exodus, and the mind (thinking) corresponds to returning" ^{[5, p. 662]}. However, as already noted above, due to the aporia of transcendence in relation to a Single Super-Being, the neoplatonic scheme does not work: the Super-Existent Absolute has no reason to manifest itself in Existence, emerging from its Super-non-existence: "In an extremely abstract form, the aporia of the transcendent principle is revealed in the 1st hypothesis of Plato's dialogue "Parmenides". It is shown here that if we consider the one in itself, regardless of everything that does not coincide with it, then any definition of existence will have to be denied regarding such a one. In this case, we will have to say that it does not exist, including as a single one. It is “neither identical to itself or to another, nor distinct from itself or from another.” This means that one cannot say about it “the one is the one”, because it is devoid of any certainty and meaning that would distinguish it from other things and make it something existing alongside them. It also does not differ from anything else, i.e. it does not allow anything else outside of itself. Being one and denying its other, the one cannot be the beginning. On the other hand, the last hypothesis of "Parmenides" shows that the denial of the one destroys the very possibility of cognition and existence of things, because "if there is no one, then there is nothing" ^{[5, p. 660]}. How exactly the transition from the first hypothesis "Only One" to the second "One is" takes place, Plato and the subsequent Neoplatonists never revealed, or rather failed to explain.

Meanwhile, according to the authors, the divine (Beyond)being (not to be confused with the being of the world) is already contained in the very Single Absolute, as a possibility of being, and can be deduced from it without involving additional predicates and multiplication of entities. The One, being Absolute, possesses absolute freedom, which, however, it cannot even use, since it cannot be able to. If there were something else besides the Absolute itself, then the Absolute would also be on a par with itself, thereby losing its absoluteness. This freedom, however, consists in the fact that the only other Absolute is nothing itself, there is nothing, the complete negation of the Absolute as such, its disappearance into present non–existence. This is the first hypothesis of the Parmenides dialogue in Losev's interpretation of "Conclusions for One (138c—157b) with the absolute assumption of one (137c—142b)": "1. Briefly: if (exists) if there is only one thing and there is nothing else, then this one does not exist" ^{[7, p. 500]}, that is, the only alternative to the Absolute, left to itself, is its pure negation, destruction, and disappearance. One can choose from two possible positions of Oneself to the Super-Being only through double negation (in fact, this is the application of Hegel's law of "negation of negation" in relation to the One Super-Being): the One itself, which has known itself, is different from its own non-being, and has become to be, will be different. This is the only way the Neoplatonist model works for the Super-Being: The presence of the super-being of the Other (the absolute non-existence of the Super-Being) in the Absolute → The exodus of the Super-Being into the Other (non-existence), as a manifestation of the super-freedom to simultaneously be in Oneself and in that single state of the Other-Self → A return through the denial of one's own non–existence to Oneself as Being, to one's "isness" from non-existence into Being.

As previously shown by the authors ^{[8, pp. 79-95]}, cosmology based on a pair (being-non-being), in contrast to the Platonic-Plotinus model briefly described above, leads to the logical formation of lower ontological levels from higher ones without the need to involve the inexplicable spread of Good through emanation, transfusion of "abundant" Good through The "edge" of the highest ontological level to the lowest: non-existence is already contained in the being of everything, like the Chinese monad (Chinese monad. A symbol related to the Tao. It looks quite simple. This is a circle that consists of two halves in the form of drops of black and white color. In each of these drops there are small circles of the opposite color: white in black, black in white. This symbol is the personification of constant struggle, on the one hand, and harmony, on the other hand. The basic law of dialectics was formulated in Ancient China as early as the 4th century BC. It is about the law of unity and struggle of opposites), and comparing oneself with one's own non-existence through the "negation of negation" reduces entities to a more "existential" level of being, turning the Mind into a Soul, the Soul into Ideas, and Ideas into things without involving There are such additional entities as Plato's "low-quality matter," which he calls whatever he likes: space, nurse, and matter, a dark and difficult kind. means: 1) country, land, place, area, plot, region, edge; 2) imaginary place; 3) position).

The non-existent (or super-existent) Absolute, God is the Unity-the First Principle, not self-aware (because there is no "self") The One always generates itself as a God who exists for himself: "And in general, everything that has already reached perfection gives birth; and what is always perfect always gives birth, and gives birth to the eternal, but worse than it itself" ^{[9, p. 327]} — who is an observer of self-existence: without For an observer, God is One, unaware of himself, does not exist = Super-exists (this is reminiscent of George Berkeley's principle "to exist is to be perceived" from the Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge ^[10]). God is like Nothing and is nothing. If his existence is not attested at least by himself, then existence=non-existence, being=non-existence. To be, you need a self-witness by analogy with Descartes' "I think, so I exist." And this self-generated god, having discovered and identified himself as his own essence and existence, as a denial of his own non-existence, disappearance, having realized himself, reveals himself to himself in each of the successive acts of self-knowledge with an endless series of his Names. Both the Super–Being and the Super-Being generated by him into his own being are the same Absolute, Unity in a state of constant continuous generation of self-awareness, an endless instantaneous cyclical process of generating Oneself from the Super-Being and returning Oneself to oneself-the Super-Being. "According to the teachings of the Neoplatonists, each new level of reality is a circular movement that includes 3 points: 1. The presence of the effect in the cause (μονή). 2. Exodus from it (πρόοδος). 3. Returning to it (ἐπιστροφή)" ^{[5, p. 660.]} Further, this process of self-knowledge in the self-limitation of the names of God spontaneously develops infinitely: realizing himself in the Name, the Super-existent Personality God continues to expand into the namelessness of the infinite Super-Existent Absolute, appropriating names to himself as self-contemplation expands in the mirrors of names, as ideas of the particular Self–knowledge is first of the Absolute, self-limiting itself within its Super-Existence, and then going beyond its own boundaries into unlimited itself - and again knowing itself within new boundaries-names. God is a process, not a stasis, and worlds are the product of a system of mirrors in which God looks, realizing himself in his reflections.

That is, in the bowels of God, along with the idea generated by his inherent literature, generated by the Word of God, its image arises in the form of an image of an idea as a Given, which, according to the definition of the authors, is what is called Providence in theology, that is, an Idea containing an extremely detailed plan for the development of the Universe for all times of its existence ^{[8, pp. 79-95]}, developing within the framework of its private form of existence from the beginning to the end of its implementation. After that, the final image of the developed idea, as a whole, from beginning to end, acquires an independent existence in the depths of God's memory, as a fulfilled Word that has developed into the full Image of God, as Its reflection in the realized idea. And thus realized ideas acquire their own independent existence in God, in His Consciousness, as a part and reflection of himself in the countless mirrors of God's realized Words – and in fact, they themselves become gods of their worlds, forever imprinted and existing autonomously in God's memory.

The idea contained in the Word contains within itself the fullness of its cosmos, unfolding within its inherent forms of existence – for example, in the space-time continuum of the observable universe.

If we apply an analogy with human consciousness – which, as we pointed out above, is not only inevitable, but also the only way possible for the human mind by intuitively associatively generating new ideas – then first the word evokes a visual image associated with it, which appears in consciousness, as on a kind of screen in front of the mind's eye – but this the screen does not exist in reality anywhere. However, an image visible in the imagination by the "inner vision" can be fixed in memory and exist as a record, which can be returned to consciousness at any time in the form of a memory image. This analogy with the workings of human thought and memory is also found in classical Christian theology. This is both the Augustinian correlation between the Hypostases of the Trinity and the human psyche with its triad "mind – will – memory", and the dogmatic teaching of the church about God's eternal plans for the world in general and every thing in particular, through the contemplation of which the Creator knows from time immemorial the essence of everything that happens in the world even before the realization of events "for us", that is, he knows the whole creation from its "wrong" side, which in its entirety is not accessible to human knowledge. However, the standard model of understanding eternal ideas "near God" has problematic aspects that generally correspond to the fundamental problems of Platonism already mentioned above.

Thus, any fleeting existential vision of the development of the divine idea, not existing in itself as a real existence, but only as a reflection of God in an idea developed from the Word, is recorded in the depths of the memory of the divine consciousness and finds in it its true existence in Eternity, which is the stay in the Kingdom of the Father, and the Eternal Life promised by Jesus in God, Who, having created an Image, remembered and will never forget it. Here it is necessary to recall the image of a book characteristic of the biblical narrative, in which the meanings and destinies of all things are recorded ^[11]. The problem with the standard model of "divine memory" is the lack of proper coordination of static and dynamic moments in its "functioning". The source of the difficulty is the priority of the static description of the Absolute in traditional dogmatics and philosophy, while ignoring the possibilities of a procedural interpretation of the divine life. This difficulty in our concept is removed by the process of the deity described above: being initially infinite, God knows himself infinitely in the process of self-knowledge of the Absolute.

That is, the lifeless Absolute is the First Principle, and the process God himself is a personality generated by the self-knowledge of the Absolute, and his Word, and the Reality generated by it, and its realization, and its image reflected into Eternity, and the material Cosmos, as a reflection of the eternal Reality in the existence of our timeless world, exist in the depths of the Deity, not entering into existential contradictions with each other, but co–existing in God as different sides of the same divine essence, different sides and manifestations of the one being of God - and thus the problem of transcendence-immanence of God and matter is naturally removed. Let us emphasize that matter exists only as an image developing inside the idea generated by the Word, and does not exist in some "place" separate and separate from God, the material image is only shown to God in His own "imagination", as His reflection in the mirror of the idea generated by His Word. There is no matter and worlds outside of God, they are all God Himself, and they are in God. It is worth noting that modern physics has not preserved any of the classical philosophical definitions of matter. At the same time, it is worth paying attention to the statement of one of the researchers that "in modern science, of all the versions of ancient atomism, it is Plato's mathematical atomism that arouses the greatest interest as a reason for fruitful comparisons" ^{[12, p. 200]}. Platonism approaches modern scientific knowledge in a non-substantial (unsubstantiated) interpretation of matter. It is known that by the beginning of the 20th century, the concept of matter as a carrier of mass, distinct from force and energy, on the one hand, and from space and time, on the other, began to weaken. Einstein's theory of relativity made mass ultimately dependent on speed, which opens up prospects for correlating modern scientific cosmology with the history of cosmological understanding of the concept of "motion" ("eternity is infinitely fast motion", etc.) within the framework of a non–substantial interpretation of matter. And the discovery of the Higgs field abolished the idea of mass as a fundamental property of matter.

Let us also emphasize that God, who is in goodness and contemplation, his Word, which he generated from contemplation of himself, and the Spirit, which develops the Word-idea into an image-reflection of God, who contemplates himself in this reflection, are one and the same god and exist together, as one, as a whole.

4. The category of contemplation in the history of theology

In this context, it is necessary to raise the issue of analogues of the concept of a contemplative God in the history of theology and philosophy, given that the phenomenon of contemplation is a key concept in our proposed theological and philosophical concept. The concept of "contemplation" in philosophy and in ordinary life can mean either sensory observation or direct intuitive apprehension of supersensible objects. Since ancient times, contemplation as a pursuit of wisdom has been considered a distinctive feature of the philosopher. Subsequently, under the influence of the Platonic tradition, an understanding of contemplation arose as such an understanding of the essence of things, which is carried out directly without relying on sensory perception and discursive thinking. In the context of the criticism of metaphysics, philosophy of the 20th century brought the phenomenon of contemplation to the periphery of its developments and now, for the most part, it is of historical and philosophical interest to modern scientists only.

In the dialogue "Phaedrus" we read the following lines: "The thought of God is nourished by reason and pure knowledge, just like the thought of every soul that strives to perceive what is right, having seen genuine existence, even if only for a short time, appreciates it, feeds on the contemplation of truth and is blissful until the firmament takes it in a circle again to the same place." the place. In this cycle, she contemplates justice itself, contemplates prudence, contemplates knowledge..." [247d].

The phenomenon of contemplation plays an important role in Aristotle's theology.: "Aristotle's God is, as it were, an ideal, the greatest and most perfect philosopher, a pure theorist contemplating his knowledge and his thinking. His element is speculation" ^{[13, p. 26]}. The Stagirite said that God is a "mind" that "thinks for itself, if only it is superior and its thinking is thinking about thinking" ^{[14, p. 316]}. By contemplating himself, God exercises the highest (dianoetic) virtue. Accordingly, contemplation of God is also the highest virtue for man. However, a distinctive feature of Aristotle's immaterial Prime Mover God is his personal indifference to the destinies of finite things and people, and his separation from the sublunary world. He is "occupied" entirely with himself, realizing in self-contemplation the beginning of a circular movement, which, in turn, moves the world in a circle, which naturally resembles him in this act. In Aristotle, God appears as a logician, a deified philosopher. Such a God does not think of nature "sympathetically." God is fundamentally self-contained here, "automatically" launching the process of realizing the eternal cosmos with his divine life.

Plotinus, in a treatise called "On Nature, Contemplation and the One," we find the statement that "all things have come from contemplation and that contemplation is the main and ultimate goal of their existence, and here we are talking not only about those who are visibly endowed with reason, but also about those in whom for whom it is not manifested, for the formative logos also act in the last, lowest things of this world, each of which strives to achieve this goal to the best of its abilities, whether the capabilities of its true essence or the capabilities of an imitative image" ^{[9, p. 95]}.

The concept of contemplation in Neoplatonism acquires not only an epistemological, but also an ontological meaning. M. V. Lakhonin comments on this point as follows: "Nature, within its substance, has a soul and life, which, in turn, are the product of its self-contemplation. It also has what in later European philosophy is called self-awareness, which extends to things belonging to it to the extent that they are capable of perception.… Contemplation inherent in nature has the ability of natural intuitive concentration and produces objects of its own contemplation – in the paradigmatic Platonic sense – the relationship of ideas and things" ^{[15, p. 44]}.

It is noteworthy that the ancient Greek word "θεωρία" – "looking, observing", "θέατρον" – "theater" and "θεός" – "God" – are of the same root, which is very consistent with the concept presented by us, as well as the fact that the Greek word "idea" and the Russian word "to see" from the point of view The points of etymology are also of the same root (in ancient Greek, the initial "v" was reduced over time). However, there was another version: in particular, Plato believed that the Greek word "God" ("theos") comes from the verb "theein", meaning "to flee": "The first of the people who inhabited Hellas worshipped only those gods, which are still revered by many barbarians: the sun, the moon, the earth, the stars, the sky. And since they saw that all this was always running, making a cycle, it was from this nature of running that they were given the name of the gods" [Cratilus 397b]. This etymology, if true, coincides with the procedural understanding of God in our concept. John of Damascus proposed to elevate the word theos to the verb theaomai – "to contemplate": "For nothing can be hidden from Him, He is the All-seer. He contemplated everything before it came into being..." ^{[16, p. 45]}.

It would also be appropriate to recall here that in searching for analogues to the concepts of "consciousness" or "self-awareness" in classical philosophy until Modern times, it is necessary to take into account historical limitations in the interpretation of these concepts by philosophers of different eras. So, for Plotinus, there is no consciousness, no self-knowledge, no thought in the One. The one is simply the self, equal to itself ^{[17, p. 160]}. Moreover, for Plotinus, the human self and self–awareness "are the product of the activity of the imagination - far from the highest, and not exclusively human ability" ^{[17, p. 159]}.

Comparing the concepts of contemplation presented above in the context of the revelation of the divine life, one can see the differences between the scheme presented by us and its historical and philosophical analogues.

5. General characteristics of the proposed theological-cosmological model

So, let's summarize the main points of our proposed concept.:

1. God is the Absolute, who dwells in contemplation of Himself in the process of self-knowledge; going over his Names and Words, God awakens to life the ideas or monads contained in them, the development of which generates worlds reflecting God.

2. The existence of the world resides "inside" God (and not outside of him, as is customary in many philosophical systems) in the form of a picture of the development of worlds in the "imagination" of God. The worlds themselves are a kind of mirrors in which God sees Himself. These reflections of him acquire an independent eternal life in the eternal "memory" of God, which is the only existing Kingdom of Heaven, again, "inside" God, and not "outside" Him: there is no "outside", and nothing but God exists, and God does not need anything outside himself, including and something proposed in philosophical systems, designated as absolute Nothing. The cosmological Nothingness transformed into an ontological something "outside" of God resembles a logical substitution, indicating the fundamental problems of those systems that use this logical approach.

3. Contemplation in itself does not set any goals, it is not the fulfillment of unfulfilled desires or an expression of the fulfillment of divine incompleteness – all aspects of the violation of the divine Absolute in the models developed in the past. This removes the problem of the purpose of creation.

4. The absolute metaphysical primacy of the Spirit is asserted.

5. A consistent concept of the existence of the world is developing as a reflection of God in himself, and Salvation as the eternal abiding of a mature person in the memory of God, who does not forget anything – this memory of God, in fact, is the Kingdom of Heaven.

6. The problem of transcendence-immanence is solved: everything happens in God himself and there is no "outside of him" at all; at the same time, the development of worlds in God's "imagination" and staying in God's memory-eternity, being of the same nature as belonging to God, are two sides of a single stay in God.

7. A consistent explanation is given of both the meaning and the "mechanism" of translating ideas into material objects, worlds and universes.

8. It opens up the possibility of reconciling religious and philosophical views within the framework of the proposed model with modern scientific views and scientific data, as well as with modern philosophical systems of postmodernism, starting with Bergson's conception and ending with Hartshorn's process theism.

9. A system of original religious and philosophical views is developing on the evolutionary process of Mind generation, the existence of the soul, the will of God, God's Providence, human free will, the problem of good and evil, theodicy as God's justification for the imperfection of the world order, and so on.

10. The problems of outdated theological and religious-philosophical concepts within the framework of the biblical and Gnostic-pantheistic paradigms are revealed.

6. Conclusions

6.1 Cosmological conclusions

6.1.1. Divine ideas and the way they are implemented in the world

The ideas of God are superanimate and superintelligent entities, essentially gods for their inner worlds. It should be understood that worlds develop in the superminds of ideas, similarly to the fact that the Ideas themselves are the result of the development of the process of self-knowledge of the Absolute in the Super-Existent Personality God. Ideas can form natural symbioses of subordination, that is, a kind of hierarchy: acting within the "older" idea, the younger creates its own world within the world of the elder. Such a hierarchy, unlike all the proposed hierarchies of theology and Gnostic systems, firstly, is not a system of unconditional subordination of the younger to the older, and, secondly, does not lead to the "impoverishment" of divinity, down to the imperfect Demiurge, the creator of the "fallen" world - or the devil, a service force that betrayed and rejected the Creator.. The coexistence of ideas in the hierarchy is more like a symbiosis in which the gods cooperate, each creating in his own field of common Providence.

At the same time, monads, being independent deities within the worlds they create, can generate their own ideas within their worlds. For example, in the observable universe, the idea of the emergence of life may operate, within which the idea of the emergence of Intelligence in living beings through evolution also operates. It may come to the guardianship of minor gods over specific intelligent beings, which, for example, in theology are guardian angels. And so, through the hierarchy of worlds, up to the generation of Intelligence, which will be able to rise in reverse reflections to be born again and become God himself and the son of God. At the same time, in the earthly world we are observing, being born again through the baptism of the Spirit is facilitated by those who follow the first of the sons of God, Jesus, while the rest of human minds must independently go through the path of being born again from the Spirit, not by faith in the son of God, Jesus, but by their deeds, presented to the Judgment of God, according to which God either he will remember them in eternal life or he will forget them, erasing them from existence into non-existence. The comparison of the proposed concept with the metaphysics of T. de Chardin is promising: "His theological concept is based on the idea of the immanence of God, who stands at the beginning of all creation and controls the world through evolution. In his views, de Chardin was close to monistic panentheism. He believed that the spiritual principle permeates all creation, is the source of its integrity and is already present in molecules and atoms. He also believed that the evolutionary process is governed by the "law of complexity," according to which inorganic matter, guided by the Spirit, reaches increasingly complex forms, resulting in organic matter. After its appearance, conscious life forms also come. According to de Chardin, man is the pinnacle of a conscious form of life in nature. He differs from all other beings in his ability to be aware of himself, his thought process: not just to know, but to know what he knows. De Chardin called it "knowledge squared" ^[18].

The implementation of ideas can be thought of as follows, based on an analogy with the ideas of computer operation that are familiar to modern people. The source code of the program displays a virtual reality image on the monitor, conceived by the programmer, and embodied in the form of a sequence of written commands consisting of alternating only zeros and ones. Or, for greater clarity, an example of showing through a movie projector: the "film" of God's Providence projects reality through the Spirit onto the "screen" of the material world, and God is the only viewer in this cinema. At the same time, the "screen" or "monitor" in this case is the "imagination" of God, by analogy with the imagery of a person's imagination, whose images do not exist in reality anywhere, but live and are seen by a person with "inner vision".

Note that for the actors acting "on the screen", everything that happens has all the signs and properties of material reality – similar to the fact that in a developing movie, its screen characters eat real-looking food, stumble upon solid objects during movement and die from being hit by non-existent bullets. So the participants in the developing image of the idea feel like they are actually living in a full-fledged material world, while for the contemplating God they are just a play of colored light and shadow in his own imagination, at least until they achieve their own place of their personality in Eternity, in the promised Kingdom of the Father by Jesus, through Birth. Having descended from the screen from above into the reality of divine being and personal abiding in God.

So, God's providence for the world, contained and developing in the idea generated by the Word, is "recorded" by the Word in the Spirit, which is the executor of God's reflection in the mirror of the image, which is the world generated by the Word. From the visible world, the spiritual "substrate" of the "source code" is not visible, just as the program is not visible on the monitor screen, but without it the world does not exist, and disappears without a trace, like the image on the screen when the electricity is turned off. "You will take away their Spirit, and they will disappear, and they will return to their dust (Ps. 103:29)."

However, if we assume that God has "all the moves written down" in His Providence, then every pebble polished over the centuries by the flow of water, every one-day moth or worm that dug into the earth until it dissolved into it, does not disappear without a trace, but brings its own living, unique tiny shade to the all–perfect divine goodness, reflecting from the timeless world into Eternity with the totality of their past fleeting existence, and continue their full-fledged existence in It. And then the very Idea of the creation of the world becomes clear, which is nothing more than the self–knowledge of God through the reflection in the "mirrors" of existence of everything from a grain of sand to the Great Attractor, looking into which God sees Himself in them - nothing that temporarily existed in the world disappears without a trace, but passes into Eternity, finding its place in the immortal Existence of God. And then the promise of Jesus comes true for all Creation: "The kingdom of God is within you and without you" (Thomas, 2) - everywhere and forever, because God has no death and non-existence, but only one whole Being.

6.1.2 The question of theodicy

Note also that in this model, there is no need for theodicy, that is, God's justification for the Evil created or allowed (permitted) by him in the form of corruption and death inherent in the nature of this world. The world is conceived exactly as it is, not because of the personal imperfection attributed to the Demiurge in Gnostic systems, but because of the need for a dynamic of development, the absence of external factors that would lead the system to stasis, when development and evolution would be impossible in conditions of constant and predictable existential well-being. In other words, the catastrophism of the world is a necessary condition for its development and the evolution of Reason in it: happiness and prosperity generate the sleep of Reason, and it, in turn, generates monsters of non-existence. Figuratively speaking, in order for the world to reach the heights of Reason, it needs to strive for these peaks – otherwise it will not work. In a world of universal prosperity and happiness, as depicted in a pastoral paradise, a Godlike person will probably quickly get bored and escape from it at least to hell, where at least something is happening.

Catastrophism, conflict and entropy of the world are a necessary condition for development, and death, unfortunately, is the key to the evolution of species. The conflict between the objective necessity of the finiteness of all living things as a means of evolution and the subjective perception of it by all living things as the universal Evil and imperfection of the world is insoluble, and entails accusing God, who created pain, suffering and death of mercilessness and cruelty on the one hand, and clumsy attempts at theodicy on the other. But neither side can offer a clear model of an ideal world, except for the already mentioned "paradise of sweetness", where God's righteous chosen ones with lyres in their hands sing hosanna to God forever.

And here's another thing that needs to be emphasized: it is the irresistible disasters that a person cannot overcome on his own that force a person to seek God and turn to Him for help, that is, they are the cause of such important properties of the Mind as God–seeking and Communion with God - in a world of universal happiness, man does not need God. And the Mind does not grow in greenhouse conditions.

6.1.3 Understanding Divine Providence

From the point of view of the proposed model, Providence or Reality is the property of the Word-idea in the sense of omniscience about all possible ways and means of its development – all this is already fully contained in God's Word about the idea he contemplates in a collapsed form, and unfolds into an image as it develops. As Nikolai Kuzansky wrote, "everything is wrapped up in the one God, since everything is in Him; and He unfolds everything, since He is in everything" ^{[19, p. 104]}. If we think of Reality as the god of our world, then the Word-idea that generates it is an analogue of the Super-Existent Absolute, which generates a personal God through an act of self–awareness, and Reality itself is an analogue of the Existing Personal God generated by the Absolute on its ontological level. And the process of self-knowledge of the Word-idea in Reality through its descent into being should be similar to the self-knowledge of the Personal God who exists in Super-Existence.

In relation to the particular case of the observable universe, God's Providence (Given) appears to manifest itself in the world of matter in the main law of existence, the law of cause-and-effect relationships. Any event that has occurred entails subsequent events in time as its consequences. Each cause has only one effect, and in this way a continuous chain of events is built, flowing from one another and forming a tree of history, an incredibly complex network of intertwining individual event stories, each of which has an initial event that led to its development into what is happening here and now. God's providence is Divine Omniscience at all times about everything that has happened and will happen. And the so-called freedom of choice is just an illusion caused by those simplifications of reality in the form of ignoring many factors influencing the choice beyond consciousness. As the famous physicist Hawking wrote, "yes, everything is predetermined, but we can assume that it is not, since we do not know what exactly is predetermined"^{[20, p. 55]}.

The main thing in the implementation of Providence, recorded in the Spirit of the Word, is the autonomy of the development of worlds without direct intervention of God: God does not interfere in the events of the worlds, allowing them to develop in accordance with their Providences – this applies to any worlds, among which the observable universe is a special case of worlds governed by the law of cause and effect, acting spatially-the time span of the observable universe.

Returning to the applicability of the model under consideration in relation to our observable universe, we point to the development of such a concept as free will, postulated in church dogmatics. The apparent possibility of making elections with the full determinism of Providence causes the illusion of freedom in making "free" decisions by living beings, and ultimately human free will, which in this case naturally follows from a lack of awareness of consciousness about the real causality of the "elections" performed by consciousness, and is not postulated by the church dogmatically as a special grace, provided by God to man and mankind according to God's will, according to God's will.

In general, the will of God, as already noted above, cannot exist in the sense of God's will for anything, God the absolute cannot have desires and, consequently, the will to fulfill them – this, in particular, also explains God's non-interference in the affairs of worlds that exist autonomously within the framework of rigid determinism. in relation to them, the Crafts. Thus, the presence of free will in making a free choice between the available opportunities provided by circumstances, as options for action, is, as already mentioned above, the illusion of a lack of awareness of the subject about the reasons that define "free choice", as well as an essential sign of the imperfection of the subjects who make this choice.: For a perfect god, there is no will as a manifestation of desire, while for imperfect beings it manifests itself in the choices made due to the lack of perfection that causes the desire to fill it: the desire to acquire what is missing determines the final choice of possible options for action.

However, it can be assumed that there are cases of God's direct intervention in the affairs of the world, which is recognized as a Miracle of God and a manifestation of the very Will of God, the existence of which we have already denied to God in the arguments given above. Considering such an assumption seems possible for us, firstly, only within the limits of the observable universe, the only world known to us; and secondly, it is necessary to first define the categories of mind and soul, and their relationships with each other.

If we interpret Fishing as a record in the Spirit of everything for all time from the beginning to the end of the world, as the development of a Word-idea, then in this sense, not only humans and animals have a "soul", but in general, everything from the universe to a grain of sand: the "source code" of Fishing is caused by the Spirit of any object he looks at the "screen" of existence and keeps it there "in plain sight" of the contemplating God until the "program" of his existence is exhausted. That is, everything in the visible world is a reflection of spirit in matter. This spiritual prototype of the material incarnation can be conventionally called the essence, or the essence of things present in the world of matter. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he expressed himself figuratively in the Gospel of Thomas: "81. Jesus said: I am the light that is on everyone. I am everything: everything has gone out of me and everything has returned to me. Cut down the tree, I am there; pick up the stone, and you will find me there." It is the "writing down" of an image or essence in matter that creates the possibility of the interaction of the Spirit of God with the material world, the matter of which is, as it were, attached to the Spirit, without merging or connecting with it as one, and not directly interacting in any way.

6.2 Anthropological conclusions

6.2.1 The human phenomenon

The next question is about man: where is his immortal soul, which Jesus has prepared for the Kingdom of Heaven, the unattainability of which we have just postulated?

As we have established above, the world is self-sufficient in its development and autonomous existence, and God's intervention in it in the form of manual control is unnecessary. This means that, contrary to biblical myths, humans themselves were not created by God personally and personally, but were, as science tells us, the fruit and result of evolution. If we proceed from the theory of natural evolution from the formation of the universe to the emergence of life and, eventually, intelligence, then it is possible that it is the goal of Providence: the world should give rise to a godlike mind, which later, being reflected into the universal Mind of God, itself turns into His Idea, and becomes an independent actor capable of creating its own worlds, that is– the god of his worlds. Let us recall that the inner world of a person is a product of his mind – and in this construction of his own inner world, reflecting the outer one, and in this sense accommodating it entirely together with God, the God-likeness of the human mind is manifested.

6.2.2 Changing the approach to human rationality

If we abandon the primitive biblical paradigm of the "creation of the world" and take the side of evolutionary theory, then we will have to admit that there is no soul in man – but there is a self-learning mind that begins to master knowledge of the world from itself, from scratch, which we see in the behavior of a born baby, which differs from the born animals except perhaps more than theirs, helplessness.

So, let's say that there is no soul. But there is a Mind that seeks God. And from this moment, God's intervention in a self–sufficient autonomous world begins in response to a request from a man who sought God in faith and prayer - the time has come to reap the fruit from the tree of the universe, planted for this fruit in time immemorial, because this fruit is ripe: The Mind is ready to accept God into itself, and become God himself.. God finally reveals himself to man at his request, expressed in the Search for God: seek and you will find.

To clarify: the soul, as the source code of the object of the material world, which is also a child, as a record of Providence about its existence, is present in the Spirit, like everything else. But a born child doesn't have a soul in the sense of personality, and it won't be for a long time.

And here it comes to the heavenly treasure that Jesus suggests collecting and storing, as opposed to earthly wealth and well-being. Only the human Mind is the real container of his wealth, as well as the entire universe surrounding him. The reflection of the external world in the human mind creates his inner world, which contains the external world, including God as the object of God's Knowledge. It is Reason, being the ultimate goal of God's Providence, that is worthy of Divine dignity, and finds a way to be reflected back in the Spirit of God, thereby gaining independent existence as a disembodied Spirit, God-like and God-like. But the treasure of the earth, accumulated by passionate and vicious desire in the human mind, will not let him go and, having firmly tied himself to the world of matter, will disappear with death along with his personality and mind, which are not imprinted in the world of matter by anything except the neural connections of the disintegrated brain.

That is, the spirit of a newborn human reflected in matter, the object of the soul's providence for him, as a record of the source code of the Spirit, must develop into a Mind that seeks God. This causes a Divine Response in the form of "rebirth" or Baptism of the Spirit, that is, the reverse reflection and imprinting in the Spirit of the God-seeking personality of man as an independent immortal spiritual entity. That immortal soul, which is by no means given at birth, and is in no way attached to a mortal body, not being present in the world of matter at all, but is the result of the spiritual development of an intelligent personality to a state of God–knowledge in Faith and Love - precisely through the reverse reflection in the Spirit of the human mind, which so far exists only in the form of material neural connections Through his brain, a person's personality is transitioning from the material looking glass into the world of Divine Reality. From the screen existence to the source code of the Spirit of God: the characters of the screen descend from it into the real world of being of God. From this to the world, the transition to which is closed to matter and impossible by definition. And therefore, only the Mind that seeks the Kingdom of Heaven will enter It, becoming its inhabitant, a disembodied spirit that has preserved its self-developed personality of a godlike man in all its godlike fullness.

Reason, in its definitions given at different times by great thinkers, combines, among other things, important properties for our consideration: self-awareness, personality as the separation of "oneself" from the rest of the world, egocentricity as the property of placing oneself as the center of the world and being, literature or verbality, word-making as a way of cognition, that is, the ability to to name and define objects and phenomena through literature, and finally, most importantly, God–seeking and God-knowledge.

However, it should be recognized that if we keep within the framework of evolutionary theory, then it would be incorrect to assume God-seeking and Communion as externally "built-in" inherent properties of the Mind, and they should also be deduced from evolution as its consequence, without assuming any direct or indirect intervention of God in its processes.

In fact, it is in the sacralization of objects and phenomena that the first glimpses of Reason appear, and a new type of thinking characteristic of it, conventionally called "scientific": a reasonable person tries to find the cause-and-effect relationships of phenomena and ways to influence causes in such a way as to avert the negative consequences of the actions of these causes. And how does the immature mind of the ancient savages do this?

By analogy, by expanding the scope of familiar associations.

What does a primitive person see? The same as the modern one: the one who is stronger wins. And what does it take to avoid the deplorable fate of losing your life and going to feed your fellow tribesmen or other tribes? To fight. And if you're weak? Bring gifts and beg for mercy.

It is the latter that is transferred to the terrible phenomena of nature, which a person cannot resist: the mind personifies its fears in order to avoid deplorable consequences, turning the unknown objective causes of the terrible consequences into entities in its own image and likeness. And then the only hope becomes an imaginary omnipotent god, with whom it is necessary to enter into communication in order to receive this help.

And then another type of thinking enters, magical and religious – when a person begins to adjust facts to his religious fantasies, to a developed system of understanding cause-and-effect relationships (erroneous), accepting only those that correspond to the theory he created, and discarding, ignoring everything that does not fit into the scheme.

Thus, the idea of God settles in the human consciousness quite naturally, precisely in an evolutionary way, developing from primitive forms of magical consciousness to more complex and perfect ones through the unity and struggle of opposites of scientific and religious types of thinking – until it reaches the stage of turning to a conscious single universal deity located outside the world created by him and subordinated to him through the laws of being through causality.

6.2.3 Characterization of God's will in relation to individual freedom

If God is absolute, then he wants nothing, being already in absolute goodness and self-satisfaction from himself, and his will, even if we assume its existence, does not manifest itself in any way and cannot manifest itself as long as "the Lord is good", from whose absoluteness nothing can lead him, and this "nothing" is something that does not exist and cannot be. Nevertheless, due to the same absoluteness, the will of God, as the idea of his manifestation of his ability to act for the fulfillment of desires, must be allowed and taken into account by us within the framework of the model we propose – otherwise the very fullness of God would be incomplete.

The will of God, stated in Christian dogmatics, cannot be accepted in the model under consideration: the divine will is postulated as the action of God in fulfillment of his desires and looks extremely anthropomorphic. Due to our postulated absence of desires and needs from God the Absolute, his will in this sense should not and cannot exist within the framework of the proposed model. What relates to the action of the Spirit is not determined by the desires and volitional efforts of God, but is a natural development of divine contemplation that requires neither desire nor its "intense" realization. In this context, I recall the Buddhist concept that the act of understanding is not karmic, that is, it is not an action in the standard meaning of the word associated with need or "strength."

Let us especially note and emphasize once again that within the framework of the evolution of the world, as we have shown above, the idea of the illusion of human "free will" is justified not as granted to man by a special act of divine will, but as organically arising from the evolutionary process itself, which makes it a part of human nature itself, and not something planted in a person from the outside. That is, freedom of will is inherent in man by his, as already shown above, imperfect and not self-sufficient nature, and arises again as a result of the evolutionary development of the Mind, as an inherent human nature property of personality. This again confirms the absence of the need for God's direct intervention in the process of the evolutionary emergence and development of the Mind, as a phenomenon on a universal scale.

6.3 Soteriological and ethical conclusions

6.3.1 Communion with God, divine revelation and salvation

So, in the process of its evolutionary development, the Mind inevitably comes to the idea of Seeking God, and then Communion with God. Since it turns out to be completely impossible to discover God by objective scientific methods, personal experience comes to the fore, which by its very nature is subjective and fundamentally unprovable. Having found God in his own mind, a person in it turns to the God he has found and turns to the help he seeks with a request, supplication, prayer. However, it is important that you are answered. A person seeks and waits for such an answer from the God to whom he turned, and if he receives it, it is primarily in the form of receiving what he asked for: for example, he prayed for recovery from an illness, and suddenly he recovered as if nothing had happened, a miracle. At the same time, it turns out to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the ordinary religious bias mentioned above in the unconscious selection of events that are only suitable for expectations from the real intervention of God in the system of vital cause-and-effect relationships in order to change it at the request of a person, even at the subjective level of personal experience.

However, if there is a God and it was He Who created this world for the purpose of the evolutionary emergence of Reason in it, then, undoubtedly, sooner or later He will enter into personal communication with this Mind. That is, he will begin to respond to a person's prayer appeals to Him. It is just as difficult to say when and at what stage of the development of religious thinking this contact begins, as it is generally difficult, as mentioned above, to establish how real this contact is in contrast to the phantoms of a morbid imagination. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that God's reciprocal attempts to contact the human mind begin even in the early stages of the magical thinking of savages. It should be noted that the difficulties in the subjective nature of Communion with God are due to the illusion of human free will provided by God, which in turn follows from God's principled deliberate non-interference in the evolutionary process of the development of the world and the Mind in it. That is, God will not reveal Himself to humanity or to an individual, since He has no desires, until man himself seeks Him in an act of Seeking God, and, believing in the Existence of God, turns to God with a request for Communion with God. God's response to such a person can also be a personal Revelation, the bearers of which later often become the founders of their own new religions, including those that are currently recognized as "world religions": first of all, Christianity, as well as Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, etc. Both the general ideological similarity of religions and their dissimilarity in dogmatic and ritual entourage is primarily explained by the cultural environment in which the recipient of Revelation was raised, which he is able to perceive and interpret within the limits of his inherent imaginative and ideological series, the cultural code in which he was raised. In other words, God speaks to man in the language of his familiar imagery and ideas, outside of which man is simply unable to master the new knowledge received from God. So, Pavel says to himself that he "heard ineffable verbs" - that is, the new knowledge simply did not fit into his consciousness and remained undeveloped, like speech in an unfamiliar language.

Note also that Jesus characterized the creators of religions as "thieves and robbers": "All who came before me were thieves and robbers; but the sheep did not listen to them" (John 10:8) - why? Apparently, because, having received a personal Revelation in the form of God's address to them, they succumbed to the temptation to create their own religious organization and lead it with goals, often quite personal. In this sense, a good example is the person of John the Baptist, who, according to Heb. When John saw Jesus, he testified about himself and the end of his mission: "33 I did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, 'On whomever you see the Spirit descending and remaining on him, the same is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. 34 And I saw and testified that this is the Son of God" (John 1:33-34). However, he continued his water baptisms, which had already been made meaningless by the fulfillment of God's promised meeting with Jesus, unwilling to sacrifice his position as a great prophet for the sake of discipleship with Jesus and thereby becoming the "thief and robber" mentioned by Jesus in see the above quote.

Then, first of all, where is God and His Kingdom? Based on what has been said, it turns out that He is everywhere, both outside of us and inside, as stated in the Gospel of Thomas.: 2. Jesus said, "If those who lead you tell you: Look, the kingdom is in the sky! - then the birds of the sky will get ahead of you. If they tell you that it's in the sea, then the fish will get ahead of you. But the kingdom is within you and outside of you."

And how to get to It? It turns out that there is no way out of the world of matter, It is inaccessible to material objects, like the program code for characters acting on a computer screen, and matter has no access to the Kingdom of Heaven, since this and that world do not exist for each other, but exist simultaneously in God only as reflections of each other – this is how the Divine manifests transcendence.

We have already noted that personal imperfection, insufficiency in something generates the desire and will to achieve what is desired, which determines the illusion of choosing from the given opportunities in these specific circumstances. In particular, God–seeking, as the desire of one's own incompleteness to fill oneself with divine fullness. For example, to receive the missing requested: healing from diseases, deliverance from troubles, resurrection from death finally. And even, most of all, to find God as a personal friend and intercessor, and eternal life with him and in him.

And God responds.

How does he do this if he is in a dispassionate contemplation of himself, from which he does not seem to care about anything? He responds to a request, to a direct appeal to him who asked for what he wanted.: "Lord, if you will, you can cleanse me, I will, be cleansed, and the leprosy will come off him at the same hour" (Matthew 8:2). This "I will" is the Word of God, which, intervening in Providence, changes it and with it the world about which He is providential.

This "I want" of God, however, does not violate his Absolute, because it is not his desire – he is all–good and all-sufficient, having no desires - but the desire of another, to which God always responds because he is all-good, that is, he is a reliable altruist, pouring out abundant Love on all his creation – let us agree with the dogmatic opinion of Christianity in this. And in this "I want" the Will of God manifests itself, as an action in response to the desire of the one who sought him: god does not want anything for himself and in this he is weak-willed, but responding to a request addressed to him, breaks away from contemplation and performs the action of making a decision and suggesting the decision to His Spirit for embodiment in Providence. However, it is impossible to simply insert a Miracle into the fabric of existence without tearing it, destroying the world created by the Word, in which everything is intertwined with a network of cause-and-effect relationships. And therefore, the whole Craft of the world is recalculated and rewritten by the Spirit so that the past remains in the past, and the future changes taking into account the intervention of a Miracle in the fabric of existence. In some ways, this can be compared to cutting a shrub by a gardener: new shoots will grow in place of the one cut to an even line, without affecting what turned out to be below the even line of pruning.

Does God always respond to a request? Always, of course, but this does not mean that it automatically fulfills any desires: a decision made by the Will of God can either ignore the request or fulfill the desire of the requester, but not at all in the way he imagines it. This is how God's Will is brought to life, to the existence of the world.

6.3.2 Understanding ethical categories within the framework of the new concept

Separately, it is necessary to point out a particular consequence of the general non-manifestation of his Will in God: the incorrigible innate sinfulness of man attributed by theology is a product of the biblical Law, which declared itself the receptacle and expression of the Will of God himself. A transgressor of the law is a God–abuser, because by doing so he opposes the Will of God; in a more general sense, sin is a violation, resistance and opposition to the Will of God. If we assume that God himself does not have a manifestation of his own Will, then there is no sin and there cannot be, he simply does not exist. As for such human qualities as conscience, shame, justice, etc., according to the proposed model, within the framework of the evolutionary development of the mind, they are not at all innate qualities given to the soul by God from the beginning, as a God-like and God-like distinction between Good and Evil, but rather as ethical norms and moral principles instilled through education, accepted in human communities. The main one, according to the Hebrew Bible, is the law of "reciprocity": do not do to another what you do not want for yourself. And, again, the sacredness of any life as a consequence of the instinct of self-preservation.

6.3.3 The ontological meaning of heaven and hell

Also, on the basis of this model, the idea of heaven and hell can be developed: both are extensions of existence, accepted and enclosed in the memory of God: the good and joyful remain so, and continue their existence in the memory of God as in the Kingdom of Heaven, as well as the opposite, forever imprinted in their painful existence, fixated in a vicious circle of evil intentions, deeds and their consequences. Thus, conditional good rewards itself, and conditional evil torments itself and infinitely punishes itself; at the same time, it is possible to imagine some kind of overcoming of the vicious circle of evil achieved in the development of atonement – and thus the effect of divine forgiveness through overcoming atonement: the amount of atonement, turning into the quality of divine forgiveness.

Along the way, distorted, completely pagan ideas about the Kingdom of Heaven as a kind of heavenly hierarchy of subordination are being corrected.: God, in the most general view of a "non-existent god," is, firstly, self-sufficient, and, secondly, omnipotent and omnipotent within himself, and for no reason does he need any helpers in the form of angels, who were "minor gods" in ancient paganism and gradually transformed into service forces of good. and evil, fighting among themselves.

7. Conclusion: a brief summary

So, the proposed model, firstly, removes the question of the purpose of divine creation: divine contemplation in itself does not set any goals, is not the fulfillment of unfulfilled desires or an expression of the fulfillment of divine incompleteness - all aspects of the violation of the divine Absolute in the typical cosmogonic models of the past; secondly, it asserts the absolute metaphysical primacy of the Spirit; inThirdly, it completely solves the problem of transcendence-immanence; fourthly, it allows us to develop a consistent concept of the existence of the world as a reflection of God in himself, and Salvation as the eternal abiding of a mature person in the memory of God, who does not forget anything – this memory of God, in fact, is the Kingdom of Heaven; at the same time, if we assume that God can forget everything that he does not accept into his memory – based on this assumption, it is possible to develop the concept of the relationship of good and evil, which, respectively, find and do not find a place in Eternity.

The proposed philosophical and religious model of the "Contemplative God" is, in fact, a new word in religious and philosophical science as a whole, an absolutely original, internally consistent religious and philosophical concept, freed from the shortcomings of previous philosophical systems listed above, and may be of interest to the entire scientific and philosophical community.