Interesting quote posted at Indistinct Union:

John Polkinghorne, a physicist and a priest, has put it this way: “God will download our software onto his hardware until the time he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves.” That gets to two things nicely: that the period after death is a period when we are in God’s presence but not active in our own bodies, and also that the more important transformation will be when we are again embodied and administering Christ’s kingdom.

Is it only me that sees this as more creepy than attractive? If this is all there is to it, I am tempted to say count me out.

(It is also another example of someone entertaining themselves with their thinking, creating imaginations that gives some temporary comfort. Nothing wrong in that, but it is good to be honest about it.)

But as usual, we can also find it here now.

This timeless now that everything happens within is Christ’s Kingdom. And when I notice that, its content - this human self and its surroundings, or Kosmos if we want to be grand - is noticed as already and always fresh, new, stainless, pure.

So in that case, count me in.

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What are some of the ways we made in God’s image?

If we take God to be beyond and including all polarities, and ourselves to be this human being, then we see how this human being is intrinsically embedded in the wider world of form. It mirrors and is born from the universe as a whole, dependent on its existence by infinite causes reaching back to beginning of time and stretching out to the limits of the universe, mirroring and expressing the same dynamics, processes and patterns as the universe as a whole.

We can also find ourselves as timeless and spaceless awakeness, within which, to and as the world of form arises. In this way, we are made in God’s image. Although more accurately, the whole sense of I and Other falls away so there is no I to mirror God. It is the intimacy which is left when the intimacy of I and Other falls away.

And by finding ourselves as awakeness, find ourselves as this field of awakeness and form, already and inherently absent of an I and Other. So here, we are made in God’s image as awakeness, form, and form as nothing other than awakeness.

Without having much familiarity with the tradition, it seems that the shahadah, lā ilāha illā-llāh, there is no God but God, can be taken in several different ways.

There is the ethnocentric interpretation, taking the Islamic God as the only one, or rather, the Islamic interpretation of God as the only correct one.

Then, the interpretation of the practitioner or faithful, having God as the single or main focus for ones attention and life.

Or the worldcentric one, seeing God as One, with many interpretations and faiths appropriate to the culture and needs of different people.

Or the one of the mystics, seeing all as God, and eventually allowing a sense of separate self to fall away.

The second part of the shahadan, wa muħammadan rasÅ«lu-llāh, means that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, and I can’t say I have any problems with that.

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