Notes by Doug Muder (1997)

"We are still left, however, with the question asked at the end of the section on love: Where does love come from? Only now it can be enlarged to a perhaps even more basic question: Whence comes the whole force of evolution? And to this we can add our puzzlement about the origins of grace. … To explain the miracles of grace and evolution we hypothesize the existence of a God who wants us to grow--a God who loves us. To many this hypothesis seems too simple, too easy; too much like fantasy; childlike and naïve. But what else do we have? … No one who has observed the data and asked the questions has been able to produce a better hypothesis or even really a hypothesis at all. Until someone does, we are stuck with this strangely childlike notion of a loving God or else with a theoretical vacuum." [pages 268- 269]

"If we postulate that our capacity to love, this urge to grow and evolve, is somehow 'breathed into' us by God, then we must ask to what end. Why does God want us to grow? What are we growing toward? … All of us who postulate a loving God and really think about it eventually come to a single terrifying idea: God wants us to become Himself (or Herself or Itself). We are growing toward godhood." [pages 269-270]

"When I said this was a terrifying idea, I was speaking mildly. … For no idea ever came to the mind of man which places upon us such a burden. … As soon as we believe it is possible for man to become God, we can really never rest for long, never say, 'OK, my job is finished, my work is done.' We must constantly push ourselves to greater and greater wisdom, greater and greater effectiveness. … God's responsibility must be our own." [pages 270-271]

"The development of consciousness is the development of awareness in our conscious mind of knowledge along with our unconscious mind, which already possesses that knowledge. It is the process of the conscious mind coming into synchrony with the unconscious. … To put it plainly, our unconscious is God. God within us. We were part of God all the time. God has been with us all along, is now, and always will be." [pages 280-281]

"In my vision, the collective unconscious is God; the conscious is man as individual; and the personal unconscious is the interface between them." [page 282] (Compare this with what William James wrote in 1901: "Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the 'more' with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life.") "Being this interface, it is inevitable that the personal unconscious should be a place of some turmoil, the scene of some struggle between God's will and the will of the individual." [page 282]

"Since the unconscious is God all along, we may further define the goal of spiritual growth to be the attainment of godhood by the conscious self. … Does this mean that the goal is for the conscious to merge with the unconscious, so that all is unconsciousness? Hardly. We now come to the point of it all. The point is to become God while preserving consciousness. … We are born so that we might become, as a conscious individual, a new life form of God." [page 283]

"The goal of theology presented here, and that of most mystics, … is not to become an egoless, unconscious babe. Rather it is to develop a mature, conscious ego which then can become the ego of God." [page 283]

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