The Experience of God

the cause of being is not some mechanical first instance of physical eventuality that, having discharged its part, may depart the stage; rather, it is the unconditional reality underlying all conditioned things in every instant.

This rational capacity to think and to act in obedience to absolute or transcendental values constitutes a dependency of consciousness upon a dimension of reality found nowhere within the physical order. It is a capacity for something that nature cannot “see,” and a desire at once inexhaustible and often remarkably impractical.

whether there is a God or not, for truly rationally reflective persons—persons, that is, who allow themselves neither to lapse into brutish indifference to everything other than practical concerns nor to fall under the sway of some inflexible materialist ideology—the question of God never ceases to pose itself anew, and the longing to know about Go

In Plato’s Timaeus, the demiurge is a benevolent intermediary between the realm of eternal forms and the realm of mutability;

we know far more than we are usually aware of knowing, in large part because we labor to forget what is laid out before us in every moment, and because we spend so much of our lives wandering in dreams, in a deep but fitful sleep.

There are certain perennial problems to which all interesting philosophy returns again and again; but there are no such things as logical discoveries that consign any of the older answers to obsolescence.

The practice of contemplative prayer, therefore, is among the highest expressions of rationality possible, a science of consciousness and of its relation to the being of all things, requiring the most intense devotion of mind and will to a clear perception of being and consciousness in their unity.

the structure of rational consciousness is ecstatic: our minds are capable of reflecting the world because there is a kind of elation in our thinking, a joy, or at least anticipation of joy, which seeks its fulfillment in an embrace of truth in its essence. Every movement of the intellect and will toward truth is already an act of devotion, or (aga

the educated class is usually, at any given phase in history, also the most thoroughly indoctrinated,