God is all awareness, self-aware. Unamuno, Life 7.24
The
consciousness of God, for Unamuno, includes the individual
consciousness of every single living being. It has memory of each
being that has existed, ever, and so keeps their individuality alive
beyond the ravages of time. It is also a personal consciousness, he
believes, not the impersonal Soul or soul-stuff imagined by some
ancient pagans (like Marcus Aurelius, who believes in the
conservation of soul as part of matter, but not the conservation of
individuals as coherent beings).
Hay
quien vive del aire sin conocerlo. Y así vivimos de Dios y en Dios
acaso, en Dios espíritu y conciencia de la sociedad y del Universo
todo, en cuanto éste también es sociedad.
Dios
no es sentido sino en cuanto es vivido, y no sólo de pan vive el
hombre, sino de toda palabra que sale de la boca de Él. (Mat. IV, 4;
Deut. VIII, 3.)
Y
esta personalización del todo, del Universo, a que nos lleva el
amor, la compasión, es la de una persona que abarca y encierra en sí
a las demás personas que la componen.
Es
el único modo de dar al Universo finalidad dándole conciencia.
Porque donde no hay conciencia no hay tampoco finalidad que supone un
propósito. Y la fe en Dios no estriba, como veremos, sino en la
necesidad vital de dar finalidad a la existencia, de hacer que
responda a un propósito. No para comprender el
por
qué, sino
para sentir y sustentar el
para
qué
último,
necesitamos a Dios, para dar sentido al Universo.
Y
tampoco debe extrañar que se diga que esa conciencia del Universo
esté compuesta e integrada por las conciencias de los seres que el
Universo forman, por las conciencias de los seres todos, y sea, sin
embargo, una conciencia personal distinta de las que la componen.
Sólo así se comprende lo de que en Dios seamos, nos movamos y
vivamos. Aquel gran visionario que fué Manuel Swedenborg, vió o
entrevió esto cuando en su libro sobre el cielo y el infierno (De
Coelo et Inferno,
52) nos dice que: «Una
entera sociedad angélica aparece a las veces en forma de un solo
ángel, como el Señor me ha permitido ver. Cuando el Señor mismo
aparece en medio de los ángeles, no lo hace acompañado de una
multitud, sino como un solo ser en forma angélica. De aquí que en
la Palabra se le llama al Señor un ángel, y que así es llamada una
sociedad entera. Miguel, Gabriel y Rafael no son sino sociedades
angélicas así llamadas por las funciones que llenan».
There
are people who take life in and from the air without being aware of
it. This is how we live in God, where we find our spirit and social
consciousness—an awareness of all the Universe, insofar as this too
is association.
God
is not felt save when he is lived, and it is not by bread alone that
man lives, but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God
(Matthew 4.4; Deuteronomy 8.3).
This
personalization of the All, of the Universe, to which the love that
is compassion brings us—it belongs to a personage who embraces and
encloses in himself all the other persons whose association comprises
universal society.
Giving
the Universe consciousness is the only way to give it purpose. For
where there is no awareness, there is no finality, no end whose
recognition becomes purposeful. Faith in God, as we shall see, rests
nowhere else but in the vital need to give existence purpose, to make
it a response to some intention. Faith is not about understanding
why?, but rather about
feeling and maintaining our final answer to the question: for
what? This is why we need God,
to give this feeling & meaning to the Universe.
It
should not be strange, then, when I tell you that this consciousness
of the Universe is made and integrated by the consciousness of all the
beings that form the Universe—that it is a sum of all the
individual consciences of each and every being, without exception—and
yet, it has its own personal conscience distinct from all that
compose it. Only thus do we understand the holy saying, that we exist
in God, moving and living and having our being in him. Emanuel
Swedenborg (†), that great visionary, saw this, however dimly, as
he tells us in his book on heaven and hell: “An entire society of
angels appears sometimes in the form of just one, as the Lord has
allowed me to see. When the Lord himself manifests in the midst of
the angels, he is not accompanied by a multitude: just one being
appears beside him in angelic form. Hence the Lord is called an angel
in the holy Word, which indicates entire societies when it refers to
angels. Michael, Gabriel, and Rafael are angelic societies whose
names derive from the offices they fulfil” (On Heaven & Hell
§52).
---
(†)
Son of a Swedish professor of theology, Swedenborg (1688-1772) spent
his youth and early adulthood studying natural science and
engineering, with some notable success in anatomy and physiology. At
the age of 53, he experienced a vision after which he devoted himself
to publishing tracts outlining a unique, mystical approach to
Christian theology that favored the Pietist approach to Lutheranism,
denounced by orthodox Lutherans as heresy.