Understanding the Virgin Mary Part 1 Iconic Participation

I was asked a question about the Virgin, and I shall answer in two parts, this first being a brief explanation of how I view concepts pertaining to the Holy. There are at least two worlds: (1) the material world, being creation which is not conscious, and (2) the conscious world, which is the material world inhabited by Consciousness Generators; i.e., life. I do not imply the two are essentially separate. I have separated them in my thought only. Notice I have not postulated a spiritual world. This is because the spiritual is the mystery, is the entire question, and by setting up a homeland for it, I have answered a great part of the question without doing anything but saying: the Holy has a home. And that would be-say, heaven. And when the Holy comes home from work, It sits down on a holy couch...and so on. If we postulate a world of the spirit, we have answered all our mysteries and are left with the jejune task of delineating what this spiritual realm looks like! So, we do not deny the spiritual, but we do not think in terms of a spiritual world either. People have said that God is everywhere. This is a trivial observation. For example, God is not present in the plannings of the Atheist. So when the dull observe that God is everywhere, it is supposed to mean that the spiritual somehow infuses the material world. However, we have seen that the spiritual does not exist everywhere in the conscious world; not in the mind of the Atheist. I believe it is the conscious world we are actually interested in. Now, if there be Powers beyond our worlds, we know nothing of their homes. We do not postulate a spiritual world. We do not deny it either. It is a mystery - right now. How do such Powers or forces or spirits manifest themselves , then, into the world of mankind? At the present time, we think (1) the spiritual bursts into the conscious world, seemingly on its own power. If this is the case, why is the spiritual not always present in the conscious world? Why is it not present all the time? We have seen above that some people believe the spiritual to be everywhere within the material world. Why is it not omnipresent in the conscious world? Suffice it to say that it is not so present. We also think (2) that the spiritual is a pretty necklace of imagery woven by the human mind - sometimes carried along by the collective unconscious. The dynamics of the appearances of the spiritual in the material world is explained in the works of the unconscious. This is a result of the wonderful Dr. Jung, but it is an untenable theory; at least until it can be explained how imagery is determined by the genetic make-up of humanity. The appearance of the Spirit within the Conscious World uses the entrance created by the grammar of Imagery of Consciousness. Consider the apparitons at Fatima: the image of the Virgin as described to us was essentially totally congruent with the imagery we already possessed. The Spirit accords with the Image and the Image agrees with the Spirit. For example, at Fatima, the apparition did not say that it was St. Paul. That would have been a stumbling block indeed. Furthermore, the hunger of the Spirit to appear is balanced by the hunger of the Conscious World to receive the appearance. For example, Fatima's apparitions occurred in the temporal proximity of World War I. The Conscious World cries out - the Spirit hears the cry from a million light years away and moves beyond the speed of light, a Cumaean Sibyl running on nitro. I do not intend to try to explain every facet of this. I just want to start us thinking. I want to set forth that the Spirit-World thing is two way, not one way. And I call it ICONIC PARTICIPATION The Spirit needs the Image. At Fatima, if there were no existing image of the Virgin, there would have no image of the Virgin. The Image is created by the Conscious World and is maintained for the use of the Spirit. By maintained I mean that it is not a moribund part of the Mind. For example, if I were to go to Fatima, it is very doubtful that I would see Zeus, let's say. Through ICONIC PARTICIPATION the Spirit enters into the Consciousness Structure of the Image and becomes part of the Conscious World. This is important, I think; the manner by which the Spirit enters the World. For the most part, we cannot grasp God. God seems to be hidden from us. We find this frustrating and hard to understand. However, David Foster has written that the " Invisibility of God" is actually the normal state of affairs in any such system of processing data, whether conscious or pre-conscious. Succinctly, the Controller of a process has to operate at a much higher speed and level than the computers at a lower level. Hence, the Controller will be essentially "invisible" to the lower computers who only know of the Controller's existence by the inputs they received from higher up. Therefore, we may think of the process of Iconic Participation as the process by which the Spirit, which moves at least at the speed of light, is slowed down and made comprehensible by the Imagery of Consciousness, which is slow as molasses in January in comparison to the Spirit. This is not too far fetched. Consider the difference between thinking about doing something you greatly love and talking about that same thing. Thinking is fast and furious - quick and ferociously fast. All high spots of difficulty are made low and all low spots of boredom are made high. Talking, however, is much slower and laborious. And all the while you talk, you want to be doing. And in talking you are forced to make the logical connections. And you can't just force the difficulties to disappear - you have to formulate a plan how to do so. The world of Consciousness Structures of Language and Imagery is wonderful, but it is excruciatingly slower than the speed of thought. And that speed is the least speed at which the Spirit operates.