Review (Part Seven): The Experience of God – Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart

The dream and the reality Right after his introduction, Hart took a couple of pages to tell the story of waking from a pleasant dream, but with a sense of foreboding.  Now, near the end of the book, he continues that story.  The dreamer is now awake.  He considers the ingenious  intricacy of the distortions […]

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Review (Part Five): The Experience of God — Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart

Bliss Mind over matter There is a mystery at the base of all of our ruminations about consciousness, and that sense of mystery resists reduction to material causes.  Reality is one, embraced within the totality of being.  “[P]erhaps we really should look elsewhere for the source and sustaining principle of that unity.”  And Hart does: […]

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Review (Part Four): The Experience of God—Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart

Consciousness The mechanistic vision of reality holds that material forces are inherently mindless; intrinsically devoid of purpose.  Consciousness, on the other hand, is everything that matter is not:  directed, purposive, essentially rational.  Materialism and the fact of consciousness cannot be reconciled. The materialist point of view means making no accommodation for any spiritual reality.  But […]

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