The Problem with Awareness Is

The main problem with "awareness" as a topic for human contemplation lies in the fact that we humans want to contemplate the beginnings of things with which we have been confronted.  Originally, for each person, awareness has to do with one's earliest memories.  If we truly believe that Creation was made from nothing, then it is the smallest of things to consider that all of reality has been created from nothing at the moment we are first aware of it.  Everything that is thought to have gone before is--neither more nor less than the first burst of Creation--as much a candidate for "new creation" as the churning depths of Genesis. 

To humanity in general--to the "masses" of humanity that both Old and New Testaments as translated are wont to call "Gentiles"--this is nonsense.  There is history, after all--though of course the most assiduously and conscientiously pursued sciences of history remind us ceaselessly that we do not know as much as we think we know.  And then there are the natural sciences, which we can look forward to telling us everything except, well, everything.  We will never know it all.

And then there is Jesus, who cares little for time.  Or space.  Or history.  Or science.  To Jesus the existence of Elijah is as much a thing before it happens, as when it happens, as after it happens.  To Jesus this generation is all generations.  This is the implication of Jesus' distinction between the Gentiles and the believers in God: the Gentiles are believers in the world, and the true believers--of every possible extraction--are believers in God.  There are no gradations in this analysis, and no silly notions that the believers in God have proper or orthodox appreciations of Creation while the Gentiles are deluded.  The most sublime Christian world-views, for example, are just prettified pagan friezes.

What the believers in God believe in is God.  The value of every other object of contemplation is found in each object's two-fold deficiency--the object is less than perfect, and our appreciation of it is less than perfect.  This reality impinges on us most acutely in our contentions about beginnings--about where we imagine we come from, and what we imagine we have inherited from where we arose.  This realm of thought is where the greatest gulf arises between our conceits, on the one hand, and our proper aspirations regarding our Creator on the other hand.

We have no imaginings of ourselves as distinct from God except as those imaginings are undergirded by fancies about where we come from.  Indeed, we are distinct from God, but we do not know where we come from--just as we will never know where the wind (as a set of realities ever receding from the physicists' grasp) comes from.  This is one reason why it is so fatuous to view the teachings of Jesus as confined to a faith tradition (or a "Judeo-Christian" tradition.)  When Jesus sets himself at odds to "the Gentiles," he is taking a stance against how all of humanity behaves.  When Jesus' messenger John taunts the Children of Abraham with the declaration that God could fashion of stones children of Abraham, this gospel teaching is refuting not merely John's Jewish audience, but is refuting by necessary extension the fancies of causation that entrance all of humanity.

The teachings of Jesus are pre-Christian, pre-Jewish, pre-Abrahamic, pre-Creation.  This is so necessarily.  If the truths of God are contextual, they are not truths of God.