Originally Posted by Og

It is impossible to fool myself in such a manner. The use of terms such as I and myself and me are all indications of ego. The nature of me as a biological entity is such that a sense of self is essential to my existence.

But as I've carefully and methodically tried to describe, the reality is that there is no ultimate meaningful distinction between you and me or anything else. The difference between your parents and you and your society is similar to the difference between a tornado and the weather systems that produced it. It is a continuum.

This is the reality that the consciousness obfuscates. Consciousness is necessarily about categorizing and creating boundaries. Consciousness uses these boundaries to create perception and awareness of an "external" world. It uses these categories to define the behavior of your person in the world. This is the essence of the garden of eden story as interpreted by myself and others like carl sagan and joseph campbell. Those ancient peoples must have had an intuition for this kind of stuff as well.

"I" am not god. "I" or "Myself" is an illusion. The reality is that we are all expressions of the divine ground of being and necessarily identical with it. Please don't think that I'm saying that the categorical consciousness that creates the "me" is whatever your concept of "god" is...

The notion of "I" is of a boundary between what is me and what is not me. This boundary is an illusion. It's a useful illusion/fiction and creates our modern society and propagates our species, but it's not ultimately true.

I've seen your recent posts going after my notion of identity with the divine. I understand your misconception. It's hard to convey this idea in words. That's generally why metaphors are used in religion.