The Gwydiona Experience

"'...it's impossible that you don't feel it! God is here already, everywhere. I can see [Him] shining from you...'"
- Poul Anderson, "The Night Face" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 541-660 AT p. 637.

"God" should mean a supra-rational transcendent experience, not the irrationality of temporary madness, which is what it turns out to mean here. See the previous post about Ken Wilber.

CS Lewis makes the same point as Wilber:

"...a sceptical friend of ours called McPhee was arguing against the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the human body. I was his victim at the moment, and he was pressing on me in his Scots way with such questions as 'So you think you're going to have guts and palate for ever in a world where there'll be no eating, and genital organs in a world without copulation? Man, ye'll have a grand time of it!' when Ransom suddenly burst out with great excitement, 'Oh, don't you see, you ass, that there's a difference between a trans-sensuous life and a non-sensuous life?' That, of course, directed McPhee's fire at him. What emerged was that in Ransom's opinion the present functions and appetites of the body would disappear, not because they were atrophied but because they were as he said 'engulfed'. He used the word 'trans-sexual', and began to hunt around for some similar words to apply to eating (after rejecting 'trans-gastronomic'), and since he was not the only philologist present, that diverted the conversation into different channels."
- CS Lewis, Voyage To Venus (London, 1978), pp. 27-28.

Comments on Lewis
(i) I do not see why the Christian Heaven cannot include eating. It is described in the New Testament as a banquet.
(ii) "Trans-sexual" has come to mean something else.
(iii) I do not subscribe to Christian doctrine but Lewis might be describing a possible future development of humanity.

Is the eternal atemporal or trans-temporal and what might that mean? Is the Absolute impersonal or trans-personal and again what might that mean? (I think that the Absolute, that which exists independently of any external relationships, can only be everything, the totality.)

Lewis wrote a work of Christian apologetics called Beyond Personality. If three parallel straight lines symbolize three personal beings, might a triangle symbolize one tri-personal being, the Trinity? (However, I think that the Trinity doctrine arose not because philosophers speculated about trans-personality but because the Fourth Evangelist deified the Son and personified the Spirit while remaining monotheist.)

If the supernatural exists, then by definition it transcends the natural. Secularists deny the supernatural but not, unless they are also reductionists, transcendence, which means going beyond:

consciousness transcends unconsciousness;
human consciousness transcends animal consciousness;
civilization transcends primitive society etc.

As ever, I am grateful to Poul Anderson for implicitly raising such issues in fiction. The third installment of his History of the Technic Civilization is "The Problem of Pain" and the third last is "The Night Face." The former dramatizes a theological problem addressed by CS Lewis and the latter involves the unfortunate identification of "God," the transcendent, with insanity.