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[rva_jeremy]

We confuse the infinity "knowing" what it is like to be separate, as actual separation.

The approach you describe is basically where I've been slowly, slowly heading in my thinking: that the experience of separation is not some anomalous, "bad" deviation from "good" unity, but is instead merely a feature of foreverness we experience in a novel manner as a consequence of the vantage point that this peculiar thing, individuated attention, affords us.  To put it pithily: experience is infinity projected into time and space. Anagogy, your explanation is so concise and comprehensive -- I applaud you!

There's a normative aspect in this cosmology of which I think I need to prepare myself to let go or reimagine in some way.  I'm kind of shocked that after so long studying Confederation philosophy, I still have this manichean, caveman concept of "UNITY, GOOD! SEPARATION, BAD!"  Of course it's more elegant to think of the individual life as just part of a single phenomenon, elongated and potentiated by time and space.  There was a philosophical essay I was reading that described the concept of dimensional space as a "medium of particularity" (in the Hegelian, dialectical sense of individual/particular/universal), and I think this really captures the function well.

What is challenging about this perspective might be its least abstract but most personal consequence: it necessarily throws into stark relief the character of the ego, for lack of a better label for that part of our experience that seeks a meaning on its own, particular terms.  I'm starting to wonder whether this isn't exactly what Buddhist thinkers mean when they say there is no fundamental ground available to us: the part of us that seeks security, stability, satisfaction, comfort, etc. is really pretty meaningless juxtaposed with more infinite concerns, hence the spiritual path pushing the individual away from ego identification towards something that participates more directly in the real teleologically meaningful direction.  It doesn't change the nature of individual experience; it merely changes how it is appraised.

Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The Selfish Gene in which he introduced this idea of life writ large as merely a vehicle for genes to reproduce; that genes were the real "players" in life, cells, plants, animals, consciousness, etc. all being evolutionary adaptations that help genes survive and thrive.  I sort of feel myself pulled in this direction, but from the metaphysical direction: that our individual consciousness is a kind of meta-phenomenon merely facilitating or existing as a consequence of the Creator's timeless process, projected into space and time.  So there is no cosmologically sound explanation that will ever satisfy the ego, because the ego is not really the beneficiary of experience but merely the means to it.

Finally, I think this is precisely what often bugs people about Confederation philosophy: that we, the kinds of people at the level of consciousness where we're reading this post, having these human experiences, living our lives on socially normative terms, no matter how much we might believe in a greater reality, we really crave some meaning to this particular experience in terms that apply and resonate within the experience itself.  We can have that--we can talk about lessons, catalyst, Wanderers, etc. in ways that we can reason about and make sense of our daily lives around--but beyond a certain level of thinking, everything points to a greater cosmological process that the ego does not participate in so much as plays the role of a vehicle for it.  That can be very disturbing for people, but its certainly worth meditating on.

Thank you to everybody indulging me in this thinking, it is a tremendous comfort to me (yes, the ego me) to be able to share these thoughts.  Thanks especially to anagogy for the generous and sympathetic response.  Please forgive any clumsiness in the writing above.