Gospel Koan 20.4
Belief as Exemplary Support
Koan 20.4
The Gospel is the exemplar: 'ideal example' of belief: a 'grant of leave' held in faith: 'support' and in trust: 'consolation' of future realising.
Summary exposition
The central mechanism is the Gospel’s function as the paradigmatic model of a specific kind of belief: one that is a sustained grant of leave, supported by faith and consoled by trust in what is yet to be realized. A single, potent example is the act of planting a crop; the planter operates on a grant of leave for the future harvest, a permission supported by faith in natural laws and consoled by trust against the anxiety of the unseen. The implication is that reality itself is underpinned by this exemplary structure of anticipatory permission, making the future a constitutive element of the present.[1]
The Gospel of Being
by John Mackay
A rigorous yet readable exploration of how existence functions—and how that relates to you.
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Past, present, and future are not existent locations. The 'past' is a present-moment recollection (snapshot) of some previous condition; the 'future' is a present-moment projection of potential. Both are generated by the only thing that fundamentally exists: the continuous conference of difference we experience as the 'present'. ↩︎