Participating in truth
Jesus said he is the way, the truth, and the life. We should not view these as different objects, but rather different reflections of the one reality. Truth, life, and the way to salvation are all the same.
To be saved is to encounter and live within reality, within the truth. It is to encounter the world as it is, no longer with an overlay of concepts which can contain truth, but only by way of exclusion of the larger frame. For concepts can only ever be limited expressions of individual things, subtracted away from the interconnected reality at the ground of all being.
To return to reality is to return to the garden, to walk again with God in the cool of the day. It is to be no longer ashamed, or to refer all things to a limited self, upon which good and evil can press.
When Adam and Eve partook of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, the finite self or ego was born. Experience, life itself, was now always relative to whether the ego considered itself pleased or not. Adam and Eve in some sense left reality, at least in their mentality. They were now separate from creation in all its beauty - this is the meaning, in my view, of their expulsion from the garden. The world was no longer a natural place of rest for them, but rather a threatening world “out there”, which had every capacity to endanger their finite self.
Prior to their fall from innocence they were a part of all life on the earth, and never considered themselves separate from it. They lived in the flow - the way, the truth and the life. There was no “inside” and “outside” for them. There was awareness and joy, experience and peace, but no “me” threatened by “that” or “them”.
We can imagine that they were unconcerned about death - it was not a reality for them. They were content with whatever life and truth that God gave them. There was nothing to threaten “them”, for there was no “them” - there was only life, experience, love and communion. There was no conceptual distance or separation from life “out there”. No subject, no object - just experience and union.
The human being becomes lovely when it is no longer burdened by a sense of limited self or ego. We see this loveliness in young children, before they become self-conscious, and also in the great mystics, saints and sages. The great mystics are utterly content with what happens, for there is no longer anyone really “there” for it to happen to. Their internal “model” of themselves, what we might call the empirical self or ego, which could never really contain who they actually are, has largely dissipated, or, at the very least, lost all determinative power in their lives.
They were still individual human beings - persons - existing within the flow of God’s creation, but they are no longer constrained by an internal “entity” which judges all things good or evil depending on their relative relationship with this “entity” or sense of self. This “entity” is in reality an illusion - it is a habitual pattern of thinking that has metastasised into an identity. The true human identity is beyond knowing and conceptualising, for in Christ it flows perichroetically* into the eternity of God.
The result is joyful living. A participation in the flow of life, rather than a restless, resistive, anxious inner dynamic. The many become united in the One - the created multitude rests together with the One Divine in the hypostasis of Christ. Christ “inside” and Christ “outside” - Christ all in all (Col 3:11), the multitude summed up in Him (Eph 1:10).
This mode of living is a life lived in Truth itself - for limited concepts, thoughts and abstract models of the world no longer hold sway. They may be used of course, but the individual no longer takes them seriously, for they have “seen” the truth - that is, they have tasted the joy of participating in the truth, in reality, in union with all things. A union of love, where individuals are united yet not confused.
To re-enter the garden, all that is needed is to lose one’s “self” (ego) to gain all things (Matt 10:39) - which is the participation in life and truth itself.
* see St Maximus the Confessor, who extended the perichoretic “flows” from the inner Trinitarian life, through Christ, into the created.