Your conclusion is a non sequiter. It is based upon your own psychological projections. GOD does not suffer. Man and nature in which man is embedded suffers. Creation is about a superabundance of Being, not about deficiency. GOD is not deficient. GOD is the fullness of Being.
We are not GOD, neither are we Christ. We may be graced with awareness of the Divine Presence that is immanent and Transcendent, and we may become suffused and transfigured by the Presence (Theosis), but we may not in Truth claim GOD/Christ as our identity. That is just ego-inflation by contact with the Transcendental.
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γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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I certainly am not claiming to be Christ now, not in this present awareness and frame of identity with my ego (to which I still am stubbornly attached). I can't explain how my identity shifted to that of Christ, it certainly wasn't because of a conscious choice on my ego's part. It may have been as suggested that my ego simply inflated to assume God-like proportions which would explain the agony I experienced while contemplating the Abyss (big ego = big suffering). But who really knows?
But that is really getting off the original topic. Markos, you are exactly right when you say that my idea of God is based on my own psychological projections, but so is your idea of God. If you follow any idea (psychological projection) back to the beginning you have to face the question "Why", and then you have to face the answer "Suffering", otherwise you're not being honest or at least you're not facing the full implications of your belief. The problem is the idea of God to begin with.
My ultimate point is that to know God as it truly is (in its fullness of Being) we have to drop every idea including the idea of God itself, otherwise God IS deficient. As long as there is even a residue of God, there is suffering.
I'm sure you're familiar with the koan: "If you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha". The idea, image or presence of God is the final illusion which must be cut-through.
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What you're searching for is what's searching.
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We will experience GOD to the degree that GOD reveals Him/Herself to us. The same is true for human beings. You can only know me inasmuch as I share myself with you. Moreover, you can never know me to the extent that I know myself.
I understand mystical experience from my own experiences, plus from the numerous mystics that I have studied over the past 30 years. Some formulations are necessary in ordeer to correcetly impart as much of our experiences to others. The Muslim mystic al Hallaj said, 'I am the Truth,' no doubt referring to the Divine 'I AM' that he experienced as the Essence of GOD (pure Identity). Nevertheless, because he phrased it thusly, he was convicted of 'shirk' - blasphemy - and he was crucified, after his hands and feet were cut off. The crucifixion was because of his similarity to the words attributed to Jesus, which Muslims were familiar with, and the amputations derive from some aspect of Islamic law. St. Paul said: 'I live, yet not I; Christ liveth in me," and from that formulation, we understand that he remained a "clay vessel," which was filled with Divine Awareness [Holy Spirit], and that he was not confusing his ego with GOD. Meister Eckhart was excommunicated, and very nearly burned as a heretic for saying things like the 'I' which is me, and the 'I' which is GOD, are the same 'I.'
Genuine religious experience results in a diminishment of egotism and egoism, not grandiosity. It is best, when speaking to others, to treat GOD as Wholly Other than oneself to avoid pantheism, or solipcism or monism, or some other -ism which confuses or offends others. After all, when one is talking about 'others,' one is not in a state of mystical oneness with others, such that everyone is aware of The ONE. Westerners confuse ego with non-ego, so the formulation needs to be right when speaking. It helps to avoid self-deception as well.
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γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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