of us receive, retain, or pass on any love or wisdom if we did not experi-
ence it as our own? How could we have a partnership with God through
love and wisdom if we had no way of doing our part to form that part-
nership? There is no such thing as a partnership without mutuality.
What makes the partnership mutual is that we love God and we act on
what we receive from God, doing so as if we were on our own but trust-
ing that we have God’s help. How could we live to eternity if we had no
partnership with the eternal God? How then would we be human if that
likeness were not in us?”
[ 7 ] All agreed with this and said, “We need to draw a conclusion
from all this.” They came to the following: “We are vessels to receive
God. A vessel to receive God is an image of God. Because God is love
itself and wisdom itself, we are vessels to receive love and wisdom; our
vessel becomes an image of God as we actually do receive love and wis-
dom. We are a likeness of God because we experience things from God in
ourselves as if they were our own. We go from being a likeness to being
an image of God to the extent that we acknowledge that the love and
wisdom or goodness and truth in us are not ours and did not originate in
us; they exist solely in God and they come exclusively from God.”
[ 8 ] Next the group took up the second topic for discussion: “Animals
and birds, whether noble or not, are born with knowledge that relates to
every drive or love they have; why then are human beings born without
any knowledge that relates to any drive or love they have?”
The participants began by verifying the truth of the premise in vari-
ous ways, particularly the notion that human beings have no innate
knowledge or instinct, not even in relation to marriage love. They made
inquiries and heard from researchers that newborns lack even an innate
knowledge or instinct for recognizing their mother’s breast; newborns
learn to nurse only when their mother or whoever is nursing them gives
them her breast. Newborns know only how to suck, an instinct they
gained from sucking all the time while in their mother’s womb. Shortly
after birth, they do not know how to walk or how to shape sound into
any human word, or even how to use different sounds to express their
love and emotions the way animals do. Unlike animals, they have no idea
what food would be good for them—they seize anything at hand, clean
or dirty, and put it in their mouths. The researchers also said that with-
out instruction people have absolutely no idea how to make love to the
opposite sex. Not even young men and women know how without learn-
ing about it from others. In a nutshell, we are born as mindlessly physical
§48 god the creator & creation 69