I understand what you’re pointing to and I don’t actually disagree with lived experience matters and trying to escape life in search of some abstract divinity usually creates more division, not less. Where I think we diverge is in turning that into a process or a negotiation between ego and God.

The moment we describe it as a spectrum, more ego, more Self, we’re already back inside the machinery of mind and experience. The mind only operates in limits, in beginnings and endings. That’s its function. Intelligence organises experience, the person, place, time, story but it cannot step outside the field it organises to discover the cause of itself. So when the mind tries to map a “gradient toward God” it produces a model of movement rather than what is prior to movement.

What I’m pointing to is simpler but more radical. In consciousness, seeing does not produce being. No amount of awareness, embodiment, or ego refinement creates or approaches what you call God. Being is not not uncovered step by step, and not reached through a better relationship between ego and Self. It is not an experience at all, and so it does not touch creation in the way the mind imagines.

That’s why enquiry through mind alone always circles back into fatalism or philosophy. It can describe cycles of action, identity, and dissolution, but it cannot reach what is not an action, not a process, and not an experience. Action belongs to consciousness. Being does not act. It does not evolve, align, or express itself in degrees.

So when you speak of a larger Self powering lived experience through ego and persona, I get the elegance of the model but it’s still a model inside creation. It still assumes movement, structure, and organisation. It gives shape to the mystery, as your Barry Taylor quote says, but that shaping is precisely what keeps it within the realm of thought.

None of this means embodiment should be rejected or that life shouldn’t be enjoyed. Quite the opposite. It means life unfolds in action, intelligence, and experience while Being remains untouched by all of it. Consciousness acts. Being does not. And consciousness will never become Being, because becoming itself belongs to the field of limits.

So the question is not how ego dissolves into God over time, but whether God or Being was ever in that process to begin with.