I see how those two quotes of mine look like a contradiction. When I said, "How can something you feel be an illusion? If you feel it, then it must be real," I meant the feeling itself cannot be an illusion, though the thing that caused the feeling can.
Okay, so where are you going with this? Something about being conscious and feelings leading to determining our future? How do feelings being a reality in themselves work in this?
Because, if you are to have real power to determine the future, you have to get outside the cause and effect chain of the physical reality. It is like floating down the river in a canoe without a paddle. If the river takes you where you wanted to go anyway, then you think you have power to determine, but if it doesn't take you where you want to go, then you think you are powerless. To truly have power to determine your course, you have to get outside the canoe and push. Perhaps consciousness, being on a different plane of reality allows us to step outside of the boat and take charge of our destiny.
The pure naturalist would say that this is nonsense because consciousness is created and governed by physical events, so you are really not stepping outside the cause/effect chain. He believes that we are nothing more than the sum of our physical parts.
But since conscious experience is real and yet cannot be described in terms of the rest of the physical reality (except by metaphor), and since it allows us to transcend time a little bit by remembering the past and understanding future effects of our actions, I am suggesting that conscious experience might allow us to have real power to determine the future.
Once we stop looking at the paradox of freewill in a universe where God knows the future as a purely physical one, perhaps it will become less of a paradox. God obviously does not dwell in the physical. He is a transcendant Spirit. And we too, as I have suggested, do not dwell entirely in the physical.
If, as in the venn diagram example, our consciousness is a little circle inside God's consciousness, which is the set of all consciousness, then perhaps what we feel God feels. As you have said before, God does not see and is not seen, but is "seeing" (or perhaps all three). So if we can share feelings with God, then perhaps we can also share his power. When we make a decision, the power comes on loan from God, the action comes from our physical body, and our will may or may not be in congruity with God's.
I hope that made at least a little sense...
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