It's not a line between two points, but rather like the circle representing the middle term in a venn diagram. By being in Christ we are in the Father. Such an understanding of mediation makes much better sense of the fact that Christ taught us to pray, "Our Father": he didn't tell us to say, "Lord Jesus, please tell your Father for us..." In fact, the linebetweentwopoints conception puts the Father in a hostile position. The use of the first understanding of mediation by Protestant critics of the Catholic practice of honoring the saints belies a lack of intimacy with the Father.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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