Obama and Anti-American Personality Disorder

Alpha and Omega: while these two are more or less distant in time -- in the horizontal -- in vertical space they must not only be proximate but ultimately two aspects of one being. With this in mind, Davie makes the orthoparadoxically correct 〇bservation that "we must always be able to understand first as last and last as first."

But this highlights a more general principle, to the effect that our intellect must adhere to our faith, and vice versa.

Which reminds me of a particularly cluminous essay in a new collection thereof called Splendor of the True: A Frithjof Schuon Reader. For me, the Schuon scale of luminosity runs from bright to blinding, but in this piece nearly every sentence is highlylighted or wonderlined.

The essay is called Understanding and Believing (it originally appeared in his forcibly raccoomended Logic and Transcendence).

Schuon begins with the truism that it is possible for a man to believe without understanding. At the looooow end this is just bovine stupidity, but at the high end this is mature faith, which is quintessentially an intuitive perception of an unfathomable truth experienced subjectively as a generative mystery (i.e., as an active presence, not a mere absence).

But what people generally don't realize is that the opposite is equally true, "that one can understand without believing" (Schuon).

How can this be so? Didn't Blake say that "truth cannot be told so as to be understood and not believed"?

Yes, but the operative word there is truth. Evidently, one of the hallmarks of falsehood is that it can indeed be understood (so to speak) but not actually believed -- for it is written, who would believe that shit?

There appears to be something paradoxical here, because why would one need faith if one has understanding? Isn't faith just a kind of booby prize for those who lack understanding, a glorified fig leaf over our naked ignorance?

That's one way of looking at it.

Schuon goes on to say that a form of hypocrisy arises whenever there is a disjunction between certainty and behavior, and here is where we see the gulf between understanding and faith. This is because genuine belief -- or faith -- involves "identifying oneself with the truth one accepts" -- and then waiting for the truth to be realized or actualized within.

When I read this passage, the first thing that occurred to me is that secular materialists of all kinds -- proglodyte liberals, assorted purveyors of blind scientism, kosher darwienies, atheistic sales reptiles -- do not actually believe what they understand, or their behavior would be entirely different.

In short, materialists are devoid of real faith, for they do not put into practice what they screech, nor do they exhibit the courage of their concrocktions.

Consider: if I understand myself to be nothing more than a wild animal who has no possible contact with anything transcending matter -- e.g., truth, morality, beauty, wisdom, etc. -- then my behavior should comport with my understanding.

Such an animal will frankly meet the diagnostic criteria for a Sociopathic Personality Disorder, except they would not be ill. Rather, they would be "awakened" or "enlightened," like a reverse Buddha, or an inscapee to Plato's mancave.

Let's look at those criteria, and see if the shoe fits up their ass.

"A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years."

Well, sure. But why 15? Isn't that a little arbitrary? Why not birth? Rights are for suckers -- Christians, constitutional conservatives, "civil" libertarians, homos.

"Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest."

I know. Give Obama credit. There's a leftist whose faith is in conformity to his understanding.

"Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead."

One word: Obamacare. Okay, two more: Arab spring. Three? Fast and Furious. Four? I will close Gitmo. Five? That idiotic reset button gift.

"Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying."

Yeah, I see your point. Maybe the left isn't so hypocritical after all, because the media-academic complex certainly embraces such hopenlie antisocial behavior:

"The new Western media, products of the fully propagandized Western university, have broadly succumbed to the sympathy with totalitarian ethics and intentions that Revel warned was the West's imminent danger, and the communists' long-term strategy....

"Having morally weakened the West by exploiting the legitimate free press to their clever advantage, and at last having converted that press itself into a de facto ally, the enemies of freedom could begin their work on the inside of the Western establishment in earnest. It was now time to bring the ideological war home."

Meanwhile, "The Western media has been factionalized into the totalitarian propagandist majority and the searching, skeptical minority which forms the last remnant of the true calling of that free press which was once supposed to be a bulwark of liberty" (Jonescu).

But in the inverted world of the sociopath, we are the sick folks, for which reason those regular folkers sic the IRS on us.

Yes, the left directly attacks what freedom they haven't yet eroded. But at this point, what difference does it make? What's good for the state is good for you. You don't know that?

The next criterion: "consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to honor financial obligations."

Too easy. Let's move on.

"Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another."

At this point, what difference does it make?

"Irritability and aggressiveness."

ARE YOU DEAF? AT THIS POINT, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE, FUCKWIT? LET'S JUST HOPE YOU KEPT THOSE RECEIPTS FOR 'CHARITABLE GIVING' BACK IN 2006! AND NO, I DON'T CARE THAT YOUR CHURCH DOESN'T ISSUE RECEIPTS.

Okay, you got me. But at least this proves that I can keep an open mind. I hereby withdraw my charge of leftist hypocrisy.

A Borne Again Man of Dustinction

Don't know if I have time to spell- or even basic sensecheck, so you're on your own...

To say there is a human nature is to say there is an archetype of our humanness, a "cosmic man." It has to be cosmic, because everything about the cosmos has to be tweaked just so in order for us to existentiate the archetype.

For example, imagine if I have the idea for a palm tree. If I live, say, in a subarctic zone, no matter how perfect the idea, the palm tree cannot take root there outside the archetype.

Both Kabbalah and Vedanta posit a Cosmic Man from whom we are descended: Adam Kadmon and Purusha, respectively.

A google search for the two yields some arresting images, although I didn't spend any time looking for the best ones. For example, here is Adam Kadmon and his holo-hoops, the one below descending from the one above:

And here (see below ↓) is Adam Kadmon bifurcating into Adam-and-Eve, the archetypal terrestrial parents (recall that in Judaism, the proper unit of mankind is not man or woman, but man-and-woman, 1 and 0):

Down here (↓) is another shot of the cosmic man, as if emerging out of O (or vice versa):

Here's a shot of Purusha, kicking back and enjoying his cosmic slack. Note that the world seems to be a product of his creative imagination:

Here's another that captures the relationship with O -- a humandala, as it were:

Ultimately, the positing of the Cosmic Man helps us to unvert the cosmos, and to understand the nature -- which is to say, end -- of evolution. The Cosmic Man is both alpha and omega, and thus, both the ground and destiny of evolution. In between is this little nightmirror we call "history." In the night it is hard to see the image, which is precisely what Finnegans Wake is allabout. Yes, Obama is an uncommonly lightless loafer, but it's always the Dark Pages down here. You can look it up. With a little light.

I want to shift gears momentarily, because for the past two weeks I have been flooded with Baader-Meinhof phenomena revolving around the Cosmic Man -- as if he's dropping hints everywhere. Look out below!

For example, in Bouyer's The Christian Mystery, he discusses the idea of "Christ as the Second Adam, or rather the last Adam, that is, the heavenly man whose radiant image, as First Corinthians tells us, we have to put on," because "we have borne for too long the disfigured image of the first man."

Also, the neophyte Raccoon cultist or even advanced stalker will be reminded of the obscure references on pages 254/f. 17; 261/47; and 264/58. I know. They're funny because they're true!

Now, this is intriguing. "Son of man" appears in the the Hebrew Bible over 100 times, so it is a very common construction, and one that would have been familiar to Jesus (in other words, he obviously didn't coin the term, except of course he did). But what does it mean, exactly?

Here is Kabbalist interpretation, which may or may not be kosher: "the essential meaning of Ezekiel's vision, then, is that the son of man, the human son of God, is he who has achieved the mystical capacity to see the divine nature of his own higher self."

This comports with what Bouyer says about the matter. He adds that in his letters, Paul rewords the concept in order to get away from Jewish esoterism, and make it "more accessible to non-Jews." Thus, the phrase "Son of Man... disappears from a preaching to the Gentiles, in spite of its central place in the preaching of Jesus. All its content" is "now transfered into the figure of the heavenly Man, which Paul introduces when he contrasts with the first man another man, who is not just a second Adam, but the final Man."

This gets very dense, and I'm running out of time. But Bouyer quotes Paul who wrote of a "psychical body" and a spiritual one: "the first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam a life-giving Spirit." And "the first man was from the earth, a man of dust, the second man is from heaven." Therefore, "Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven."

But there's an additional twist here, because it was a common belief in antiquity that "the primordial man was a quasi-divine being and that man as he is now only a degenerate form of this being, fallen into matter and multiplicity..."

However, this is not the Jewish understanding; rather, it is unalloyed Gnosticism, for if you will note the image above of Adam and Eve, they do not represent an a priori fall from Adam Kadmon. In short, the fall occurs to Adam & Eve, not in them.

And again, "humanity" is both source and goal for human beings. We must "become reintegrated into the second Adam" in such a way "that it becomes more than a second beginning -- for Humanity is its final goal" (Bouyer). The Body of Christ? Yes, you could say that, because that would seem to represent the real instantiation, or existentiation, of Adam Kadmon/Purusha herebelow: body of Christ, mind of Slack.

I Am. Not Myself. But Maybe Somedeity...

Continuing with Davie's thesis that Christianity represents a synthesis of Judaism and Vedanta, he writes that under Christianity (C), the two different views of God -- continuous (V) and discontinuous (J), immanent (V) and transcendent (J), "are placed together in the perception of identity-in-difference."

This particular orthoparadox "informs the entire theology of C: thus, Christ is God and man; the bread is the body; One God is three persons, etc. In short, the boundary relations of absolute identity, on the one hand, and infinite difference, on the other, combine to yield identity-in-difference..."

And as mentioned a couple of posts ago, it is as if C embodies a balance between predominantly left (J) and right (V) cerebral hemispheric approaches to the divine.

Again, one doesn't want to oversimplify or push the analysis too far, but I think it is fair to say that a law-based approach is more exterior/objective, whereas the experiential approach of Vedanta (or Zen, or Mahayana Buddhism) is more subjective/interior.

Just as there is no monastic tradition in Judaism -- radical withdrawal from the world being considered mishuggah (except on the Sabbath, and even then the slaccent is on being with the world more intimately) -- Vedanta is in many ways a lawless religion, so to speak.

Or in other words, remove all of the laws from the cosmos -- which are ultimately spun from maya's web -- and what you are left with is God.

Along these lines, Davie goes on to suggest that Judaism's "main concern" lies with "finding an answer to the question, Who? (who is this God revealed to Abraham, Moses, and the prophets?...)," whereas the central concern of Vedanta "is identity-with" the ultimate principle. In Judaism there can be no identity with God, just as in Vedanta our apparent separation is only a stubborn illusion.

As it so happens, if we dig a little deeper, we see that the same dialectic obtains within Hinduism, between the rival ganges of Shankara and Ramanuja, or nondualism vs. qualified nondualism.

And Davie points out that in the Old Testament there are numerous references to the godmensch. Still, there is a certain line one cannot cross in Judaism, for which reason (among others) Jesus-as-God is a non-starter, and more generally, "what H takes to be saving truth, J regards as blasphemous."

Another interesting contrast between Judaism and Vedanta has to do with creation. J is famous for taking a lot of pointless speculation out of the grubby hands of the tenured, and insisting that creation has a beginning, so deal with it.

Conversely, Vedanta maintains that creation has no beginning, and that this particular cosmos is just one in an endless series of emanations.

Likewise, with J, creation involves divine choice, whereas with V it is somewhat "automatic," in the sense that Brahman cannot not create, because this would violate its own nature.

Because of this, it seems that Judaism cannot help but be eschatological, or future-oriented, most particularly, with regard to the messiah or savior. But in Vedanta there can be no end, because any end will just be a new beginning. To be perfectly accurate, beginning and end are always now.

Davie reminds us that Jesus is called Alpha and Omega, first and last, beginning and end, which permits of two perspectives which are unified in the one person.

The whole thing becomes a little confusing because of our immersion in time. Because God is in eternity, beginning and end must by definition be the same in him; or, what we call beginning and end are the serial instantiation -- the "moving image" -- of eternity in time.

As we have said on a number of occasions, herebelow eternity takes time, whereas thereabove it takes all day to get nothing done. But nobody minds, because you've got forever to do it.

Now, a religion provides the cure for the particular spiritual disease it diagnoses. The cure is what we call redemption in Christianity, or holiness in Judaism, or moksha in Vedanta. But is there a way we can see these three as different symptoms of the same underlying disease?

At least superficially, it appears not. For what is the disease? In Judaism, identity with God would be a fatal spiritual sickness, whereas in Vedanta the very same thing is the cure!

But we need to make some more subtle linguistic distinctions, or at least find a way to bullshit our way out of this metaphysical nul-de-slack.

For example, in Vedanta the point is not to elevate the local ego to godhood. Rather, there is a lower self (jivatman, [•]) and a higher self (atman, [¶]), and we dis-identify with the former in order to identify with the latter. And for Davie, the lower self "approximates to the Hebrew nephesh," while ruah does duty for the higher, more subtle being. (And as always, we are happy to be corrected by brother Gandalin for our hamhanded analysis.)

There is also the distinction between local image and nonlocal likeness that is emphasized by both Judaism and (Eastern) Orthodox Christianity. Thus, our "fallenness" is essentially a measure of the distance between image and likeness, lower self and higher self, jivatman and atman, nephesh and ruah, slack and conspiracy, etc.

In each case, redemption, or sanctity, or liberation, or slack, is an eschatological movement from the one toward the other. There is an "immaculate manhood" (Davie), so to speak, at the end of our seeking, which "draws us on by offering glimpses of ourselves in our ideal nature."

And in the case of C, "the likeness which was lost through Adam is fully restored in Jesus," who is uniquely image and likeness; whereas for the subgenius, we would measure the same distance on a logarithmic scale of 1 to Bob.

In fact, I believe it was Schuon who said something to the effect that Jesus is both man's icon of God and God's icon of man (man-as-such).

And what -- or who -- is man-as-such?

Ah, that leads us into a deuscussion of this purusha character, more on whom tomorrow.

Original Synthesis

We're still cogitating this provocative Jesus Purusha isness. I haven't actually finished the book, as I need to think about what the author has said thus far before proceeding further. At times he gets either a little murky or else doesn't clearly explain what he means in plain lowman terms.

I imagine that being a shut-your-trappist monk in an ashram can do that to a guy. Without an interlocutor to occasionally squinch up his face and go dude, whaaaaa?, you might not get the feedback you need in order to know when you're starting to sound chopraesque, which is to say, either too vaguely gaseous or too idiosyncratically solid. You need to have some meat in the muddle and be able to speak with a pliable substance that is neither too unyielding nor falls apart as soon as you chew on it.

Davie speculates that instead of just the usual distinction between primitive Palestinian-Jewish and Hellenistic stages -- or layers -- of Christianity, we need to supplement them with a third. Primitive Christianity could have ramified in different directions, and did ramify in different directions, hence all those early struggles to define orthodoxy and exclude heterodoxy.

Speaking of tossing, we may need to coin a neologism, "orthoheterodoxy," for those elements of Christianity that are considered outwardly heterodox but are inwardly -- which is to say esoterically -- necessary in order to make sense of the faith.

I would suggest that this whole book is exploring such orthoheterodox territory -- things that must be acknowledged as true, but which the authorities would prefer to keep quiet due to the danger of misunderstanding. I can't say I blame them. Milk and meat and all that.

Meister Eckhart, for example, might be the most important orthoheterodox theologian, and it is quite easy for the illwilled or smallbrained to make mischief with him. The best defense for this is to understand orthodoxy, and to always place what he says in that context. He's definitely not trying to venture outside the faith, but simply providing imaginative ways to explore it.

Same with Davie. He is quite clear in affirming that he is not trying to challenge orthodoxy, but illuminate it with some novel pneuumatic tools.

Here's the deal: the Christ-event is, yes, an event, but it is first and foremost a non-event, in the sense that it transcends history. You might say that it is much larger than history -- indeed, is the source of history -- and yet, must play out in time.

Therefore, whatever we might say about it is always attempting the impossible, like trying to describe a three-dimensional reality in two dimensions. If we forget this, we are inevitably drawn into a form of concretized mythological idolatry, worshiping a god of our own invention.

Davie suggests that there is a kind of implicit dialectic between Judaism and Hinduism, as if they represent two tendencies of the religious brain. Indeed, this idea converges nicely with our recent series of posts on the differing worlds of the right and left brain. Naturally, it is not a matter of either/or, but both/and (and more!), and Davie suggests that Christianity is precisely this both/and original synthesis.

Remember, you can just play with the idea. You don't need to believe or disbelieve at this early juncture.

Truth is one, of course. But it is also uncontainable (by man) in the sense alluded to above. Thus, Davie speculates that two major halves of this truth are emphasized by Judaism and Hinduism (also remember that neither is absent in the other; it's just a matter of emphasis).

Let's begin with the Creator/creature distinction. In Judaism the stress is on their differences, while in Hinduism the stress is on their identity, i.e., Atman is Brahman. The Ultimate is present to both, one via identity, the other via difference:

"This apparent opposition will in turn reflect the inability of the unaided human mind to think them both together," at least until encountered in the form of "the Incarnated One." Then the inference is that Hinduism is in fact true, albeit for one person. But in any event, this is a stumbling block to the left brain.

In Judaism you might say that the emphasis is on God's transcendence, while in Hinduism it is on his immanence. In the case of the former, "the only way in which [God's] transcendence of the world can be demonstrated is by divine suspension of, or irruption into, the processes of nature, and by divine acts of intervention in human history" (Davie).

Conversely, with the immanentized deity of Hinduism, we have the perception that "Nothing is external to God." Creation here is a kind of "self-projection" or emanation, as opposed to a distinct act of separation (and some would say "divine withdrawal," or tsimtsum, just to emphasize the God/world distinction). In Hinduism continuity subordinates discontinuity, but this also brings with it the potential danger of pantheism that Judaism so jealously guards against.

Which, as the crock ticks down, reminds me of a story Schall Turner tells in his On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait. I'll just summarize. Regarding the seeming opposition between God's omniscience and our free will, he suggested to a friend that Protestants are "either/or" while Catholics are "both/and."

However, his perceptive colleague reminded him that if this is the case, then it's a choice between either "either/or" or "both/and," so either/or wins.

Therefore, it must be a choice between "either/or," or "both/and," and/or "both/and and either/or," and only the latter is fully ortho-hetero-paradoxical.

So Many Worlds, So Little Time

Davie writes that "Although Christian theologians have frequently spoken of the Unacknowledged Christ of the Vedanta, they have been strangely silent about the Unacknowledged Vedanta behind Christianity."

This is unfortunate, because, as alluded to yesterday, the metaphysical principles embodied in Vedanta -- i.e., the Upanishads -- "can be shown to supply the logical precondition of orthodox Christianity."

Certainly they provide a better fit than, say, the dualistic Platonism that some of the early fathers over-relied upon in order to make sense of their new revelation.

More generally, if Christianity is truly universal, there can be no objection to assimilating ideas and concepts from other cultures in ardor to advance our understanding.

True, Christianity is also a historical religion, which can at times work counter to the idea of universality. For example, if the arc of salvation runs only from Jerusalem to Rome, that excludes an awful lot of history. Perhaps we need to reframe the command to preach to the four corners of the world.

World.

There is the exterior world, of course, but more importantly, there is also the interior world. If you take the command literally, you might as well stand alone on top of a mountain in some far off corner of the earth, yelling into the wind.

No, the point is, you have to reach the people who inhabit those corners.

We've all heard about the "first world," "second world," "third world," etc. Every once in awhile it occurs to me that I need to write a post about how there are also various internal worlds in different stages of development.

Starting back-to-front, Professor Wiki says that the 4th world consists of socially excluded sub-populations (even if living in the first world), and hunter-gatherer, nomadic, pastoral, and subsistence farming peoples living beneath the modern industrial norm.

Third world peoples have entered history, and are at least starting to develop, while first world countries are completely there. The second world might be thought of as an attempt to arrest time -- as in the case of contemporary progressives -- via a planned economy.

But as we know from baneful expedience, any effort to control a self-organizing structure from the top down results in chaos, so the second world ends up tending toward the third, as we see in Obamaworld -- e.g., record numbers of people on food stamps and disability, millions giving up on finding work, etc.

How would the above scheme apply to the interior worlds? I suppose you would say that progress in this domain represents a conquest of dimensionality, as we have discussed in the past.

I'm starting to run out of time, but it occurs to me that the interior analogue of the second world would also tend toward the third and fourth, as it involves a rejection of time and of verticality. As we know, there is nothing progressive about progressivism.

Hmm. While searching for something else, it occurs to me that I might have adequately discussed all this in the past, e.g., Pimp-Slapping Obama and Conserving Our Metaphysical Dream of Progress, Universal Religion and the Many Worlds Hypothesis, and Just One Thing I'd Like to Know, How You Stay High, and Live So Low.

Down to 12 minutes. Time enough to say that the fourth world is diffuse mythological/magical, the third world centralized mythic/magical authoritarianism, the second world progressive / leftist / fascist / socialist / atheist statism, and the first world the vertically informed horizontality of American-style classical liberalism.

No time to read them, but probably some more relevant posts under this heading.

And now 5 minutes to spielcheck.

Render unto Lois Lerner what Belongs to Obama... or Join Apparatchiks Anonymous!

In a chapter on Islam, Caldecott points out that -- very much in contrast to Christianity -- it endeavors to overcome "the gulf between man and God" via politics, i.e., "by attempting to establish a theocratic state."

Conversely, "the very fact that Christians were not 'under the law,' made possible the modern conception of a purely secular state..." Indeed, many writers locate the foundation of the secular state in Jesus' advice to fork over to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.

However, I wouldn't be so quick to link Jesus to a particular political philosophy, at least based on that crack alone. Clearly, he is making a statement about spiritual priorities and about the overall purpose of life. He's not enunciating a theory of governance. Besides, context is important. What would he say in Nazi Germany? "Render unto Hitler what belongs to Hitler." I don't think so.

Anyway, I think we can all stipulate that there is, by definition, a gulf between man and God. How to bridge it? First of all, it is axiomatic that man cannot do it from his side alone, otherwise he would be God (or God would be him, to be precise).

The diverse religions are essentially defined by their differing methods of divine linkage. Both Islam and Judaism do so via conformity to the Law. Buddhism and Vedanta do so by illuminating and eliminating one of the partners from the law firm, i.e., satori and moksha, respectively. Christianity bridges the gap from the other end, via the Incarnation.

Thus, in a way -- and I don't intend this as a critique, just a description -- only Christianity can literally do the job (at least for one person), since again, no matter how perfectly we conform to the law, we will not somehow be transformed into God. What distinguishes Christianity is the claim that the task has been accomplished, and that we may participate in it via divine adoption.

About that ontological gap between heaven and earth. It is interesting how similar leftism is to Islamism, because both approaches attempt to force salvation on us via politics. Obama is just the latest nitwiteration, nor is he the last, since leftists, by definition, do not learn. Leftism cannot be corrected or cured, only awakened from.

But every "from" implies a "to," so I might add that -- similar to alcoholism -- there is no non-spiritual cure for leftism. Note that the alcoholic shifts his allegiance from the bottle to a "higher power" that can restore him to sanity -- to O, as it were. Just so, the leftist must transfer his allegiance from the state to that very higher power who created us free and equal to begin with, prior to the state.

(Reminds me of an old post called Apparatchiks Anonymous, reprinted at the end for your amusement.)

This might be an opportune time to discuss another recent (for me) book, called Jesus Purusha: A Vedanta-Based Doctrine of Jesus. Caldecott mentions it in The R of B, so I picked up a copy. For only 57¢. Yesss!

The incongruous cover of the book makes it look like some kind of vaporous new age crock of native American Choprababble, but it is anything but. Almost all books are too long. This is one of the rare exceptions that is too short. It's rather dense and concentrated, and some of his definitions are on the idiosyncratic side.

In any event, it's not so much a Vedanta-based doctrine of Jesus -- in which Jesus is demoted to guru, swami, divine salesman, or even avatar -- but rather, a Christian assimilation of the Upanishads. It strikes me as completely orthodox, and does no violence whatsoever to the creed in order to make it fit into a vedantin metaphysic. Thus, it is not some shallow attempt at ecumenism, integralism, or synthesis, but a real metacreative brainwave.

However, I'll just stick with the parts I understood, since this guy seems to be above my praygrade.

The book takes the form of a series of letters "from the ashram of Jesus Purusha" to an English monk, setting out the theological position of the former. In so doing, he attempts to explain to the monk that his approach is not only orthodox, but highlights previously unappreciated implications of orthodoxy, since Vedanta provides the linguistic tools to do so.

Indeed, Davie shows that the metaphysical underpinnings of Vedanta supply "the precondition of orthodox Christology" -- the metacosmic principles by which something as flat out strange as Christianity is even possible, let alone true. It definitively relieves us of the need to appeal to myth or miracle in order to pull it all together. Which most Christians don't seem to mind doing, but that's no way to convince the rabble in the skeptic tank.

Davie speculates on the possibility of contact between India and ancient Palestine. Why not? Then again, who knows? Given the very nature of vertical murmurandoms, they will obviously strike down in distant temporal and geographical locales. Thus, we shouldn't be surprised that the Vedas announce that "In the beginning there was only Prajapati. His word was with him. This word was his double." Same memo, slightly different formulation.

This I found most provocative. Let's say that Jesus, instead of appearing in Palestine, had been born in India. He is gathered with the disciples, and asks the question, "Who do you say that I am?"

How would "an Indian Simon Peter" have responded? Yes, "thou art the Son of the living God." Except that in India, this would have been something of a commonplace, owing to the avatar principle.

No, this would have to be something different from your garden variety mangod. Davie suggests that the title "Christ" can mislead, since it is wedded to a specifically Jewish worldview. Is it possible that this title is part of a larger category?

Davie suggests that Simon Peter would have responded with something to the effect of, "You are the eternal Purusha," which is to say the "cosmic man" made flesh. This is very different from the usual Atman = Brahman available to all mortals as part of our standard equipment.

You might say that this realization (of Atman = Brahman) is equivalent to the Judeo-Christian doctrine that we are created in the image and likeness of God. That being the case, every man is ultimately God (i.e., is "not other" than God), even while God is obviously no man.

But to say that Jesus is the Purusha is another thing entirely. He is not a mangod, but rather, the Godman.

And with that, I'd better stop for the day. To be continued.

*****

As promised, the Apparatchiks Anonymous 12-step Program:

1. We admitted we were powerless over the intoxicating dreams of socialism, and that our lives and governments had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a power far greater than our own omnipotent egoic fantasies of total control could restore us to true liberalism.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the Source and Guarantor of our liberty.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of the well-intentioned failures and frank evils of socialism.

5. Admitted to the Creator of our Liberty, to ourselves, and in a live phone call to C-SPAN, the exact nature of socialism’s wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have the Creator of Our Liberty undo our college education and remove all these defects of ideology.

7. Humbly asked Him to cancel our subscription to the Times.

8. Made a list of all races, genders, and classes our government programs had harmed, and became willing to make amends by ignoring their constant whining, and preferably laughing at them.

9. Made direct amends to such people by realizing we have nothing to apologize for.

10. Continued to take a personal inventory, and when we were again tempted to abuse ideology for the purposes of blotting out reality, just got drunk instead.

11. Sought to improve our conscious contact with the Source of our Liberty through prayer, meditation, and listening to Rush Limbaugh.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other leftists, even if it meant being denied tenure, disinvited to dinner parties, unfriended, and generally slimed by our intellectual inferiors.

Cosmic Desire: What Make a Bulldog Hug a Hound

I want to articulate some lust wishes before moving on from Being Alive. Caldecott asks the key question: could Life itself "be a transcendental" in the manner outlined by Christopher Alexander? I don't think there's any doubt about it, because otherwise who or what is Good, True, Beautiful, and One? Something dead?

"Of course, for Life to be regarded as a transcendental, it would have to be in everything, not just biological organisms" (ibid).

I frankly don't see this as a huge conceptual problem, or requiring any kind of great ontological leap. Rather, the converse: you actually need a leap of faith and a heap of credulity to imagine this whole manifestivus comes from, and returns to, death, truthlessness, ugliness, and ir-irreducible multiplicity.

"If God is life in the highest sense," then this life revolves around "self-giving and self-receiving" (ibid.). As we have already discussed, this is exactly how a living system maintains life: one doesn't want to stretch the analogy, but life itself is always rooted in exchange with the other. It's just that in God, the self is the other and the other is the self -- or, they are distinct but undivided.

But here again, it is possible to look at the ecosystem through the same spooktacles. I've mentioned before Alan Watts' quip that there can be no radical distinction between, say, the honey bee and the flower. So intertwined are they, so interdependent, that the one cannot live without the other. It is as if each is an external organ of the other -- except there must be some sort of "interior glue" holding them together.

Which reminds me. One afternoon in... let's see, must have been 1986. I had just passed some sort of written exam for my doctoral program, and was having a little celebration with myself. Not a major buzz, just a few be-ers while sitting on the balcony of my apartment in Pacific Palisades. (I even remember the soundtrack of the moment: REM's dreamy Fables of the Reconstruction.) It was springtime, and the birds were quite active, darting in and out of the trees. You know. Randy. Libidinous.

While contemplating the scene I fell into a sort of light trance, as it occurred to me that it wasn't the birds who were doing this. How to explain... It was as if I intuited the underlying "desire" of nature, just flowing through the birds at that moment. After all, nature revolves around this abstract desire, filtered through everything from bacteria to Bach.

And what is this desire? Yes, it is in the service of life. And it's a self-giving, or self-abandonment, except it doesn't become conscious until it reaches the human plane.

Think of all those Medieval stories of courtly love; or come to think of it, Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends.

Again: self-abandonment seems to be the essence of love, and would therefore be the inverse of narcissistic self-love. Which is why the encirclopedia says that everything about God must be completely unnarcissary (p. 10).

Bottom line: Brofessor Dixon was quite right about the generalized nature of this metacosmic desire:

Why do all these men

Try to run a big-leg'd woman down?

Why do all these men

Try to run a big-leg'd woman down?

Must be the same old thing

What make a bulldog hug a hound

So, God's interior activity "must be reflected throughout the creation. The existence of a thing is a receiving and a giving of itself" (Caldecott, emphasis mine).

And interestingly, while the self-giving High Life becomes articulate in man, so too does its inapposite mumbler, for only lowlife humans can "fail to be fully what they are or should be, and fall short of the real" (ibid.).

I just thought of a bumper sticker. That no one will understand. Still, here it is: Entropy: Don't Fight it, Join it!

In other words, as Caldecott explains, the essence of human life is not to simply "exist passively" or "merely to resist entropy," but to love actively, which ultimately implies -- well, if Jesus is the cosmic person (we'll be swimming this Ovocative nocean at length later), the human quintessence, then the implication is Jesus; or, more precisely, the self-abandoning -- and therefore, other-serving -- contours of Jesus's life.

Since the transcendentals converge, being alive would have to be an expression of truth, and vice versa. We all know phonies, don't we? But Caldecott suggests that (he's actually quoting Alexander here) most human beings "are not fully true to their own inner natures or fully 'real.'" Thus, "When you meet a person who is true to himself, you feel at once that he is 'more real' than other people are."

And not only. For I myself am more real in the presence of a real person, and indeed, will have a hard time being myself, or selfing my being, should I fail to discover those person(s) without whom I am not real.