The ‘Law’ and its Application

presented in an initial message and supplemented by two later postscripts

Pender Island, September 15, 2006

www.goodshare.org/thelaw.htm

second postscript to The ‘Law’ and its Application as of September 15, 2006

in the original note, there is the clear assertion by Jesus that the ‘Law’ is a personal guide and that law is a ‘curse’ whose application is only to guide us on our way to enlightenment (‘faith’), yet in Christian teaching, though not in Buddhist and aboriginal teachings, the ‘Law’ becomes something generalized that must be complied with by all.  But from whence comes the foundations for a system of general application of the ‘Law’ and the establishment of an earthly authority empowered to interpret, impose and enforce the ‘Law’?

in this second postscript, citations from Augustine of Hippo, selected readings of Augustine translated and introduced by Mary T. Clark will serve to illustrate foundational thoughts embodied in a ‘historical’ (causal-deterministic) way of thinking that has been preserved in Christian teaching in this regard.

at the same time, citations from The Myth of the Eternal Return, a contrasting, alternative way of thinking about ‘organizing the social dynamic’ will serve to illustrate foundational thoughts embodied in a ‘trans-historical’ (spatial-relational mutual influence) way of thinking that has been preserved in aboriginal, Buddhist, Taoist teaching, which subsumes the imposing of general ‘Law’ and the ‘historical’ mode of thinking.

coming from a western ‘upbringing’, it is quite ‘startling’ to see these differences ‘come clear’ in a foundational sense, and to see the ‘civilized’ and the ‘uncivilized’ (‘primitive’) compared together with their respective foundational models of organization (‘Law’ and central-authority driven, ... and, ... continuous renewal induced).  For example, in our western Augustinian view, the decline of the Roman Empire was seen as a ‘rotting’ and ‘putrefaction’ due to constituent factions in the Empire falling to temptation and worshipping false gods (evil demons in disguise).  But that’s not all, because the model is general and applies also to the organization of the human body, aging and death in general are understood in terms of rotting and putrefaction due to the body becoming possessed by ‘evil spirits’ that need to be fought off.

picture the difference then, in the primitive cultures where aging and death is seen in the trans-historical (transcending-the-historical-view) terms of continuing renewal or ‘evolution’.  The death of the Roman Empire, and/or the human body, rather than being seen in the negative terms of something being eliminated, lost, destroyed, is seen in terms of a ‘sacred renewal’ or ‘metamorphosis’ so that the soul of an ancestral brotherhood (empire) and the soul of the ancestor continues to be included within the divine unity of Nature, in some transformed manner (in the manner that the animating soul of a hurricane continues on in the atmospheric space-flow because it never was contained inside of the hurricane but was ‘of the divine unity’ when it emerged (illusorily) as a seemingly locally coordinated entity with a self-center).

beyond this, the practice of the primitives was, and continues to be (so, ‘primitive’ might be a misleading term here and we could instead speak about the ‘naturalist’ which is inside of each of us) to eschew association with their ‘historical self’ and to embrace association with their ‘trans-historical self’ which equates to thinking in the terms that one is ‘of the ongoing evolutionary flow’ rather than that one is ‘of the material body’ with its finite ‘birth’ and ‘death’ (the ‘profound discontinuities’ that we must suffer, in Augustine’s view).  If we associate with the material body existence, then we just have to endure it as we age and our body is attacked by evil spirits, many of whom set up residence within us, chuckling and muttering as they consume our flesh and infuse it with toxic excrement.  This is a far cry from a vision that sees us as ‘of the divine All of Nature’ and undergoing a sacred metamorphosis that is the very essence of life, the continuing life of the natural Universe.

these very different understandings of the world and our relationship to it, come from our notions of ‘organization’ and how it is achieved, and thus to the concepts of ‘Law’ and its application and earthly Empires (nation-states) and kings (central governing authorities).

as in the initial portion of this note, it is easy to interpret the teachings of Jesus as being in the ‘naturalist’ camp together with Buddhists and Native North Americans etc., so what is presented here is really ‘evidence’ that suggests that Christian teaching, which is in many ways very close to what we call ‘western teaching’ (the continuing Euro-American cultural entrainment), has split off from the teachings of Jesus, and indeed many scholars describe Augustine’s works as having a heavy hand in this, ... but they do not say that Augustine’s teaching conflicts with the teachings of Jesus, but merely that he introduces the concept of a split ‘Church’ and ‘State’ where we now have the ‘city of God’ and at the same time the ‘city of man’ and that while the former must sit above the latter, the latter will have its own organizing and behaviour-‘guiding’ methods.

to be clear, the proposition i am suggesting in this note and its postscripts is that Augustine’s influential interpretations CONFLICT with the essentially ‘naturalist’ teachings of Jesus, a conflict that may have been aided and abetted by difficulties in translating Jesus words through Greek rather than the original Aramaic, as quite a number of religious scholars maintain.

the conflict can be encapsulated in the above imagery wherein (it is herein proposed that) Jesus intended that we are ‘of the continuing evolutionary flow’ (i.e. the ‘Kingdom of God’ is the evolutionary flow as with Buddhism and aboriginal belief traditions) but that we have lost our way and split apart the ‘male’ (material-causal historicism) from the ‘female’ (spatial-relational transformation) and that we must put the two back into one in order to enter the kingdom; i.e. in order to understand that we are ‘of the evolutionary flow’ rather than ‘of the material body’, the material body relating to the evolutionary flow in the manner that dust relates to the asserting persona of the tornado or spiralling clouds relate to the asserting persona of the hurricane (i.e. where we are dynamical forms of organization INCLUDED WITHIN the evolutionary flow-dynamic).

this shift in understanding exactly parallels to the shift in science (not yet assimilated into our culture) from the object-paradigm of Newton to the (energy-field-) flow-paradigm of relativity and quantum wave dynamics; i.e. what we formerly understood to be ‘objects’ that existed in their own independent right and enjoyed a temporal sequential historical life, become understood in the more comprehensive terms of dynamical forms of organization within a dynamically unified hostspace (the ‘spacetime continuum’ or energy-field-flow).

it is clear that Augustine ‘leaves out’ the participative role of space in the dynamics of man as did Plato in his Republic and apparently, Cicero in his de Republica.  this is a problem when one accepts that there can be a multiplicity of ‘good States’ each with their own paternalist central governing authority, since, we do not REALLY live in a euclidian space where all we have to concern ourselves with is the dynamics of independent objects, but instead, live within a space that is relative and relational where the multiplicity of States, each with their own central governing authority is innately related in the manner that a multiplicity of hurricanes are relative by being included within a common dynamically unifying atmospheric space; i.e. the individual entities are dynamical forms of organization within a common dynamical hostspace and their insides are not independent of their outsides; e.g;

 ‘And when you make the inner as the outer, and the outer as the inner, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one so that the male shall not be male and the female (shall not) be female, then shall you enter (the Kingdom).”  --- Jesus (per the Gospel of Thomas)

to understand Augustine’s argument as the nature of ‘the State’ and to the concepts of ‘justice’ and ‘Law’ bound up in it, ...it is useful to peruse his Chapter 21 in ‘City of God’, which follows in its entirety;

“This now, is the place where I should explain as briefly and clearly as possible what I promised in the second book of this work, that if we were to accept the definitions used by Scipio in Cicero’s De Republica, there never was a Roman state.  For he briefly defines a state as a commonwealth.  If this definition is true, there never was a Roman state, for there never was a commonwealth, which he wished to be the definition of a state.  For he defined a people as a numerous gathering united in fellowship by a common sense of right and common interests.  What he means by a common sense of right he explains by arguing that a state cannot be administered without justice; therefore, where there is no true justice, there can be no right.  For what is done rightly is surely done justly, whereas what is done unjustly cannot be done rightly.  For the unjust human inventions are not to be called or considered as rights, since even their makers say that right is that which flows from the fountain of justice, and deny the definition commonly given by those who misunderstand the matter, that right is the interest of the strongest.

So when there is no true justice there can be no gathering of men united in fellowship by a common sense of right and, therefore, no people as defined by Scipio or Cicero; and if no people, then no commonwealth, but only some kind of mob unworthy to be called a people.  Consequently, if a state is a commonwealth, and if that is not a people, that is, not united in fellowship by a common sense of right, and if there is no right where there no justice, then it certainly follows that where there is no justice there is no state.  Furthermore, justice is that virtue which distributes to everyone his due.  What justice, then,  is that which removes a man from the true God and subjects him to unclean demons?  Is this to give everyone his due?  Or is he who retains a piece of land from the purchaser and gives it to someone who has no right to it unjust, whereas he who takes himself from the Lord God who made him and serves wicked spirits in just?

Certainly this same book, De Republica, argues very sharply and vigorously against injustice and in favor of justice.  And since when it was previously argued on behalf of injustice against justice, maintaining that a state cannot exist or be administered except through injustice, it was put forward as the most valid position that it is unjust for some men to serve other men as masters, and yet an imperial city including a mighty state cannot govern provinces without pursuing such injustice: the answer to this argument on the part of justice was that the rule over provincials is just, because servitude is useful to such men and is established for their welfare when rightly established, that is, when license to do wrong is withdrawn from wicked men, and that those subjected will be better off because, when not subjected, they were worse off.

To confirm this reasoning a remarkable example is given, as though from nature and expressed this way: “Why, therefore, does God command man, the soul command the body, the reason command the passions and the other vicious parts of the soul?”  This example teaches clearly enought that servitude is useful to some men and service to God is useful to all.

For in serving God the soul rightly commands the body, and within that very soul the reason subject to God the Lord rightly commands the passions and the other vices.  Therefore, when a man does not serve God, how much justice can we suppose him to possess?  For when a man does not serve God, in no way can his soul justly command his body or his human reason command his vices.  And if there is no justice in such a man, without doubt there is no justice in a community of such men.  Here, then there is no common sense of right which transforms a multitude of men into a people, whose wealth has been said to be a commonwealth.  For why need I speak of the utility whereby also a gathering of men, according to our definition, is called a people?  Although, if you carefully note, there is no utility to those who live impiously as do all who do not serve God and serve demons --- demons all the more impious in demanding that sacrifices be paid to them as to Gods --- yet I think that all we have said concerning a common sense of right sufficiently demonstrates that in terms of this definition a people in whom there is no justice cannot be said to be a state.  For if it is said that the Romans in their state served not unclean spirits but good and holy gods, must we repeat what we have already said enough times, nay, more than enough?  For can he who has read the previous books of this work and has reached this point doubt that the Romans served evil and impure demons unless he is either exceedingly stupid or shamelessly contentious?  But aside from the character of the gods to whom they offered sacrifices, it is written in the Law of the true God: “He who sacrifices to any God except to the Lord only shall be utterly destroyed” (Ex. 22:20).  He who prescribed such a threatening commandment did not will, therefore, that sacrifices be offered either to good gods or to evil ones.“

 * * *

it’s worthwhile here, to include the comments of the translator of his overall works, Mary Clark, to put this chapter into context of Augustine’s overall thinking in regard to the ‘Law’;

“Augustine’s famous charge that there never was a Roman Republic was made because Cicero’s definition of a State suggested a people united for justice, and since justice required that God be given due worship, the Romans who substituted for God a legion of devils were not a true Republic.  This highlights the Augustinian position that all legal rules are subordinated to justice and conscience. “Put justice aside then and what are kingdom’s but great piracies?”   “Now to war against one’s neighbour’s, and to proceed to the harm of those who do not harm you, for greedy desire of rule and sovereignty, what is this but flat thievery in a greater excess and quantity than usual?”  (Chapter iV.6)

The thrust of Book XIX is not political but eschatological.  Everyone seeks happiness and all seek it in some good that they choose.  There is no evil reality in itself but only a good proudly preferred to God.  Political power is not an evil, only inordinate love of power.  The vestige of God in every good thing calls on us to transcend it and allow the infinite longing of the human heart to find its true happiness in the Infinite God.  Unless love for God has priority in our lives the realities we seek --- wealth, power, honor, pleasure --- become idols.   As false gods they cannot give peace to persons who are “made toward” God.  All peoples seek happiness,  and complete happiness is to be found only in the supreme good, which is eternal life.  “where God shall be all in all, where eternity shall be firm, and peace most perfect and absolute. (XIX.20)

This happiness is visible only to the eyes of faith and is to be received from God for the asking.”

 * * *

one can recognize in these citations from and about Augustine’s thoughts/writing in regard to ‘the state’, a basic shortfall in the modeling paradigm that parallels that picked up on by Poincaré in the case of mathematics where there is an advance prejudice as to the existence of ‘objects’ which figure in all the theorems and proofs etc. of mathematical physics, but which are themselves accepted without any elaboration, and which would be of no use in a purely spatial-relational (fluid-dynamical) world where we would have to speak, instead, in terms of ‘dynamical forms of organization’ (spatial-relationships that are transforming in the continuing present)

that is, the existence of ‘States’ is an a priori prejudice and Augustine’s discussion focuses on ‘what is not a state’ and then what states can do and cannot do etc.

the existence of the ‘state’ is fundamental to the ‘historical’ perspective (seeing things in terms of the temporal-sequential actions and interactions of independent objects), but is otherwise not necessary to an understanding of  the world since spatial-relationships (dynamical forms of organization) are a more comprehensive way to go.

for example, we could make a historical movie on any particular nation-state, and indeed on a hundred particular nation-states within a contemporaneous era.   while there are frequent mentions of interactions with the world outside of the nation, the sense is preserved of the nation being an independent entity capable of authoring its own behaviour and driving and directing it from an ‘internal-to-the-nation purpose’.   now, how do we put all these individual temporal-sequential historical accounts ‘together’ as was in fact the condition within which they transpired?  What is the missing ‘dimension’? 

the ‘missing dimension’ is the common RELATIVE space, a dynamical space that wraps around the globe in all directions and back into itself from all directions.  we ‘unfolded’ these historical accounts from this common dynamical relational space; i.e. an historical account is an unfolding that synthetically extracts an account of a dynamical form of organization (DFO) included within a dynamical continuously unifying hostspace, and makes it FALSELY appear as if that DFO is an independent object with a ‘life of its own’; i.e. ITS OWN HISTORY.

there is a way to combine all the historical movies, or rather, to capture an integrated (non-unfolded) visual account and that is by way of a holographical dynamic or holodynamical graphic that includes anything/everything included in the object-animation but which is purely spatial-relational and has no dependency on objects-that-exist-and-do-stuff (e.g. objects that have a temporal beginning and ending).  you can picture this if you can picture the kind of holodynamics as seen in the disneyworld ‘haunted house’ and imagine if one were made that depicted the whole earth (in a translucent depiction) so that we would see the imagery of everything happening all around the earth in a true simultaneous mutually influencing manner, with everything pushing off of everything else so that the depiction was entirely spatial-relational-dynamical without any dependence on particular ‘independent’ objects and their ‘persisting temporal existence’ i.e. where there was only ‘flow’ (evolving energy-flow space in the continuing present) within which dynamical forms of organization (DFOs) took form, ‘lived and aged’ for some time, and were again subducted into or rather ‘subsumed’ by the dynamically unifying flow, such DFOs being the purely relative dynamical basis that we, the observer, then impose ‘objecthood’ on so that we can then re-render this real-world dynamic in the synthetic terms of a linear-temporal history of objects and their interactions.

if we stick with the holodynamical view (which is why natives cultivate understanding in sharing circles rather than by debating ‘what is the single real historical reallity), the native view follows that says that ‘canada’ and the ‘united states’ do not really exist but are the way that europeans fought over how to divide up what they stole’.   this is getting very close to Augustine’s . “Put justice aside then and what are kingdom’s but great piracies?” 

in other words, the ‘justice’ of giving every man his due is what ‘makes a state’, and giving every man his due means that his pursuit of wealth etc. rather than being an end-in-itself, is given a higher meaning in his love of God.

so, without God (outside of nature and above it) to give higher meaning to a ‘state’, the ‘state’ cannot exist since its material goals as ends in themselves are ‘false icons’.  the natives and buddhists, meanwhile, see Nature as all there is, as in the holodynamical evolutionary flow view where ‘states’ are no more than interdependent dynamical forms of organization.

so Augustine brings to us the notion of multiple states that are true states if the people in them believe that God takes precedence over their material pursuits, but it is all a circular argument and the only grounding that the ‘state’ is given in Augustine’s argument is ‘what it is not’.

and here we go with the same backward-implying meaning-giving for the oxymoronic (of one believes the teachings of Jesus) ‘just war’ by way of reference to a war that would not be just.

“Now to war against one’s neighbour’s, and to proceed to the harm of those who do not harm you, for greedy desire of rule and sovereignty, what is this but flat thievery in a greater excess and quantity than usual?” 

throughout Augustine’s argument, then, there is this dependence on a God outside of nature for a ‘state’ to exist, and for the state’s acceptance of that God as the supreme authority, for ‘war’ to be ‘just’; i.e. for God to be on the side of the nation that is waging war on another, the paternalist reason for doing so being given in the above citation, and repeated here for convenience;

“it was put forward as the most valid position that it is unjust for some men to serve other men as masters, and yet an imperial city including a mighty state cannot govern provinces without pursuing such injustice: the answer to this argument on the part of justice was that the rule over provincials is just, because servitude is useful to such men and is established for their welfare when rightly established, that is, when license to do wrong is withdrawn from wicked men, and that those subjected will be better off because, when not subjected, they were worse off.”

the whole Augustinian argument leaves unexamined and unsupported, the advance prejudice of ‘states’ as independent objects that possess linear temporal existences, and thus, the ‘historical model’ is accepted without examination and supportive argument as an a priori prejudice or ‘convention’, ... which is the essential paradigmatic underpinning of the ‘just war’.

once we have ‘the state’, we have the paternalist central governing authority with a God-beyond-nature’s guiding hand on its shoulder and a justification for war (as a paternalist duty to ‘withdraw from wicked men the license to do wrong’).

just as the legitimacy of the object paradigm is left unexamined and unsupported in mathematical physics, as Poincaré brought out, with the result that spatial-relational paradigm (relativity) is occluded and not considered, so it is again in this case where the legitimacy of the nation-state paradigm is left unexamined and unsupported in Augustine’s city of god (he examines only when a state is not a state, but does not question that states can exist as independent objects with a temporal sequential ‘life-time’).

 * * *

that pretty much covers the essentials of Augustine’s modeling of the ‘state’, the ‘Law’, how ‘war’ can be ‘just’ and how all of that relates to God, the key point being that his whole argument is built upon a ‘historical view’ that accepts the existence of a state as an independent object, if it is ‘backed’ by a God-beyond-nature, and it leads to the notion of the aging and death of a state by way of the infiltration of evil that rots, decomposes it until it dies a death of ‘profound discontinuity’.

moving on to the alternative understanding of the ‘primitives’, or ‘naturalists’ who associate themselves with the ongoing evolutionary flow and regard their material bodies merely as dynamical forms of organization with the flow, the image of the self is somewhat more optimistic in that one understands himself as being included in the ongoing metamorphosis (the evolutionary dynamic) so that one’s death is innately supportive of ongoing life.  so, ‘aging’, rather than being ‘rot’, is understood as participation in the metamorphosis of the dynamical hostspace that one is included in, so that one’s self is of the timeless transhistorical ongoing evolution wherein all living forms are a dynamically unifying brotherhood and where one’s material body is akin to the substance that passes through an ocean wave or that passes through the tornado, or like the teachers, students and bricks that pass through the dynamical form of organization known as ‘university’; i.e. these material-constituents such as the teachers and students do not create the organizational form, the organizational form inductively actualizes and shapes their behaviours since the organization form is ‘of the community-hostspace dynamic’ in which the DFO of ‘university’ emerges and persists.  to characterize a university in the positivist terms of its material-constituent parts and ‘what they do’ would be to miss the point that they are a DFO within the community hostspace dynamic, the notion of themselves as an independent body that is driven and directed by an internal purpose, being a reductionist illusion that occludes the greater reality of their inclusion as a dynamical form of organization within a common dynamical hostspace.

in the following quotes from Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return, ... which has been a common theme of ‘naturalist’ cultures not only in the eastern mediterranean but around the world, the world is seen as continuous dynamically unifying ‘All’ and this unifying is by way of cycles of renewal.  thus, in the belief traditions of these ‘naturalist’ cultures or ‘primitives’, what is put into precedence is keeping oneself OUT OF THE HISTORICAL view and instead associating ONE’s SELF with the continuously renewing flow of nature.  Eliade points out how profound, to the ‘naturalist’ cultures, is the renewal implied by the moon-cycle with is three days nothingness that mark a new beginning, and also how rituals like celebrating the Sabbath and ‘confessing the errors of one’s way’ are ways of orienting to the notion of renewal, new cycles of beginnings that originate within the mother-space in which we are included (i.e. we are continually being given renewal by the living natural universe we are included in).  in this view our experience is trans-historical; i.e. it is ‘of the dynamical hostspace we are included in’, the ‘evolutionary dynamic’ that transcends the temporal-sequential historical accounting in terms of independent objects and their finite life-times marked by the ‘profound discontinuities’ of ‘birth’ and ‘death’, and instead uses as grounding for the ‘self’ the flow that gives natural meaning to these objects (DFOs, according to the relativity and quantum view).  that is, the notion of a discrete object that pops up, lives for a while, rots and dies in an absolute finality, is total abstraction that occludes our life experience of inclusion within an ongoing flow, in a natural space wherein nothing is truly lost or destroyed or comes into existence out of nowhere, but where everything is included and everything is participating in an ongoing metamorphosis.

so, when reading the citations from Eliade, and trying to put oneself in the frame of understanding of the naturalist cultures (which is accessible to each of us, since we are equipped to be born into a naturalist trans-historical culture just as well as an abstractist-rationalist historical culture, one must imagine this quest to liberate oneself from the sense of being an historical object in the flow and instead of thinking of oneself as being the flow, but at the same time being a uniquely situationally included dynamical form of organization with it,... that DFO aspect being visible by way of the material structures that are continually passing through it.  this is easier to think of in the case of the university where we can understand that the teachers and students and bricks are given their organization over generations by the persisting ‘swirl’ within the community hostspace dynamic.  for the university president and faculty to ‘fall’ into thinking that they are at the helm of a powerboat that is fully under their central governing authority, that they can drive and direct from their own abstract inner purpose and destination-orientation, is a false view that denies and occludes the essential inner-outer attunement (the male-female androgynous nature of the dynamic) that constitutes the university DFO and which will render it a hollow lifeless shell, a mockery of its true nature that may be left to be powered by corporations as a robotic caricature of its former self, ... the same type of ‘fall’ that can happen to an individual human being if he can’t get out of understanding himself in terms of an independent entirely internally-driven historical object.

Eliade comments;

“What is of chief importance to us in these archaic systems [native and other ritual that puts things in the context of cyclic renewal as in ‘preserving the sabbath’ or confessing one’s sins] is the abolition of concrete time, and hence their antihistorical intent.  This refusal to  preserve the memory of the past, even of the immediate past, seems to us to betoken a particular anthropology.  We refer to archaic man’s refusal to accept himself as a historical being [one who ages linearly in time; i.e. the alternative is to associate with the continually renewing evolutionary flow itself], his refusal to grant value to memory and hence to the unusual events (i.e. events without an archetypal model) that in fact constitute concrete duration.  In the last analysis, what we discover in all these rites and all these attitudes is the will to devaluate time.  Carried to their extreme, all the rites and all the behavior patterns that we have so far mentioned would be comprised in the following statement: “If we pay not attention to it, time does not exist; furthermore, where it becomes perceptible --- because of mans ‘sins’ i.e., when man departs from the archetype and falls into duration --- time can be annulled.”   Basically, if viewed in its proper perspective, the life of archaic man (a life reduced to the repetition of archetypeal acts, that is, to categories and not to events, to the unceasing rehearsal of the primordial myths) [one of the most important is the moon’s disappearance in illo tempore for three days and its renewal], although it takes place in time, does not bear the burden of time, does not record time’s irreversibility; in other words, completely ignores what is especially characteristic and decisive in a consciousness of time.  Like the mystic, like the religious man in general, the primitive lives in a continual present. (And it is in this sense that the religious man may be said to be a ‘primitive’; he repeats the gestures of another and, through this repetition, lives always in an atemporal present.”

so, the disappointments we have experienced in our lives can comes from our ‘fall’ into ‘historical being’ where we see ourselves as ‘wearing out’ in time and ‘failing to achieve our life goals’.  but the archaic view which is really the ‘spiritual view’ understands that this frictional engagement that we are experiencing is engagement with/in the evolutionary flow and the temporal-sequential historical understanding is just illusion.   the evolutionary flow is invisible, in the same manner as waves are invisible (we see them indirectly, by the local disturbance of the water or by the dynamics of dust as in a Kundt’s tube experiment) but the continuously transforming energy-field-flow of relativity theory etc is the mother of the dynamical forms of organization that are tangible and visible.   (here it is useful again to think of the earlier-mentioned alternative imageries of the ‘university’, which make the point that we can regard ourselves as either a self-powered historical being that is confined to life as an asserting agent within historical time, ... or as a DFO who draws his power, form and direction, by way of inductive actualization/shaping, from the evolutionary flow in which he is included.)

as Eliade points out, the troubles the Romans were having (the myth of romulus and remus also predicted a finite duration for Rome, the arrival of a death day) were interpreted as the approach of the death of Rome, when the troubles were instead signalling the evolutionary dynamic itself, the continuing renewal, and it was only the death fixation of historical being and their clinging to ITS life that had them all shook up.

the Romans’ culture avoidance of accepting that the Roman Empire was inductively actualized and shaped by the dynamical hostspace or ‘world dynamic’ that they were included in, ... and instead thinking of themselves and ‘it’ in terms of ‘historical being’ which persists and is animated entirely from some internal vitalism is the historical model that pervades our present day culture and gives rise to such images of ourselves, man’ in terms of something which undergoes a historical progression or internals-driven, genetically determined future.

.

but that form is instead, inductively actualized and shaped by the dynamical hostspace-flow it is included in (which is entirely missing from the picture)....

that is, it is consistent with our experience to understand dynamical entities with an individual nature such as ‘man’ in terms of their having been inductively actualized and shaped by the dynamical hostspace they are included in, rather than tracking ourselves backwards in time, in historical style, as being causally determined by some genetic accident, that in turn can be tracked back to ‘the beginning of life’ (as if the energy-flow-field that constitutes the universe is somehow devoid of ‘life’) when some kind of earthy soup of chemicals under precisely the right conditions was infused with energy by a bolt of lightning and voila, ‘life was born unto a dead universe’.

which brings us back to ‘organization’ and the western historical view wherein organization is a ‘deliberately arranged’ thing as in the Augustinian argument with its ‘state’ and ‘Law’ and ‘just wars’, wherein man is made the puppet of a supra-nature battle between God and evil demons, both vying for our allegiance down here on the earth that God created for this experiment, beneath the supra-natural heavens.

in such a deliberate, rational (unnatural, abstract) scheme of organization, there is no place for the role of the dynamical hostspace we are included in, in inductively actualizing and shaping our behaviour.

but yet, when people are on the beach and the tide goes out, or the tsunami pulls all the water out, the crowd goes out to have a look.  moreso than organization driven deliberately from out the internals of independent object-peoplle, this is spatial-relational induced organization, ... and when the tide comes back in, the crowd is orchestrated, by the transforming of the dynamical hostspace it is included in, to retreat, and if they are not in phase, as when the tsunami comes back in or when one strays too far on the sands of Mont Saint-Michel where the tides are 40 feet and the ebb exposes sands for miles out, and they don’t retreat fast enough, then dissonance or ‘out-of-phaseness’ results within this pulse of space-induced organization.   but there is no way to describe this wavy, ‘continual-return’ kind of organization in the sense of historical beings and their forward progression driven from the internals of the animated people-objects. (the internally-driven motion of independent objects is of course, ‘absolute movement’, thanks to our imposing of absolute space on our mental modeling which objectifies (converts DFOs to independent objects and breaks them out of) the flow that we experience inclusion in and re-renders ‘reality’ in the ‘historical’ terms of these abstract ‘independent objects’ and ‘what they do’.).

the trouble in our current era is, that’s all the television news ever tries to do is to start with the untested and unstated assumption that there is ‘a historical reality’ based on ‘independent objects’ and what they do and they then debate over the explicit defining of that historical reality, how it is unfolding in time, and whether the US/Western Empire is going to fall or not and all that ‘historical’ obfuscation of our authentic trans-historical experience, that drives fear into people because it makes them cling to notions of duration and things that wear out with time and die with an explicit finality, and the profound discontinuities that are associated with all that.

primitive man (and the naturalist man that is in each of us) was not ‘denying reality’ by trying to get out of that sense of historical being since historical reality is an illusion (the cloud formation that attracts our eye, by which the hurricane is made visible to us on a satellite view, is not the real hurricane. the real hurricane is a DFO that is inherently included in or owned by the hostspace flow).   rather than associate the self within the illusion of historical reality with its internally-driven ‘independent objects’, primitive man chose to live in, and associate his ‘self’ with, the continuing present (the evolving space of the continuing present aka the evolutionary dynamic) wherein we are DFOs, dynamical forms of organization intrinsically included within or ‘of’ the flow, and when we notice our body aging, it is a reminder that we are participating in a metamorphosis along with our brothers, the brotherhood of man and all things that is a divine dynamical unity.

our theme, The ‘Law’ and its Application, is clearly bound up in these questions of how we understand ‘organization’ and whether it is ‘deliberate’ and driven by the internal power and direction of independent objects (as in the ‘historical view’) in which case the person who sees his ‘self’ as an independent object takes full credit for his assertive behavioural accomplishments, or whether it is space-induced in which case the person sees his ‘self’ in the trans-historical terms of a dynamical form of organization within the ongoing evolutionary flow, that is androgynous.  it is androgynous because his actualized behaviour is no longer seen as driven from the interior of his independently existing self, but as being mutually actualized by his local (internal in a relative sense) assertive potentials that are inductively actualized and shaped by the (external in a relative sense) dynamical hostspace in which he is uniquely, situationally included.    

so, what happens to our ‘assertive accomplishments’ when we are in a trans-historical understanding mode? 

well the first thing is, we no longer think in terms of independent power-boat like individuals, so the idea of ‘individual’ accomplishment goes right out the window, but not the idea of ‘individual engagement’ with the community hostspace dynamic, ... the thing that is sucking all the professors and students and mortar and bricks around into the dynamical form we call ‘university’ and continues to do so over multiple life-cycle generations of teachers and students and mortar and bricks.   

in the trans-historical understanding of ‘inclusionality’ (being dynamical forms within the evolutionary flow), we are tuning in to the ‘winds of change’, ... those winds that can turn a whole fleet of sailboats up into the wind at once, deflecting the wind at the same time (and as a necessary consequence, since if the flow induces change in something in the flow, the change induces changes in the flow; i.e. it is all ultimately ‘flow’ and ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ the parents of temporal sequence, meld back into inner-outer relative dynamics) so as to convert this inclusional attunement into directed and naturally coordinated motive power.

there is some place that the wind is asking us to go, not an explicit place but some place that will be determined by the manner in which we move to discover it since the winds of change that invite us to visit it transform in our taking up the invitation (i.e. as we move in the service of seeking to sustain harmony in the space we are included in).  and we are naturally sensitive to this ‘call of the winds of change’.   now the powerboat people (people who have ‘fallen’ into historical mode and are stuck in their powerboat view of self where the sailboat attunement is turned off) like the university president or faculty club who believes they are at the helm of a powerboat, attempt to take the organization where they want to take it (steering it around obstacles and difficulties, of course, but nevertheless ‘in control’ of things), ... but it cannot sustain its power in its own right (taken out of its inductively actualized coupling with the dynamical hostspace) forever, and if it is not drawing its power from attunement to the hostspace flow it is situationally included in, its bought or borrowed power will eventually dry up and then perhaps the self-styled powerboat operators will go back to the community and say, ‘don’t let me die, ... what do you want of me?, ... ask and it shall be done’.  but so long as things are ‘going fine’, the reason that is given for things ‘going fine’ is ‘the wisdom of those who are sitting at the helm in the central control authority’, ... and the people most responsible for persisting belief in this accreditation are, .... ‘those who are sitting at the helm in the central control authority’.

the fear of failing to achieve our goals (as comes with thinking in ‘historical mode’) tempts us to become the lackeys of the powerboat culture and to let our creative products serve powerboat goals, ... but our very nature is to resist that, and to stay with our attunement to the flow we are included in, ... and so when a person refuses to capitulate to the demands of the powerboat authorities, he has made his choice to stay with attunement to the flow and it is the flow that will prevail, that is for sure (though without explicitly predetermined form), and this is felt first by the more vulnerable and not by the powerful authorities; e.g. .

when riding on a motorcycle in Texas and New Mexico i was always attuned to the winds and the skies and adjusted my helm so as to bypass thunderstorms, but those in the security of their de-sensitizing metallic condoms aka ‘cars and trucks’ were too destination oriented for that, and i often came hailstones on the road and cars/trucks in the ditch that marked their lack of attunement that was born of their self-assumed powerboat-based invincibility, ... Invicta Roma Aeterna, ... Invicta Me Aeterna, that property of objects (and seeing ourselves as objects) which as Parmenides (a 500 B.C. proponent of the ‘historical view’) told us ‘either exist’ or ‘do not exist’, ... setting up a historical reality of ‘profound discontinuity’ indeed.

the news media is constantly trying to put us into ‘historical being’ mode and we have lost the ‘tricks’ (rites etc.) that enabled primitive man to avoid ‘the fall’ into historical time and to keep himself in the spiritually connected atemporal now (the evolutionary flow).

the powerboat people (we, when in that mode) are currently (post 9/11) convincing one another of the ‘death of an era’, the death throes of which are an ‘age of terror’, ... in the same manner as the Romans did to themselves and of course, we, the descendents of the Roman Empire continue to believe that ‘Rome did die’, that this was a profound historical discontinuity, ... when it was instead an artefact of the ongoing life-as-evolutionary-flow.  anyone who could, at the same time and without bias, appreciate the contemporary unfolding fortunes of all participants, the Romans, the Barbarians, the Vandals, the Arabs could appreciate things in the trans-historical terms of simultaneous good and bad and continuing renewal.  who has a better ‘grasp on reality’? ... those who are saying ‘these are bad times and we are on our way down’, or those who are at the same time saying ‘these are good times and we are on our way up?’  if we are of the ethic of ‘mitakuye oyasin’, we can acknowledge that both are true at the same time, and that our particular predicament does not equip us to capture reality in terms of what we see from our unique situational inclusion within the hostspace flow-dynamic.

if we accept the greater reality of the brotherhood of man which is necessarily in trans-historical terms as in the holodynamical visualization described earlier, and accept that a particular historical view is an abstract illusion then we no longer have to worry about the impending death of the western world or the US Empire, because in the transhistorical terms of continuous renewal and dynamically unified brotherhood, we are instead able to understand that we are undergoing metamorphosis and like the sailboat mode of organization, we can proceed by sustaining dynamical balance and harmony with the common dynamical community hostspace we are included in, rather than by resorting to our powerboat explicit destination-oriented mode of organization where the imagery is in terms of sustaining the life of our Empire even as the global hostspace dynamic it is included in is inviting it to participate in an all-inclusive metamorphosis or ‘evolutionary transformation’.   to reject our inclusion within a common hostspace dynamic and set about building defensive walls to protect us from ourselves, is a form of madness that comes bundled into historical thinking of the type advocated by Augustine with its ‘just wars’ (all wars are civil wars if we are a dynamically unifying brotherhood of One as in the transhistorical view)

the Augustinian view is a ‘historical’ view that grounds our impression of reality and our sense of self in the material existence of independent states populated by independent people which, being independent, must be directed in their behaviours by generalized ‘Law’

the ‘naturalist’ view is a ‘trans-historical view that grounds our impression of reality and our sense of self in our attuned, dynamical-balance seeking relationship with the dynamical hostspace in which we are each uniquely situationally included, as an individual and/or as a nation-state.

it seems clear to me, that this second ‘naturalist’ manner of understanding the world and our relationship with (within) it, is what is alluded to in the teachings of Jesus that we have ‘fallen’ out of, embracing instead the one-sided male, paternalist deliberate control based historical view of ourselves.

how do we get out of entrapment in this hollow historical way of understanding the world and ourselves?   

 ‘And when you make the inner as the outer, and the outer as the inner, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one so that the male shall not be male and the female (shall not) be female, then shall you enter (the Kingdom).”  --- Jesus (per the Gospel of Thomas)

as in the translations from the original Aramaic, ‘the kingdom’ is both within us and without us; i.e. it corresponds to the divine unity of nature, the ‘evolving space of the continuing present’.

we no longer need ‘Law’ when we re-enter the kingdom, the ‘tao’ or the ‘evolutionary flow’;

“Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.  But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.”

since the behaviour asked of us is unique and personal according to our situational inclusion within the flow, and we are made aware of it by sustaining inner-outer dynamical balance and harmony with the dynamical hostspace in which we are included.

this getting in touch with ourselves as androgynous dynamical unifying of opposites is what the primitive spiritual tradition and the ‘Buddha Dharma’ (the ‘Law’ or ‘Truth’ of the way of the Buddha) is all about;

anyhow, this note is not about preaching religion, it is about presenting some things we have put into the foundations of how we understand the world and our relationship with it, that have been ‘buried’ and ‘obscured’ from our view by generations of accepting practice within our culture.

our embrace of deliberately imposed social order has been reaching new highs over the past century.  it amounts to an attempt to ‘stop evolution’ and to take over the helm and to manage evolution deliberately from here on in.

this attempt is fuelled by generations of convincing ourselves that we are truly at the helm of our own powerboat behaviour and that our assertive accomplishments are truly ‘our own’, a view that occludes the mother role (through inductive actualization and shaping of behaviour) of the dynamical hostspace we are all included in.

we are dismayed that our ‘empire’ is crumbling and that rot and putrefaction leading to its death is well underway.

that alternative view of the ‘naturalist’ in us, embodied in the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha and in the 10,000 year old tradition of the north american natives, is that we are all a brotherhood of One which continues on just as the evolutionary flow continues on since it is the evolutionary flow, and that we should chill out and accept our participation in a spatial metamorphosis, using the sustaining of inner-outer harmony as the orchestrative actualizing and shaping our behaviour, both as individuals and as local brotherhood known as ‘people-nations’.   the abstract notion of ‘the State’ with its ‘Law’ that is used to deliberately impose peace, is a recipe that is having us go to war against our own spiritual mother, the ‘tao’ or evolutionary flow.

 * * *  end of second postscript * * *

.

postscript to ‘The ‘Law’ and its Application’  as of September 12, 2006

This postscript is to cite a current example of ‘Christian Teaching’ which, to me, illustrates very well how Christian teaching departs from the teachings of Jesus and actually provides, unintentionally, a historical account of how this happened.   The article I am referring to, ‘Theology for an Age of Terror’, is in the journal Christianity Today and can be accessed at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/009/1.78.html

The central issue is ‘Law’ and whether ‘Law’ is to be conceived of as implicit, something to provide personal guidance, since we are all included in our common hostspace dynamic in a uniquely situated way, or whether ‘Law’ is to be conceived of as explicit and general so as to be applied by any person to other persons (equipping each of us to be ‘a Judge’ and an ‘Executioner’).

How we perceive ‘Law’ not only effects our social dynamical ‘management’ but also our ‘scientific’ manner of reasoning since ‘Law’ comes into play equally in our reasoned inquiry and the same questions as to the nature and application of ‘Law’ arise in the context of reasoned inquiry.

The article ‘Theology for an Age of Terror’ speaks in terms of a time during which the Roman Empire was ‘crumbling’ and the uncertainty and ‘terror’ which reigned at that time associated with the collapse of an unnatural imposing of ‘Law’ on a diversity of people in an extensive region (‘Empire’) in which Rome occupied the center as a ‘Central Governing Authority’.  Clearly the ‘Law’ was applied in an explicit and general manner wherein an individual conversant with the law was equipped to be both a ‘Judge’ and ‘Executioner’ and the distribution of authority to local communities to interpret and administer the law in local nations (regional peoples) and communities provided the basis for the Imperial social dynamics management.

What comes across in this current article of Christian teaching is the very issue of how does one reconcile the teachings of Jesus with the need for restoring peace and security in an ‘Age of Terror’.  As the author says, Christians were confronted with this question for the first time in the era (fifth century A.D.) where Augustine was writing his self-described ‘great and laborious work’ ‘The City of God’ which, according to this author and others; “For 1,500 years, it has been the bedrock of a Christian philosophy of history”.

For the first time, Christians had to think about what it means to follow Jesus Christ while also participating in civil governance. What does it mean to wage a just war? Can followers of a Palestinian peasant who declined to call armies of angels to deliver him from physical assault now sanction violence against heretics and recalcitrant pagans in his name?

It is not hard to see, when one reflects on it, that there are certain, shall we say ‘supremacist’, assumptions in the authors perspective that recall the Papal Bull Inter-Caetera of 1493 which gave Christian explorers dispensation to kill the savage pagans in the Americans and seize their lands, if they could not be converted to Christianity.

To be sure, this ‘supremacism’ is a western cultural characteristic and it has only been in my lifetime that the acceptance of ‘Empire’ has become somewhat ‘politically incorrect’ (e.g. the last ‘British Empire Games’ was in Vancouver in 1954. But in the wake of WWII and with India, the prize of the British Empire winning its freedom, the tide was turning against the ideas of Empire and the centralized control of vast regions and populations by an ‘elite’ (i.e. ‘paternalist-supremacist’) few.  The British Empire thus became ‘the British Commonwealth’ and considerable softened its ‘central control ethic’ even though as recently as 1987, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was helping the South African government sustain its Apartheid policy and labelling Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress party ‘terrorists’ (her Conservative party supporters wore ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ badges in this era).  The interpretation of many is that the ‘State terrorism’ perpetrated by many governments (and remember, a ‘just war’ is a war that is duly authorized by an elected central governing authority) is often more odious than what those of a political leaning like Prime Minister Thatcher label ‘terrorism’.

How we look at ‘history’ is very much tied up in this question of reconciling Christian teaching with the teachings of Jesus and our conception of ‘Law’.    And the interpretation of history is very much in open contention as the furore over the remarks of UK Conservative Party David Cameron’s a mere two weeks ago have raised; i.e.

“The Tory leader, who met Mandela in Johannesburg last week, made his most forceful break yet with the Thatcher years in an article written for today's Observer. His remarks were welcomed by veterans of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, who engaged in a fierce political battle with Thatcher during the 1980s as violence escalated in South Africa's townships while she resisted growing international pressure for sanctions to be imposed.

But his intervention drew sharp criticism from some of the ex-Prime Minister's closest allies. Her former spokesman, Sir Bernard Ingham, said: 'I wonder whether David Cameron is a Conservative.'

Describing Mandela as 'one of the greatest men alive', Cameron writes: 'The mistakes my party made in the past with respect to relations with the ANC and sanctions on South Africa make it all the more important to listen now.

'The fact that there is so much to celebrate in the new South Africa is not in spite of Mandela and the ANC, it is because of them - and we Conservatives should say so clearly today.' http://free.financialmail.co.za/06/0901/bookfront/ednote.htm

It is no coincidence that the current world is still split by those who would turn a blind eye to ‘State terrorism’ but who are quick to label those who resist State terrorism ‘terrorists’ and those who believe that the question is instead how to sustain peace and harmony.

In the presence of conflict that is leaving a wake of death and destruction, the restoring and sustaining of peace and harmony does not have to proceed by way of identifying ‘the guilty party’ and proceeding to ‘hang them’ or capture and incarcerate them.   It takes two to tango, as is David Cameron’s interpretation of history that has angered so many conservatives in the UK, and those who are ‘in control’ or ‘on the side of the ‘Law’ have no monopoly on righteousness any more than ‘the majority’ has a monopoly on ‘truth’.

So, while all of the instances of the proud phraseology ‘The British Empire’, the symbols of belief in maintaining centralized paternalist control by those who are ‘most evolved’ to ‘keep the peace’, have been ‘taken down’, they have not exactly been burned or thrown away.

Returning to the Roman Empire era and Augustine’s philosophical contribution to Church doctrine and the role of ‘history’ therein, we find the current author (Timothy George, Dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University and an Executive Editor of Christianity Today) equating the ‘crumbling of the Roman Empire’ with an ‘age of terror’ where the nature of the violence changed (others were beating up on the Romans rather than the Romans beating up on others) and the realization was coming through that Rome; “Invicta Roma Aeterna: eternal, unconquerable Rome ... "The city to which the whole world fell has fallen. If Rome can perish, what can be safe?"

The author falls into the trap of interpreting history through a particular pair of eyes, those of the people who were losing the security and prosperity that they had enjoyed.  But not everybody in the world was in freefall, others were rapidly improving their condition.   Natural evolution always prevails and Nature doesn’t crumble and die, collapse and and death is just one of view of the evolutionary dynamic that characterizes Nature, a view that comes to us if we ‘hold on’ to the perspective of a particular strain.  But as Antoine Béchamp observed ‘Nothing is the prey of death, everything is the prey of life’ (i.e. new life consumes older life but ‘life’ is the ‘operative agent’, not ‘death’.  ‘Death’ is an abstraction imposed by the observer by focusing on a particular history since there is nothing of the ‘dying organism’ that is lost or goes missing, all included in the new dynamical forms of organization that we refer to as ‘life-forms’).

Thus, the ‘death of the Roman Empire is more correctly about ‘new life’, the evolutionary dynamic which is spatial-relational life that persists as a diverse variety of dynamical forms of life outwell and inwell into it.  It is only particular perspective that casts the crumbling of the Roman Empire in a terrorific light.  These days were good for Barbarians and the Vandals, just as the rise of Mandela’s African Congress amidst the violent collapse of the Thatcher supported apartheid imposing South African government.   

The ‘Law’ was available to the Barbarians and Vandals as well as to the Romans.  The ‘Law’ was available to all from the time of Hammurabi (18xx – 1750 B.C.) and his ‘Code’, the last three of the 282 items of which follow, which show their inbuilt dependency on ‘who is in control’;

280. If while in a foreign country a man buy a male or female slave belonging to another of his own country; if when he return home the owner of the male or female slave recognize it: if the male or female slave be a native of the country, he shall give them back without any money.

281. If they are from another country, the buyer shall declare the amount of money paid therefor to the merchant, and keep the male or female slave.

282. If a slave say to his master: If    If a slave say to his master: "You are not my master," if they convict him his master shall cut off his ear.

 Laws of justice which Hammurabi, the wise king, established. A righteous law, and pious statute did he teach the land.

Hammurabi, the protecting king am I.

So, whose law are we talking about?   Law is something that is imposed by a central controlling authority, but there can be many central controlling authorities, and thus the Laws of the Vandals, decree that certain things shall be done which are in conflict with that which the Laws of the Romans decree.   How then is Law anything other than a personal guide since its administration requires a central authority, and there is no way to establish, other than by war, who the ultimate local authority shall be.   If God is the ultimate central authority, he is not speaking up and settling arguments as to which of two disputing central authorities deserves precedence.

Which law shall I go with if I am a barbarian living within what Rome claims to be ‘its realm’ where ‘its laws prevail’? Which law shall I go with if I am a black south african living within what the apartheid-imposing South African Government claims to be ‘its realm’ where ‘its laws prevail’?   Jesus said;

Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.  But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.”

In this regard, we have this problem that multiple different self-appointed (and even democratically elected majorities have no monopoly on the truth; e.g. North American natives can argue very ably that ‘Canada’ and ‘the United States’ have no other grounds for their ‘central-authority-ship’ than the manner in which Europeans fought over how to divide up what they had stolen) ‘central control authorities’ claim that their law takes precedent over the law of the other.

The ‘Law’ may be a fine thing, but it needs a central control authority for its administration and there’s the rub, ... which central control authority shall prevail.  God’s not talking.

BUT, Jesus says that the ‘Law’ is only a personal guideline anyhow, to help us through the period wherein we are seeking enlightenment (‘faith’) but are not yet there.

Furthermore, he says that there is no ‘ultimately correct ‘Law’’ of the many that are proclaimed, imposed, administered by the various different groups that claim that the ‘real’ central control authority’ falls in their capital city, since these national distinctions are not real distinctions;

 “In Him the distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free man, male and female, disappear; ye are all one in Jesus Christ.”

Now, the author of the ‘Theology for an Age of Terror’ article is a ‘westerner’ with a ‘western point of view’.  He is not interpreting history as a descendent of a Vandal might.  He is not interpreting history as an Arab might since the power of Arab society rose in the wake of Rome’s collapse (the fall of Rome is approximately put at 465 A.D.) and the Arab Empire took control over many of the lands that had been important sustainers of the Roman Empire.  The ‘Cliff’s Notes’ précis might be something like; ‘Those kept poor and backward by occupying Imperial armies finally got so fed up that they were will to die to break the yoke of imperial enslavement and so, even simple peasant folk became courageous (suicidal even) warriors that the imperial armies, softened by their own success (decades of peace), were overcome by them.  The people who were held in contempt for being backward, primitive, savage thus rose to power which was further fuelled by the wealth and growth that came with it;

The Arab Empire Of The Umayyads

Muhammad's victory over the Umayyads, his capture of Mecca, and the resulting allegiance of many of the bedouin tribes of Arabia created a wholly new center of power in the Middle Eastern cradle of civilizations. A backward, non-agrarian area outside the core zones of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia suddenly emerged as the source of religious and political forces that would eventually affect the history of much of the known world. But when the prophet Muhammad died quite suddenly in 632, it appeared that his religion might altogether disappear. Many of the bedouin tribes that had converted to Islam renounced the new faith in the months after Muhammad's death, and his remaining followers quarreled over who should succeed him. Though these quarrels were never fully resolved, the community managed to find new leaders who directed a series of campaigns to force those who had abandoned Islam to return to the fold.

Having united most of Arabia under the Islamic banner by 633, Muslim military commanders began to mount serious expeditions beyond the peninsula, where only probing attacks had occurred during the lifetime of the prophet and in the period of tribal warfare after his death. The courage, military prowess, and religious zeal of the warriors of Islam and the weaknesses of the empires that bordered on Arabia resulted in stunning conquests in Mesopotamia, North Africa, and Persia that dominated the next two decades of Islamic history. The empire built from these conquests was Arab rather than Islamic. Most of it was ruled by a small Arab-warrior elite, led by the Umayyads and other prominent clans, which had little desire to convert the subject populations, either Arab or otherwise, to the new religion.

Unaccustomed wealth and political power, which was reflected in the growth of new cities around Arab garrisons and the expansion of older urban centers, were the Arabs' rewards for these startling victories. The Umayyads, to the dismay of many of the faithful, developed into autocratic rulers who were more concerned with perpetuating their dynastic power than advancing the interests of the Islamic faithful as a whole. Their growing arrogance and adoption of a life-style stressing luxury and material gain exacerbated divisions within the Islamic community that had begun to emerge soon after Muhammad's death.

After a pause to settle internal disputes over succession [the Sunni –Shi’a Division], the remarkable sequence of Arab conquest was renewed in the last half of the 7th century. Muslim armies broke into central Asia, thus inaugurating a rivalry with Buddhism in the region that continues to the present day. By the early 8^th century, the southern prong of this advance had reached into northwest India. Far to the west, Arab armies swept across North Africa and crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to conquer Spain and threaten France. Though the Muslim advance into western Europe was in effect checked by the hard-fought victory of Charles Martel and the Franks at Poitiers in 732, the Arabs did not fully retreat beyond the Pyrenees into Spain until decades later. Muslim warriors and sailors dominated much of the Mediterranean, a position that would be solidified by the conquest of key islands, such as Crete, Sicily, and Sardinia, in the early decades of the 9th century. By the early 700s, the Umayyads ruled an empire that extended from Spain in the west to the steppes of central Asia in the east. Not since the Romans had there been an empire to match it; never had an empire of its size been built so rapidly.

There is a general point to be made here.   The ‘Age of Terror’ mentioned in the September, 2006 ‘Theology for an Age of Terror’ article in Christianity Today, is only an ‘Age of Terror’ from a western viewpoint, ... the simultaneous flip-side view, rather than being a ‘loss of security’ was one of ‘rising freedom and empowerment’ since the Roman Empire had thrived by keeping its vast realm under the thumb of the central controlling authority in Rome.   Just as the ‘age of terror’ as the South African apartheid-imposing political regime was collapsing, in spite of support from Thatcher and her ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ wearing fellow conservatives, had its flip side in the rising liberation and empowerment of those enslaved by the ‘State Terrorism’ of the prevailing central controlling authority.

Here is a picture of ‘evolution’ where new life is subsuming earlier life.   Only one particular side of the story is ‘collapse and death’, ‘uncertainty and terror’.

Why not the ‘evolutionary understanding’ instead of a particular perspective, that of those who have enjoyed a period of security and prosperity that comes from being members of the political group from which the ‘central controlling authority’ is constituted?

But that is not the way it works within our western culture.   The viewpoint we see in Christianity Today is the same viewpoint we see in the media, a form of communication that has itself become highly centrally controlled and which, like the author of the ‘Theology in an Age of Terror’ article, assumes that there is ‘one true reality’, and that ‘true reality’ is one in which he sees history in such terms as ‘the collapse of the Roman Empire’ rather than the subsumation of a particular dynamical form of organization by other dynamical forms of organization.  That is, even in the case of the empire of the human body, there is a continuing vitality of the participating dynamical forms of organization (alcohol producing enzymes etc.) that had until lately vitalized the now-inert corpse or carcass.  Nature includes everything; nature excludes nothing.   If we were participants in the Roman Empire, the ‘Age of Terror’ we would have experienced would be from the point of view of one who has supported the central control based management of social dynamics which has sustained security and prosperity for some time and is now threatened with collapse.  Of course, if we were Barbarians or Vandals or Arabs, it wouldn’t have been an Age of Terror at all, that is just the perspective of those who are ‘going down’ while others are ‘coming up’.

To every Age of Terror where the security of a central control authority which was for so long invincible begins to show chinks in its armour; Invicta Roma Aeterna: eternal, unconquerable Rome, or Invicta Londra Aeterna: eternal, unconquerable London or Invicta New York Aeterna: eternal, unconquerable New York (financial control center), ... the ‘terror’ is on the part of those who have been supporters of the central control based system.

Here, it must be recognized that not all cultures seek to manage their social dynamics by way of explicit, generalized ‘Law’ imposed and administered by ‘central control authorities’.   The Native American philosophical tradition did not approach its management of social dynamics by way of central control authority based administration of ‘Law’. 

The Native tradition, like Buddhism was pantheist (a-theist) and rather than visualizing God as a central control authority, recognized instead the divinity of Nature that we are included in; i.e. the ‘Great Mystery’ or ‘the ongoing Creation’ aka ‘Creator’ that is immanent in the living, flowing space we are all included in and which is a divine unity as in a ‘coniuntio oppositorum’ (union of opposites);

 "The Medicine Wheel is the shape of the Zero. The Zero is the symbol and fact of Creation. The Zero Chiefs say that the Zero is not nothing, but is instead Everything. . . . Creation, the Zero, is perfectly balanced. The Zero is Female (WahKahn) and Male (SsKwan), and has designed and birthed all of life."

This parallels non mainstream interpretations of the teachings of Jesus as Mircea Eliade notes in ‘The Two and the One’ (Mephistopheles et l’Androgyne) such as the Gospel of Philip;

“According to the Gospel of Philip (codex C of Khenoboskian) the division of the sexes --- the creation of Eve taken from the body of Adam --- was the principle of death. “Christ came to establish what was thus (divided) in the beginning and to reunite the two. Those who died because they were in separation he will restore to life by reuniting them!”.

Only a Roman (westerner) has the constrained, self-interested perspective of seeing things in terms of the ‘death’ of the Roman Empire.  Life goes on, evolution goes on, the divine spatial-relational energy flow of the Universe of Nature goes on.  Nature is God, God, Nature as Proclus said.  Only those that participated in the attempt to control the social dynamic using generalized ‘Law’ imposed and administered by a ‘central control authority’ saw things in terms of ‘the death of the Empire’ and an ‘Age of Terror’.

Those embracing the alternative interpretation of the teachings of Jesus, recognize that ‘death’ is an abstraction born of our nostalgia for a persisting dynamical form of organization which has outwelled into the common dynamical hostspace we share inclusion in, when it inwells or is subsumed by new dynamical forms of organization.  There is no ‘death-finality’ in the evolutionary dynamic of Nature there is only continuing life as new dynamical forms subsume prior dynamical forms with anything being lost, with everything continuing to be included as in Nature’s way.

As the author of ‘Theology in an Age of Terror’ notes, Augustine’s way to resolve ‘creation’ was by way of his conception of ‘history’  --- “The City of God, an opus magnum et arduum, as [Augustine] called it—a "great and laborious work." it has been the bedrock of a Christian philosophy of history.”  and, as he also says, it provided a way of dealing with the question that arose as ‘Rome collapsed’; ... “For the first time, Christians had to think about what it means to follow Jesus Christ while also participating in civil governance. What does it mean to wage a just war? Can followers of a Palestinian peasant who declined to call armies of angels to deliver him from physical assault now sanction violence against heretics and recalcitrant pagans in his name?”

Instead of acknowledging, as the non-mainstream interpreters of the teachings of Jesus did, that there was a problem of perspective with this notion of ‘death’ (the death of the Roman Empire) Augustine’s solution was to accept this notion of death as a ‘profound discontinuity’, to make it the ‘stake in the ground’ and to deal with it by thinking of ourselves as ‘resident aliens, in a world of profound discontinuity’.  In this manner we could keep our constrained self-interested perspective that brings to the notion of an ‘Age of Terror’ and the ‘death’ of an Empire (getting all dramatic about our vested interest within a continuously evolving hostspace dynamic).

“Augustine reminded his hearers that the City of God in its pilgrimage here on earth was not exempt from the ravages of time, that it was ever marked "by goading fears, tormenting sorrows, disquieting labors, and dangerous temptations."

Christians hold a double citizenship in this world. Like the apostle Paul—who could claim that his true political identity was in heaven (Phil. 3:20), but who also appealed to Caesar as a Roman citizen when his life was at stake—so believers in Christ live as sojourners, resident aliens, in a world of profound discontinuity and frequently contested loyalty.”

There are no ‘profound discontinuities’ in the natural world we live in,... there is only spatial-relational transformation.  That is all that energy-field-flow dynamics allow (relativity, quantum wave dynamics).  The objectification of ‘things’ is our objectification that we impose on our mental models of the world that is not imposed on Nature.  The native belief is that we as individuals are subsumed within the evolving space of the continuing now which does not deny our individuality any more than it would deny the individuality of a hurricane, or any other dynamical form of organization within the hostspace flow-dynamic.

How does this ‘unification of the sexes’ come into play? ... as in the Gospel of Philip;

. “Christ came to establish what was thus (divided) in the beginning and to reunite the two. Those who died because they were in separation he will restore to life by reuniting them!”

and again in the Gospel of Thomas;

“And when you make the inner as the outer, and the outer as the inner, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one so that the male shall not be male and the female (shall not) be female, then shall you enter (the Kingdom).”

and again in the Second Epistle of Clement;

“When asked at what moment the Kingdom would come, the Lord himself replied; “When the two shall be one, the outside like the inside, the male with the female neither male nor female.

As has been discussed in the body of the note on ‘The ‘Law’ and its Application’, the notion of ‘bringing the two sexes together’ (union of opposites) can be easily seen in systems inquiry wherein any ‘object’ can be dually interpreted as the outwelling of assertive behavioural potentials in ‘coniunctio oppositorum’ with the accommodating backpressure of the dynamical hostspace these potentials are included in.  Our dual understanding of a ‘university’ was given as an example.  Before we actually give a name to ‘the university’ and thereby ‘declare its objecthood or ‘existence’’ (as John Stuart Mill observed, this is an intellectual act whereby we impose the notion of object-existence on some persisting form), within the community hostspace dynamic, a behavioral pattern or form is inductively actualized and shaped by the community hostspace dynamic in which it is included.  Once we analyze it analytically (in an ‘in-and-back-out-again’ manner of inquiry),we come up with its constituent parts (departments, faculties, teachers, students, buildings, support staff) and ‘what they do’ and how this is all brought together by a ‘control center’ (chancellor, president, board of governors), ... so  that it appears as if we can understand a ‘university’ strictly in terms of its parts and what it does.   But what is more foundational to our understanding of a ‘university’ is the ‘out-and-back-in-again’ ‘synthetical’ inquiry that exposes how the MALE assertive potentials that are being actualized and shaped within the FEMALE accommodative backpressure (receptive/resistive) of the community hostspace dynamic.  Only when we understand things, INCLUDING OURSELVES in this ‘union of opposites’ manner will we have a spiritual understanding of the world and ourselves; i.e. only when we understand things in this manner will we be including ourselves in this divine evolutionary flow-space that is otherwise known as ‘the Kingdom’.

That is, our western tradition is to understand things, including ourselves, in purely masculine assertive terms, as independent objects that exist in the manner of the analytical view of the university where everything we need can be found inside of us, including the inner purpose that drives and directs our behaviour.  Such a view does not require our inclusion in a dynamical hostspace flow that inductively actualizes and shapes our behaivour; i.e. where the sexes are in union.

As the buddhists say, we must let go of the rigidity with which our eyes look out ot the world and objectify everything and judge the behaviour of the objects out there as if the were independently driven from their insides, since this is what holds us back from experiencing our inclusion in the evolving space of the continuing present.  Instead, we have to relax our crow’s eye judging and let the