Wonder-ing

Sunday, April 13, ~4AM

I’m wondering when and how I got nudged (catapulted?) into a recent focus (near-obsession?) around a theme that I’d as soon not be caught in and yet seem unable (unwilling?) to get myself out of. Although the phrase may be more confusing than clarifying, the gravitational source for this orbit (wobble? whirlpool?) seems to be around “the death of God.” Yikes! Some exploration of that phrase is forthcoming, so have patience but also abandon all hope for a satisfactory clarification.

While I recall a sense of being struck at some point when reading (probably on the essential and unequivocal crux of Christianity that must be known in the cross/crucifixion), I’m not finding a specific place or even the text that threw me into this “flow” and therefore splash about supposing that maybe this location/focus/muddle might be more like a crest of a wave that developed over the past year or so than that it happened in an isolated passage. And (staying with the water metaphor), my motion feels more as treading than like swimming with a purposeful, well-defined target in sight. Maybe a dimly-detected direction developed rather gradually as I was being drawn to read some seven books by Stanley Hauerwas, three by Don Cupitt, and five by Rowan Williams.

Whatev-ah, to borrow the summary term effectively voiced by younger friends. Perhaps that tone works because some things in life just refuse focus. Like that shape-shifting form that Odysseus wrestled, these moments (decades?) are not meant to be confined to one stable meaning or center. Still, a bit of review across the terrain/sea might add insight or at least ease frustration.

Moon Setting, April 13, ~6AM

Likely the most compelling writer over the past year has emerged as Thomas J.J. Altizer (1927-2018). In his “theological memoir,” Altizer offers one interpretation of the key phrase:

Why is it not possible to understand the death of God as occurring in the Crucifixion itself? Is the sacrifice of Christ not finally the sacrifice of God? Is this why the cross is the most offensive symbol in the history of religions, one wholly unique to Christianity, and yet profoundly resisted by Christianity itself, as can be seen not only in Christian theological thinking but in Christian art and iconography… Even Dante could not envision the Crucifixion, and when this first fully occurs in Western poetry in Paradise Lost, it occurs only through a revolutionary vision of both God and Christ, one in which an uncrossable chasm separates the absolute sovereignty of the Father from the humiliation, suffering, and death of the Son. This is a chasm that only deepens in the further evolution of a uniquely modern Christian vision. And when the death of God is first called forth in Western vision and thinking, in Blake and Hegel, it is inseparable from a pure vision or a pure thinking of the Crucifixion. Is not the very ultimacy of this offense a decisive sign of the presence of an ultimate faith? Is a truly profound offense possible apart from the depths of faith? Is not an ultimate offense only and wholly within? pp. 106-7 in Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir by Thomas J. J. Altizer, 2006 

Altizer’s synthesis of his own work is stated: “my deepest theological goal eventually became one of discovering a coincidentia oppositorum between [Satan and Christ]. Elaborating on this, Mark Taylor comments in his foreword to Living the Death of God:

It is important to understand that the ‘coincidence’ of opposites is not the ‘union’ of opposites. When opposites coincide, they are not reconciled but juxtaposed to create a tension, which is simultaneously the most profound suffering and its overcoming. As Altizer’s thinking matures, he comes to understand this passion in terms of the death of God. Far from an abstract philosophical concept or literary trope, the death of God is, for Altizer, an actual historical event first enacted in the person of Jesus and then actualized in the course of history, which culminates in the ‘absolute abyss or total darkness’ of modernity… p. xiv

A search for meaning in this “abstract philosophical concept or literary trope” requires considerable willingness to enter the expanses of paradox, parabola, mystery, and suchlike. While wading/sinking into the depths of “the death of God,” I’ve also found it helpful to move back and forth into “fiction,” particularly the novels of Walker Percy, and across into theology, especially the work of Altizer. Helpful also is interpretation of Altizer’s work offered by his colleagues: Lissa McCullough (e.g., her chapter “Theology as the Thinking of Passion Itself” in Thinking through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer; and Robert Detweiler, Breaking the Fall.

Altizer affirms the importance, the vital necessity, of the role of literature and art in our moving forward.

I found that it was literary scholars who were most deeply unveiling this [‘that ultimate crisis which had become our destiny, a crisis shattering modernity itself, and therefore dissolving modernity’s comprehensive negation of theology’], discovering in our most profound literature a religious or ultimate vision that is simply inexplicable through our given theological categories… p. 24, Living the Death of God.

Sun Rising, April 13, ~7AM

As noted above, reading Walker Percy’s novels provide a very helpful weaving from the theological into the fabric of life. For example, in Second Coming, the protagonist searches for God traumatic experiences of suffering, physical/mental/emotional illness, death, and suicide.  In particular, he struggles in knowing the names of “death” (pp. 272-3) and in confronting the ways people seem to be “living death” (p. 324). 

Altizer’s work also contributes to finding peace and presence of the divine even in the times when we feel abandoned:

…the very disappearance of God, or the pure invisibility of God, could make possible a total presence of God. [Monet , Water Lilies… only seen with pond  totality… we can only see these paintings by actually seeing the pure emptiness of God, for only that emptiness makes possible a seeing of the invisibility of God.

    Nor is there even an echo of a mysterium tremendum . Now every mysterium tremendum is absolutely silent and invisible, and only thaat invisibility and silence makes possible such a pure mysterium fascinans , a mysterium fascinans which here undergoes an epiphany as totality itself … an epiphany of the sacred, and perhaps most so because it is not an epiphany of God. Is this a genuine  coincidentia oppositorum of the sacred and the profane, and one in which both the sacred as sacred and the profane as profane are dissolved, or in which each fully passes into the other… Thereby we actually see a pure moment of incarnation, and a moment which here and now is all in all, so that now Earth itself is actually paradise, and paradise in this absolutely joyous moment

(pp. 80, 81, Living the Death of God.)

Morning, April 13

        I think this has something to do with my attraction to photography of Nature and the editing that moves toward the invisible. For now, let’s close with a sense of opening:

While ultimately faith is a gift of grace, humanly it is an ultimate struggle, and the absence of struggle can be understood as an absence of faith, but the struggle itself can only be a truly individual struggle. Hence this is a struggle transcending any possible guidelines or rules, and wholly inseparable from one’s unique condition and situation.  (p. 155, Living the Death of God.)

April, full of Spring!

Paradox, Certainty, Suffering, and the All-Surpassing Omniscience (That is, Love)

August 24, 2020

     The year 2020 must go down as a great humbler. Perhaps this period of time, if viewed in the long landscape, reveals possibilities, particularly opportunities to inspire radical remakings. Reflecting off the craziness of the current political arena, we might channel this turbulence to transform meanings of crucial standpoints. Could the time be ripe for radical change in the prime movers among the complex of Power to Love? How might we engage creative chaos? What if we’ve been tangled in the old, old but failed, mythos of the hero? And what if this heroic sense of self (which necessarily generates blame as well as hubris) is incommensurate with our divine guidance? Can we risk surrender to the divine? How can a person let go of the struggle without falling into darkness?

     Perhaps the sense of what to do and what not to do requires a revolution in the feeling of certainty. The Good Books tell us that Knowing belongs to the Omniscient and thus reaches beyond our cognitive grasp (cf. Philippians 4:7, Peace surpasses understanding; Ephesians 3:19, Love surpasses knowledge). So why be surprised when the best we can reach of certainty comes in a sacred texture of bewilderment, being awed, surrendered.* 

The mark that someone knows that the Real’s knowledge encompasses his acts, states, and words is that quaking and dread becomes his watchword, and awe holds up the banner of rulership from his head to his toes. . . Adam was biting the fingers of wonder with the teeth of bewilderment: ‘What’s this? What happened?’” (William Chittick translating Sam’ani, The Repose of the Spirits, pp. 90,103 on al-‘Alim: the Knower)

October 8, 2020

Teachings of Sufism often return into the theme of mystical annihilation (fana) as one approaches the One (see, for example, Stoddard, Sufism, p. 64; Lings, What is Sufism? p. 78; Ernst, Shambhala Guide to Sufism, pp. 61, 115). An outgrown, dysfunctional sense of knowing needs release in order to birth wonder. Why bother about a feeling of ineptitude if we are swept into the ocean? 

      Richard Rohr’s meditation this week comforts me in the reminder that being heroic (my term, not his) is not the only way of acting responsibly in the presence of suffering. He uses the metaphor of a swollen river, sweeping folks off into its flow. The responsible action to today’s crisis comes not just in heroic activism that works toward systemic reform, but also and equally valuable are works of education/healing and those of hands-on help for persons in distress. In Mark Wallace’s writings, the caring attention extends to all of creation, trees to butterflies. 

“As the breath of God who animates all life, the Spirit becomes present in the spaces opened up between persons who risk themselves for the other. . . The Spirit is not a static entity but a potential modality of divine presence that becomes actual in the co-partnerships of persons with one another and other life forms” (pp. 10-11, Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation).

August 1, 2020

     Even so and always, the work zone flows from the interior and, of course, the Source. Blame and anger transform into constructive fire for healing and loving. The only effective agent, God.

*Previous blogs elaborating the theme of Bewilderment include:

August 18, 2019 When Bewilderment Tracks the Mystery

May 13, 2020 Recognition on the Pathway

September 7, 2018 Living with Bewilderment

August 24, 2019 Bewildered by God

November 16, 2019 Longing into Certainty

March 23, 2019 Rumi, Radical Love, & I/You (part A) 

August 18, 2018 Transcendent Power

February 10, 2018 Tracking on the Path of Attraction

December 16, 2017 “and He is with you”

November 14, 2017 Sure Good?

Leafless Prophecy

   Most days the camera lens wants to avoid telephone lines, poles, and yellow stripes on the road. It tries to exclude ugly concrete forms and hunting stands. Warnings caution about glare on closed windows. Watch out for unwanted shade from screens. Question including any unraked fallen leaves. 

      But for this moment, grey skies invite forgiving. Maybe paradise says so. Widen beauty enough for the shadowed lands. Know connections demand accepting imperfection. Windows look out even when the glass isn’t polished. And reflections matter much. 

      In mid-life years, leafless limbs of winter whispered forebodingly; old, now bare, trees prophesy life eternal. 

Prophesy: (transitive verb) to predict with assurance or on the basis of mystic knowledge; (intransitive verb): to speak as if divinely inspired.

One

Perhaps the biggest find

of the hundred or so purchased

over about a decade

from books on the porch 

of the local library sale

was yesterday in the Billy Collin’s

one dollar buy

No better must have been

the $1 translation 

of Ibn al-Arabi's Fusus

although I haven’t finished reading it

in the two three years since

But Billy Collins makes little 

of finishing

A poem is not for finding one final

meaning

I did finish a book earlier today

about Life and Love and Truth

And I’m reassured by all three

that no one here

tells my L/life 

so I’m about releasing

my unique one heart

broken/restored inside outside

whole in One

“Interpret Your Own Self”

Sunrise March 28

Some weeks before attending the Radical Love event at the Garrison Institute, I was already well into Alan Williams’ Rumi: Spiritual Verses, his translation of Book 1 of the Masnavi. Soon after returning from the Institute and while completing that book, a particularly compelling passage called out: “Interpret your own self” (3758). Williams’ notes tell that this line is “almost identical” to 1088b. So looking back, I find, sure enough, a green sticky marker there pointing to #1088 in the way that I use for the few passages that jump off the page shouting: “Pay attention here!” So what might “Interpret your own self” mean and why is it so important? 

     I believe that this act of interpreting leads me further in the journey of knowing myself and thus connects with the awe-inspiring hadith: “to know oneself is to know one’s Lord.” This challenge continues to provide a bridge between authoritative text and personal construction of meaning.  Samples of previous explorations of the hadith include blogs from 2017: Sept 20, Sept 23, Nov 1, & Dec 16. When I look back at Chittick’s Me & Rumi: The Autobiography of Shams-i Tabrizi, I find this hadith frequently cited (see his listing on p. 357) and particularly in #58 (p. 69) that traces through Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad toward today: “He who knows his soul knows his Lord.”

     I’d probably been prepped for Rumi’s “Interpret your own self” by simultaneously reading Jawid Mojaddedi’s Beyond Dogma: Rumi’s Teachings on Friendship with God and Early Sufi Theories, followed by William Chittick’s Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul. For example, from Beyond Dogma, I feel reassured in my sense that, properly approached with sufficient humility, it’s not too presumptuous to read and interpret Rumi’s Masnavi as direction, as a personal invitation to each individual, for moving closer to the Presence. In short, Rumi guides a person toward knowing him/herself in the way that knows one’s Lord.

     Mojaddedi discusses this ultimate access as coming through “contemporary Friends of God.” In other words, access to the Divine is not locked away in some remote revelation, in an almost indecipherable language where those saints who communicated with God are so unreachably far above us that we just have to follow recipes. Instead, Mojaddedi explains Rumi’s “assertions about the comparable loftiness of contemporary Friends of God, and especially the leading Friend of God of every era”:

“The priority of this concern for Rumi would also account for his emphasis on the shared potential of all people to reach the lofty level reached by Prophets and Friends of God, if they fulfill their mystical potential. . . Rumi’s predilection was to emphasize the closeness of all humanity to the divine…” (pp. 39-41)

This reminds me of Chittick’s calling the “human soul a potential intellect” (Science of the Cosmos, p. 127) and asserting “the only created thing that is omniscient in any real sense is the fully actualized intellect, the radiance of God’s own Selfhood” (p. 128; cf all of Chapter 6 on this potential).

     Mojaddedi elaborates on the basis for our means “to interpret”: “the most distinctive characteristic of [Rumi’s] mysticism is his celebration of the continual communication of God with His creation.” He provides a footnote: “I have decided to use the term ‘communication’ in preference to alternatives such as ‘inspiration’ or ‘revelation.’ The term ‘wahy’ is notoriously difficult to translate and has taken on two dimensions of meaning in relation to Prophets …” (footnote 5, p. 185). Mojaddedi further discusses the difference (and overlap?) between ‘verbal expression’ and ‘internal/non-verbal promptings’ and ‘inspirations.’ This discussion continues with lines from Rumi’s Masnavi as Mojaddedi says that Rumi “describes the Friend of God’s knowledge in the following terms:

The Tablet that’s Preserved was his director— / From what is that ‘preserved’? From any error.
Not through stars, magic or one’s dreams at night,/ But wahy-i haqq and He knows best what’s right!
Sufis may call it mere ‘heart-inspiration,’/ To hide it from the general population.
It’s ‘inspiration of the heart,’ since He/  Is manifest there—it’s thus error-free.
Believer, through God’s light you now can see;/ From error you have full immunity!”
(Mojaddedi in Beyond Dogma, p. 65, translating from Book 4 of the Masnavi, lines 1852-1856. In his more recently published Book 4, Mojaddedi translates wahy-i haqq as “God’s own words,” p. 112.)

So how does the direction to “Interpret your own self” play itself out? I’m finding that “the path of attraction,” as it applies specifically to listening for which readings stir the beating of my heart, is leading me back to the writing left by the guide whose hand I took. It happened like this: I noted my response (an “internal/non-verbal prompting” perhaps) to a comment Omid made in the Radical Love Institute about angel wings on donkeys. He told me it came from Rumi’s Fihi, translated by Thackston in Signs of the Unseen, somewhere in the middle of the 246 pages. I’d already begun reading in this book and, upon returning home, scanned to see if I could find the passage. Didn’t work; so, more properly directed, I started at page one and read forward, finding (pp. 111-112) the angel-feather-on-donkey-tail passage, and kept going. I noticed along the way that Thackston frequently referenced Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisa’i and felt another point of attraction, this time to the Kisa'i text. But, as often happens on a travel, while considering getting a copy of Kisa'i, I felt drawn to other collections of similar tales already on our shelves (Ibn al’Arabi’s Bezels of Wisdom, Attar’s Memorials of God’s Friends, Heschel’s The Prophets) but these were not lighting up. Instead, I was caught by a book with which I hadn’t connected in earlier attempts--our Sidi’s Stories of the Prophets ( by Shaykh Muhammad al-Jamal ar-Rifa'i as-Shadhuli). It had not especially resonated when I’d tried it a few years earlier. Now it rings like a bell or maybe like the lovely chimes on our porch.

Muddy

Muddy. Last night’s dream may have offered this term as a guide to enable a confluence of currents to merge in order to yield revelation, possibly even to offer a continuing semi-substantial base (i.e., mud) for holding my own, or perhaps better for surrendering to the higher Will, whether to stand, sink, or swirl.

     One stream, as the previous blog noted, moves along with persistent musing around theodicy: trying to reconcile A with B: A—the existence of suffering and evil in the world, and B—God who is both all-love and all-powerful. That stream carries the force of several overlapping themes and sources including a number of readings relating to the biblical book of Job and extending way back some fifty years to college days when a course that I was taking required our involvement in the theatre production of MacLeish’s J.B. This stream has churned more muddy through certain life experience, particularly in relation to the death of my son fourteen and a third years ago, still weighed in the heart most every day. 

     And the dream was likely provoked by reading from two quite different genres. From fiction, Iris Murdock’s Black Prince and Owen Egerton’s recent (2017) book Hollow, described in a back-cover review:

 “a beautifully strange modern take on the ‘Book of Job,’ populated with haunting and hilarious characters worthy of Vonnegut’s best. A meditation on grief and love, Hollow is simultaneously heart-wrenching and laugh-out-loud funny.” 

Both of these books pursue existential questions of life and death, love and hate, heaven, hell, here or there, God or not. Such questions cannot be satisfied by anyone, by any way other than the individual living them out.

          And still I read because I believe in the “imaginal world” where one wonders about truth, not about facts, but about the True that runs free of literalism, materialism, and the “hardened heart.” Usually these wonderings lead into other kinds of reading focused on spirituality. 

     Not long before being presented with the muddy dream, I had been steadily reading, ten or so pages a day, in Frithjof Schuon’s The Eye of the Heart: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Spiritual Life (copyright 1997). From his final section, I was trying to absorb as much as possible of the revolutionary ideas, revolutionary because he turned keys to the kingdom upside down. Fear turns to perfection in overcoming evil. And, what of Love?

“… its most direct expression is the contemplation of the Divine Perfections which may be designated synthetically by the term ‘Beauty.’ This perspective of love is situated beyond fear and negation: instead of having painfully to reject the world on account of the ephemeral and deceptive nature of its always limited perfections, love, on the contrary, attaches itself to the divine Prototypes of these perfections, so that the world—henceforth emptied of its content, since this is to be found again infinitely in God—will be only a play of symbols and an accumulation of husks, and thus will have no further hold over man.” (pp. 170-171)

     The dream was not dramatic but perhaps just a hint to notice. Sometimes the important things turn more subtle. In the dream, a new system became available; perhaps it involved an improvement in teacher evaluation. The interesting aspect was that it could only be accessed by persons who already had in place a certain level of sophistication in their practice. The term applied to the more developed system was “muddy.” In the dream, I was surprised to hear that term because I had just encountered it somewhere else—perhaps an echo from the reading?

     In waking, perhaps still in the between space, I wondered if the reading from Schuon might only be accessible to persons who had in place a muddy readiness that’s built by certain life experience, also by reflection, and by (to use Schuon’s title for this final section of his book) “Meditation” in The Eye of the Heart.

“… if [Beauty] is most immediately graspable in the created, it is, conversely, the most difficult aspect to grasp in the Uncreate. If God’s Beauty were as easily accessible as that of creatures, the apparent contradictions of creation—the sufferings that we consider to be unjust or horrible—would be resolved of themselves, or rather, they would vanish away in total Beauty… When we look at the sufferings of this world, we must never forget that God compensates them infinitely by His Beauty; but this is beyond rational demonstration.” (171-2)

     Approached from this world especially with expectations of rational demonstration, the problem of suffering will appear “as clear as mud.” But if a sufficient foundation is built, life experiences and questionings which otherwise risk mind-splitting and heart-breaking may instead take one further on the the path or in the river of Love and Truth, Beauty, and the other names of God as they swirl eventually into the One.

Winter Solstice & the Imaginal World

December 21, 2018

Knowing, in this world, needs opposites to build meaning; and yet:

“If we look at the attributes of God’s Essence, such as life and knowledge we see that their opposites—death and ignorance—do not exist as such” (p. 131, Murata in Tao of Islam).

Today marks the winter solstice. This world’s extension of darkness offers an opportunity to reach further for the opposite, to strive toward the essence of light. Rumi gives a marvelous fable teaching the crazy difficulty humans have in finding the true light and in escaping the illusion of color. He illustrates with a rabbit tricking a lion. Nicholson’s commentary tells:

“…the whole fable is an allegory of the Divine Reason (manifested in the Hare) inspiring men to triumph over illusion and realise that essentially they are one with the Logos which knows all things as forms of itself and itself as the hidden ground of all” (pp. 88-89, Commentary on Book I, Mathnawi, lines 1111- ).

In order to further emphasize how susceptible humans are to confusion, Rumi brings in another figure (one close to my heart). Nicholson comments: “Reason or Spirit, the Divine element in Man, is compared to a horse which its rider cannot see, so that he thinks he has lost it” (p. 89). Rumi’s lines are translated by Alan Williams:

     “A man thinks he has lost his horse and yet

         perversely speeds his horse upon the road. . .

     That silly man, in panic and in seeking,

       goes searching on all sides from door to door:

     ‘Who is the one who stole my horse, where is he?’

       ‘Sir, what’s this one you have between your legs?’…

     The soul’s so visible and near, it’s lost,

       lips dry as dust and belly full of water.

     How can you see the red and green and brown

       unless you see the light before these three?”  (p. 109, Spiritual Verses)

As the Solstice pushes us to long for light and as we laugh at the silly rider (who is lost due to human presumption to know beyond human capacity), we might open to the teaching about Life and thus be better equipped to cope with our experiences involving death. Murata continues from the opening quotation about death not existing:

“If we look at the attributes of God’s Essence, such as life and knowledge we see that their opposites—death and ignorance—do not exist as such. What we call death and ignorance are relative lacks of life and knowledge. Only absolute nonexistence—which, of course, does not exist—could possess absolute death and absolute ignorance.” (p. 131, Murata in Tao of Islam).

And yet we are placed in this world where “there are no absolutes within creation” and therefore:

“things can be understood only in their relationships with God or with other things. There are two extreme poles, represented by spirit and body, light and darkness, heaven and earth, subtlety and density. Between the two poles stands a spectrum of created things that are in some ways qualitatively ambivalent” (p. 132)

One source for help in dealing with the inescapable confusion when caught between the poles comes through engaging an “imaginal world.”

“The middle world is ‘imaginal’ because, like an image in a mirror or a dream, it combines attributes of both sides and cannot be discussed in isolation without distorting its reality. It is neither a spirit nor a body, but it has certain attributes that are spiritual and certain that are bodily” (p. 132).

Here and now, this material is helpful to me because I need the imaginal world that helps me hold the invisible horsepower capable of dealing with the longest nights and with the loss of loved ones. By working and playing in this imaginal world, I move closer to the passage:

“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” I Cor 15:55 which references Isaiah 25:8 Hosea 13:14.

Dec 21, "normal" setting for photo

same as above but perhaps into the "imaginal"

Sense of the Sacred

                 

The world seen through the windows of my study, even in the muted tones of autumn, abounds in natural beauty. And still, it's a world away from the rainforests and breath-stopping coastlines of Australia where we felt spirited away to a magical place.   

But there, too, like the D.C. suburbs where we resided for many years, the streets outside our airport hotel in Sydney, convenient for the return flight, were of a different world, much more grey and noisy. In order to enter the beauty of nature and especially to commune there with the divine, we may need to realize the different realities or "worlds" around and within. 

            In Religion and the Order of Nature, Nasr contrasts a) the world that can be seen, loved, and nurtured as sacred with z) one targeted for pollution and destruction by humans driven by voracious intentions bent on feeding insatiable appetites. In addition to feeding sensory lust for material possession, the rapacious aggression can result also from a thirst for knowledge stripped of the sense of the sacred. “The environmental crisis requires not simply rhetoric or cosmetic solutions but a death and rebirth of modern man and his worldview.” Humans must be reborn to conceive of “a sacred realm reflecting the divine creative energies” (pp. 6-7).

         It’s almost as if inhabitants of this globe are on different planets using the same words but ruled by hugely different worlds. Certain words reference a person’s dominant values such as “nature,” “money,” “sense,” and perhaps most importantly, “God.” And to boggle the mind, the same word can mean vastly different worlds. Each person serves a master of meaning whether it is his/her own self, a quest for knowledge, the Divine Source, or some other force. 

         A complication arises when the culture surrounding words and worlds pervades the individual so that meaningfulness can scarcely be found--unless consciousness develops and shifts . Nasr elaborates how the meaning of Nature has dramatically transformed so that the presence of God often goes missing due to the “scientific revolution” and the “death of God.” It can happen unless a person is “reborn” (as noted above). Without the reborn consciousness, persons in the “modern” world tend to treat nature (including plants, animals, and “othered” humans) as objects suitable for exploitation. The following passages detail the contrasting worlds and significant consequences.

“… among all the factors distinguishing one type of humanity from all others was the presence of the skeptical vein. It led to many scientific discoveries but also to the loss of sacred knowledge and in some cases the sense of the sacred itself. And it remains to this day a salient feature of that type of human being for whom the desecration of nature is meaningless because there is nothing sacred to start with. . . this type of naturalism involved more the rediscovery of pleasure than of the spiritual significance of the body or nature. . . There thus appeared this other important characteristic of modern man so prevalent to this day, that of being a prisoner of his senses, which he must seek constantly to satiate without limit, and that of a follower of a naturalism that is against the order of nature as a value in itself, a being devoted to the bodily gratification without the least interest in the significance of the body in the religious, metaphysical, and cosmological sense.” (p. 172)

The “rediscovery of pleasure” and the “bodily gratification” especially expresses itself in the “appreciation of the importance of money.”

“The modern world needs nothing more than the so-called world-denying mysticism that is nothing other than its ascetic aspect that seeks to control the passions and to slay the dragon within, without which the greed that drives the current destruction of nature cannot be controlled. Moreover, world-denial is simply one aspect of a single reality whose other dimension is ‘world-confirmation,’ but the soul cannot confirm the world as sacred without first of all denying the ‘world’ that disperses the soul from within and makes it ever more reliant upon the material environment for the satiation of an ever-increasing thirst. One wonders how, in the light of the crucial nature of the problem at hand, a deeper distinction is not made by often well-intentioned eco-theologians between the world as enticement toward passion, greed, and aggression and the world as God’s Creation and ultimately theophany.” pp. 217-18.