A Note on Pantheism - from Siva through Spinoza to Sofa

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A Note on Pantheism - from Siva through Spinoza to Sofa

Postby Gouda » Mon Nov 28, 2005 8:30 pm

"A Note on Pantheism - from Siva through Spinoza to Sofa"<br>by J. Blum (no relation to William, though he did once inquire about that). <br><br>taken from <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Calumet Review</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->vol. 2, no. 4<br>Fall, 2005<br><br>It is, perhaps, and perhaps sadly, my Destiny to be a scholiast, a commentator upon the texts and acts of others, one of those Gibbon so justly condemned. So here is another of my ongoing scholia on Ben Watson’s <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. </em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> One of our spies was out some time ago and got engaged in a conversation with a Catholic Girl, who likes others just like herself, if ya know what I mean, who couldn’t shed the vestige of popery involving the personal god and creator bit. The Catholic Girl thought the universe too marvelous and detailed to have been the product of chance. Our spy suggested pantheism as a way of escape from this vestige of superstition. What is pantheism, asked the Catholic Girl.<br><br>And we’re so glad she did. Those of you engaged in Highly Important and well-paid activities will be given the short version now: a metaphor. Now move on with your busy lives. The rest of you may browse through the more considered answer which follows.<br><br>Pantheism is for those of us with enough Greek-for-Pretension just what it appears: all-god-ism. God is all in all and/or the universe is divine. One can posit the existence of a godhead atop or within this all-in-all, or one can simply assert the unity of all things and call that unity numinous, spiritual or divine. Hinduism is pantheist, whether its practitioners like it or not (1), there was at least a strong pantheist component in the old paganisms of Europe and the Mediterranean, certainly the old Roman religion and its innumerable numina qualify. Shinto and Taoism and the traditional religions of most of the world are pantheist at the core. Joseph Campbell is at pains throughout his many volumes of the same basic book to stress that the mysticisms of the so-called higher religions all attain to a sort of pantheism. Omar Khyyam and al-Hallaj and the Sufis in Islam, Meister Eckhart and Erigena in Latin Christendom, the Jewish Kabbalists and Hassidim (2), and a strong tendency throughout Orthodox Christianity all lean in the direction of pantheism. “I am the cup, the wine and the drinker” runs one Sufi refrain, “Glory to Me!”<br><br>Now, as mentioned, pantheism is essentially the notion that God is all-in-all, whether or not there is an “and then some” depends on the orthodoxy of the pantheist (for instance, the Hindu catechist as opposed to, say, Spinoza). Most of the ancient pantheistic texts which survive intact come from outside of those portions of the globe which have been long under the sway of those claiming power of attorney (and sole power at that) for God the Cosmic Penis—the religions which like to hear themselves referred to as Abrahamic Monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam (in all their multiflorescence). India is where pantheism and haute literature have met most often. The most famous of Hindu texts to “Westerners” is the Bhagavad-Gita which can be seen as an equivalent to a Platonic dialogue or the Book of Job wherein God, in the form of Krishna, instructs the warrior-prince Arjuna (for whom he acts as charioteer, perhaps, being omniscient, singing The Ides of March’s infamous line “I’m your vehicle, baby” to himself as he goes) in What Is (which is, essentially, himself) and on why he should go forth and slaughter his childhood playmates and kinsmen. Krishna may be all-in-all, but he prefers--and who wouldn’t?—to present himself simply as the best of the best and the baddest of the bad, or as Mr. Blue himself puts it:<br><br>                        I will make known to you my divine<br>manifestations, but I shall name the chief<br>of these only. For, of the lesser variations, in<br>all their detail, there is no end.<br><br>We shall have occasion to list some of these lesser variations, after Mr. Blue finishes telling us about “the chief of these.” Here he goes:<br><br>I am the Atman that dwells at the heart of every mortal creature; I am the beginning, the life-span, and the end of all.<br>I am Vishnu: I am the radiant sun among the life-givers: I am Marichi, the wind-god: among the stars of night, I am the Moon.<br><br>I am the Sama-Veda: I am Indra, King of Heaven: of sense-organs, I am the Mind: I am consciousness in the living.<br>I am Shiva: I am the Lord of all Riches: I am the Spirit of Fire [Agni]: I am Meru [Everest] among the mountain peaks.<br><br>How he does go on! ”I am OM...I am the ocean among waters...of weapons, I am God’s thunderbolt [vajra]... I am the knowledge of things spiritual, I am the logic of those who debate...” And on and on: “I am the sceptre and the mastery of those who rule, the policy of those who seek to conquer: I am the silence of things secret: I am the knowledge of the knower.”<br>(The translation of His Serene Blueness comes courtesy of the classic English translation by Swami Prabhavananda and Mr. Cabaret himself, Christopher Isherwood.)<br><br>But, as we say, all in all is all in all. By pantheist logic, Mr. Blue here is also the stench of mass graves, the sewage pouring into Lake Michigan after a major rainstorm, the slagheaps of East Chicago, the bedsores and twisted atrophic limbs of Terry Schiavo, the baby laxative used to dilute cocaine, the dirty needles of the junkie, the rapine of mercenaries, the heavy metals in our tapwater, our canned tuna and our children’s’ vaccines...<br><br> Of course, Krishna did include “the policy of those who seek to conquer.” Are we ready to face the idea of Hitler and Bushco (and Atilla and Kitchener and the rest) being manifestations of divinity? Paleolithic cultures deified the animals they hunted—the ultimate origin of the Christian communion, the guts and gore of God, haec corpus meum—Amen. Neolithic civilization made ample use of human sacrifice and associated the sacrificed with fertility and divinity—Dionysus, Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Osiris and the rest of those divinities owed serious royalty checks by the spiritual equivalent of Microsoft that is Christianity. Mithraism focused its devotion on the sacrificer (Mithras) rather than upon the sacrificial victim—which would be equivalent, in some measure to a Christian cult of Judas (3). Pantheism is clearly problematic at best when considered as a basis for moral and ethical behavior and system-making. We begin to see, then, why Jainism and Catharism exalt abstinence and even suicide—though this behavior too is ethically suspect. For is the self less a piece of the Divine than the other? Schopenhauer, a great admirer of Hindu philosophy, calls the pantheist entity “the Will,” and follows after Hinduism towards an idea of moksha, release, and nirvana, extinction, though this posits that there is something external to this all-in-all, a pure and detached consciousness from which the Will (kama-mara in Buddhist terms) has been extinguished. There is no logical answer to this conundrum—Schopenhauer’s logic would deny the possibility of such a divine transcendence. All-in-all can’t logically add, and then some. So we shall find a way of deflating the tension with a comic treatment of pantheism, which is, necessarily, no less valid. Frank Zappa penned a sort of pantheist hymn which appears on the last album to bear the name of The Mothers of Invention, 1975’s One Size Fits All. It’s called “Sofa,” and therein God addresses the Universe, which is both his lover and himself (Ptah in an Egyptian creation myth begat the world in an act of masturbation, or as Zappa elsewhere put it,” don’t get no jism on that sofa, sofa.), and largely in German, which is the language of both Deep Mystical Thinking (Eckhart, Goethe, Novalis) and of high-end electronics. Like Krishna, diverse avatars are listed:<br><br>                I am the heaven<br>                I am the water<br>                I am the dirt beneath your collars<br>                I am your secret smut and lost metal money down your cracks<br>                I am your cracks and crannies<br>                I am the clouds<br>                I am embroidered..<br>.<br>Mystics have oft stressed what is called “negative theology,” which is often what is termed “anagogic,” that which leads upwards. God is not great, because greatness is an idea inadequate for expressing the divine. Good is not good, not only because divinity (pantheistic especially) is “beyond good and evil,” but also, and again, because the idea of goodness exhausts itself without approaching the infinite and ineffable reality of God. <br> <br>Now, Spinoza’s god is/was quite materialistic—all in all and nothing else. The universe, as we call it. This is the only idea of the divinity acceptable to The Calumet Review, which, as Spinoza’s innumerable Christian and Jewish foes were quick to point out, is no idea of the divinity at all. Fair enough, whether we think ourselves pseudopodia with some degree of reflexivity of God, The Universe or The Sofa is really as irrelevant to both that totality as to ourselves. Or as Stephen Crane put it:<br><br>                A man said to the Universe:<br>                “Sir, I exist!”<br>                “However,” replied the Universe,<br>                “That fact does not instill in me<br>                A sense of obligation.”<br><br>Fate is chance after the fact. Free will is necessity from a different angle.(4) We will not find the ethical precepts we cherish in the vastness of the cosmos, whether we call it divine or no. But we should not take this as an invitation to abandon them (though close examination of the legal minutiae alleged to derive from these precepts is never a bad idea). The forces of nature, gravity for one, apply very differently to large organisms such as ourselves (much less giant redwoods) than to amoebae or plankton. This does not render gravity any less “real.” Our ethical precepts exist at the “mesocosmic” level of human social interaction. On this level, <br>the stench of mass graves is evidence of the monstrosity of the likes of Hitler and Bush.<br><br> Hinduism, whose sacred texts are indeed vast, declares “O Wonderful, O Wonderful! I am food! I am food!” Hitler is food, George Bush is food, or will be. Is this comfort? Hail the conqueror worm, whose policies Krishna is also.<br><br>NOTES<br><br>(1)        Dancing With Siva, A Savite Catechism, available at the Lake County Public Library’s Munster branch attempts this stupid distinction. It tells the reader that the Cosmic Dancer is everywhere you wanna be and then denies that this is pantheistic. I have long noted the incongruity in Hinduism between its generalities, which are absolutely spot on, and its particulars, which are as dogmatically stupid as those of any other religion. If all is God, then what the fuck is the caste system?<br><br>(2) Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, advises us that Buber has sanitized to the point of distortion the bigoted aspects of Jewish mysticism, thus making claims of pantheism for this material problematic at best.<br><br>(3)        See Borges’ story, “Three Versions of Judas,” for something like unto this notion.<br><br>(4) Spinoza’s works are well-translated and easily enough available. An excellent interpretation of these works and their historical consequences is to be found in Jonathan Israel’s recent masterpiece, Radical Enlightenment.<br> <p></p><i></i>
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