[MD] A theist appropriates MoQ

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

Hi Paco,

If you're suggesting a Gnostic, or esoteric (Campbellian in a sense) reading of
mythology (of which Christianity is), you'll get little argument from me
(Pirsig does as much in ZMM when he transposes Quality for The Tao). One could
just as readily transpose Quality for other mythos-being such as Yahweh and
Odin (or Quanyin and White Buffalo Calf Woman). However, while
Taoism-in-practice lends itself to such esoteric considerations, the Occidental
traditions have been long stripped of such possibility ("God died", to
paraphrase Nietzsche, "when Gnosticism died"). Where the Tao has a firmament of
balancing forces (Yin/Yang, male/female, etc), the Occident has become
monolithic (I suppose some argue that Mary is the female balance, but this is
rare outside certain areas, and even among this subculture "Mary" is an
interventionist, not an equal). 

I am only familiar in passing with Wilbur, but some here find him valuable. As
I think I've pointed to, I find the writings of Joseph Campbell more
illuminating in this regard. When I need more, the teachings of the Buddha fill
any void. 

You say, "Perhaps a more inclusive myth will be "invented by DQ?", to which I'd
respond that the MOQ is, in fact, a myth, not an inventor of myths. The MOQ,
like all "fingers pointing at the moon", is an analogy, its "DQ/SQ" are every
much the analogy as the twin-horse chariot Phaedrus encounters in the
culminating moments of his Chicago days. Quality, The Tao, Odin, Yahweh,
Quanyin, Isis, all analogies, all ways to point towards the void, to glance at
that which can never be seen. They are all "works of art", an art of text,
tapestries woven by words, but the central goal of all is always "not here, but
there", always to direct your eyes away from the words and designs and towards
that elusive shadow moving on the corner of our vision.

>From the beginning of Hero with 1000 Faces.

"Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some
red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin
translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the
hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning
of a bizarre Eskimo fairy tale: it will be always the one, shape-shifting yet
marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly
persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be
known or told." (Campbell)

Arlo