Islam: A Higher Religion?

 Is Islam one of the higher religions?  Perhaps it is but it manifests as one that is totalising, that cannot share space with any other in its ideal form.  The tenets declare they must control all the organs of life and government.  There is nothing that is outside its writ.  Obviously this makes it very difficult for any society that has a mixture of religious affiliation.  

Their view of Western women is that they are fair game and no better than prostitutes.  Pakistani Muslim rape gangs are notorious.  Can Western democracies accept the ever-growing phenomenon of parallel societies with absolutely contrary mores.  They don’t wish to assimilate and have no respect for the host culture.  It’s a major problem and one incapable of being tackled by a liberal multicultural world view.  You can be as accepting as you like, they will never accept you.

Contra culture as the incarnation of religion as T.S. Eliot says in his ‘Notes towards the Definition of Culture’ many of the physical manifestations of Islam in music, architecture and poetry are of the highest order.  If Eliot was right its concrete incarnations ought to be derivative and repetitive.  Sufism presents a different picture despite what invidious epithets we may apply to the founder of the faith and its revelations.  Needless to say the stern upholders of orthodoxy reject the ameliorating influence of the Sufi path.  Clearly the innate reaching after the absolute transcends the overtly held doctrine with its anger and smiting.

I might be prepared to leave it there if that were the only consideration but when the masses of unreconstructed Muslims reach the shores of Europe freed from the control of the tyranny which they are accustomed to, we are confronted with tumult and disorder.  Islamic immigration must be severely restricted.

Loyalties by John Galsworthy

 (I see that this play in on an Indian curriculum.  Interesting for the Hindus who have so many markers for who’s in and who’s out and their well know admiration for the ‘pukka sahib’.)

It was Groucho Marx who famously said - “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me for a member.  Here’s De Levis who wants to belong to a club that doesn’t want him for a member.  Really he doesn’t want to be a member of that club either in the sense that he does not share the ethos of that club.  Dancy underlines this aspect of decency which De Levis does not share:

(Act III)

It was a crazy thing to do; but, damn it, I was only looting a looter. The money was as much mine as his. A decent chap would have offered me half. You didn't see the brute look at me that night at dinner as much as to say: "You blasted fool!" It made me mad. That wasn't a bad jump-twice over. Nothing in the war took quite such nerve. [Grimly] I rather enjoyed that evening.

De Levis could not resist taking a free horse and to maximise the deal ‘tried her high’ to test what quality she had.  Now the idea that Dancy thought he was getting rid of a ‘weed’ that he had not the keep of is specious rationalisation.  Dancy is described in the play directions as a ‘riding man’ friend of the landed gentleman Winsor and in a cavalry regiment.  That he would not be aware that a filly had potential is nonsense.  So he knew De Levis would grab the chance and had the money to keep her in his stable.  True. but the bitter remark ‘he would’ shows that DeL. against all the ethos of respect for the noble animal, the horse, was prepared to risk ruining her by hard training.  Again ‘not decent’.  … a decent house…..a decent club.  Decent is a key value in that world that De L. is trying to crash.

Winsor: He sold that weed you gave him, Dancy, to Kentman, the bookie, and these were the proceeds.

DANCY. Oh!

WINSOR. He'd tried her high, he said.

DANCY. [Grimly] He would.

Recollect also that De L. ascribes chagrin to Dancy on account of this parting with an excellent filly which won two races and was sold to a bookmaker for £1000 (£73,000 in todays money) a far from negligible sum but for a very wealthy man,  not an amount that would cause him to impugn the name of a ‘decent house’ as being the sort of place that you might have money stolen in.  

CANYNGE. Without any proof. This is very ugly, De Levis. I must tell WINSOR.

DE LEVIS. [Angrily] Tell the whole blooming lot. You think I've no feelers, but I've felt the atmosphere here, I can tell you, General. If I were in Dancy's shoes and he in mine, your tone to me would be very different.

CANYNGE. [Suavely frigid] I'm not aware of using any tone, as you call it. But this is a private house, Mr De Levis, and something is due to our host and to the esprit de corps that exists among gentlemen.

When the so called weed that De L. sells then goes on to win the Classic race ‘The Cambridgeshire’ his fury at missing that coup causes him to blurt out the tale of his stolen money to the club at large - a decent quiet club.  

COLFORD. It makes no odds, General. Four of us in there heard him. He's saying it was Ronald Dancy robbed him down at WINSOR's. The fellow's mad over losing the price of that filly now she's won the Cambridgeshire.

Any critique of his attitude is met with the accusation that it arises from antiSemitism.  There’s a clash of values certainly but unless you espouse the ethos of the club why attempt to join it.  Doing so makes you a bounder, a pushy, flashy sort of fellow.  A man like that is not clubable.  The conventional view that this play is about antiSemitism does not hold water.  As St Erth puts it:

DE LEVIS. Well, I shall tell people that you and Lord St Erth backed me up for one Club, and asked me to resign from another.

CANYNGE. It's a matter of indifference to me, sir, what you tell people.

ST ERTH. [Drily] You seem a venomous young man.

DE LEVIS. I'll tell you what seems to me venomous, my lord—chasing a man like a pack of hounds because he isn't your breed.

CANYNGE. You appear to have your breed on the brain, sir. Nobody else does, so far as I know.

DE LEVIS. Suppose I had robbed Dancy, would you chase him out for complaining of it?

Indeed. What of Dancy, if he gotten away with the repatriation of his money as he saw it?  If someone from the same class as the country house set had so far forgotten himself as to steal that money would the theft have been pursued by legal means or would they have gone a different way about it.  The important thing is not to make a fuss, a damnable scene.  That would have been to no one’s benefit.  Without accusing anyone, using some formula derived from public school practice, the money would find its way back to its owner.  No more need be said and the whole thing would be forgotten.  No scandal would be attached to the house.  Nevertheless some association with ‘Dancy’ would be generally known and the chill of decent society would be felt.  A previous case:

MARGARET. Do you remember St Offert—cards? No, you wouldn't—you were in high frocks. Well, St Offert got damages, but he also got the hoof, underneath. He lives in Ireland. There isn't the slightest connection, so far as I can see, Mabel, between innocence and reputation. Look at me!

What would Rabbi Bonder in his disquisition on wealth ‘The Kabbalah of Money’ have to say?  De Levis had to an extent taken advantage of the impecunious Dancy.  He might have balanced the scales of the universe by doing the ‘decent’ thing. 

‘Listen old chap, that filly you gave me.  I know you were stuck then.  I sold her on and got the price she was really worth.  I’d like to split the difference with you.  It would be on my conscience if I didn’t.’

A brilliant play one that ran for a year when it was first put on.  

Nisargadatta on Ajativada

 Questioner: Repeatedly you have been saying that events are causeless, a thing just happens and no cause can be assigned to it. Surely everything has a cause, or several causes. How am I to understand the causelessness of things? 

Maharaj: From the highest point of view the world has no cause. 

Q: But what is your own experience? 

M: Everything is uncaused. The world has no cause.

(All quotes from 'I AM THAT' by Nisargadatta Maharaj : sect/appearance and reality) 

Nisargadatta is not making some sort of Human point. He appears (good word that) to be holding the rather rigorous view called ‘ajativada’. Ajati meaning ‘not born’. What is unreal can have no origin. The cosmos is an appearance - ‘vivarta’. Vivartavada holds that the cosmos is not a freestanding or independent entity. It never emerges from the Absolute but remains within it. There is thus no causal chain in the sense of A causing B and B causing C or a train of distinct events. None of this happens according to the ajativada doctrine.  

This line of thinking has Buddhist overtones. In the Sunyavada view: ‘Emptiness is form, form is emptiness’ .(Sunya - empty)

The world does not have a cause says Maharaj. ‘That all depends on what you mean by cause's says Cyril Joad. One might see a certain similarity to scholastic thinking re contingency and causality in which the cosmos is retained within the will of the Absolute in a current way and not just prior to the ‘big bang's. The whole enchilada is kept in existence now.

Nisargadatta next moves to the material analogy. There are all kinds of vessels made of clay, all kinds of jewellery made of gold but in the final analysis there is only clay and gold in different forms.

M: Of course, everything is inter-linked. And therefore every- thing has numberless causes. The entire universe contributes to the least thing. A thing is as it is, because the world is as it is. You see, you deal in gold ornaments and I — in gold. Between the different ornaments there is no causal relation. When you re-melt an ornament to make another, there is no causal relation between the two. The common factor is the gold. But you cannot say gold is the cause. It cannot be called a cause, for it causes nothing by itself. It is reflected in the mind as ‘I am’, as the or- nament’s particular name and shape. Yet all is only gold. In the same way reality makes everything possible and yet nothing that makes a thing what it is, its name and form, comes from reality.

But why worry so much about causation? What do causes matter, when things themselves are transient? Let come what comes and let go what goes — why catch hold of things and enquire about their causes?

This is offered as a solution to the appearance of multiplicity. Vivarta (appearance) is a consistent doctrine in Vedanta. You only seem to see variety. There is only unity.

The questioner gets annoyed at this escalation up the metaphysical ladder. Actually one can sympathise at this noetic evasiveness.  

Q: Words like God, universe, the total, absolute, supreme are just noises in the air, because no action can be taken on them. M: You are bringing up questions which you alone can answer. Q: Don’t brush me off like this! You are so quick to speak for the totality, the universe and such imaginary things! They cannot come and forbid you to talk on their behalf. I hate those irres- ponsible generalizations! And you are so prone to personalize them. Without causality there will be no order; nor purposeful action will be possible.

The Questioner has a valid point. God is not a bystander. This existence has a divine purpose. Q wants to align himself with it, just that, and let what comes by grace happen in its own time.

Q: My own feeling is that my spiritual development is not in my hands. Making one’s own plans and carrying them out leads nowhere. I just run in circles round myself. When God considers the fruit to be ripe, He will pluck it and eat it. Whichever fruit seems green to Him will remain on the world’s tree for another day.

What is Philosophy

 Philosophy is a disquisition on the obvious. Staring at the everyday until it becomes uncanny. How does consciousness stick to itself? I don’t have to pay any attention to it. There it is self shining, enveloping every moment as I-I. There is no need to fix your attention on it. It is simply there. Samadhi must be where consciousness becomes self fascinated but without a definite content. It somehow locks on to itself and rests. The cache is cleared. It’s the final rinse.

A.N. Whitehead on Disorder and Order in societies (from Process and Reality)

 But there is not any perfect attainment of an ideal order whereby the indefinite endurance of a society is secured. A society arises from disorder, where ‘disorder’ is defined by reference to the ideal for that society, the favourable background of a larger environment either itself decays, or ceases to favour the persistence of the society after some stage of growth: the society then ceases to reproduce its members, and finally after a stage of decay passes out of existence. Thus a system of ‘laws’ determining reproduction in some portion of the universe gradually rises into dominance; it has its stage of endurance, and passes out of existence with the decay of the society from which it emanates. (pg.91:’Corrected Edn. of Process and Reality’ eds Griffin and Sherburne)

I had to type out that paragraph in order to better get at the intricate meanings implicated in each other that have to be painstakingly unfolded and balanced against each other. It is a matter of subtraction and re-inserting. It seems to me that as he writes, the new ideas that occur are spliced in and do not fit neatly. He is not natively lucid.

His observations cover everything from the macro to the micro, from this ‘cosmic epoch’ to the adventures of protons. The same process is at work throughout though with the added boon of rationality in the human. There is an implication for political life there also. With mass migration you may have an element enter into national life that is antithetical to the culture, to what Whitehead terms its ‘satisfaction’. We may expect change towards adaptation or a mixed reception tending towards deterioration in the long run. When the majority of the receiving society has lost its sense of identity and the confusion that occurs with too rapid social change all kinds of demented adaptations will ensue. (Cf. Mattias Desmet ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’ also ‘The Pursuit of the Millenium’ by Norman Cohn)

Hundreds of years may pass before the culture stabilises into partial fusion or in the worst case, the domination of one sector over the others.  

'The Three Impostors' by Arthur Machen ( Novel of the White Powder)

 Where were we with the Three Impostors?

Does it spoil the fictive aspect of the novel to know that all the stories told by the Three are pure fabrications purely designed to fool up their hapless auditors.  Dyson drawn into the world of yet another brother of Miss Leicester/ aka Leddy,  a victim of the white powder, at last suspects that he has  been wound up like a seven day clock.  Of course it just adds another layer of disbelief to the mix and embedded in their fictions is truth which we are told must come out.

Machen says somewhere near the end of the book that it is concocted out of unlikelihood and coincidence but such is the mystery of London that nothing is more improbable than what happens.  Anyway he may be exaggerating because there are connections within the novel.  Russell the egregious struggler who lives on bread and tea is a friend both of Dyson and ‘the man with the spectacles and the furtive scanning’.   Even in an impersonal city like London there are villages of artistic communities that know of each other, that meet and mingle.  All associates and the associates of associates are potential leads to the whereabouts of the hunted.   So it proves.

The gold Tiberius creates its own system of gravity.  For now  the sauntering duo, Phillipps and Dyson, who will exit the house down the drive will not cross the path of the killers who have escaped out the back.  However they have met the emissaries of Doctor Lipsius and if they report the grisly find in the abandoned manor would be wise to do so by way of anonymous tip-off.

'The Three Impostors' (novel of the Black Seal as told by Miss Lally)

 Must I remind you that it was the piquant Miss Lally that is leaving the house in the prologue with a dripping parcel?  And what that parcel contains? Her larky manner should not blind you to her thoughtful consideration of a suitable addition to the Doctor’s cabinet of horrors.  What unconscious confessions will the ‘Novel of the Black Seal’ contain?

The format of the tale follows that told by ‘Wilkins’.  Poverty stricken in London about to expire meets a benefactor and employed by him goes on a journey leading to strange and terrifying events.  In a sense this is like those elaborate phone cons run by groups of thieves.  There is a script.  They follow it closely hewing to the fears and hopes of the ‘mark’.

Why are they doing it?  Wilkins tells that when he came back from America his fortunes changed utterly.  He now was welcomed everywhere and his bona fides were accepted without question.  We may conjecture that certain forces emanating from the dark side were looking after their acolyte.  

How did Miss Lally find Phillipps in Leicester Square?  The  rational sceptic is putty in her hands.  I see the coin is like a tracking device.  It brings earnest seekers to it to continue the slaughter that it commemorates.  The Three Impostors will themselves be confounded should they get hold of it.

Miss Lally is not a good girl.