Well, I think it depends on what the definition of "is" is... (somebody had to say it... :)

I can tell you that for me, how the universe really is and who I am are literally the same. What that means for me is that I believe the universe is the sum of the perception of The Deity (who I call goddess) at the instant that goddess perceives it. "I" am a side-effect of goddess' perception of the part of the universe that "I" am here to perceive.

There are a lot of metaphysical ramifications to this, but that's my core story, and I'm sticking to it :)

So how does that affect your day-to-day interaction with the world, on a smaller scale? (And, on a side note, are we talking about the self-perception of a monistic deity that’s one with the Absolute, or the perception by a transcendent deity of a separate material creation?)

"People die."

That's my core story; everything else -- character, plot, background, tone -- is all just how that plays out on a larger scale than a two-word sentence. In terms of your question... the "who we are" is the "people" side of it, I guess, while the "how reality is" is the "die" side.

And, yeah, I know it sounds morbid and miserabilist, but it's not, honest. I'm a happy nihilist.

Not bad. It’s got overtones (if you want to read it that way) of this H.L. Mencken quote Will Shetterly turned up earlier this week: “We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.”

My reading of Matt's Deity is that She is monistic and that all perception is Her self-perception.

As an aside, though, transcendent/immanent is one of those easy distinctions -- like nature/nurture, mind/body, and Left/Right -- that I think, though handy for quick superficial assessments, both collapses on further inspection, and obscures more than it clarifies.

Well you know, David, on a day to day basis, I take showers, brush my teeth, and am otherwise hygenic.

However, in my understanding of the universe, there is no day-to-day basis. Experience is a story "I've" come up with to explain to goddess the circumstances she finds herself in when she occupies "me." "Yesterday" happened only insofar as "I" remember it to explain to goddess why she finds herself editing a post she thought she finished five minutes ago, before the FedEx lady walked in.

So, only Now exists, and everything else is some bullshit I'm making up as I go along to explain it to the consciousness that happens to be experiencing "Now" from "my" point of view.

Also, Ben's take on Matt's Deity is very good. More concise that I could have said it. It hinges on the Discordian principle that all things are true. So she is both a monistic deity who's one with the Absolute and also a self-aware turd in some other universe who happens to bring our universe into being by her perception thereof. She is also a radiant being of light wrapped in shimmering samite on a throne, the queen of heaven. And so on.

To go back a bit, I think part of the way we use stories to muddle through this complicated universe has a lot to do with figuring out who we are in which stories. That is, if the Jews were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought them out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, and that's what the world is like, it's a very different world if you are a Jew or a Pharaoh, and you would match patterns very differently.

Take, again, the story of the bat in the war between the birds and the beasts. If that is what the world is really like, and I think a lot of people see the world that way, how does it teach us to act, to match patterns? Well, if I think of myself as a bat, that is, as being like and unlike everybody else, as being unsure of my proper place and my alliances, it teaches me that I need to quickly make the decision of where I stand and more important who I stand with.

If, on the other hand, you know you're a bird—feathers, beak, wings, the whole nine yards—you've never doubted that you're a bird—you've never had anything to do with those beasts down there—the lesson is not to trust bats, who for all they can fly, will, when push comes to shove, betray you to the beasts.

It's a different story, it's a different universe perceived, and it's a difference sense of who you are.

In terms of this discussion, Hal Duncan's core story—People die—is very different than Matt Hulan's, in which neither People nor Death play any really significant role. Mr. Duncan, and I hope this comes across with the appropriate admiration, as I'm dreadful at tone in text, identifies himself strongly as a Person in his worldview. Mr. Hulan's, to the extent that I feel moderately confident I grasp it, eschews that identification. Yes, "people" "die" in some sense, but Mr. Hulan is no more a person than he is dead (in this core story).

Another more-or-less core story, or at least a story I've tried to plant as deep in my core as I can by deliberate digging, is that people are different, one to another, and that's what makes the world interesting and fun. Your story (Freeeow!) is in lots and lots of ways different from mine, and as a result we interpret our perceptions of the world differently, we have different patterns in our heads to match those necessarily incomplete patterns to, and we come up with different universes.

Then—and this is the good part—we interact with each other, our universes overlap but don't quite line up, we become confused, we search for the reasons, we discover each other's patterns and the stories behind them, and although we don't adopt each other's stories at our absolute core, we include them in our libraries, and we do so with each other's points of view (altered and incomplete, of course). So I learn that Freeeow! is a story, and that People die is a story, and that I am the universe is a story, and I learn—not, perhaps, who I am in those stories, but at least who I might be. Because that, too, is part of who I am.

And, for the sake of clarification, while I do believe that there is tremendous power in being able to say, briefly and simply, who I am, I also believe that such statements are incomplete and wrong. That's not the fault of the statements. A long and complicated statement would still be incomplete and wrong, and would lack the power of briefness and simplicity.

Thanks,
-V.

*applauds wildly*

Following the link from Ben's place.

Matt Hulan wrote:
Well you know, David, on a day to day basis, I take showers, brush my teeth, and am otherwise hygenic.

This is my new favorite statement of praxis.

and also (to V):
*applauds wildly*

*joins right in*

One of the problems at the intersections of worldviews is the question of what roles we play in each others' core stories. (That may be easy for me to say -- in writing this paragraph, I'm realizing that one of my core stories is "that isn't my story.")

Nowhere does this come through so clearly, I think, as with Duncan's example of the story of Sodom... regardless of the fine morass of exegetical product that can be extracted from that story, the essential problem is that it only works for people who can comfortably cast themselves as Lot or one of his relations. This gets back to the relationship between "how the universe really is" and "who you really are", because in the end the two define each other. It's trite that in defining the universe we define ourselves, and in deciding what play we're in we create a dramatis personae that must be cast from the available pool of actors.

Yes, well said, Vardibidian. For what it's worth, I think your core story of Judaism or Ben's, based on the loss of the Temple and the writing of the siddur, are clearly better and more accurate as regards Rabbibical Judaism than the wider core story I project on "monotheism as a Big Thing", the core story which is, I suppose, "we are the few good men in a city of iniquity" -- a core story which I find problematic for exactly the reasons specified by Dan. But, not to shift the topic...

Another more-or-less core story, or at least a story I've tried to plant as deep in my core as I can by deliberate digging, is that people are different, one to another, and that's what makes the world interesting and fun.

I nod vigorously in assent. That's exactly the "people" of my core story, the people who've come so far it makes us go Freeeeow!, the people who can be slaves in Egypt or wonderfully, miraculously *not*, the people who lose their temples and come up with new ways of living because of it, the people who are just little parts of this huge holistic cosmos (not "Persons" so much as "persons"), who awkwardly, stubbornly meet each other and say "that isn't my core story", and who -- in my core story -- die.

This gets back to the relationship between "how the universe really is" and "who you really are", because in the end the two define each other.

Yep. In one sense, I think, "who I am" and "what the universe is" are complements of each other. The "universe" is the rest of the stuff around that isn't "me", while "me" is the stuff that isn't the "universe". It's just a definition of boundaries between self and not-self. Of course, we might equally well reject that as an arbitrary distinction. The materialist in me prefers to see "who I am" as just an unimportant part of the "what universe is", while the mystic in me likes to see "what the universe is" in terms of a gestalt, largely unconscious, bigger "I".

Hal Duncan wrote:
The "universe" is the rest of the stuff around that isn't "me", while "me" is the stuff that isn't the "universe". It's just a definition of boundaries between self and not-self. Of course, we might equally well reject that as an arbitrary distinction.

Hah. Indeed we might.

Tangentially: for all that a week is an eon on the internet, I am stunned to find that the above post of Ben's, which I've been thinking of as "recent," is in fact from 9 months ago. Gee thanks, Ben, you got me thinking so much that it changed my perception of time. I've been slow in keeping up my own journal, and I blame you.

[wanders off, chuckling. and pursued by a bear.]

Well, and to be fair, Mr. Duncan, there are plenty of Jews for whom remnant theology (your few good men in a city of iniquity) is their core story. Even Jews are different, one to another. Remnant theology gets right up my nose, whether it's Jeremiah or ben-Gurion. We don't, though, liturgically, sit around and tell each other the story of Lot (or, worse, of Dinah) at a major festival, and tell ourselves that the more one tells the story of Lot, the more is he to be praised. On the other hand, my generation came awfully close to that with the Anne Frank story, so what are the odds.

If it hadn't been clear in previous rants, just as important as the stories we think are the way the universe really is are the ones we reject as not being really the way the universe is. For all that Sodom is a fascinating story, ultimately I reject it as a model of the universe. I've come, lately, to read Jonah more often and more carefully; I don't know if that's the way the universe is, but I'm having trouble rejecting it. And, to follow through with our host's observations, I find myself identifying with the poor saps on board with Jonah, bewildered by the storm, when Jonah tells them to throw him overboard and they refuse. It'll be ok, he tells them, and eventually, they do it. And it's ok. What is it like for them, when they get into port? What's it like for them when they hear that Jonah made it to shore alive after all? How much is my own perception of what's going on like theirs?

Oh, and I have to ask, Dan P - when you say that one of your core stories is that isn't my story, do you mean that in the sort of Canterbury Tales story-swapping way, or in the first-contact way?

Thanks,
-V.

V., I apologize for the confusion. It's hard to arrange the personal pronoun and the possessive to make that phrase unambiguous. To avoid hijacking our host's discussion with my personal neuroses, I guess I'd say in the sense of trying on pair after pair of mis-sized shoes.

I love the book of Jonah so much, since I figured out that it's a hella funny parody of prophetic remnant theology.

In the traditional prophetic story which draws on "we are a few good men in a city of iniquity":

1. God comes to the prophet to tell him to go to the evil city (usually Jerusalem) and warn the king.

2. The prophet may initially demur the awesome undertaking, a la Moses, but soon bravely accepts its trials and dangers.

3. He warns the king; the king, in his arrogance, and the people in their vice, do not repent.

4. God's inevitable, justified destruction occurs, and, usually (i.e. in Jeremiah, or the Talmudic story of God scolding the angels for rejoicing at the death of the Egyptians at the Red Sea) the prophet and/or God grieve for the stubborn, foolhardy defiance of the moral law. "Alas, alas," says the prophet, "if only I could have saved them; if only I could have turned them away."

In the Book of Jonah, on the other hand:

1. God tells Jonah to go warn Nineveh (which is a non-Jewish ciy).

2. Jonah, far from being brave, gets the hell out of there, takes the first ship heading anywhere.

God sends a storm which terrifies the sailors: Jonah snores like a baby. When they wake him up, he shrugs and says "throw me overboard". They plead with him not to make them do this evil thing, and he draws up a whole far-fetched legal contract indemnifying them... a typical humorous "taking to extremes"

Does Jonah repent, and get carried by a whirlwind to fulfill his prophetic duty? No. He's mad as hell. He gets swallowed by a big fish and spends a while in its cold damp fishy stomach.

Finally he gives in and the fish spits him up on the shore of Nineveh -- door-to-door service.

3. Grudgingly, complaining the whole way, he desultorily warns the king of Nineveh of God's wrath.

The king repents. Boy, does he repent. Not only do the court and all the citizens put on sackcloth and ashes and fast -- so do the cows and the horses.

God says, "okay, cool."

4. Far from being relieved, Jonah is so pissed off he goes to the desert and sulks. "See?" he says "that's what I was afraid of -- you made me look like an idiot! Crap, I knew you were going to go all merciful at the last moment and let them off. Man. I'm so mad I'm going to starve myself to death." (So much for the humility and sense of perspective of prophets...)

5. God makes a plant grow which shelters and feeds Jonah -- Jonah, true to form, lets himself off the hook on the whole hunger strike thing, though he doesn't tend the plant. One day he wakes up and the plant is dead. Boy is he mad.

7. God says gently "you didnt even tend the plant, and you miss it. Think how much I would have missed Nineveh."

This is precisely in the satiric tradition Hal is talking about. It doesnt do anything explicitly heretical, doesn't imply that God is wrong or all prophets are fools -- but it gently deflates and turns upside down remnant theology, until it's a little hard to take it so seriously anymore.

It's a different voice of God speaking -- one for whom the harlots and unbelievers of Nineveh are unutterably precious.

It's also proof that the Redactor did have a sense of humor; and that, I think, allows us to go re-read the whole Tanakh for its moments of black humor, tall tale, cautionary note, and self-deprecating folly.

That's a great reading of Jonah, and I agree that it's a funny book. At the same time, though, I do find it terrifying. After all, Jonah's just some schmuck, I mean, he's not particularly good, he doesn't want to have the coal burn his mouth, he doesn't say send me, he isn't qualified to be a prophet, and he doesn't want the job.

And I'm not qualified. And I don't want the job. And, heck, I see a lot more of myself in Jonah than in Job.

Boy, what would my life be like if Jonah were one of my core stories, a story I really grew up on, telling me that the world was like that, that we were called, whether or no, and that Nineveh would likely be saved, even if we were cross about it, and also many cattle?

Thanks,
-V.

It's been decades since I read Jonah but reading it again, yeah, I have a sudden image of Jonah as played by Jack Lemmon. And every story should end with the phrase "and also many cattle."