FredP

Well, it's your basic Einsteinian concept of "warping" spacetime by generating a massive gravitational field around the ship. This is what the warp nacelles do. It's mainly based on the pioneering work of Zefram Cochrane in the late twenty-first century. 2063, I believe. Ugh. What a geek I am.

It doesn't hurt that half of them are trained theater actors. Who would have believed a Shakespearean actor as a starship captain! And yet, he was Da Man, as they say. That was a pretty good analysis of the Trek phenomenon too, Beach. I, alas, know far more about TNG "history" than any normal person should. Like what year Picard, Riker, and Geordi graduated from Starfleet Academy. I also have the Enterprise D technical specs. I remember at one time actually having a pretty good grasp of warp field geometry. You don't think I'm serious. Sadly, or maybe not, I've forgotten most of what I knew.

Dean Stockwell. Another great series. While we're on favorites, how about the two parter where he first enters himself as a high school student, and then a comrade of his brother's in Vietnam?

Bad example, don't you think? C. S. Lewis was arguably the most important defender of orthodox Christianity in the 20th century.

Since my brain is in a bit of a Zen way at the moment, it makes me say, hmm... Maybe the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD because the earth IS the knowledge of the LORD. But that would be reading too much into it. Or would it?

Well, the Orthodox position isn't that Jesus is half human and half divine, where humanity and divinity are quantifiable ingredients one mixes together in equal proportions. It's that Jesus is completely and utterly human in every essential sense of the word, and that precisely as such he participates fully in the nature of God. No tomatoes, please, I'm just stating what the Orthodox view is.

Sorry, didn't mean to get anyone's hopes up. I've wanted to do a chalk outline of an integral systematic theology for awhile, and I might actually have found a piece of chalk to use.

Anybody remember "Cause and Effect" -- the one where the Enterprise is caught in the "temporal causality loop" and the crew keep experiencing the same sequence of events over and over again, with the ship being destroyed at the end of each loop? Are we officially off-topic now?

In Zen, just about every question is based on false assumptions. For example, that there is an actual entity called "you" asking another actual entity called "me" a question...

Wow, des, how do we like exactly the same episodes?! Or maybe my bringing them up caused you to remember them. That was such a great melody. Damn, I need to see that episode again! Oh yeah, I love that one! "Darmok." (Don't worry October, I looked that one up.)

DCJ doesn't really post that often.

It strikes me you'd find yourself at home philosophically in Unitarian Universalism, but most UU churches aren't going to share your political views. It's always something, isn't it? What you probably are is a traditional, rather than modern, Unitarian -- an 18th century liberal, rather than a 20th century one. Anyway, based on the 8 Points, and the writers that TCPC tends to draw on, you will find a lot of theological resonance in Progressive Christianity.

Or is it both? Is it, like Jung said, the rhizome and the flower? Yes, it's both; just like a pebble on the beach is Spirit. But are we talking about Spirit itself, or the pebble on the beach that is Spirit? Conceptually they're still two different things, even if ultimately they're not. Sorry, I'm in a paradoxical mood this week, so I can only imagine how unnerving it is to have a dialogue with me. If it's any consolation, the outline of my new book is coming along nicely, thanks in large part to these feats of mental gymnastics.

As much as I did enjoy the book for many reasons, and am looking forward to the movie, I do understand that some people are concerned about the way it completely revises the past. Sure, it's fiction, but it dovetails with so much bad historical scholarship going on in "Early Christian Studies" right now, that a spiritually immature and historically naive population is eating it up, and not thinking too much about the fiction/history boundary too much. God knows I don't have any naive belief in the "official" traditional history of Christianity; but people need to know that the "alternative" history presented in The DaVinci Code is no less mythological and symbolic than the "official" one. As for protecting children against anti-Catholic propaganda, hey, I grew up Fundamentalist -- the ultimate anti-Catholic propaganda machine! Nobody protected me!

I was just thinking more about this today. You're correctly describing something, but I'm not sure consciousness is what it is. What is not found in body or mind and cannot be objectified is called, variously, the One, the Absolute, the Ground of Being, Ultimate Reality, and so on. Consciousness, of course, participates in this reality, and therefore can awaken to its nondual identity with Absolute Being, but is still -- at least as the term is ordinarily used -- part of the field of manifestation, and subject to development and dissolution. It's probably worth clarifying what we mean when we use this highly loaded word, to avoid more confusion than we'll invariably already have. When we say "consciousness," are we referring to The Witness -- to Absolute Being -- which transcends both subjectivity and objectivity, and includes them in nondual union? Or are we merely referring to a center of subjective experience in the world? Anyway, welcome, and thanks for your thoughtful post.

Wouldn't that be the answer to "Does a cow have a Buddha nature"? Or does that properly belong in the jokes section?

I think Insurrection is actually my favorite Trek movie (of them all). But yeah, I could mostly do without the others with the TNG crew. As for episodes, I have four favorites. "Yesterday's Enterprise," where the Enterprise C enters a time-rift and comes into the present, which alters the last 20+ years. "Parallels," where Worf bounces around a bunch of parellel universes. (The final universe, where they send him back, has their Riker speaking to "our" Picard on the big screen, where he had been killed by the Borg [not Marcus] in their universe. Surprisingly, a really touching moment.) "Frames of Mind," where Riker is kidnapped and undergoes some brain-altering experiments, into which he weaves a play he's been working on with the crew. And #1 pick, far out ahead of the rest, is "Inner Light," where Picard is knocked unconscious by a probe, and experiences an entire lifetime in 30 minutes as a member of a dying civilization, so that he can tell their story. I think that was the best episode of any Trek series, or any sci-fi series for that matter, that I've ever seen.

It has one, it just isn't aware that it does. Which is nothing against dogs, most people don't know it either.

But Aletheia, you are the great patron saint of Both/And! Seriously though, in this atman/samsara mode or aspect of existence, there is dissolution, isn't there? These bodies and brains, these tiny, self-conscious, utterly unique moments through which the great web of manifestation experiences itself, they grow old and die. This must be half the paradox, mustn't it? Every spiritual tradition on the planet that's plugged into this stream contains practices and injunctions to keep us from becoming too attached to the "things of this world." Of course, this doesn't mean that there's "another world" with "other things" -- it means that transcending the world is the only thing that enables us to live truly authentically in the world. Hey, thank goodness I'm not Buddhist then, eh? Eh, what does the Buddha know anyway?

With a name like that? Well they haven't strung me up yet, so I guess so! Welcome, Fred

Yeah, I decided I didn't want to list every different view. But, for the most part, Buddhism "reduces" everything to mind. Strictly speaking, that is acosmic. Eh, not exactly. ;) Buddhism, after it's all said and done, still contains the paradox "nirvana is samsara," just as assuredly as Hinduism says "Atman is Brahman." (Indeed, they have the same meaning, exactly.) From Wikipedia: And along the whole non-dogmatic line: Watts frequently said things that sounded like this, but he also insisted on the identity of the World -- actually every single thing or moment in the World, from a subatomic particle to the World itself -- with the Absolute. Watts was prone to using shocking language to make a point, to jar us out of thinking a certain way, so I tend to view these comments in this way. Wilber sometimes says things that sound like this, too, but again, in the context of his overall view, no. Obviously he considers the world of Form to be important and "real" enough to write 800 page books about it, and to develop detailed theories and taxonomies about it. For Wilber, it's the same paradox: [1] Only the Absolute is ultimately real; [2] The World is an illusion; [3] The Absolute is the World. The idea being that "The World," understood as an ontological reality of its own, apart from its being grounded in the Absolute, does not -- cannot -- exist. It seems to me that, across the whole spectrum of eastern religion, you have the "conventional" understanding of maya or illusion -- that the World is unreal, and the more subtle understanding -- that the ultimate disctintion between the World and the Absolute is unreal. Similar to the way that, in the West, you have the (different) conventional understanding and the (identical) subtle understanding. Fun stuff.

Yeah, unfortunately, that approach eventually buckles under its own weight, when you reach a critical mass of mistakes. But that's OK because Jesus will come back before that has a chance to happen!

What did the Buddhist monk say to the hot dog vendor? "Make me one with everything."

Buddha nature isn't another word for God, if by "God" you mean "Deity." Actually, when I was talking about the experience of conscious union with everything and everyone, transcending the illusion of the separate self, etc., this is pretty much exactly what Buddha nature is. Not exactly. Buddhism, as westerners are fond of pointing out, is not a dogmatic religious philosophy. As with Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc., there are a variety of ontological "options" one can take with respect to it. Certainly, the acosmic variety is probably the most well-known, even "orthodox" -- just as within Christianity, conventional theism is the orthodox view. Zen Buddhism, for example, interprets the Buddhist religious system in terms of the ontological view of Taoism -- which is not, strictly speaking, acosmic. Even Alan Watts, who eagerly embraced Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, seemed to use the language of identity of the Absolute and the World, just as often as he spoke of the World as cosmic illusion. Wilber uses both also. So it's somewhat unclear. At the end of the day, of course, to say anything about this stuff requires speaking the language of paradox, anyway.

Mystical literature in every religion is replete with very detailed, specific descriptions of these experiences. More recently, it has been shown that there are reproducible neurological changes that accompany them. Sure, you can say that's not proof that God is actually "out there," or that these folks are uniting with God, and that's true -- but the experiences, and the changes in ethical and moral perspective, are real, and striking. If you happen to already believe that the world is a certain way, philosophically, this is a strong corroboration. I thought we decided that sin wasn't an appropriate topic of conversation in Progressive Christianity? Sorry, couldn't resist. Anyway, you're right -- in a naive pantheism where God is just the sum total of everything that exists, this would be a devastating criticism. But my view, and the view of the perennial philosophy, is more complicated than that. On the one hand, God gives being to us, such that everything that exists participates in God. On the other hand, God is still infinitely beyond us in every conceivable way. In the world, we are given the choice that enables us to reach towards God; but that choice is also what enables us to do wretched things. We are given the choice to be Jesus, but we can use that choice to become Hitler. Still, this doesn't make God Hitler. Hitler chose to use his being for evil. Does that clear anything up?