The Garden of Reality: Transreligious Relativity in a World of Becoming 2018012209, 2018020416, 9781498576246, 9781498576239

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The Garden of Reality

Faber, Roland. The Garden of Reality : Transreligious Relativity in a World of Becoming, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2018. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Faber, Roland. The Garden of Reality : Transreligious Relativity in a World of Becoming, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook

The Garden of Reality Transreligious Relativity in a World of Becoming

Copyright © 2018. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Roland Faber

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Faber, Roland. The Garden of Reality : Transreligious Relativity in a World of Becoming, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Faber, Roland, 1960- author. Title: The garden of reality : transreligious relativity in a world of becoming / Roland Faber. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2018012209 (print) | LCCN 2018020416 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498576246 (electronic) | ISBN 9781498576239 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Religion. | Religions—Relations. Classifcation: LCC BL41 (ebook) | LCC BL41 .F33 2018 (print) | DDC 200—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012209 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Faber, Roland. The Garden of Reality : Transreligious Relativity in a World of Becoming, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Abbreviationsxi

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Introduction1 The Essence (For the Impatient)

13

Prologue: What Hath Multiplicity Wrought? 1. Commemoration 2. Vignettes 3. Via Dolorosa 4. Existentiality 5. The First Word (Event and Horizon)

15 15 21 27 31 39

1 The Relativistic Code 1. Palimpsest 2. Variations, Permutations 3. Connectivity 4. Apophasis 5. Infinite Worlds I 6. Indetermination

51 51 56 58 65 71 75

2 In A Gadda Da Vida 1. Conviviality 2. Variation and Conflict 3. The Kingdom of Names 4. Unity and Polyphilia 5. Subtractive Affirmation

79 79 86 90 96 102 v

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vi

Contents

3 Laozi, Oscillating 1. Resonances 2. Oscillating Contrasts 3. Meaningful Regresses 4. Mutual Incompleteness 5. The Many Ways of Truth and Unity

107 107 111 116 120 127

4 Syncretic or Sympathic? 1. Conjectures 2. Transreligious Flows 3. Multiplicity 4. Coinhabitation 5. The Indistinction of Suffering

133 133 139 148 154 160

5 Be Transreligious! 1. The Category “Transreligious” 2. Mystic Cosmology 3. The Cycle of Love 4. Infinite Worlds II 5. Skillful Suspensions (Be Multiplicity!)

169 170 176 185 198 207

6 Apophatic Ecstasies 1. The Nameless Name 2. The Absolute, the All-Relational, the Surrelative 3. Impersonations 4. The Ultimate Manifold 5. Emanations, Insistence 6. Polyphilic Pluralism

219 220 228 234 240 248 255

7 The Buddha, Luminous 1. Plurisingularity 2. The Luminous Mind 3. Uncompounded Reality 4. Bhagavat 5. Khora (The Selfless Self) 6. The Tree of Life

267 268 275 285 293 301 314

8 Circumscriptions, Circulations 1. Differentiations 2. Bifurcations 3. Multiplications 4. Manifestations 5. Reconciliations 6. Circulations

327 328 333 341 352 361 376

Faber, Roland. The Garden of Reality : Transreligious Relativity in a World of Becoming, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook

Contents

vii

9 Theopoetics and Cosmopolity 1. The New Axial Age 2. A New Cosmopolitanism (of the Event)? 3. Theopoetics and the Novelty of Truth 4. Deconstructions 5. The Garden of Relativity (Omnirelativity)

397 398 408 418 429 440

Epilogue: Clouds of Truth 1. Reality, Clouded 2. The Transylvanian Argument 3. An Experiment with Truth 4. The Last Word (Magnitudes and Domains)

449 449 451 455 465

The Essence (For the Inclined)

479

Bibliography481 Index523

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About the Author

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565

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viii

Faber, Roland. The Garden of Reality : Transreligious Relativity in a World of Becoming, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook

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Acknowledgments

The becoming of this book has had a surface history that can be told and a depth that only rises when I remember with appreciation the friends, conversation partners, and colleagues that accompanied two decades of my research and development of thought. When I had put the frst half of the Garden to paper, a few years back, I suffered a life-threatening illness that brought its completion to a halt. And although many other projects gestated in the meantime, I have only after years of dormancy endeavored its completion. It is in this context that I am grateful to the administration and my colleagues of Claremont School of Theology for granting the research leave without which I could not have found the time and energy involved in such a vast task. It is also with gratitude that I think back to the time when my friend and colleague Karl Baier and I, during our common years at the University of Vienna, spent many hours debating over, refecting on, pondering, and conversing about new ideas and profound concepts, venturing into the landscapes of Western philosophies and Eastern religions, some of which have survived, in the meantime developed and matured, and eventually replenished my current interest in transreligious questions and the new horizons that motivate this current book. In the many years of testing the ideas of A. N. Whitehead as well as curiously exploring and further advancing a process universe, maybe no one has shared similar sensitivities more closely than my friend and philosophical sojourner Catherine Keller. It is with great pleasure that I remember the many opportunities I have had with you as a conversation partner, as we share some odd affnities in weaving together the likes of process thought in its existential and cosmic import with poststructuralist landscapes under the sun of mysticism and its transformative noetic character. Our common fondness of Gilles ix

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Acknowledgments

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Deleuze had brought us together, the mental explosions of Nicolas of Cusa have sustained our mutual interest in certain thought patters arising from such resonances, and that of Ibn ‘Arabi developed in sync more recently, albeit from different starting points. It was my interest in the Bábi-Bahá’í religions and their unrivaled transreligious scope that led to the acquaintance with some of their most exceptional scholars without the work of which I might not have entered the gate to a new universe of discourse that, with all the other infuences on my work, has now found expression in the book at hand. I remain in deep appreciation for the delightful, insightful, and always open mind of Stephen Lambden, who with complete mastery of Biblical, Islamic, Bábi-Bahá’í, and related literatures navigates the ocean upon which I just embarked and set sail, and who involuntarily, by his friend- and companionship, has given me the courage to engage this universe and weave it into the philosophical and multireligious discourse the Garden sets out to perambulate. I want to especially thank Stephen Lambden and the learned Moojan Momen, whose profound knowledge of all scholarly matters related to the religious traditions and histories interwoven in this book, whose resonant sensitivity for Eastern religions, and, I feel, similar vision of relativity as an unavoidable category of the human condition I was fortunate enough to discover, for their close reading of the fnished manuscript regarding its scholarly accuracy related to their academic felds and living knowledge of the communities that treasures these universes. All errors in this regard will, of course, remain mine. Finally, I want to thank the precious students and academic assistants, friends and colleagues, who over the years have not only patently listened to my lectures and read my works with interest and, hopefully, sometimes with gain, but also engaged me in vivid discussions, marveled with me over ideas, and tested my thoughts. You have my respect and I remember you in great appreciation.

Faber, Roland. The Garden of Reality : Transreligious Relativity in a World of Becoming, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook

Abbreviations

BAHÁ’Í SCRIPTURAL WRITINGS

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ABL

‘Abdu’l Bahá. ‘Abdu’l Bahá in London. Chicago: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1982. ATN ‘Abdu’l Bahá. A Traveller’s Narrative: Written to Illustrate the Episode of the Báb. Translated and edited by Edward G. Browne. Los Angeles: Kalimat, 2004. BP Bahá’í Prayers: A Selection of Prayers revealed by Bahá’u’lláh, the Báb, and ‘Abdu’l Bahá. Wilmette, IL, Bahá’í Publishing, 2009. BWF Bahá’í World Faith: Selected Writings of Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l Bahá. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 1969. DPh ‘Abdu’l Bahá. Divine Philosophy. New York: Bahá’í Publishing Committee, 1918. ESW Bahá’u’lláh. Epistle to the Son of the Wolf. Wilmete, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 1988. GDM Bahá’u’lláh. Gems of Divine Mysteries. Aeterna Publishing, 2010. GL Bahá’u’lláh. Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 1976. HW Bahá’u’lláh. Hidden Words, Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 2002. [The Arabic Section of the HW are quoted HW. A, the Persian section as HW. P] KA Bahá’u’lláh. The Kitab-i Aqdas: The Most Holy Book. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 1993. KI Bahá’u’lláh. The Kitab-i Iqan: The Book of Certitude. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 1974. xi

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xii

Abbreviations

PM Bahá’u’lláh. Prayers and Meditations. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 2013. PT ‘Abdu’l Bahá. Paris Talks: Addresses Given by ‘Abdu’l Bahá in 1911. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 2011. PUP ‘Abdu’l Bahá. The Promulgation of Universal Peace. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 2012. SAB ‘Abdu’l Bahá. Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l Bahá. Wilmette: IL, Bahá’í Publishing, 2014. SAQ ‘Abdu’l Bahá. Some Answered Questions. Translated by Laura Clifford Barney. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebner & Co., 1908. (Barney Translation) SAQ ‘Abdu’l Bahá. Some Answered Questions. Newly Translated. Haifa: Bahá’í World Center, 2014. SDC ‘Abdu’l Bahá. The Secrets of Divine Civilization. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 2015. SLH Bahá’u’lláh. Summons of the Lord of Hosts. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 2002. SV Bahá’u’lláh. The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys. Translated by Marziah Gail. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 1991 [The Four Valleys are quoted with the SV and pages in this book]. SWB The Báb. Selections from the Writings of the Báb. Haifa, Israel: Bahá’í World Center, 1976. TAB ‘Abdu’l Bahá. Tablets of ‘Abdu’l Bahá. 3 volumes. Chicago: Bahá’í Publishing 1909. TB Bahá’u’lláh. Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh revealed after the Kitab-i Aqdas. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 1994. TDP ‘Abdu’l Bahá. Tablets of the Divine Plan. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 1991. TOU ‘Abdu’l Bahá. Tablet of the Universe, as Lawh-iAflákiyyih. In Makátib-i ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, volume 1, 1997, 13–32. Translation anonymous: http://bahai-library.com/ abdulbaha_lawh_aflakiyyih. TU Bahá’u’lláh. Tabernacle of Unity. Haifa: Bahá’í World Center, 2006. UR Bahá’u’lláh. Tablet of the Uncompounded Reality (Lawh Basít al-Haqíqa). Introduction and Translation by Moojan Momen: “Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet of the Uncompounded Reality (Lawh Basít al-Haqíqa).” In Lights of Irfan 11 (2010): 203–21.

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Abbreviations

WHITEHEAD AI CN Imm. MT PNK PR RM SMW SY

Alfred North Whitehead. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press, 1967. Alfred North Whitehead. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Alfred North Whitehead. “Immortality.” In The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Edited by Paul Schilpp. La Salle: Open Court, 1991, 682–700. Alfred North Whitehead. Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press, 1968. Alfred North Whitehead. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. New York: Dover Publications, 1982. Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978. Alfred North Whitehead. Religion in the Making. New York: Fordham University Press, 1996. Alfred North Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967. Alfred North Whitehead. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. New York: Fordham University Press, 1985. OTHER SCRIPTURAL, AUTHORITATIVE, AND OFTEN QUOTED WRITINGS

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ADJ BA BG

BJS DB

Shoghi Effendi. The Advent of Divine Justice. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 1990. Shoghi Effendi. Bahá’í Administration. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 1974. The Bhagavad Gita [if not quoted with other authors, the text uses:] Mahatma Gandhi, The Bhagavat Gita According to Gandhi. Translation and commentary by John Strohmeier. Berkeley, North Atlantic Books, 2009. The Brahmajala Sutta: The Discourse on the AllEmbracing Net of Views. Translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Kandy: Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 2013. Shoghi Effendi (ed.). The Dawn-Breakers: Nabil’s Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahá’í Revelation. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1996.

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xiii

xiv

DFG FPT GPB GPW LG LS PDC TBG TDM UP

Shoghi Effendi. Directives from the Guardian, CreateSpace, 2015. Roland Faber. Prozeßtheologie. Zu ihrer Würdigung und kritischen Erneuerung. Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 2000. Shoghi Effendi. God Passes By. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 1970. Roland Faber. God as Poet of the World: Exploring Process Theologies. Louisville: WJK, 2008. Helen Bassett Hornby. Lights of Guidance: A Bahá’í Reference File. New Deli: Bahá’í Publishing, 2010. The Threefold Lotus Sutra. Translation by Bunno Kato and Yoshiro Tamara. Tokyo: Kosei Publishing, 2005. Shoghi Effendi. The Promised Day Is Come. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing 1996. Roland Faber. The Becoming of God: Process Theology, Philosophy, and Multireligious Engagement. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017. Roland Faber. The Divine Manifold. Lanham: MD, Lexington Books, 2014. The Upanishads. Introduction and Translation by Eknath Aeswaran. Tomales, CA: The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, 2007. Shoghi Effendi. The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh. Wilmette: IL, Bahá’í Publishing, 1993.

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WOB

Abbreviations

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Introduction

The future of humanity is bound to conviviality by the deepest motives for its existence together and with the Earth in peace. Nothing is, of course, easier said than this, but is further away from realization than is imaginable. If the common motivations of conviviality are profoundly, that is, unavoidably, religious in nature, which is also contested, but cannot be dismissed outright, and even if it were to be dismissed, their convivial realization would be unattainable without a peace that takes these religious motivations (even if contested) into account. If these motivations were to contribute to such a future society of humanity that is inspired, safeguarded, and sustained by the insight that without conviviality of religions eventual peace is a mirage, these deepest religious motivations of existing together will have to become, or come to be understood to always have been, relative to one another. In other words, I am proposing that the insight into the relativity of religious motivations, experiences, conceptualities, and truths is essential not only to the survival of humanity but to the very own conviction of religions that their religious motivations, experiences, conceptualities, and truths are meaningful, real, coherent, and true. This proposition can be contested from at least four sides. First, one can be convinced counter to my proposition that as long as religious motivations are in play, humanity will always be divided; that peace must be attained beyond, and by the exclusion of, the infuence of religions and their deepest motivations since they will always recoil into their own unbridgeable identities and their own inherent claims of superior and ultimate mediation of meaning, reality, coherence, and truth; that religious motivation is not the amplifer, but the instigator of a profound violence that holds humanity in a state of mutual denigration, destruction, and war. Examples abounds. The alternative would be to obliterate religious motivations, make us forget them for good, and 1

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Introduction

instead concentrate on the communality of our bodily existence, our material metabolism by which we are a community of the mutual fow of materials through one another and in ecological interlocking with the rhythms of the Earth and the universe. Yet, to be mindful: this is not a neutral description of existence, but already presents a philosophical perspective on existence, just one without religious motivations and maybe even one without the reality of mind and spirit. Second, one can be convinced counter to my proposition that, if religious motivations are a real human phenomenon, at least a naturalistic explanation of these motivations—instead of a spiritual one—would better contribute to the vision of the peace of a future humanity living beyond the violence of today. We should not take these motivations on their own terms, but as real social and psychological phenomena that must be reckoned with. Yet, they must also be pacifed by, and integrated into, a conviviality that is motivated by the natural intentions religions conveyed (in earlier times), but are unable to materialize. The reason is that they cannot understand their own emergence as an evolutionary vehicle of the transformation of nature into another natural, and not a supernatural, state (much as your mind cannot grasp the exteriority of your brain). Instead of projected spiritual and supernatural realities, and instead of ultimate realities, religions must become transparent to their natural truths: that of evolutionary processes explaining the world to a frightened humanity awakened to consciousness in a world of becoming that does not care about its existence one way or another. Hence, we must not look at the explanations religions tell and sell as truths. Instead, we must embrace the evolutionary mediation of human survival that religions captured only on a mythical level, but that has furthered, and was meant to have transcended into, a scientifc account of our existence on Earth and in the cosmos. In such a scientifc, empirical, and rationally refected account of reality, religions had provided the service to uphold the natural instincts of well-being of the individual and the wholeness of society in an evolutionary universe; they had contributed to the evolution of humanity. But now, they must yield to the evolutionary story itself as the most rational and realistic account and true motivation for human existence in conviviality. Third, one can be convinced counter to my proposition that not only is there a true level of reality that can only be accessed by religious motivations, experiences, and truths, but that the diversifcation of the inner spiritual truths of religions is a simple error, that religions conveying their specifc experiences and formulating their specifc truths are incompatible, and are so in principle, because the search for reality must lead to one true account— namely, that of my religion or worldview—that will eventually (have to) prove all other accounts wrong. The search for this superior truth is vital for the survival of humanity as it is the eschatological truth about humanity itself,

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a truth that is still hidden, but is making its way to the light. We must help its propagation and the universalization of this fnal truth even if it costs lives since truth is more important than life and conviviality is only the aim as long as it fulflls the domination of this truth. The multiplicity of religious forms, experiences, and perspectives is an error to be equated with ignorance or sin; deviation is a matter of ill will and wickedness; and nonconformity is the true enemy. Conviviality is a menace. Fourth, one can be convinced counter to my proposition that, in principle, relativity is a contradiction in terms and that truth is always per defnition absolute. Hence, there can be no conviviality of religious motivations exhibiting contradictory truth proposals that could claim to still be based on reality; such conviviality can only be based on a lie, the lie that truth be irrelevant to life. A peace based on the relativity of truth claims, then, must be abhorred. Instead, we should seek the absolute truth counter to all truth claims, which uphold the illusion of their incompleteness as true. We must not only fght such an illusory utopia of conviviality, we must avoid it at all costs, for truth’s sake. While such a view need not be motivated by dreams of power and superiority, it will play a hand in their games—given what we know of human nature and inclinations so far. But its argument must be taken seriously, because it is also motivated by a fear of losing humanity in the wake of a relativism that is feared more than the inconsistencies of life. The relativity of truth is feared, because it seems to say not only that we cannot know absolute truth, at least never in an absolute way, but that there is no such absoluteness by which everything posited can be divided into true or false, is or is not, has a meaning or has none, is real or is not. If this is the case, however, so say the proponents of the simple absoluteness of truth, then no one has access to truth at all. There would not be relative truth, but no truth. If there is only relativity of truth, then all claims are equally true and false, are and are not, have meaning and have none, are real and are not. Then nothing we experience has meaning; no direction, ethical decision, or purpose, is justifable over any other; any motivation (even the worst inhuman one) would be equally viable. Some would say this is how nature works: it doesn’t care one way or the other. But others would claim that we can at least know to some extant how nature works, what laws it follows, even if only fragmentarily, but truthfully so as truths. It is interesting that all four of these objections are motivated by a claim of the truth of a certain kind of oneness over multiplicity. Materialism seeks this oneness at the expense of religions, which are nothing but an annoying multiplicity; naturalism articulates a vision of the oneness of religions at the expense of the inherent meaning of religious diversity, which is only a mythical cacophony, laid over the one true story of evolution; exclusivism seeks religious Truth at the expense of the multiplicity of religions, which

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Introduction

are disavowed as false imaginations of ignorant, deviant, sinful creatures in their revolt against the “true truth” that was revealed to me, to my mind, to my community; absolutism, fnally, seeks the truth of truths at the expense of any ontological (sometimes even epistemological) diversity, discarding the truth of perspective, uniqueness, event, complexity, paradox, and so on. How about inclusive truth—inclusive of multiplicity—instead? Could truth be one and diversifed, at the same time? Could life be such a multiplicity that it cannot simply be reduced to an exclusive oneness (of truth)? How about the oneness of the universe—in all of its glorious diversity? How about the one diversity of forms of existence, throughout all of its vastly different phases of evolution, comprising the life of the Earth? How about the fascinating complexity of our own body with which we feel to be one? Oneness without multiplicity is indifferent only from a dimensionless point, only one—but there would not even be a way to conceptualize one point alone without a context, as a space in which it is only one point. One is nothing without the multiplicity in which it appears as one. This has been a part of philosophical and religious discourses and refections for millennia and it is decidedly part of the materials and refections of this book. Yet, beneath the endeavor to articulate transreligious relativity as a unifying factor, for a future humanity at peace lurks also an objection to my proposal of a different kind and from a different direction: not from the faction that wants to save unity from relativistic multiplicity, which seems to roam outside of its control, but from the faction that assumes that any claim of unity comes already too late. Don’t we live in times of a thoroughly postmodern condition, a globalized society not only of capitalist commodifcation of all spheres of life, of meaningless nihilism without anchors of meaning, and beyond any overarching narrative or integrating forms of universal identifcation, but also the hopeless and irreversible fragmentarization of all attempts to social, spiritual, or conceptual unity? Can we really hope to recapitulate the factual multiplicity (of religions, or any phenomenon) and the acknowledged plurality of cultures, in light of the plight of oppressed minorities, the excluded, and the marginalized, and of the limiting and diverging factors of languages, cultural habits, and systems of meaning, whether religious or not, in any meaningful form? Given the postmodern sensibilities to complexity, non-linearity, diversifcation, so keenly observed and critically propagated by poststructuralist, deconstructionist, postcolonial, and liberationist discourses, as they react to this postmodern social and spiritual condition—can we even fathom any claim of unifcation, even if it is one of relativity and multiplicity, without seemingly falling back onto pre-modernist paradigms of authoritarian and patriarchal integralism? It will be one of the challenges that the coming considerations must address. But they will do so in light of the serious awareness that, even besides the transreligious peace, the common pressing

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Introduction

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predicaments of humanity today will not be able to be answered without assuming the ecological interwovenness of humanity with the Earth and the necessity of overcoming the domination of binaries of race, gender, culture, and worldview, if humanity not only wants to survive but survive as humanity. This leaves me with perhaps the most subtle objection to my proposition: that religion does not hold the immanent potential to be the site of the relativity of its truths, because it remains ever wedded to the subjection of Reality to the limiting horizons and distortions of human understanding. Instead of becoming relativistic in its own spiritual impulses and peaceful in its embodiments of life, religion must be saved from itself to become thoroughly human. In following the religious impulse of liberation to humanity itself, we must detach its mystical motives (its desire to unify with Reality) from their subjections to understanding and authority, organization of thought and society, in order to liberate the relativistic transformations toward peaceful conviviality that are already inherent in religious motivations. We must free mystical relativity from any such mode of limited transcendence that has already foreclosed itself to itself by way of the split between multiplicity and unity, transcendence and immanence, religion and philosophy (and science), humanity and the world, and such world-creating conceptualizations, since these dichotomies only incite reserves of antagonism instead of conviviality. Conducting a self-critique of the sphere of thought as too limited for this endeavor, several postmodern philosophies (and non-philosophies), in negation of their own representational closure of thought in itself (by which truth is only “represented” under conditions of the exclusion of its reality), have variously suggested the “outside” of any thought patterns (which always degenerate into ideologies of spiritual and social oppression) as the site of truth where reality, be it that of the hidden immanence of the One in us or that of unfathomable multiplicity, dwells. This site hides and appears within us before any such divisions, namely, as the mystical motive of unknowability and unspeakability before difference and unity, even as the material before its spiritualization. Only before any overarching synthesis, which religion (and even thought) can only avoid if it avoids its own self-constitution, can humanity free itself from all clamor of subjection, thereby generating the relativity of a frameless peace with itself in a world of becoming. Now, this challenge neither proposes the dismissal of religious motivations per se (in their mystical origin) nor denies their inherent nature as that of relativistic truth (democratically distributed); neither does it dissolve transreligious relativity under the four mentioned objections of oneness, nor must it diagnose its dead body as fnally diffused under the postmodern condition of irreversible fragmentation or, conversely, consumed by ecological recoveries of mutuality. Instead, it speaks to mystical motives before and beyond their religious vessels (and those of thought as such, too). In this sense, I think of

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this challenge rather as an aid to the search for new expressions of relativistic truth in the quest for conviviality: to suggest new, unprecedented modes of being religious and thoughtful, without being religious and thought-bound in old ways. However, as only embodiments of the apophatic will dispense the universal peace of a humanity liberated both from being a mere desire and theoretical construct (as it must be realized in this world of bodies) and the urge to organize it to death (as the apophatic will always escape totalities), in my view, such conviviality needs to advance with a transformation from within, because the apophatic “outside” is the innermost heart of all and, hence, already lives in religions and traditional thought patterns as the truth of their very relativity. In fact, it will always remain veiled in, and harbored by, such appearances, as it has no naked form. Rather than presupposing the mere discarding, instead of the transformation, of religious formations as the indispensable means for achieving peace, the task of inciting the convivial relativity of religious truth is to free religions (and thought patterns) to themselves—but from a new event and horizon, indiscriminable from their inside (the routine of old), yet radically transforming through their innermost “outside” (of mystical novelty). Coming back to my introductory proposition: Where does all of this consideration of oneness and multiplicity leave us? At least, it leaves us with the appreciation of the complexity of the question and the meaningfulness to address it. If oneness reveals itself not without multiplicity (and vice versa), the oneness of truth must also be understood as diversifed multiplicity in which truth lives as one. If oneness ought not to be sought at the expense of diversifcation, truth must be living in multiple lives, which, hence, should seek conviviality since they are from the outset bound to the immanence of their truth in the relativity of their life for one another. Further, if truth claims may avoid an assumption of simple oneness, would we not instead be seeking the multiplicity of dimensions of existence (that we all too easily divide into mind and matter); the reality of religious motivations together with the story of material evolution; the multiplicity of religious motivations; and the multiplicity of a diversifed unity of truth itself? And, conversely, if this multiplicity cannot be lived without some kind of transcending unity of humanity itself that entertains these divergences, what else than its unity in diversity will allow for the survival of humanity? If we won’t envision either humanity’s exiting into annihilation as humanity or its reduction to the boundaries of intelligent animals or algorithmic machines instead, but recognize its increasing consciousness of a shared conviviality with all creatures— what alternative “solution” will succeed if it excludes humanity’s spiritual impulses instead of transforming them into their transreligious mutuality? Then our thesis stands: that, frst, without the conviviality of humanity in the diversity of its religious motivations—as they express the profound

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motivations of existing, and existing together—convivial (not exclusive) peace is unattainable in principle; and that, second, the unity of the truth revealed in these profound, and profoundly diversifed, religious motivations must be sought not by excluding their multiplicity, but by seeking their relativity to one another. The relativity of religious truth is the self-subtracting presence of the one truth in the multiplicity of its manifestations. As the relativity of truth is not an abstract matter—or even primarily a logical problem—but a matter of human survival and conviviality, by minding the diverse religious motivations, experiences, and refections—as the common heritage of humanity meant to contribute in its mutuality, not hinder it by claims of mutual excluding superiority—the future of a human society will be bound to its own spiritual oneness to be diffused in a peaceful diversifcation. While the coming refections will venture into variegated philosophical and religious discourses, inspired by traditions as diverse as poststructuralism and perennialism, Jewish and Christian mysticism, Suf thought and Vedanta, Buddhist philosophy (such as Dzogchen and Zen) and philosophical Daoism, the motivation central to this project takes the form of a binocular view, using two lenses: that of the philosophy of process, relationality, and organism of Alfred North Whitehead (commonly known as philosophy of organism and process philosophy) and its theological renderings (commonly known as process theology), on the one hand, and the revelation of, and refection on, the oneness of religions and of humanity as a whole proclaimed by the central fgures of the Bahá’í Faith: the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and Shoghi Effendi—both movements roughly appearing in temporal continuity. I am aware that this is a minority view two times over—although its perspectives are not necessarily minor. Yet, maybe this is precisely where the common claim of unity in diversity that sustains both process thought and Bahá’í revelation must prove its viability, namely, from a minority perspective without which there would be no inclusive conviviality if it was to be excluded, and as a universal proposition that exhibits this unity of diversity beyond their own spheres of infuence by the transcending relevance of their own version of the relativity of truth that is also the basis for their own participation in it. This choice is based on several considerations of which I will name four (although more will be said later in the book). First, both Whitehead and the Bahá’í revelation insist on the becoming and unity of all religions. The former presupposes that there is no halt to this process (as there is no halt to the world process either) and, hence, that there will always be new religious intuitions, motivations, experiences, and truth perspectives in an infnite process of becoming. The latter, however, implies that this process is not one of independent and incompatible entities, societies, mind-sets, cultures, and identities that would function like unrelated substances fragmented throughout the world history and geography, but one process, however diversifed,

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Introduction

connected not by any fxed essence except by the peace-seeking processuality of the process itself. Second, since for both Whitehead’s philosophy and Bahá’í revelation ultimate reality cannot be represented by any image of a fxed essence, there is to be an apophatic nature to this ultimate and divine reality. It follows that, on the one hand, no one can claim to have the truth of this complex movement since it cannot be formulated or even known, and, on the other hand, that the truth of this ultimate reality can only appear diffused within the process itself. We need not, at this point, decide whether this Ultimate must be named divine or not (given the divergent religious sensibilities of Eastern and Western religions on this matter), whether this Ultimate should be symbolized as a ground or a being or neither or both (since all of them are in some sense too small for the truth this Reality enshrines), and whether this Reality is something rather than nothing or nothing rather than something (since language begins to fail us at this level, but coherently so). Third, both Whitehead’s philosophy of religion(s) and the Bahá’í revelation’s understanding of religion(s) allow for unique religious experiences, motivations, intuitions, and truth claims to be situated in different cultural settings in the evolution of humanity from the matrix of the universe by giving rise to universal religions with metaphysical solidarity to the world as a whole (and its understanding in truth) as well as the unique novelty of ever new forms of this universalization. For both Whitehead and the Bahá’i Faith these experiences appear in exceptional fgures: on the one hand, Whitehead views the founders of religions as their mediators and, on the other, the Bahá’í Faith claims unique revelation to have happened again in Bahá’u’lláh and that the novelty of this revelation is a part of this ongoing process. In order to be able to conceptualize this mutually supportive dialectic between cosmology and religion, we must understand that for both Bahá’u’lláh and Whitehead the philosophical endeavor and the force of revelation are intricately related. While Bahá’u’lláh highly values philosophy as traditional discipline of the insight into the mysteries of creation, he also relates it to, and transcends its conceptual limitations by, the meta-force of revelation as it confuences in, is infuenced by, and becomes transformed through, exceptional religious fgures; but Bahá’u’lláh’s noetic character of revelation also expresses itself in diverse philosophical categories of his conversation partners, but in sovereign reservation of its own mystery beyond any such conceptualization. Whitehead, in turn, understands revelatory events that generate genuine religions around unique experiences of the ultimate Reality/Divinity as fashes of mystical insight that present philosophical thought with exceptional insights informing its best metaphysical universality as always being beyond any immanent closure of fnal understanding.

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Fourth, different from any claims of exclusivity, fnality, and unsurpassable superiority, both Whitehead and Bahá’u’lláh resort to landscapes and histories of the multiplicity of an ongoing world of becoming in which the oneness and multiplicity of religions must contribute to the divine constitution of the whole process in an aesthetic of peace: The beauty of God/Reality as expressive of the peace of humanity and beyond with the Earth and the cosmos appears as the intention of the whole process of becoming. Hence, for both of them religion is the force that alone (not to the exclusion of, but in explicit recognition of the necessary coordination with, science) leads humanity to a peaceful society of the future despite its violent past and in fnding the resources for the overcoming of these violations of the ultimate intuitions of religions in themselves as they appear in the diverse revelatory and philosophical modes of consciousness. Nevertheless, this book is not an introduction to either Whitehead’s philosophy or the process tradition it engendered—introductions and explorations abounds—although it draws on its philosophical outlook and multireligious engagements. Nor is it meant to be an exposition of either the Bahá’í Faith or the historical and intellectual genesis of the Bábi-Bahá’í religions—of which a great variety of literature can be accessed. Although resonances between process philosophy (and theology) and several philosophical and transreligious elements of Bahá’í thought in this book may contribute to their mutual elucidation, their interchange as such is not the object of this book. Rather, their mutual interaction, as well as that of their backgrounds, is the medium of developing the proposition of this book for which both of them may exemplify from limited, but universally relevant, philosophical and religious standpoints of how transreligious relativity can release resources for a comprehensive peace process not only within and between religions but for the future of humanity as such. In addition, it should be noticed at this point that my proposition also refrains from speaking for the whole of all possible process philosophies. Nor does it lay claim on a comprehensive or authoritative rehearsal of the (or any fxed) Bahá’í standpoint. As my understanding of Whitehead and process thought in this book is informed, and limited, by my own work over the course of the last decades, their integrity cannot be had without a profound and inherent relativity to the perspectives under which they are developed. Similarly, it is one of the fascinating features of the Bahá’í Faith that only its scriptures (and highly circumscribed writings pertaining to their interpretation), the writings of the founding and central fgures—Sayyid ‘Ali Muhammad Shirazi (the Báb), Mirza Husayn ‘Ali Nuri (Bahá’u’lláh), Abbas Effendi (‘Abdu’l-Bahá), and Shoghi Effendi Rabbani—interpret the Faith authentically. Hence, as a sign of profound relativity, Bahá’ís are not bound to identify themselves by any orthodoxy, that is, they are free to develop their

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Introduction

own understanding of the truth conveyed by these fgures. While Bahá’ís are committed to an overwhelmingly delicate and variegated landscape of the corpus of their writings considered revelation that in itself already demands freedom of thought and conscience, their expressions always refect the views of respective individuals and don’t infringe on, or claim, any authority over other or all Bahá’is or for all of humanity. Hence, only relativity, not fnality, can be intended with their engagement. Now, if we want to blend the four resonances between Whitehead and Bahá’í thought just mentioned, we gain a frst insight in the common insistence on the way religions function for both of them, namely, that a complex developing social and spiritual body in its deepest motivations always already hides (under its stormy surface) the (potential) revelation of the divine Truth, namely, that this divine Truth, and hence the Reality it addresses, is relative. In light of the earlier considerations, we can reformulate: The relativity of religious Truth is nothing but another way to address the unity of divine Reality as both apophatically extracted from and manifestly diffused in the multiplicity of its appearances in religious experiences and intuitions. While religious communities confgure themselves around such experiences, it is the unique exceptionality of certain historical and mythical fgures, sacred writings of old and novel dangerous ideas of humaneness that interrupt the religious and mundane continuum and, thereby, mediate their uniqueness to themselves, their diversity in their multiplicity of appearance, and their unity in their pointing at their apophatic origins. In other words, the reason to engage in an investigation into the coinherence and resonance of Whitehead’s philosophy of process, relationality, and organism and of the relativistic implications of the Bahá’í writings and thought for the proposition that a future humanity might only fnd mundane and spiritual peace if it embraces the truth of transreligious relativity in the context of a world of becoming can be summarized from four perspectives (comprising a cycle of mutual elucidation that folds back onto itself). First, Whitehead’s metaphysical endeavor, striving for a universality that approximates to Reality in Truth, but can never reach it, is fundamentally motivated by the unavoidable and thoroughgoing fux of a becoming world in which universality of insight can always only be claimed by taking into account the myriads of experiences that make up its reality and that escape any closure of understanding. As these events and processes of experience and their organic organization, on their deepest level, exhibit divine presence in the form of the eros that urges to the realization of harmony and intensity, beauty and peace, no intended universality of understanding the Truth of Reality can dispense of their singularity and multiplicity, but instead must take them into account in the form of the diversifed religious experiences that will inform this Truth and Reality. Second, Whitehead knows these experiences to be

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revelations of Reality that present and transcend philosophical refection with its noblest insights. Not only, then, will revelation inform metaphysical universality (as the striving for insight into ultimate reality and truth) by holding it in fux, but such revelation will need to come to it in the form of a multiplicity of religions and their religious intuitions, experiences, and truths. Third, as it is under these conditions to be expected that new religions arise with their unique intuitions, to take them into account especially if they convey this same view, seems to be obvious. Now, it is, in the words of Shoghi Effendi, the fundamental principle enunciated by Bahá’u’lláh that religious truth is not absolute but relative. Fourth, if (new) revelation, in Whitehead’s understanding, qualifes the articulation (anew) of the noblest insights of metaphysical universality and keeps it in process, this self-referential truth of the relativity of religious truth or this truth of transreligious relativity, will elucidate process thought, as process thought will elucidate this fundamental Bahá’í principle. As such, the resonances of this binocular view becomes the non-arbitrary medium generative of the theme of this book: to unfold the multifaceted dynamics of the relativity of religious truth in the embodiment of our common transreligious relativity as the inevitable implication of, and condition for, the conviviality of humanity as humanity in peace, and, thereby, effectively, of the truthfulness of religious truth itself. The title of this book appears in a scriptural Bahá’í text in which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of Bahá’u’lláh, speaks of the multiplicity of human religious experiences, cultural and social existences, and religious revelations as if it was a garden of diversifed plants and fowers. As these multicolored and -shaped fowers contribute to the beauty of the garden, which would otherwise (in monocultures) just be dull, so he understands the reality of religions and revelations as well as thought patterns and cultures, races and philosophies as mutually enhancing the common beauty of human existence. Yet, at the same time, as it is the shadowing of the same heaven with its sun, clouds, and rain that sustains the garden, so are they bound not only by mutual diversity but by an ultimate mutuality based in ultimate Reality itself. Ultimate Truth diffuses itself like rain in the garden in order not to reduce, but to create the multiplicity of its expressions. The garden of Reality, then, is a symbol for the transreligious relativity of truth in a world of becoming. The symbol of this garden is, of course, also a profoundly ecological symbol, naming the deeper reality of the living together of humanity and all creatures in the Truth of their interrelatedness. In such encompassing form, the garden does not defer to an ideal of integration, be it in the melancholy of a primordial state or in an eschatological hope for abandonment of the world of becoming. Instead, it indicates a transformation in the realization of “unity in diversity,” of multiplicity in peace, justice, and mutuality, in this world by taking seriously the necessity to account for images of comprehensive

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Introduction

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interrelatedness between all spheres, levels, and regions of expressions of life on this planet Earth and all of their material and spiritual conditions together, and to perceive their mutual relativity as a means for a transformation of all of our dimensions of existence in view of the delightful garden. Religious peace, so I will claim, can only be transreligious, but, in this world of becoming, it must also unfold its implicit ecological complexity, captured by the eco-conscious image of the garden of all realities as their access to, and realization of, Reality. After beginning with a Prologue addressing the diffculty of envisioning conviviality, with its inherent dialectic of violence and diversity, as well as a necessary account for this complication when formulating a transformative image of the garden of Reality, the order of things in this book will be immersed in exploration of three interlocked aspects, modes, or gates of relativity of religious truth in a transreligious conversation: relativity in the mode of connectivity and relationality; relativity in the mode of apophatic subtraction in the midst of the theophanic affrmation of multiplicity; and, fnally, relativity in the mode of the love of multiplicity itself, the polyphilia in which it must fnd expression, and can only fnd expression, in an infnity of different worlds. These three modes will be permutated and recombined in ways that will yield to the diversifed content of the nine chapters. I will end with an Epilogue, an experimental refection on the implications of relativity as a truth of aesthetic concreteness over and against abstract logic, issuing into a Last Word that will recast the considerations of the whole book in terms of Omnirelativity. In all of its discourses, this book will attempt to make the case for the relativity of religious truth as a necessary ingredient of a world of becoming if we can believe that it reveals its divine Reality to intend convivial life as in a garden of Reality.

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The Essence (For the Impatient)

No one truth can contradict another truth. Light is good in whatsoever lamp it is burning! A rose is beautiful in whatsoever garden it may bloom! A star has the same radiance if it shines from the East or from the West. Be free from prejudice, so will you love the Sun of Truth from whatsoever point in the horizon it may arise! You will realize that if the Divine light of truth shone in Jesus Christ it also shone in Moses and in Buddha. The earnest seeker will arrive at this truth. This is what is meant by the “Search after Truth.” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, PT, #41) The beloved of the Lord, with their musk-scented breath, burn like bright candles in every clime, and the friends of the All-Merciful, even as unfolding fowers, can be found in all regions. Not for a moment do they rest; they breathe not but in remembrance of Thee, and crave naught but to serve Thy Cause. In the meadows of truth they are as sweet-singing nightingales, and in the fower garden of guidance they are even as brightly colored blossoms. With mystic fowers they adorn the walks of the Garden of Reality; as swaying cypresses they line the riverbanks of the Divine Will. Above the horizon of being they shine as radiant stars; in the frmament of the world they gleam as resplendent orbs. Manifestations of celestial grace are they, and daysprings of the light of divine assistance. (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, SAB, #233)

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Prologue What Hath Multiplicity Wrought?

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1. COMMEMORATION Aleppo, Syria, 2012 C.E.: In the midst of atrocities, bombings, and ferocious fghts between government troops and rebels, and who knows who else, we ask why? One answer comes to mind when we remind ourselves that this “civil war” (and whatever nameless expression it has accumulated in the meantime) arises in the environment of a long-standing religious confict between Sunnis and Alawites, followers of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, the son-in-law of Muhammad and frst Shi‘i Imam, and founded around Muhammad ibn Nusayr, who died in Aleppo at the end of the 9th century C.E. Yet, Alawis are not part of the mainstream Shi‘ite traditions of the Twelver Shi‘ites (Athna’ asheriyyah) or the Sevener Shi‘ites (Isma’iliyyah) branches either. Rather, orthodoxy has considered them to be akin to other (religious) splinter groups: as “extremists” (ghulat) by Shi‘i standards; and they are defnitely heretics (if not worse) by standards of the orthodox Sunni majority of Islam. Although Alawites were a mistreated minority under Ottoman rule, mainly settling in the Ottoman province of Syria, they advanced to become the reigning class under the Assad regime in the state of Syria, politically and militarily close knit and unlikely to give up their position of power over the majority of Syria’s Sunni population for nothing. And given the irreconcilable religious and political impasses forming the background of what has become a matter of global entanglements, everything got only worse from there onward. Aleppo, 10th to 12th century C.E.: While, at frst, part of the Persian Sassanid, then the Arab (Umayyad then `Abbasid) Empires, Aleppo became an independent Emirate under the Arab Hamdanids, harboring poets like al-Muttanabi and philosophers of the stature of al-Farabi. Briefy occupied 15

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and ransacked by the Byzantine Empire, Aleppo withstood two crusader attacks. In 1183, it became part of Saladin’s realm. Aleppo, 1191 C.E.: Under the rule of the Ayyubid dynasty, perhaps the greatest Persian philosopher under Islamic rule, expounder of the immensely infuential Illuminationist philosophy, Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi, the “Shihab al-Din” (Star of Religion), was put to death on the order of the Sunni ruler Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub Saladin. Suhrawardi became a martyr to his philosophy and was posthumously honored with the title “ash-Shaykh alMaqtul” (the murdered Shaykh) or more commonly “Shaykh al-Ishraq” (The Shaykh of Illumination)—the Martyr of the Religion of God. Saladin died two years later, at the age of 55, not long after an agreement with King Richard I of England (the Lionheart) was reached that allowed Christian pilgrims to visit Jerusalem while Aleppo remained under Muslim control. Suhrawardi’s philosophy of light upon light, while it was traditionally based on the Light Verse of the Qur’an (24:35), expounded a fascinating, comprehensive, and coherent metaphysics, cosmology, psychology (anthropology), soteriology, and eschatology of light—light being the divine essence and encompassing the origin and consummation of the All (Eschraghi, Pfad, passim). Yet, he based his philosophy less on Islamic theology (kalam), the Qur’an, or Sunni and Shi‘i traditions (ahadith), which he seldom, although always with respect, cites, but on a fresh integration of Persian and Greek sources. Philosophic streams still echoing original Greek thought, especially of Pythagorean and Platonic origins, became the center of his “vision” of light while integrating the religious ways of life and wisdom traditions of Persia, most famously among them those of Zoroastrian provenience. All of these ingredients were, of course, not Islamic in nature and somehow always remained foreign to the development of Islamic orthodoxies. Much like Ibn ‘Arabi, but unlike al-Ghazali, the great orthodox slayer of Greek philosophy, Suhrawardi accepted (and infuenced) one of the most cherished conditions of Suf thought and life as central to his philosophy, namely, that mystical intuition, vision, and contemplation reaches beyond (any orthodox) language in such a manner that it reveals itself to be the true medium of an intelligible view of the world and its interaction with Allah, the source of light, light itself (Bausani, Religion, 189–208). This immediacy of the experience of light upon light also led Suhrawardi to explore a vast variety of Egyptian-Hellenistic sources, such as Hermetic, Neo-Pythagorean, and Neoplatonic expositions of the divine emanation of light and its presence in the realm of shadows. He borrowed and developed those categories as well as that of Indian traditions (gymnopedists), as they were known at his time, to elicit the secrets of how the divine light differentiates into a manifold of creation (Walbridge, Wisdom, chs. 1–4). Not only was his new synthesis dangerously devoid of the orthodox mediation

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of Scripture (except as witness) and the restrictions of communal religious authority (ulama), but Suhrawardi, like many other philosophers or expounders of wisdom (hikmat) in Suf lore, craved for a universal paradigm that could comprise a multitude of philosophical and religious traditions under one vision with its universal, but elusive, categories of light and shadow, yet (therefore) without imperialistic preoccupation with claims of sole authority, and without occupying a space that would leave thought without alternatives in the interpretation of their experience (Corbin, Body, 118–34). In fact, his cross-cultural and interreligious approach to wisdom traditions could be viewed as an early attempt to fnd unity in the (religious) manifold that leaves the multiplicity of its appearances in their place and in their own right without resigning to a mere chaotic plurality of unrelated entities. In his polyglot explorations into the complexities of different ways of life and thought, Suhrawardi never tried to proselytize like Raimon Llull, the Majorcan Franciscan philosopher, who after learning Arabic and creating a similarly universal system of thought (although based on mathematical proportions) died in North Africa during his attempts to convert Muslims to Christianity a century later. Instead, Suhrawardi, two and a half centuries before Nicolas of Cusa’s De Pace Fide, one of the earliest pre-postmodern Christian testimonies to a sustainable peace between diverse cultural and religious traditions (right at the time of the fall of Constantinople), pursued a proposition of peace through the integration of different traditions of wisdom, gathering them around a grand vision in which immediate experience accessible by everyone emanates from beyond into both intelligibility and revelation. And he was followed by Ibn ‘Arabi’s similarly relativistic account of all religions as manifestations of the refections of refracted attributes of the apophatic Godhead, distributed like light beams from a light source (ch. 8). Suhrawardi’s Illuminationist philosophy came to be valued as one of the major expressions and motors for the development of Persian philosophy under Islamic provenance, which could never be reined in by its orthodoxy. His most important contribution to this current project on transreligious relativity (of truth), however, might simply consist in the fact that he laid out a trans-conceptual feld that gathers to the harmony of reality (light) a multiplicity of philosophic and religious traditions (rays of light) in non-imperialist terms while, at the same time, upholding an equal emphasis on intelligibility and revelation. Other than the peripatetic philosophies that, in the wake of Aristotle, collected their theses from empirical samples and believed in reason alone and its supremacy over revelation or religion (as it took its spring out of the “fantasy” of myths) and other than the orthodox theologies of Islam that, at least after al-Ghazali, established the sole authority of Qur’anic revelation and its absolute supremacy over reason and thought, Suhrawardi sought their harmony in the metaphors of an inaccessible light—“enlightening” in the

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twofold sense of revealing things in its light by making aware of the intelligibility of these things. Nevertheless, his proposed harmony is new: it is not that of a mere compound of one revelation under the purview of orthodoxy with one reason under the hegemony of the philosophers (held to be authoritative in their own right). Rather, he suggests a synthesis of subversiveness: an undercurrent stream of self-collecting oneness of a reality that doesn’t walk on two legs, human reason, and divine revelation, but indifferentiates itself from reason and revelation, although its light appears only in them, so only as the unrevealed and unthought: as the light of apophatic mystery and unthinking. Steeped in the Neoplatonic stream of thought, Suhrawardi envisions intellect to be the revelation of the divine light and revelation to be that of the divine intellect, although this intellect is only then not devoid of love and instills only then the desire for surrender to its brilliance as its very motive force if it is encountered in the unknowing to the unknowability of Reality itself. Philosophy, then, becomes itself revelatory, “divine philosophy” (hikmat-i ilahi), or rather, with Henri Corbin, “theosophy” (Alone, 9), if it encounters this unknowable, unthought, Reality in its own heart. Conversely, in the indifferentiation of Reality, divine revelation of this mystery can now as such be found in the philosophical wisdom traditions of diverse cultures and ethnicities, be they Egyptian, Greek, Arabic, Persian, Indic, or Chinese, as they, by the same token, become indistinguishable from religious expositions (Walbridge, Wisdom, 42–50). Confict arises as these wisdoms are modulated into “orthodoxies” of organized communities (be they philosophical, cultural, ethnic, or religious). Evaporating this “wisdom,” they instead generate antagonistic sets of propositions, posing competition between their (particular) revelation and (universal) reason, their religion against (other) philosophies, their sacred against (the siege of) secularity. It has become en vogue today on all sides, be they spiritual or secular, religious or naturalist—if they are interested in such bridges between thought and mystery at all—to justify one’s own view by such oppositions of reason and revelation, sacred and secular, science and spirituality, mind and heart, body and soul, reasoning and feeling, experience and authority. We fnd simplifcations and abstract substantializations of perceived enemy worldviews rampant in all circles. Sweeping statements of fervent religionists against materialism in the name of spirituality, against science in the name of revelation, against reason in the name of spiritual insights of the heart, against academic rigorousness in the name of higher sources of immediate authority, against complexity of the functioning of secular democratic society in the name of simple views of a somehow theocratic future, poison the feld, as they isolate themselves from the very site in which their voices trumpet the transformations they purpose. No wonder that such relentless antagonisms

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generate the appalled energies of opposition in the form of conscious secularity against religious bullying, freedom from religion against mere tolerance of religions, democratic diversity against religious powers of uniformity, naturalistic concepts of pacifcation against the religious clamor for superiority (look at me, me, me, me; oh, why does the world not follow my insight, since it has the authority of God!), uncommitted spiritualities over organized religions, and mystical salvation without religions and philosophies. Suhrawardi did not abide by these age-old antagonisms. Rather, closer to Anselm of Canterbury (who was already misunderstood as rationalist in this indifferentiation), he grounded his endeavor for understanding in the profound nondifference of heart and mind, reason and revelation, given that the Mind of God (the Logos, Reason, Understanding) reveals itself in the heart of every being, and that the heart of human beings is the organ and mirror of both the word and silence, reason and feeling, being and becoming, relation and understanding. However, it is only by the reversal of the heart of the mind and the mind of the heart to Reality Beyond both that “it” is in them and is the immanent light of, and in, the whole cosmos of existence. There are many reasons to adhere to such an approach of non-difference, which is neither one of identifcation nor opposition, as it is the expression of the fundamental acceptance that it is in the purity of heart and mind that Reality, which is beyond either of them, reveals “reasons” as secrets constituted from love and peace (GL, #148). Hence, it is not only in the Eastern context that, throughout millennia, thought and mystery, intellect and life, religion and philosophy, were never apart—as such departure seems to have been haunting the Greek opposition of philosophy and religion, which perpetuated itself through their respective Western incarnations until today. But even in the context of ancient Greece, we fnd its philosophers, however incomplete, to have been thinking for a reason other than mere intellectual insight, rather striving for the art of living, in accordance with the cosmic order, and the desire to reach a certain aim: that we train to become beings following the motivation of divine intellect, of theoria, the universal vision of the divine Reality; that understanding is lived as surrender to “its” mystery, the Good, manifesting “itself” in a purifed character of personality and society; that this perfection of individual and collective life is the aim of existence. Whether for the (materialist) Stoics or the (spiritualist) Plato, heart and intellect, and thought and life, were never apart here either. And if we may claim with Whitehead that Western philosophy is nothing but “a series of footnotes to Plato” (PR, 39), its scope and depth may always be uncovered again in this non-difference of reason and revelation, mind and heart in their surrender to Reality. And so did Whitehead himself. In his view, religion and philosophy spring from the same excess of creative freedom from mere necessity of living,

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much like art and culture, play and consciousness, the feeling of intensity of life, and the desire for harmony with the cosmos (RM, chs. 1, 4). It is the heart that knows the mystery of this process as an unending endeavor to fnd the boundaries of the universal horizons in which such understanding can surrender to its own heart again, enriched by its unique experiences of such freedom from limitations of knowing in the recognition of the incommensurable immensity of existence. It is in such mutuality that Whitehead develops his own thought in which the piercing of experiences of revelation discovers the heart as speaking to a broken universality of insight through which religions provide philosophies with their fnest insights of being human before and beyond any conceptualization (RM, 31–2; TDM, 510–12). It is such a mutuality that structures Whitehead’s philosophical understanding of the deepest level of any experience—and since all is in some sense experience, any event and organism—namely that any experience and event, any feeling, thought, or act, begins with an “initial aim” before it exists, that is, the indifference of God from this nascent event, in its differentiation of the potentials of its very coming to existence being suggestions of the Mind of God for its becoming most connected with all existence, with the purpose of intensity and harmony, through the realization of love and peace instead of hate and opposition, contrast instead of competition, freedom instead of bondage, insight instead of ignorance (PR, 244). As in the Bahá’í understanding of philosophy, in the wake of Suhrawardi (Terry, Companion, 140) being the limited comprehension of “the realities of things as they are in themselves” (SAQ, #59) and, maybe, the testing of these limitations, the understanding of the intellect is broken and opened to the loving perceptivity of the “lamp of the heart” (SAQ, #84) which, as with Whitehead’s “initial aim” (GPW, §20), becomes the site for illumination (PT, #54) and of the reconfguration of universal horizons of understanding from the unthought and unknown Reality of illumined love (SAQ, #83). Whether we can build, today, on a project such as Suhrawardi’s, is indeed in question and yet, in some sense, this is the experimental path this book sets out to pursue. In light of similar ancient and current, Eastern and Western, views just reviewed we might feel encouraged that the enterprise is not for naught. Still, not those, but Aleppo and Suhrawardi, while not the object of this current investigation, strike me to pierce any simplifed expectations of success as they convey a speaking and urgent twin symbol of its playground: how in the context of multicultural and multireligious confict—and with an urge for a comprehensive peace within and among religions that does not exclude justice in the face of, and reconciliation after, the violent atrocities that most painfully mark its absence—to unthink a conceptual feld that in its wake can propose the embrace of the diverse values and virtues of the many dimensions of a polyphony of cultural and religious diversity; that searches

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for their non-imperial peaceful unifcations without curbing their creatively proliferating diversifcations; that attempts to grant a non-invasive equality of access to everyone to pursue the truth in the midst of modes of philosophic thought and the revelations and illuminations of religion; and that views humanity’s complex, culturally formed, and religiously rehearsed patterns of experience as a universal process in which the collected wisdom heritages can, in their multiple and bewildering projections of reality, begin to resonate with another in the awareness of a profound togetherness that harbors us all and altogether as the convivial children of its always unthought mystery. Aleppo, with its multireligious, -cultural, and -philosophic traditions, not despite, but probably because of them, is a symbol for the fact that we, as humanity, have not yet found rest from the explosive interactions of religion, ethnicity, and politics. Rather, Aleppo is the formidable expression of this lack. One might also readily acknowledge that Suhrawardi was murdered not despite, but most defnitely because of, his grand proposal of peace as it did not ft a mono-orthodox expression of truth, but then, had to suffer for the multiplicity such a monologue (monadic logos) discredited. Yet, even if some might say that sacrifces like Suhrawardi’s—much like that of Socrates—are meaningless in the great scheme of things, in my view, if we were not keeping on trying to commemorate their lethal pain, we may also already have foregone the nucleus of the desire for a different world of conviviality they might enshrine.

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2. VIGNETTES Under the paradigm of a “Garden of Reality,” I will set out to experiment with three related, but in themselves contested, theses. First, religions can socially and intellectually contribute to a world of sustainable peace that includes modes of justice and confict reconciliation if they allow themselves, in a process of learning and trusting, to yield to a mutual relativity of their very existence as it is the profound expression of humanity’s common life on Earth. Acknowledging this truth is, however, an exorbitantly delicate matter, while negligence thereof will endanger the existential unity of our Earth and of all fesh on it. In other words, I am proposing the mutual relativity of (religious) truths as an unavoidable condition for a realization of the existential unity of humanity with its inevitable diversity and within humanity’s ineradicably various entanglements on the fragile surface of the planet Earth, treasuring our common physical and spiritual heritance. Second, relativity of (religious) truth can best be expressed in terms of perceptions (prehensions) of Reality that minimize extreme dualistic claims of absolute knowledge derived from both mere (abstract) metaphysics and

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simple revelation (as, insofar, and as long as, they self-exclude themselves from such a conversation) (Rescher, Pluralism, ch. 4), but also contributes to the diminuendo of the no less absolutist claims of scientism narrowly defning itself in terms of logicism and physicalism (Nagel, Mind, 3–12; Kelly, Mind, chs. 1, 9). I settle instead on relativistic claims of truth insofar as they resonate with perceptions of Reality in terms of a cosmology of becoming (GPW, §42). This perspectivist confuence of being and thought into a cosmology, as it recognizes a wide feld of phenomena and experiences (of becoming), engenders a comprehensive enough feld of reference, aiming at the All of things (including its recognition), yet remains volatile enough so as to reckon with its own, if not Reality’s, fundamental contingency. With Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, with its processual and relational paradigm (Loomer, Theology, 245–7), I will dive into a cosmological matrix that ably articulates religious relativity insofar as this relativity is considered central to its own cosmic relativity revealing a world in becoming (GPW, §§9–16). Third, if the claim of the relativity of truth is to propose our religious everdeveloping heritage in terms of a process of Reality, we will be sensibilized to fnd ourselves in a cosmos of multiple nested contextualities in which the stabilization of becoming and the cutting-out of propositions that claim truth for themselves are fundamentally incomplete (Faber, Immanence, 91–107). This thesis has at least three dimensions: On the one hand, since no claim of truth can articulate itself from a position of completeness, truth is understood to always be in a state of limitation. There is no God’s-eye view or omniperspective. No identifcation of one’s position on Truth with Reality will be identical with the horizon itself in which it establishes itself (Epilogue). On the other hand, since every plateau of life is itself both an organization of processes and an environment for other processes of organization, no claim of truth can escape profound movement. This proposition not only indicates partiality (taking part) and particularity (being one and not the other) but also an emphasis on certain realizations as opposed to their alternatives. We can never follow all alternatives at once and, hence, are forced to self-critically accept that, as William Connolly affrms with William James, something will always escape our contentions (Connolly, Pluralism, ch. 3). And fnally, even if we follow the presupposition that religious relativity and its cosmological expression are supportive one of another, this “correlation” grants us only valuable access to the Truth of Reality if we also gain sight of their inherent mutual disconnection. This is its driving force of transformation. In other words, the moving and transforming limitations of truth indicate the operational presence of a transcending impulse into an unknown Beyond as its transcendental condition (for the possibility of Truth). Hence, religious relativity (of Truth), as it struggles with the process of Reality, is always a transreligious movement that, in its own turns, becomes the condition of its

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affrmation as Truth. In light of the other, the surprise of novelty, and the ever-reclining horizon of an unknown Beyond, Truth (with Michel Foucault) is not our accomplice (Faber, Wahrheit, passim). From these vignettes, presenting us with criteria for the following investigation, derive the rationale for the upcoming project. Since we cannot follow all possible venues of establishing transreligious relativity (of Truth), the limitation imposed on such an endeavor will force us to choose among living options that follow these three criteria best: that they exhibit a processual character that affrms the incompleteness of truth claims; that they are open to a mutual resonance of their religious and cosmological landscapes (with their complications); and that they do not inhibit a mutual transcendence of (and into) intellectual and revelatory modes of comprehension. Given these criteria, as was already noted in the Introduction, I will engage the philosophical witness of the process thought of Alfred North Whitehead and the religious witness of the revelation connoted with the Bahá’í Faith as embodiments of an apophatic motivation through which I will seek the vision of Reality as unthought Truth in, and relativistic to, all thought and religion. Let me briefy, in light of the playing feld of this book and the remarks of the Introduction, explain what this choice means and what it does not indicate. Both Whitehead’s philosophy and Bahá’í thought, as will become obvious later, fulfll the above named criteria. That is, they are in themselves not an arbitrary choice; even their contrasting is not merely random. Whitehead’s thought like few others has instigated a century-old project of comprehensive interreligious scope that might present us with one of the few cosmological options open to a fresh and current comprehension of transreligious alternatives in philosophical and religious discourse (Faber/Slabodsky, Traditions, passim). The Bahá’í Faith, in turn, also being in its second century, emerged from a confuence of long-standing, pervasive, and interreligiously productive traditions that it regenerated in its own unique event. Additionally, its integrity is itself a paradigmatic transreligious process as it developed in a confuence of two genuine movements: the Bábi and the Bahá’í religions (Smith, Religions, passim). In them, we fnd a confuence of the inherently transreligious Suf heritage with its Indian infuences, but also the Andalusian tradition originating with the Suf Shaykh of shaykhs Ibn ‘Arabi and his school, as it merged with the metaphysics of light of Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra (Sadru’d-Din Muhammad) of Shiraz in the Persian lands of their origin (Savi, Defnition, 60–5). Various other Greek, Persian, and Indian philosophical and religious infuences can still be traced to the vast intellectual background of their arising. And in the more immediate context, we fnd them emerging from (and beyond) the environment of Persian-Islamic (especially Shi‘i) religion and culture and from the Shaykhi school within Shi‘a Islam, named after Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i (Bausani, Religion, chs. 3–8). He not only embraced and

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critically developed the impulses of Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra (Brown, Response, 51–78) but thereby expounded a profound process philosophy that is in many aspects only comparable to Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism a century later (Hamid, Metaphysics, ch. 3). If one accepts Whitehead’s commitment to a cosmology of creativity and novelty (only rivaled by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who acknowledged this heritage), it must not come as a surprise, then, that novelty will strike eventually—in the form of a new event, experience, and revelation reconfguring and challenging conviviality in the realm of religious traditions, manifesting in a quite unique commitment to transreligious relativity and with regard to a self-consciousness of its philosophical implications being their Unthinkable. Not only was the Báb (and his early disciples)—spiritually, philosophically, and theologically—greatly infuenced by the Shaykhi school from which he recruited many of his early followers, which might have translated in their acceptance of the infnite cycle of religious renewal that the Báb propagated (Amanat, Resurrection, chs. 1–2). We fnd Bahá’u’lláh in many contexts to be aware of Ibn ‘Arabi, Suhrawardi, and Mulla Sadra in philosophical discussions with Suf masters and in his tablets (letters) to learned religionists, even writing poems in the style and in revelatory reconfguration of the great Persian poet-philosophers such as Farid ad-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds and Jalal ad-Din Rumi’s Mathnavi—which found counter pieces in Bahá’u’lláh’s own mystical writings such as his Seven Valleys and his own Mathnavi (Savi, Poems, 317–61). We fnd him living with, and conversing with various communities of diverse Suf orders in different places and at different periods of his life (Ma’sumian, Seclusion, 18–26). And we fnd him expounding his own revelatory event in light of, and meditating on, their spiritual, mystical, cosmological, and transreligious insights and practices (Momen, Mysticism, 107–20). That this reconfguration also proved to be challenging, must be mostly attributed to both the Báb’s and Bahá’u’lláh’s claim, in fact, to enact in their persons and movements what others were only speaking of theoretically and in spiritual and eschatological hope: the renewal of religions, a new revelation in the cycle of infnite renewal, and the universality of their transreligious implications (Buck, Interface, 147–80), namely, the loss of superiority, fnality, and exclusivity of any religion as truth that represents the Reality/God/Truth (al-haqq). Like Jesus, the Báb was martyred by the regime of both the ulama (the religious establishment) and the Shah (the political authority). And Bahá’u’lláh spent forty years of his life in banishment and exile—without giving up on his claim to be the event instigating transreligious peace (Stockman, Bahá’í Faith, chs. 5–7). With this choice I do, of course, not mean to exclude other options of addressing the same questions or pertain to a view of establishing the

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superiority of a particular philosophy and religious tradition. Rather, I intend to add voices to the discussion that have not been heard to an appropriate measure, although—as I will try to show—they are disposed to forging a strong coalition in categorizing and propagating transreligious peace (Faber, Religion, 167–82). As any such project will not only be limited (and selfcritically so) by what it excludes but may gain something as of yet undiscovered in that which it affrms, we need not mourn the fact of such limitations further, but can concentrate on the surprises it might yield by pursuing it. As a rose is a rose and not a tulip, it is beautiful by that limitation and the novelty it exhibits relative to the tulip. This affrmation does not claim superiority, but uniqueness in the garden of Reality. Nor does the recourse to the novelty of these two philosophical and religious traditions treat them as isolated entities. On the contrary, their uniqueness is itself relative to the environment from which they gathered themselves; as they become event, they freshly modulate a stream of repetition and transformation. So can Whitehead’s philosophy not be isolated from the Greek-European philosophic tradition—as Whitehead himself alludes to in a famous statement that all Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato (PR, 39)—or separable from the long-developing stream of process philosophies from Heraclitus to Hegel (Rescher, Metaphysics, part 1). In fact, comparable to Suhrawardi, Whitehead’s thought—as he, again, recognizes— cannot even be divorced from the process traditions of Indian and Chinese provenance (PR, 7). On the contrary, it is from this vast background, which we must take into account to understand the new events, that we also gather their own inherently complex relativity reverberating through the ever wider patterns of mutual resonance and discord—of an inextricable interweaving of philosophic and religious thought (as Eastern traditions don’t isolate one from the other) as well as their oppositional contrast (as Greek philosophy developed in marked antagonism to Greek religions). Similarly complex implications surface from the unique recreation of the background of the multiple traditions united in what is, and drives, the Bahá’í Faith. A transreligious multiplicity in itself, its own dialectic of event and situation, novelty and background, has already, in its constitution, transcended Islamic dependency (Walbridge, Acts, passim). While arising from the contrasting feld of various Islamic infuences, the Bahá’í Faith is pervasively also (and understands itself as being) relative to a much wider feld of transreligious currents, not only of the Abrahamic traditions but also—although as a much dimmer background—of the religious traditions of the non-Arabic and non-Abrahamic Middle and Far East, especially (from early on) Zoroastrianism and Hinduism (Bausani, Religion, chs. 1–2). Nevertheless, while following its movement back into its complex origination process—on which much academic work has been done in the last decades—we will only understand

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its (transreligious) uniqueness if we refuse to fall into the fallacy of reducing its origination process to a form of syncretism (ch. 4). As this label is in general used pejoratively to denigrate the importance of the arrival of new religions (although less so to debase new philosophies), such boxing and fling really is often little more than an expression of structures of controlling knowledge for established power-distributions in societies and against the perplexity that disturbs the settled ways of thinking and living—both of which constitute impassibilities of conviviality. This book does, however, naturally relate to conceptualizations that constructively name and counter confictual religious diversity in terms of philosophical and religious pluralism—thinking of the work of, and critical reactions to, for instance, William James, William E. Connolly, John Leslie, Keith Ward, and John Hick, but also process thinkers such as John Cobb, David Griffn, and Marjorie Suchocki. In hopefully avoiding the most obvious pitfalls of parochialism, piracy, and blindness toward diversity (although they may always linger in some subtle residue), I also wanted to transcend the Western, mostly Christian and post-Christian predominance of the discussions on pluralism by setting a kind of counter-balance with the Bábi-Bahá’í religions, which are not Western in origin. Yet, at the same time, with this choice I also intended to avoid the classical interreligious contrasting of socalled world religions, such as Christianity and Buddhism, under the exclusion of minorities. While much majority literature is available to satisfy such juxtapositions, the minority standpoint, represented by (for instance) the Bahá’í Faith, reveals a pattern that resists ftting in into privileged majority discussions of comparative religion and theology, interreligious dialogues, but also current philosophies of religion, which, today, cannot afford to avoid addressing the questions of a transreligious relativity of truth (Smart, Religions, ch. 25). Moreover, the Bahá’í Faith is a still hidden (undiscovered) spiritual giant that by exclusory mechanisms of majority discourse has not yet been considered as a valuable source for our theme. One must also note immediately that, despite the fact that ignorance may cover that which does not arise from among the major interreligious dialogue partners, but, in our case, from a still somehow obscured Persian religious environment, the Bahá’í Faith is not a sect of Islam either—a prejudice of superiority discourses taming difference and novelty that has followed it from the outset. Additionally, since both Whitehead’s thought and Bahá’í thought have never isolated themselves from wider streams of transreligious processes, references not only to Abrahamic religions but also of their Dharmic and Daoic (and even Primal religious) allusions, and contrasting them with respective sources, will contribute to unfold this story of a garden of Reality. Finally, this minority viewpoint on transreligious relativity may add a fresh perspective on the universally relevant question of missed conviviality, interreligious

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confict, and transreligious peace, as it is refected in nuce, like in a microcosm, in the Bahá’í Faith, since its history and present state display one of the most painful transreligious processes of renewal and differentiation today in the form of the persistent and pervasive persecution of the Bahá’í Faith in the country of its origin, Persia, and to varying degrees in countries ruled by Islamic regimes (Parviz Brookshaw and Fazel, Bahá’ís, passim).

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3. VIA DOLOROSA This brings me back to the constant companions of conviviality, violence. I shall recognize its pervasive importance with three remarks on multiplicity and violence. First, although the master metaphor under which I will propose transreligious relativity (of truth) as corroborated by a (relentless) process of Reality is that of a garden, I am not so naïve as to let it be discredited by accepting any accusation that it may convey too irenic a picture of reality, given the painful absence of spiritual, religious, and political peace in our world (and its past). Not only am I aware of the inextricable complexity by which religion is often bound to mirror basal human instincts and social incarnations of power, always ready to exert unimaginable violence. Rather, this is the very condition under which I have chosen this metaphor, as it exhibits plasticity expressive of these abysses of human nature or, at least, history, without reserve—but also without surrender (ch. 2). In fact, the image of the garden, while it is meant to convey a host of fowers and plants in convivial joy, which we can readily accept as a motto of peaceful multiplicity, can also connote images of confict: it harbors symbioses or the lack thereof; it sustains itself by fertile soil or withers in exhausted dirt; it is energized by the sun or burned by its deadly heat; it regenerates in rain or drowns in torrents of cloudbursts or fash foods. The garden is subject to seasons of renewal and death; it is object to pruning and composting, decay and recycling. Its fructiferous plants portray a sign not only of life but also of a never-ending life-and-death-cycle. The garden can be maintained or abandoned. In fact, no garden is without violence, and no religious “garden” comes without a via dolorosa or a river turned to blood running through its midst. We don’t have to dig deep to fnd that Whitehead and Bahá’í writings address this via dolorosa in the form of the wedded alliance of religion and violence (in all of its forms, from narrow-mindedness to genocide) head on. In one of his most indignant descriptions of this unfortunate conjunction, Whitehead cries out over the “melancholy record of the horrors which can attend religion: human sacrifce, and in particular the slaughter of children, cannibalism, sensual orgies, abject superstition, hatred as between races, the

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maintenance of degrading customs, hysteria, bigotry,” so as to display religion as “the last refuge of human savagery” (RM, 37). And he boldly asks: “Must ‘religion’ always remain as a synonym for ‘hatred’” (AI, 172)? And the same ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, who provides the image, symbol, and metaphor of the “garden” for this investigation, can write these urgent lines: “Religion should unite all hearts and cause wars and disputes to vanish from the face of the earth, give birth to spirituality, and bring life and light to each heart. If religion becomes a cause of dislike, hatred and division, it were better to be without it, and to withdraw from such a religion would be a truly religious act” (PT, #40). No naiveté can be found behind these statements; rather we discover their bid for peace to be bathed in a bitter consciousness of the physical, social, psychological, and spiritual pain accompanying conviviality and the suffering within the uneasy knitting of multiplicity. Two other images have been used to challenge the symbolism of the garden: the desert and the rhizome. Gilles Deleuze has juxtaposed garden with desert wilderness, indicative of the single most challenging faw to its cosmological applicability (Deleuze, Islands, ch. 1): whether the All is an always recurring rearrangement of chaotic chance, cruel and indifferent in itself, or fosters some kind of directionally (only insuffciently reduced to the dense nomenclature of teleology). Others have followed, in the wake of Deleuze and François Laruelle, the image of the desert to indicate some kind of immanence without transcendence, but without losing mystical connotations of emptiness and openness (Thacker, Notes, 85–91). While a garden seems to be “constructed” (would a constructivist argue against that?), wilderness indicates a kind of natural state without human (or even divine) touch. But in an era of postcolonial awareness, mere dreams of conjured-up crisp mornings of creation devoid of (often poisonous) interventions are as naïve as the blindness toward the aimless tragedies of nature (why are they perceived as tragedies?). Even John Muir’s vision of saving wilderness was already a human intervention of preservation, something not at all opposed to the image of the idea of a garden (Faber, Intermezzo, 212–35). And we are only confned to projections of French and English gardens in this image if we remain Eurocentric. Instead, we may think of Persian “Paradise” gardens, ‘Abdu’lBahá’ was familiar with (one of the frst “architectural” Gesamtkunstwerke, embodiments of the cosmic reality mirroring spiritual realities in human settings, thereby escaping human constructions) or the Native American milpas, ecological masterpieces of connectivity and mutual enhancement of plants, fowers, herbs, and varieties of trees, but for conquistadores looking like seemingly haphazardly growing spots of wilderness allegedly demonstrating the inabilities of Native American culture (Weatherford, Givers, 83). Yet, as the natural state of wilderness remains in our memory as that which we have not earned, but which is given to us by the grace of cosmic coincidences and

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serendipities, its necessity only releases, harbors, and demands the contingencies of ever-different patterns in which wilderness already always appears as if it has left the traces of a gardener, if you accept the existence of natural laws and are inclined to at least peruse the fne-tuning problem of our cosmos (Leslie, Universes, ch. 2). What about the juxtaposition of the rhizomatic to the arboreal, the root system to the tree (or better: the forest) (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, ch. 1)? In the wake of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of multiplicity (and indebted to Whitehead’s organismic philosophy), it has become au vogue in postconstructionist circles to disavow the image of the tree for that of the rhizome, assuming the arboreal structure to be representative of hierarchical and oppressive organizations of life, law, and power, while the horizontal movements of rhizomatic plants seem to indicate an antihierarchical and insubordinate sentiment countering the impulses of fxed and sedimented power-distributions (Marks, Deleuze, ch. 2). After having explored the rhizomatic fgure of thought myself in great sympathy to Deleuze and poststructuralist sensibilities (as essential part of my understanding of Whitehead’s process universe) with some persistence (Faber, Metaphysics, 203–22)—its free movement, aimless, and always meandering without grounding—I will say this: I like trees! Although I appreciate the non-centered movements of potatoes, their concurrent expansion and decay, aesthetically, trees symbolize something incomparable about life, like mountains and oceans and the Earth. Besides, a garden can integrate both rhizomatic and arboreal life forms. In fact, the Pando Populus colony of quaking aspens in Colorado, for instance, is a rhizome-forest, one-root organism of a multiplicity of trees. What is more, the alleged stratifcation of arboreal reality, instead of the rhizome’s fat interconnectedness, might, contrary to the sentiment of wedding it to oppression, just be a sign of a vertical fow of lifeblood between roots and crown (ch. 7). And roots are not “better” grounds either, but they swim in slow motion through the soil—as do mountains, folding the surface of the planet through time. A garden is not “designed” in any narrow sense: We design commodities—of capitalist functionality; yet, the gestalt of a garden instills a joy that just is. With a second remark, I want to acknowledge the complex ways in which religion and violence always seem to appear together. I have already mentioned the acute awareness of Whitehead and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that violence is a factual and pervasively concurrent phenomenon of religion. Fertilized by religion, violence always only hides “full fathom fve” (Shakespeare, The Tempest, Ariel’s Song, Act I, Scene 2) under the surface of the garden of Reality. Seeking a peace that includes religions must not shrug off the immemorial history of its bloodsheds. Yet, neither can the desire for a different reality—a nonviolent one in which religion neither instigates nor mediates

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violent expressions of human instincts—simply surrender to a mechanical refex that identifes most of the war mongering and incitation of violence indistinctly with the presence or absence of religion (Pinker, Angels, ch. 1). Empirical research shows a vastly different, but no less disgusting picture: the interaction of human abilities, thought, and social organization can conspire to instigate atrocious ideologies, Darwinian clashes for survival, and an exploitation of religious convictions for political gains of power in the midst of a world of uncertainty (Armstrong, Fields, passim). But the phenomenon of religion is by no means identical with these motivations, except that religion highlights them, boosts them, amasses them to a critical point if and when the ideological justifcations are taken from religious frameworks in order to readily overwhelm the experiences that created these religions as unique phenomena with the confuence of instinct and power that needs superiority to hide its own fragility in a vast cosmos of uncertainties (Renard, Words, passim). Although it was always a theoretical option, the more recent fact of global connectedness has made a choice more acute than ever: whether religions should be considered a medium of, or be abandoned for good as a fundamental hindrance to, the peace process (Juergensmeyer, Kitts, and Jerryson, Handbook, part 3). The secular argument becomes almost transcendental, built on the assumption of an inherent barbarism of religions (Cavanaugh, Myth, ch. 1). Yet, neither is this argument coherent with the historical and sociological facts of religion, nor is it devoid of ideological interests of its own. And by no means is it innocent of violence either. On the contrary, except that one may make a case for hitherto designed secular utopias to have never been cleansed thoroughly enough of hidden religious impulses, one must readily acknowledge that it were precisely the anti-religious utopias of the 20th century that created the most profound, most systematically organized, and most industrially, logistically executed mass atrocities of human lives on a global basis (Avalos, Words, chs. 12–14). That is not to say that religiously motivated and misused political agitation could not reach a magnitude of which 9/11 was only a rehearsal. Yet, while the very fusion of politics and religion is always prone to the instigation of violence and destruction (especially when mediated by rigid orthodoxies and merciless apocalyptic impulses), the seemingly inexhaustible ways in which they may recombine to ignite actual genocide, ethnic cleansing, and (in general) the suppression of dissenting ways of life, is much less predictable than the mechanistic denial of a potential salvaging of religions for any meaningful, increasingly nonviolent peace process that makes us believe. A question always remains, of course: How to understand the paradox that virtually every religion desires the realization of the noble nature of humanity

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through the actualization of (divine) virtues, such as irrespective love of the other, nonviolence, and all-inclusive compassion, while with the same persistence displaying all the unfathomable forms of atrocious destructiveness on any level of human and planetary existence? How is this possible? If we don’t want to accept the secular alternative ideologies—since they are rather part of the same paradoxical juxtaposition of vision and devastating embodiments of destructiveness—another approach may present itself: to contribute to the awareness and acceptance of the fact and value of transreligious transformation. It already happens. In some sense, it always has already happened: as the fow of religious intuitions and their manifold articulations throughout the “rhizomatic” connections of religions over the course of their history. This fact might demonstrate itself to be inevitable enough to further a new self-understanding of religions as embedded in, and expressive of, a vast cosmic process that, although it always allows for destruction, also appreciates, and may harbor the resources for, a constructive transfguration of itself into processes of peace. This is at least what the players in my dramatization promise. A last remark (with which I want to transition to a different perspective): Truth may itself be under the spell of violence (Faber, Sense, 36–56). Both exponents of relativistic or absolutistic views regularly accuse the other side of generating violence. Relativists abhor absolutistic truth claims as the very source of violence—for instance in their criticism of monotheism as inherently intolerant (TDM, ch. 2). Absolutists, conversely, detest the violence inherent in an anything-goes approach to truth, occasionally even equating its admission of different ethical standards with the unavoidable consequence of attaching relative worth even to fascism. “Why not? All is relative!”—they cry out. Or is it the relaxation of the boundaries under the postmodern condition of commodifcation that heightens and furthers the urge for domination and the fow of violence through all social forms of engagement (Wink, Engaging, 13)? There is, of course, no easy way out of this dilemma. Yet, in light of these considerations, I want to suggest beginning from a different angle: that truth, whether philosophical or religious, is always of an immensely existential impact and nature, as it is its origin, and that in the site of this existentiality simplifcations and oppositions regarding absoluteness and relativity of (religious) truth become as meaningless as the violence that such oppositions create becomes futile. 4. EXISTENTIALITY With existentiality as the site of religious truth, I don’t mean to say that religion is merely a “personal matter”—since it is always also a socially

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embodied reality. I do also not mean to indicate that religion must be about a “personal relationship” with God—since profound religious alternatives suggest otherwise. And I don’t suggest that we prefer existentialist philosophy (as I do not). I mean to say that no engagement with truth—as it wants to express some kind of elucidation of Reality—can be captured by compartmentalizing it into truth-theories or logical procedures, on the one hand, and ethical applicability or political inscriptions of power, on the other. Existential engagement is neither a moment of any power, not even the power of logic, nor of any logic of power. Sure, truth (given its common-sense understanding) must at least address “what really is” and “the good life” (which would be true even for the biblical emet, trust as truth, and aletheia, its Greek version of “unforgetting”). But its impulse, I suggest, is born from the very existentiality of existence itself. Meditate only for a moment, for instance, upon Leibniz’s very question of existence (Holt, World)—Why is there something rather than nothing? It cannot be answered purely by looking at things being there (as a brute fact) or by merely utilizing logical procedures imposed on them; at least Whitehead would contest this view greatly (TDM, ch. 7). The seriousness and inevitability of the question of truth arises from a place that escapes everything we can “name” from within its own horizon. It is apophatic. This is to say that even if we accept, within some other philosophical reasoning, that existentiality is secondary to the depth of, say, différance, multiplicity, or mutual immanence—which I have pursued myself over the years with Derrida, Deleuze, and Whitehead (Faber, Tears, 57–103)—there still remains something unthought, as of yet uncaught, dimly disturbing, the “non-philosophical” (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy, 41). It awaits appreciation, an advent, but is always vacant of its arrival and only incompletely covered by adventure (AI, 296). It is not merely transcendent either, not merely absent or un-experienced. And even if you answer it with the ultimate rationality of existence (as the Enlightenment tried) or the self-explication of the Good (as in John Leslie’s fascinating work), or with aesthetic self-justifcation (as Whitehead proposes), “it” manifests as an inexplicably moving desire, a silent urge, and an intricate emptiness in the midst of everything, even as a mystery. It speaks only while we close the mouth (muein, mysterion) in the act of speaking. So, then, ask yourself: What, in light of this X (one cannot point at, it is not a “this”), does the difference of relative and absolute still mean? And is such a differentiation, then, meant to avoid or to release the violence of superiority? Does the fght over who is “right”—the relativist or the absolutist—not wither away in the face of the existential impact of the profound gratitude (or horror) of existence that answers to no side? This existential awareness is the reason that, with all due respect to their accomplishments of interreligious understanding, I don’t think that classical approaches to matters of religious truth—whether expounded by the

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systematic or speculative theologies of a particular wisdom tradition, which speak more to its subjective (emic) side, or by following the more objective (epic) paths of comparative religion (Kitagawa, Quest, 1–14)—will suffce to address the truth of transreligious relativity. These projects have already methodically excluded the transformative, existential character of this endeavor. For the same reasons, I cannot follow a merely logical analysis of truth claims as it is pursued by both analytic philosophies, which play more to an epistemological reduction of the mystery, and certain modes of philosophy of religion, insofar as they often hide their Christian evangelical bias in terms of logical games just under the surface (Plantinga, Confict, part I)—although one can meaningfully ask for such a connection between analytic philosophy and relativism in a nonfundamentalist way (Runzo, Reason, passim). With Robert Nozick (Explanations, 8–24), I am appalled by dead-man-walking arguments: “either you accept my logic or you are basically stupid; if there was power of life and death, you would be dead!” With Whitehead, I think that aesthetics is deeper than logic and exceeds its power of necessity with its power of gracefulness (RM, 99). In my view, all of these attempts of rational, logical, and unambiguous, frankly: lifeless, closing arguments on truth remain somehow caught in the subject-object dialectic of their very constructions that already exclude the very recognition of the existentiality of existence (Epilogue)—or in Buddhist terms: they remain bound by maya that perpetuates, rather than exhausts, karmic dharma. My project may come close to certain patterns of comparative theology (Clooney, Theology, ch. 3) or of a global philosophy of religion (Runzo, Philosophy, 1–12), and especially the mystical turn of religious studies (Ferrer and Sherman, Turn, 1–78)—as it (although often developed in a Christian or post-Christian environment) does comprise the existential and rational as well as the insider and outsider perspectives of religious truth. Then again, I feel that, while such projects honor the mystery of existence, they either tend to retreat from its unspeakability by constructing a new system of universal comprehension (not excluding attempts to comprehensibility of some process philosophies) or by eliminating it wholly from the equation (ch. 6). In both cases, the mystery is either silenced or silencing. This double avoidance of engaging the mystical (holding it in contrast to both silence and system) is the place where—from my own WhiteheadianDeleuzean sympathy for a apophatic-polyphilic polypoetics of multiplicity (TDM, chs. 5, 8); the resistance to the philosophical and theological reiterations of the One, the Two, and the Many (TDM, ch. 2); a new mystagogy of infnite becoming (TDM, chs. 9–10); and the immanence of apophatic “bodying” (TDM, ch. 9)— the question of the “non-philosophical” and “non-theological” character of aesthetic (prehensive) existentiality arises, questioning the closed horizons of understanding (logos) and consciousness (bodhichitta) (ch. 7),

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not as the “synthesis” of reason and revelation, philosophy and religion, but (in commemoration of Suhrawardi) as their “reverse synthesis” (GPW, 190). Instead of fusion or mere intellectual traversal, the identities of both thought patterns and cosmological horizons (worldviews) of philosophy and religion must be upset by the fathomless “outside” that is their innermost condition: the Apophatic Beyond of Reality that we have always already veiled or foreclosed in our smooth systems of coherent understanding (SAQ, ##80–2). Saving the mystical, which is nevertheless of noetic nature (irfan, ma‘rifa), from limited horizons of thought and consciousness (GL, ##1–3), devised by philosophies and theologies against one another, among themselves, or in their fusions, means to interrupt the perpetuation of this foreclosure of Reality by “the veil of knowledge” (KI, 187–8). Several strategies of philosophers against this closedness of philosophy and (by extension) of religion have been suggested in the postmodern context, saving the apophatic through the reversal of philosophy and religion to some kind of non-philosophy and non-religion, for instance, by Georges Bataille’s “water in water” as the return to (animal) immediacy (Theory, 17–26); by the summons of alterity (even the illeity of God) before the constitution of the closed horizons of subjectivity in Emmanuel Levinas (Davies, Levinas, 99); by différance before, despite, and underlying any logocentric engrossing in Jacques Derrida (Différance, 1–28); by the unframed multiplicity before any oneness in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (TDM, ch. 8); or by the One-in-One, the “other” as radical immanence in us, the vision-as-One before any divergences, in François Laruelle’s non-philosophy (Principles, 3–5). While all of them, in their own differentiations and alternative conceptualizations, try to revert philosophy from thought (logos, nous) to the release of Reality (or the Real) before and outside of its self-closure, their understanding of religion in this context is ambiguous, but nevertheless recognizable, in one or another cryptic or overt way, as epiphenomenon of representational thinking, but also (at least) as harboring the potential of its own reversal wherever one can detect in it that which obstructs ordinary religious modi operandi regarding thoughts, rites, doctrines, social organizations, and political authority through the interruptions of the apophatic subversion of orthodoxy and knowability that resists simple moves of closure, synthesis, or fusion (Sherwood and Hart, Derrida; Foucault, Religion; Bryden, Deleuze; Laruelle, Christ). Reverting to the apophatic One in its original “place” of absolute immanence, saving it from any philosophical grasping in the horizon of dualisms of immanence and transcendence (Laruelle, Principles, 22), or to the pure transcendental and non-subjective consciousness stream of multiplicity before any subject-object differentiation and both philosophical and religious constructions of world (Deleuze, Immanence, 25–7), with the same effect of hindering the impulse of dualisms (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus,

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20), these approaches mirror my own evocation of aesthetic existentiality: opening a new perceptivity (Whitehead says: prehensibility) of the transreligious “unity” of religions beyond their horizons of the knowability of Reality and, hence, also in the relativity of their profound truths to one another (RM, 104–5). As the philosophical self-closing thought patterns and their religious, self-imitating, structured formations of revelation cannot be fused, their “oneness” can only be attempted in the reversal of these closures, on the back side of thought and religious patterning of revelation, as it were, fnding their unity in the unknowable, inaccessible mystery that always escapes (PUP, #24). With Deleuze and Guattari, we could call this performative process (as it is not a process of thought alone but of existential realization), “becoming multiplicity” (from and in Reality) instead of being one (with Reality) or many (claiming one’s own reality as ultimate) (Plateaus, 24); with Laruelle we might call it “untaught knowing”—the ftra of the Qur’an and the Bahá’í writings (Eschraghi, Kommentar, 510–2), shattering any imaginations of knowing (GL, #111)—of the unclaimed and detached One-in-One in us instead of Cusa’s “learned unknowing” of the transcendent One (Christ, 13–4), although this reversal might already be a sign of a dualistic splitting of their apophatic indifference (GPW, §40). In my understanding, this is what apophatic-polyphilic theopoetics pursues (TDM, part 1) and that will underlie the coming expositions on the transreligious relativity of truth as the truth of transreligious relativity at the core of any relevant truth claims of religions (Introduction). Yet, these philosophies or non-philosophies, as far as they not only become a means to transcend philosophical thought closure, are by such openings not themselves open to the apophatic heart of revelation either (like the correspondence of irfan and wahy in Sufsm), as for these non-philosophies revelation just represents an effect of the false consciousness of thought to be still based on, and intruded by, the myths against which philosophy (in its Greek origination) arose in rebellion, but as an incomplete one. Since this inherent movement of philosophy (from mythos to logos) must lead to its own self-overcoming beyond its representational patterns of limited horizons of consciousness, it will now (after having ruled our revelation as myth) exclude spiritual insight and sensibility and instead rediscover materiality in its many organic formations and strata from economy to politics as its real site (Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 71). Hence, this new engagement beyond thought fnds sympathy with Marxism (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus; Laruelle, Introduction) or with other forms of materialism (Coole and Frost, Materialisms), rather than with religion, and partly shares the contempt these movements have for religions, except that their new recognition of immanence is also beyond the simple identifcation with matter or mind, or spirit, for that matter. Non-philosophy might have neglected that this triadic

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movement, enriched with the scientifc mind-set, was already the dynamics of the evolution of Greek thought: from mythos to logos (reason and science) to mysterion (Cornford, Religion, chs. 4, 6); from reason (Ideas) to the Good beyond Being (Plato); from empirical knowledge to intellectual vision, which is not thought, but experience (theoria) (Aristotle); from intellect to the One in and beyond the All (Plotinus); from God as different from the world to the Godhead indifferent to both (Meister Eckhart, Nicolas of Cusa)—and if not, it plays their insight down or limits their success (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy, 44–9; Gangle, Philosophies, 19). If these non-philosophies, with rare exceptions (Levinas), recognize their own mystical turn (Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida)—as part of, or as moving against, the “turn to religion” in Francophone postmodern philosophy in recent years, but also beyond (Vattimo), or even against the mystical as such, which still retains its deep traces (Badiou)—they detect it only as faint signs of the resistance of the “non-philosophical” in any philosophical and religious mode of closure and consider it only as modes of resistance, appearing in (rare) heresies against orthodoxies—such as Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, messianism, and Christian mysticism (Laruelle, Mystique)—and as secondary, maybe infantile nuclei of their own project (Almond, How, 329–44; Deleuze, Regimes, 261; Gangle, Philosophies, 19), or, more promising, as the material of non-philosophical negotiation of religious appearances after the constructs of philosophy of religion (Smith, What, 280–98). Nevertheless, such a project repeats the same problematic relationship with Truth and Reality (that some would even allow for “it” to appear as God or the One or pure consciousness) that, like the missing relativity of (religious) truth, is the theme of this book: Instead of understanding themselves to be relative to one another, which interreligious thinkers and comparative religious thought consider to be the standard of their engagement today (Panikkar, Dialogue), they seem to imitate the long past of religious confict insofar as they stand to one another in relations of superiority, mutual exclusion, or supersession (Badiou, Deleuze; Gangle, Philosophies). And instead of considering their common motivations of the engagement with the “non-philosophical,” even if it is formulated in as divergent and contradictory terms as that of immanence and otherness, oneness and multiplicity, materiality and orgiastic intensity, for which their differences would appear as alternatives in a mutually trans-philosophical project (both as transcending the philosophical project as such and as making their own project relative to one another), many of them (not all, however, and never Deleuze), they fnd themselves enmeshed in fghts over mutual superiority, denigration, attacks, and bound by a Darwinian strife to create a space for their own discipleship and infuence. What is more, not only is their learning regarding the mystical traditions and religious philosophies often scant (only engaged as far as it is of “use”

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for their argumentation), it is almost exclusively limited to exhibitions of certain modes of Christianity (and Judaism), which is then identifed with “the religion,” leaving, for instance, Islamic thought to political discourse, and ignoring Eastern religions (despite the long history of comparative studies in their own lands) ironically to non-philosophers. It can, then, not even see the vast and deep massiveness and subtlety of the worldwide transreligious connectivity of its own mystical endeavor and its own mystical specimens, such as Meister Eckhart (Fox, Meister Eckhart, chs. 3, 10–1). To this extent, their project is highly limited to what postcolonial discourse has understood to be one of the major forms of the blindness of Eurocentric colonialism (Pui-Lan, Imagination, ch. 8): the identifcation of one’s limited understanding and prejudices with religion as such that then can be used as a lens and weapon to qualify any religious phenomenon in the world as superstition, and the illusion that by engaging certain modes of Christianity one has devastated “religion” as such—a view that some still unconsciously share with Hegel, ignoring even the long Buddhist engagement with Heidegger (Nishitani, Religion). Besides, the “other” opening of philosophy, not that beyond thought, but that beyond the cultural limitations of any philosophy, that has fundamentally characterized the sensibilities of interreligious discourses, that is, the awareness of non-philosophy to be part of an inter-philosophical multiplicity and its mutual limitation throughout the world’s cultures (Panikkar, What, 116–36; Budick, Crises, 1–22), seems to be only in the very early stages of awareness, not to speak of any serious refection. Would not the critical review of a democracy of accesses (Faber, Democracy, 192–237)—from the One (Laruelle), against the One (Deleuze), as summons of the Other (Levinas), as demand of Justice (Derrida), as weak messianism (Benjamin)—free the mystical recognition of the inaccessibility of Reality (and in resistance to any identifcation of “it” with the world or even any form of current society) lack its very impulse if it excludes religious experience of the apophatic, which only exists perfomatively in the veil of its diverse appearances within religions and philosophies, reverting this impulse into a dead gesture? Does this sought Reality, if one tries to extract it from its appearances in lived religions and philosophies, really taking seriously the fact that in many non-Christian religious traditions the Apophatic is not a mere aim to be desired in a (false) movement of transcendence (and as an object of transcendence), but constitutes the innermost nature of humanity, even if it were hidden, distorted, and over-crowded with clamor of ignorance of our human Self (chs. 3, 7)? Does such arrogated superiority over religions and philosophies not miss Whitehead’s much more plurivocal immanent selfcreativity of all existents (AI, 236) and the mutual immanence of all phenomena in their revelation of Reality (AI, 201), as well as disregard the radicalism of “unknowing” with respect to its recovery of “its” undifferentiated essence

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before difference and indifference, for instance, in Nicolas of Cusa and Nagarjuna, Laozi and the Buddha, alike (Faber, Immanence, 91–110; GPW, §40)? And is not such a project really missing its own relativity as a measure of its truth if it embraces the blind foreclosure of religious sojourners of the radical immanence of Reality, which is “its” absoluteness and detachment, “the Quintessence of truth, the inmost Reality of all things” (KI, §105), such as can be found in as diverse traditions as the Upanishads and Ibn ‘Arabi, the Bhagavat Gita and Nagarjuna, Laozi and the Bahá’í writings (ch. 1)? Does this “non-philosophical” immanence not end with the shell of poverty in the search for, or claims of, a new materiality of intensities without the performative energies of love, compassion, and peace, aroused toward the unity of humanity as humanity, that religions have always harbored and lived, thereby erasing the motive force of these movements, for instance, of the dharmakaya in its wisdom and compassion (ch. 8)? And does such an avoidance of the living character of religions in the face of Reality not forget that religions can be the fercest critics of their own failures (PT, #40)? Hence, one can be inspired by non-philosophy, by new concepts (opening venues beyond conceptuality) such as the immanence (to) itself or of the multiplicity (it opens to) itself, neither identical with transcendence or immanence, nor with God or the world, nor with “itself” (TDM, ch. 8). But its revolt against metaphysics and religion is too small to grasp the dynamics of life (PR, 104–5) as it addresses itself creatively in religions, spiritualities, and in pure ways of life of sages of wisdom (which, with Deleuze, always seeks pure life), and it is too narrow to grasp the cycles of thought, intellect, and reason with their liminal “unknowing” in the face of apophatic Reality if it seeks their overcoming in a mysticism of materiality since it remains, in Whitehead’s understanding of cosmology, reductionist of the nature of experience (SMW, 17) and the all-relationality of all experiences with the texture of existence in its materiality and mentality (PR, 3–4, 20–1). Instead, the irreducibility of a spirituality of existentiality and the consciousness of perceptivity (Whitehead’s prehensibility) appear only when one seeks the universalization of the event of understanding in its sympathy with, and limiting integration into, the world of infnite becoming, driven toward a perpetual process of self-transcendence by its immanent divine “otherness” (PR, part 5). I will rather not discard the existential motivation liberated through absolute immanence of absolute otherness of Reality (GL, #21) against the limited horizons of existing in mere immanence for oneself (GL, #13), that is, without recognition of one’s innermost Self (GL, #2) as the revelation of “its” resonances with one’s Self—especially since such a spiritual journey of awakening is associated not with the fight into imagination, but with detachment and the death of Self (SV, 81). Since this “wisdom” is devised by religions (in a broad sense)—even if only through the minority lens of the Bahá’í

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Faith for which a discourse of transreligious relativity of Truth existentially exemplifes the unknowing of Reality before, beyond, and within thought and orthodoxy (Faber, Sense, 36–56)—I rather concur with Whitehead’s intimation of religion as the site for seeking the relativity of its Truth as the Truth of Reality. Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing fux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the fnal good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest. . . . The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a fash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience. (SMW, 191–2)

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In the absence of any perspective on this mystery of existence—and this is central to my proposal—this mystery refects itself back onto the mystery of the process of Reality itself (TDM, ch. 8). Its apophatic “absoluteness” returns us to a relativity by which we may become aware (even in the sense of Buddhist awakening) that we live in a horizon that always evades grasping, but expresses itself in the relative, the incomplete, the moving, and the transforming of lived religions and spiritualities as well as performed thought, although in their self-limitation in the face of Reality (SAB, #21). It is in this context of lived existentiality that resorting to violence is futile as we become processual to ourselves and to our truth claims. May we seek the “presence” of “its” silence that is neither silenced when we approach it nor silencing when “it” approaches us. It points toward the multiplicity of life and offers us a new appreciation of the contrasts always arising in conviviality not to be meant as a means for mutual destruction, but mutual coinherence. 5. THE FIRST WORD (EVENT AND HORIZON) Before I enter the discussion of the claim of the relativity of Truth and of transreligious relativity answering this Truth, I want to end this Prologue with some methodological remarks on the paradigm in which I have chosen to address these matters. To repeat its essential element from the previous section: The methodological implications, spelled out throughout the book, include with the choice of the existential approach decisions regarding a paradigm shift toward an aesthetic of event and horizon. Generally, the current discussions of relativism under the postmodern condition of humanity seems

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to have lost any measure of reference strong enough to make any claims viable in the multiplicity and often violent competitions of truth claims to succeed or to have any foundation why they should succeed besides either Darwinian survival or mere contextual accidents. Variable pre-modern, modern, and postmodern paradigms vie for attention and seek superiority among their competitors or at least for their voice to be heard on the market of alternatives. Their intentions and justifcations for the meaningfulness of the whole process of asking questions regarding truth claims are diverse and often mutually divisive. That will not change. What can change is the paradigm under which these questions operate and the reasons why they should be considered at all, which in my understanding is really only of importance if they would like to contribute to fundamentally meaningful values and connections such as Plurivocity and Univocity, Fairness and Justice, Compassion and Love, Freedom and Intensity, Harmony and Peace. They don’t have to, if they want to follow other values and intentions. But at least they will have to say so and consciously accept responsibility for their rejection. As this book is written under the condition, maybe as contingent as any other one, namely, that religious peace is preferable as such and, if we need a functional connection, that this religious conviviality it proposes is, in itself and as a paradigm for any embodiment of peace, even necessary for the mere survival of humanity, but even more so for the becoming-human of humanity, I can justify this choice only from the inside of its promises to be valid. The paradigm, I think, that can facilitate the plausibility of this decision to be actually working, at least as a peace-suggesting proposal, is that of event and horizon. I must back up for a moment and consider the current alternatives. Premodern proposals live generally from some kind of integralism of a culturally accepted worldview in a homogeneous society. Fewer societies are such today (nor have they ever been in any simplistic way) that they either share a common worldview or the homogeneity necessary to habitually accept such a general horizon of integration. But even historically, it has become obvious that an integrative horizon was never a natural phenomenon, but a cultural choice, constructed by myriads of connections among a society that in every-day exchanges or in dramatic fashion, such as occupations and wars, is constituted by relations of power, overpowering, and imperial mechanisms of submission, which were “naturalized” over time. The best that the contact and overlap between Islam and Christianity created in the West was the uneasy peace of the Andalusian convivientia, the worst were the wars between their empires; the best that the Indian continent produced was the multireligious tolerance of the Mughal king Muhammad Akbar II and the peaceful coordination of life under King Asoka, while both were still the outcome of oppression and war as well as imperial decree. The integralist paradigm bases itself on colonializations of the mind by stabilized power relations. And so were the

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expansions of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation really a question of who would have the political and military power to succeed (Kitagawa, Quest, chs. 3–5). The pre-modern integrative paradigm, where it survives, is therefore linked to these power struggles and depends on mechanisms of overpowering. If these mechanisms are spiritualized, they become the might of excommunication and dehumanization or are reborn in images of eternal hell and the total eschatological devastation of the other. They depict Reality as a wrathful king of might and shattering power and legitimate themselves by such fantasies (AI, 169). This is not a paradigm of peace. The modern paradigm (although it is complex in itself) was born from the endless suffering that the competition of the fragmented claims of premodern integralism produced—and maybe the light of decentered, more chaotic political vacancies as well as rhizomatic intellectual awakenings in the Renaissance. It is based on the insight that religion seems to be virtually indistinguishable from violence, but that our humanity is not inevitably bound by this violence. Seeking other grounds of understanding, Reason was born as universal force and later pluralized with Experience. Over against the integrative forces of overpowering Traditions and the religious and political Authorities that claim them as their possession, Nature became its new feld and Intellect its instrument. In fact, both reason and experience became the stronghold of an independence of social and individual choices (from any religious authority) to be managed by arguments and reasons and to be backed up by experiential insights in the importance of compassion and love, as well as the intellectual virtues of justice and fairness, leading to democratizations of the political feld and of the mind alike. While experiences are always pluralistic in themselves, reason discovered its own inability to fnd foundations for the unity of argumentation, or only again under occupation, oppression of difference, and overpowering and imperial coercion. Nevertheless, the rise of science was already on the horizon, given the inherent thrust of the preference of natural connections, discovered by reason and experience over and against tradition and authoritarian revelation. While science was a blessing for the relativization of political and religious manipulation, we know of course today that it also could always be and was actually functionalized by the powers-to-be and has, in fact, contributed gravely to the greatest military devastations and humanitarian crises in the 20th century. Yet, science has also given us a new story of integration: the evolution of humanity on this planet, the ecological interaction of the Earth, and their embededness in the evolution of the whole universe. Nevertheless, the built-in tension or even opposition between nature and God, science and religion, reason/experience and tradition/revelation, mechanicism and organicism, makes this paradigm less likely to contribute to transreligious peace as a matter of survival

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and necessity of humanity beyond uncertain, ambivalent, and antagonistic limitations. The postmodern paradigm, faceted as it is, knows all that and is disillusioned by all of these trajectories: the power of insight by either revelation and tradition, and religion in general, as well as the power of reason and experience, and science in general, but also the ability to facilitate social reform beyond violent clashes of forces of progress and conservation, tradition and utopism (Best and Kellner, Theory, passim). Postmodern thought is thoroughly relativistic, accepts no foundations, and still has used its insights not to justify the ensuing postmodern condition of a fragmentation that follows from these earlier paradigms (not postmodern philosophical diagnosis itself), just in a more localized manner, more Darwinian, as it were, but to deconstruct all of their presuppositions as contingent, contextualized, embedded constructions of power relations that all to easily were equated with reality. Its relativism has also infected the most basic story on the verge of its appearance, the story of evolution, as the integrative intuition it can exude has opened itself again to a multiverse of infnite variations and possibilities for which (if it could speak and laugh) any unifying direction seems to be only a hilarious joke. But, in their diversifed philosophical accounts, these deconstructions have also given rise to many new unifying connections with old wisdoms and ethical imperatives: Interconnectedness and mutuality have become as all-present methodological measures and values as justice and mysticism, pluralism of experiences and secular public spaces, religious plurality and freedom from religion, democratization as well as respect for the other have become irresistible values of the future. Ecological integrity has gained political capital, and decolonization has rekindled hope for the racially, economically, politically, and religiously oppressed, excludes, and invisible. Whether this paradigm will in any of its trajectories succeed ever to correspond to a future society of peace based on the insight of the relativity of truth as realized in constructive transreligious cooperation and harmonization is yet to be seen. But if we want this peace, then that it has to be constructed, is out of the question after the impact of the postmodern paradigm. That we should want this peace, but may in deconstructionist analysis be too weak to succeed, is the ambivalent motive force of the various streams of the postmodern endeavor. Within the sphere of the postmodern condition and its concurrent philosophical discussions as they relate to the role, function, and meaning of religion, several methodological possibilities have been explored. Yet, all of them relate to this question of ambivalence and weakness with an interesting twist: They all accept weakness not as disheartening, but as virtue for the success of a new ecological and cosmopolitan paradigm of the unifcation of humanity regarding the values of compassion, love, justice, liberation,

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and peace, where the old paradigms have failed (Greenway, Belief, chs. 6–7). Instead of strong claims of either/or, both/and statements are becoming prominent where the ecological interdependence of body and mind, society and individual, politics and religion is acknowledged. Instead of occupying, imperial, and colonizing victories of an reiterated Oneness (one might only think of the nationalist and communist ideological claims of the early 20th century), which is always constructed and not just given, multiplicity, divergence, and contextuality make only weak claims on the matter of which form of unity is the best and most valuable. Messianism and apocalypticism have given way to processual and cyclical modes of renewal such that political power cannot use religious authority anymore for the justifcation of its own interests hidden in the name of holy wars, the furthering of the apocalyptic battle between good and evil, and a messianic militarism of forced political and social change as well as the submission of the religious or nonreligious other under parochial religious pronunciations of unity. Weakness or weakening of categories, or even in the overcoming of conceptuality, has as much become a measure of this postmodern exploration of truth (Vattimo, Interpretation, ch. 1) as has the search for the often hidden implications of philosophical and religious traditions to this effect gained acceptance: that religions begin with the weakness of compassion and love (Caputo, Weakness, ch. 1), and that the strength of justice can only have a healing impact if it comes in the form of example and attraction for which often even suffering is inevitable instead of overpowering. Both the relativizing effect of such an approach through weakness and the conviction of its purpose of peace-making has become a fragile and often unspoken desire for the harmonizations prevalent within and between diverse methodological streams of this postmodern kind. It is not without this reason that hermeneutics and phenomenology have positioned themselves against the metaphysical traditions in philosophy and religion to avoid the always-lurking metaphysical violence of reiterated unifcation (Marion, What Do We Mean, 1–7). It does also not surprise that the epistemological questions of the justifcations of truth claims have been at the forefront of discussions in philosophy and religion, themselves playing out in the dialectic of experience and interpretation, immediacy and layered mediation of any knowledge and awareness, as well as literalism and symbolism. While each stream might emphasize either of them over the other, mere opposition and isolation have become the enemy of the discussion. The linguistic turn has added the consciousness of the impossibility to fnd any uninterpreted truth through experience and reasoning, as all insights are embedded in interpretive circles of individual and social, cultural and religious, imagery, power dynamics, and histories of violence and suffering (Rasor, Faith, ch. 5), and that even post-philosophical revolts can only approximate in perpetual

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deferral of an arrival. There is no halting point here. There is no bottom or peak to be reached (Faber, Intermezzo, 212–38). Nevertheless, only onesided isolation on either side can claim that truth is either absolute or nonexistent. Rather, if we hold fast to the underlying purpose of peace-making and the inevitabilities of ecological necessities, both relativity and construction, on the one hand, and the seriousness of experiential and immediate existentiality in the world, on the other, condition one another in these cycles of searching after truth. Without being able to go into any details at this point—and as they will appear throughout this book—it is the presupposition of the following nine chapters of this book on the relativity of (religious) truth and its transreligious embodiment that the philosophy of Whitehead and the religious novelty of the Bahá’í Faith can contribute greatly to this wider discourse. As I have discussed in many other places, Gilles Deleuze was able to relate to Whitehead’s work not because it was a fxed metaphysical system, but because it opened a fresh access to the categories of our mind, not as transcendental conditions of the possibility of all experiences that the epistemological project assumes, but as a moving map of actual experiences as they emerge in a world of becoming and change, divergence and complexifcation, evolution and symbolization (Faber, Whitehead/Speed, 39–72). But these experiences are not merely immediate and pre-symbolic either (SY, part 1). They are caught up in cycles of symbolization and interpretation so much so that even the physical facts are already unifcations with their own directions of intensity and harmony, reduction and diversifcation (GPW, §§8, 13). No truth is without interpretation (GPW, §§41–2) and existentiality does not appear “naked” (TDM, ch. 6). And then again, this is now not a matter of skepticism, as epistemological and anti-metaphysical nihilistic streams of thought have it, or of the discardment of both, but a matter of circulation. Yet, it is also not a matter of infnite possibilities of a total relativistic debilitation, but of events of happening, of the actual becoming of truth (PR, 181–2). Nevertheless, such becoming, although it is an expression of a creativity that cannot fnd any rational or fnal foundation (PR, 20), is not lost in mere pluralism; rather, it is steeped in organic trajectories of harmonizations of opposing intensities toward nonviolence and peace, which become the site of the revelation of Reality (AI, 165–9). The Bahá’í writings unlock a resonant feld of understanding and conceptualization, and their unknowing. Not only did the Bahá’í movement arise right at the time and in the complexities of the emergence of the postmodern paradigm in the violent confuence of pre-modern and modern models of thought and action, as they were considered and tried out in Western and Islamic societies of the time (Saiedi, Gate, 1–19), while it proposes neither of them (Cole, Modernity, passim). The relativity of truth that it self-consciously claims is surrounded with the equally profound purpose of the reconciliation

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of the whole of humanity and each human being (in its own right) as well as the cycles of their environment and the Earth as a whole. The pronounced harmony of science and religion, reason and revelation, complicated with their mutual immanent unknowing, safeguards against isolation of the spheres, the disembodiment of knowledges, and the opposition between unity and multiplicity (Taylor, Reality, ch. 1). That any truth for the Bahá’í writings, but specifcally religious truth, is always veiled in, differentiated by, and revealed through symbolic and metaphorical language, invested with a spirit of infnite levels and labyrinths of infnite unknowability, instead of literal and immediate reiterations of patterns and structures, allows for the multiplicity of its facets to be set free and become mutually enhancing instead of releasing their destructive forces (Sours, Syllable, ch. 2). The four powers and sources of insight for the Bahá’í writings—experience and reasoning, tradition and intuition (SAQ, #83)—demonstrate a profound relativity of mutual dependence of any truth claim on incompleteness and leave a place for the world to be steeped in a mystery that in principle is beyond any reach of either of them. The acceptance of (virtually) all religions as true (GL, #111) defes simple explanations of either relativism or absolutism. The relativity of all categories, their construction, as it were, catapults us in a world of becoming, but not into chaos. Rather, the harmonization of all of these forces, their interdependency and coinherence, directs us toward ever-new cycles of intensity and harmony, the process of which becomes the very expression of ultimate Reality beyond any name, but in “its” infnitely many names and their mutual realization and embodiment, and the art of their peaceful growing together in always new religious, spiritual, mental, and social forms of life. It is this convivial life itself that, freed from the shackles of oppression, opposition, antagonism, and destruction, reveals, if at all, its own divine purpose. A special place in considering the methodology regarding the transreligious relativity of truth must be given to the hermeneutics of liberation of the ones that not even participate in the possibility to conceptualize the discourse and praxis of peace-making since they are on the outside of the whole process, the underside of society, and among the one excluded from recognition of existence among humanity or, as nonhuman life, the ecological interconnectedness as a whole. Paradoxically, postmodern relativity has hindered and furthered the encounter with the religious, racial, economic, social, cultural, and political other and excluded. Over the modernist preference of the power of universal, colonizing reason and individualistic, autonomous experience of Self, deconstructive relativism makes the multiplicity of minority voices and the social complexity of the Self visible again, as excluded multiplicity that (in religious terms) harbors the (divine) signs of interconnectedness and its brokenness. Yet, it has also left the philosophical and social space often with the impression that in the relativistic scheme of truth that it propagates

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nothing does really matter ultimately since there is no measure by which it would make sense to engage in liberation at all. Paradoxically, the postmodern paradigm and the liberation discourses within its wake have hindered a cosmopolitan aim of harmonization and peace, of the universal healing of this brokenness (ESW, §93) because of their suspicion that universalization is always oppressive, and have admitted a substantialist model again by which traditions (in the plural), liberated from universalizing reason and common human experience of being human, can be pitched against one another anew (Saiedi, Gate, 11–14). The regionalization of discourses has also strengthened an isolation of religious traditions in their self-assertion, at the expense or the denial, for instance, of the universality of human rights and universal human values and characteristics. Even more disturbingly, with the rediscovery of the importance of an unoccupied activation of a liberated multiplicity, the postmodern decentered chaosmos of divergent horizons has also, and by the same token, given way to new quasi-fundamentalist attempts of the recovery of a pre-modern religious orthodoxy with its renewed claims of superiority, which takes postmodern relativism as basis for its existence (“we are one voice among many”) and as justifcation for the denial of (the allegedly nihilistic implications of) this basis (“we make better sense of the chaos of voices”). It is in this context that Whitehead and the Bahá’í Faith contribute to a different integration of liberation into the conceptualization of a society of peace and a methodology related to this endeavor. A struggle for liberation that remains bound by a substantialist model splinters the rediscovered multiplicity and instigates the oppositional forces of minorities in their self-affrmation, which in their renewed antagonism are often tempted to fall back into the Darwinian struggle for survival, taking recourse to conceptual antinomies and actual violence in the interest of the liberation of specifc groups, classes, and ethnicities (Karlberg, Culture, chs. 1, 6)—for instance, by remaining, already with their analysis of oppressive structures, bound by an impression of the irreconcilable antagonisms of class or race or gender struggles. In the Whiteheadian philosophical paradigm and through Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation as well as the principles ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gleaned from it, conversely, this chaosmic and antagonistic multiplicity is meant to become transformed into (and to appear in the “form” of) nonviolent mutuality (Cole, Bahá’u’lláh, 79–98). Here, the overcoming of the oppression of excluded minorities of any kind and dimension must issue in the overcoming of the impulse of struggle itself by a fundamental reorganization of the whole social and ecological structure and their very conceptualization in the service of a universally reconciled society of peace (Karlberg, Democracy, passim). This, not any brushing over of the struggle for survival of minorities and the excluded, the poor, and the disadvantaged (Rieger, Remember, 20), but the recognition of mutuality

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in the nonviolent patient process of transformation of the whole human structure of “living together” religiously, ecologically, politically, socially, economically, and so on (Faber, Justice, 160–78), is the aim of Whitehead’s paradigm of harmony and intensity when it invokes the divine motive force of peace (AI, ch. 20), and it is the central conscious intention of the revelation of Bahá’u’lláh (ESW, 33). The mutual coinherence of all peoples of humanity with the Earth is released through a new course of actions for an “ever-advancing civilization” (GL, #109) that develops from and with the mutual conceptual relevance of the Bahá’í principles (PT, part 2) such as the unity in the multiplicity of the (Manifestation of) Reality/God and religions; the overcoming of all prejudices; the recovery of the socially constituted and personally responsible Self in its search after Truth/Reality; the permanent undermining of all the fantasies of racial, religious, sexual, or class superiority; the integration of minorities of any kind, of any “race, class, creed, or color” (ADJ, 22); the overcoming of economic, social, political, cultural, and religious suppression of the other by othering, exclusion, and structural injustice; the preference of the poor (HW. A, #57; SAB, #200); the comprehensive and global establishment of economic, social, and minoritarian justice; the adherence to the basic principle of compassion and consultation in all things, individually and socially, religiously and politically (TB, 168); and so on. This principled praxis is the site, methodologically and conceptually, in which the relativity of religious truth and its transreligious embodiment can become an expression not of a mere relativism of values and actions, but of the mutuality of all values in the actual compassion of peace-making that must be addressed with a peace-making vocabulary that in Wisdom without condescension (hikmat) and Exploration (bayan) without manipulation will “quench the hatred and the animosity which lie hid and smolder in the hearts of men” (ESW, #13). I shall not, therefore, in the coming chapters build a conceptual framework of the relativity of truth in its transreligious embodiment on the epistemological presuppositions and postmodern discussions per se, prevalent in the relativistic dialectic of experience and language; further, not on the antagonism of phenomenology and metaphysics as source of the interpretation of experience or the relativity of symbolization of truth, although they will all appear at some point in appropriate contexts in this book (and I have explained why I am not following the phenomenological/metaphysical split, and don’t see Whitehead and Deleuze follow it either in TDM, chs. 5, 15); not on divergent non-representational post-philosophical discourses, as their own internal antagonisms linger behind the promised overcoming of conceptual violence by envisioning conviviality only after the exclusion of the existentiality of religious experience; and not on the liberation discourse as such, although it reminds us of a new integration of tradition/revelation and reason/experience

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at the site of the excluded and the poor. The reason lies in the shift of the paradigm (already sketched above) that has happened with Whitehead’s and, as I see it, also in the Bahá’í revelation. Instead of remaining in the analysis of such interdependences, entanglements of mutual superiorities, or explorations of the conceptual space, or even refections on behalf of the excluded on the basis of only particular revelations against the oppressor, by which these tensions allow us to venture into an endless actual process of differentiation and opposition, I glean from Whitehead and the Bahá’í writings something different. In the most universal way formulated: that there is only a world at all because it “happens.” This is the existential and aesthetic approach, I mentioned in the last section (TDM, chs. 6, 8). It means this: Anything that actually happens cannot be restated in any categories without the impact that the novelty of that happening has on such an analysis (PR, 18–20). If anything that is is an event (as Deleuze claims for Whitehead and himself), if any event is a process of the becoming of new events, and if the process is a nexus of events and processes interlocked by mutual inclusion and creative surpassing alike (PR, 21–6), then we ought to shift the paradigm from the discussion of conditions and justifcations of truth, be they philosophical or actionist, categorical or revolutionary, to the actual happening of transformation in events of truth (Bradley, Transcendentalism, 155–91). This is the existential truth that only events release (Deleuze, Fold, ch. 6), but neither any analysis or theory or interpretation, as all of these activities are themselves already (the outcome of, and included by) such events of the happening of truth, nor any course of action per se, as all such courses actualize interpretations of past events and are already fading into past interpretations in the horizon of a new event. The appeal, then, is to the events that create the very horizons of understanding (and its overcoming in its old shells) and, at the same time, are expressions of such new, even unprecedented horizons they integrate and harmonize or leave out and discard. This is close to the post-philosophical agenda and the liberation discourse (Razor, Faith, 158–63), but it builds not on the preference of any revelation or method or non-conceptual materiality, or any epistemological site in antagonistic preference over others, but on the relativity of all of them in the novelty of their coinherent happening. The question is not a liberationist or hermeneutic, post-conceptual or epistemological one anymore, but one of event and horizon in their mutual pluralization and unifcation, creative renewal, and structures repetition, their “incoherent coinherence” and “processual connective transcendence” (I will take up this theme again later in the Epilogue: The Last Word). Transreligious relativity, then, is not an interpretation of truth, but happens as the event of truth. Whitehead expects such events to happen (MT, 174) and the Bahá’í revelation proclaims that such a profound event of renewal of,

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and novelty beyond, any past horizon of interpretation and for any course of action has happened (Sours, Station, ch. 6). It is through the shift of the horizon that the novel event opens that we may, without denying or disturbing, but by affrming, the circularity between reason and revelation, experience and interpretation, liberation and reconciliation, begin to understand the conceptualization of universal peace within a new cosmic and cosmopolitan consciousness of a transreligious humanity not only as urgent today but rather as inevitable actual condition of its very future.

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Chapter 1

The Relativistic Code

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“In the beginning was relativity.” In the beginning of the journey through the transreligious truth is the truth of relativity. While detractors of “universal relativity” follow the simple logic of the performative contradiction of such a true statement (if it is true, it must be wrong), Whitehead asserts not only the truth of relativity to be universal but universality to be grounded in relativity. “Universality of truth arises from the universality of relativity, whereby every particular actual thing lays upon the universe the obligation of conforming to it” (SY, 39). It is not the universality (of truth) that is in danger by claiming universal relativity, but particularity, because particularity would be lost if relativity is not the truth of its particular importance for the All of existence. The particular truth of religions is universally relevant, but their universality is established through their universal relativity. This is the thought to keep in mind as we begin to explore the “relativity of (religious) truth” with its universal importance for existence in a world of becoming and a multiplicity of worlds of becomings. 1. PALIMPSEST Consider a palimpsest. Reality is a palimpsest. Relativity makes a palimpsest. As palimpsest, reality is relativistic. And the ways to understand this relativity are themselves relativistic (Faber, Indra’s Ear, 179). As a palimpsest, reality’s relativity is irreducibly complex, as it were. That is, any attempt to simplify its many layers in order to establish unity must lead into some form of reductionism through which many of their defning characteristic will be lost. It is as if we were to understand a forest by one tree or a garden by one fower, or the universe, for that matter, by the Earth alone. 51

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A palimpsest is literally a layered text with overwritten, washed away, and added layers of new writing. Although it is a contested hypothesis that reality should be understood as a text, it is vital to the semiotic understanding of reality as, for instance, proposed by diverse philosophies of the 19th and 20th centuries such as that of C. S. Peirce or the structuralist and poststructuralist followers and revisionists of Ferdinand de Saussure (Gutting, Philosophy, 215–21). It became symbolized by the much repeated and embattled phrase of Jacques Derrida that “everything is text” (ibid., ch. 10). We will see that essential elements of this claim could also shine without direct semiotic references, for instance, in Gilles Deleuze’s cosmology, constructing reality of events and plateaus, and the like (Deleuze, Logic, ch. 11), and in Whitehead’s cosmology with its metaphysically universalist and pre-linguistic claim regarding the relativity of the texture of the universe (PR, 4). In a deeper sense, we may understand the “Qur’anic universe” as such a semiotic process produced by a Word of God as the sudden whole (Corbin, Body, 241), a coming together of mystical letters overshadowed by the Breath of the Merciful (Corbin, Alone, 201), and the harboring of the meaning of the act, process, and essence of creation (Cole, World, 145–63). The Báb and Bahá’u’lláh developed the implications of the kabbalistic potency of those creative letters (Savi, Summit, 242), as it had already become the sophisticated underpinning of Suf cosmology, to understand divine creativity in terms of the production and manipulation of primordial forms, shapes, and energies expressed in these letters of the (Arabic) alphabet (Schimmel, Dimensions, 411–25). Bahá’u’lláh’s scriptural Tablet of the Light Verse (Lawh-i Ayah-yi Nur), also called Commentary on the Disconnected Letters (Tafsir Hurufat al-Muquatta‘at), is such a rendition on the creation of the world from the so-called “disconnected letter” (Lambden, Tafsīr al-ḥurūfāt, passim), mysteriously ornamenting the beginning of many Qur’anic surahs and the Báb’s neo-qur’anic Qayyum al-Asma’s surahs (Lambden, Letters, passim). As they form creative words, not only an infnite multiverse of worlds was brought into existence but existence itself was constituted (Saiedi, Gate, 119–21). It is an often-repeated mantra of Bábi and Bahá’í scripture that (what it understands as) the Manifestations of the creative Will/Mind/Word of God, such as Moses, Jesus, or Bahá’u’lláh, are the One(s) “Whom Thou hast appointed as the Announcer of the One through Whose name the letter B and the letter E have been joined” (PM, #56:11). The creative imperative “Be!”—in the original Arabic represented by the word kun, consisting of the two letters kaf and nun (KA, n188 on ¶177)—is hereby a semiotic reconstruction of the biblical creation impulse of Gen 1:1–3 in which God “speaks” the world into being (Izutsu, Sufsm, 198; Brown, Beginning, 29). In the creative process, then, not only are any of these creative letters themselves a sign (surah) of/from God. In the words and sentences they form—like the surahs

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of the Qur’an—they inscribe creativity and meaning onto the Mother Book, the Hidden Scroll, that is, the hidden Text that is the texture of the world itself (Lepain, Tablet, 50 with n30). In the metaphorical “heavenly” language of the exalted divine dominion, the world is a text enfolding a texture that is created from the movements of the divine Pen and the infnite sea of divine Ink (Milani and Fananapazir, Study, passim). In fact, creation springs from one Point on the divine scroll as it fows from this divine Ink like a tear drop or drop of blood (SV, 57), and its text/ure unfolds in its letters and words a palimpsest, many times overwritten, recreated, rejuvenated through acts of divine creativity, a new creation, a new Day (Saiedi, Gate, 78–81). If we, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá desires, recognize “the tablet of existence as a scroll endlessly unfolding” and “all created things . . . upon that scroll as letters and words” (SAB, #29), we will also awaken to a new understanding of creation as layered with cycles of time and strata of renewal, forming a complex book of which our world forms an infnitesimal part, as it is itself many times overwritten, renewed, and washed away. From this description, it may have become clear that the assumption of complex layers of this cosmic texture is only invalidated if it was reduced to a neat little system of related parts—like a puzzle, ftting together to a seamless picture. Yet, taken as a relativistic complex of creative, unprecedented, and reciprocal rhythms, themes, pitches, and harmonies of descriptions, inscriptions, prescriptions, as well as their mutual interference with all of the possible patterns of mutual entrusting or elimination that are already inscribed, highlighting or fading in ever-new compositions, Reality is a writing-on, a composing-anew, and an eternal process of reconstructing and surprising novelty in all the repetitions, recapitulations, returns of its textual/textured creativity. Although the human urge for foundations tends to systematize reality into those “neat little systems of thought,” they indicate, as Whitehead has so aptly commented, nothing more than a “defect” whereby the human lack of imagination “over-simplifes its expression of the world” (RM, 50). Instead of neat little puzzle-pictures by which we reduce reality to sets of “dogmatic statements of the obvious” (PR, 8), Whitehead wants to raise awareness for an understanding of reality that cannot be conceptualized into defnite systems, but will always end and renew itself in cycles formed of fnite and vanishing events of momentariness forming ever-new patterns of existence. The more we use our imagination as instruments to release the potencies of seemingly defned facts and correlative conceptual sets of interpretation, and the more we regain the capacity to feel the infux and movement of the world process before and in all formal stabilizations (PR, 130), the more we will fnd ourselves in a vast world with an infnite, always yet unthought-of background and an always yet unwritten future to which we can at best react with

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“tentative formulations of the ultimate” (PR, 8)—of the unknown that calls to a creative life, a new Day, a writing-on of the scroll of the world (Rev. 6:14). With Deleuze we might say that the world is not stratifed in clear-cut hierarchies of systems (something he labels to be arboreal), but interconnected in relativistic ways by intersecting “planes of immanence” (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy, ch. 2) or plateaus of integrated meaning (in lively changing rhizomatic connectivity). Although such planes form in themselves a unity of some sort—which some have identifed with the Platonic khora (place) while others prefer organic metaphors—its integrated immanent elements are not fxed monads or unities of systematic immovability, but, in Deleuzian diction, of manifold intensities (Deleuze, Fold, 116–7), that is, nomads of constant distributing movement through these planes (Deleuze, Difference, 37), of events (Deleuze, Fold, ch. 6) and foldings (Deleuze, Negotiations, 156–63). And instead of a priori internally and externally fxed planes of a stratifed reality, Deleuze imagines their structure to be relativistic, that is, constantly recreating itself internally and intersecting with another in contingent ways (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 53–7). As something “inscribed” in one plane of meaning—like an event or a concept—is constantly alive and moving in relation to the movements of all other inhabitants of such a plane, so are all the planes, whether existing or newly forming or disappearing as integrative unities of meaning, constantly shifting in the mutual touch, interference, and departure of their populations (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy, 57–9). Any event of a plane can thereby be a point of interference between many planes, infuencing and being infuenced by them, contributing to their respective diversifying movements, and making sense always only in many ways—in its life cycle rhizomatically integrating (in) new planes and disintegrating old planes. As the process of Reality of this world of becoming, understood in this way, appears as a palimpsest of creative movements, multivalence, ambiguity, and polysemy, it is easy to overlook that the multilayered reality of the universe indicated by Bahá’í writings is quite resonant with, if not congenial to, the creative power that the relativity of such a Reality-in-becoming releases. First and foremost, since the fundamental approach to Reality in Bahá’í scripture (GL, #1)—and hence forming some kind of Bahá’í identity of thought (Stockman, Bahá’í Faith, 31–3)—is expressive of an understanding of the unity of God (tawhid-i ilahi) as an “unknowable essence” (dhat-i ghayb), the biblical admonition (and its comparative refections within scriptural texts of other religions) to avoid making any picture of God or ultimate Reality (for both of which is used the same concept: al-haqq) is to be taken seriously beyond any compromise (Lambden, Background, 37–78). Insofar as this understanding of the unity of God/Reality enfolds all understanding of unity—especially in its three-in-one Bahá’í formulation of the unity of God, religion, and humanity

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(Bowers, God, ch. 13)—one should not try to force one’s mind to imagine an objectifed picture of Reality. Instead of attempting to systematize Reality in the form of a static idol, assuming a God’s-eye-view, which in the Bahá’í context is not only considered impossible but impious (GL, #26), the processual and relativistic understanding of the universe as palimpsest will not only save us from such a temptation but it will provide a constructive alternative implicit in the apophatic imperative. As the infnite universe with its many worlds is considered the juncture of the creative letters of the Word (PUP, #57), this Word refects, at the same time, the creative process in light of the unknown Reality of which it is considered the perfect mirror (PUP, #46). Since such a manifestation of the impossible—the divine beyond all categories mirrored within categories (Faber, Tears, 96–7)—is not only understood as inscribed in any creature of any kind and level of existence but as manifesting itself—its Self (nafs)—throughout many worlds and in many forms appropriate to these worlds (Corbin, Alone, 186–8), it manifestly cuts through any isolated integrity or stratifcation of these worlds, levels, structures, or planes of immanence as it appears as an event in and between them (ch. 7)—an event that always escapes its situation, but also any fnal naming and systematization, into neat categories or their hierarchical arrest. We fnd many such intersections between seemingly integrated structures of meaning in the Bahá’í writings, some of them tiered, some of them equalized, some of them transgressing any neat systematic imagination. These intersections link infnite worlds of adventure, but also infnite levels of worlds of ascension. They introduce us to a multiverse of mystical and cosmological approximations of the Throne of God (which in mystical language hints at the hidden presence of God as it spans heaven and earth), but also to many shifting spiritual states only insuffciently represented by hierarchical images or linear connections (Savi, Summit, 31–6). In their imaginative expressions, they transverse symbolic complexities like palaces and gardens to indicate both progressive intensifcation of approaching the presence of God though gates and ways, walled courtyards and antechambers, but they also portray that which thereby escapes in terms of more chaotic hiatuses of infnite impassable seas and hidden realms (Collins, Mythology, passim). They bridge the journey of the soul toward/with God/Reality through mystical valleys and diffcult ascents to mountains, but also leave us in their shifting emphases with nonlinear variations of their theme. Even the irreducible threefold of realms or worlds of God-CommandCreation (Momen, God, 30), which is essential to the deeper articulation of the Bahá’í multiverse and symbolized in the so-called “ringstone symbol” (Figure 1), is not only represented by three horizontal lines consisting of the letters B (ba) and H (ha)—hidden remembrances to the word and reality of the hidden and manifest side of bahá’ (LG, ##907–11)—but cut through by a

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Figure 1  Ringstone symbol of the Most Great Name.

vertical line, indicating the cycling process of emanation, manifestation, and return of the Manifestations of Reality throughout all of the realms (Lambden, Word, passim). They enfold themselves in a multiplicity of divine refection and presence in multiple ways. They emphasize rather than hide the palimpsest of Reality of which they are the chief Bahá’í conceptual expression (ch. 7). In terms of Deleuze’s intersecting planes, we could say that they form the extreme possibility of events that are not only present on some planes as most events are, but on all planes—not yet created or already vanished; past, present, or future; spiritual or material; uncreated or not even conceived yet. Such extraordinary events would be infuential on, and infuenced by, all planes of existence. Such events would express absolute relativity or (to use a term of Charles Hartshorne) surrelativity (Hartshorne, Relativity, 21), as they always harbor, mirror, hide, and carry the burden of the infnity of relations to ever other planes of existence and meaning, which are otherwise inaccessible from some, many, or any of the ones to which they are related as events (ch. 6).

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2. VARIATIONS, PERMUTATIONS Another way of conceiving the unity and multiplicity of the relativistic palimpsest of Reality is to imagine it in musical terms as a form of (theme and) variation. One might recall the Goldberg Variations of J. S. Bach to intimate the meaning of this metaphor. It generates a real pattern in its open creative movement. While Bach ends his work after 32 variations, there is no a priori reason he could not have ended earlier or added other variations. The perfection of a universe of variations is contingent, like the universe is a contingent variation of the theme of the divine Word. Such a universe is open for additions of ever-new variations of the creative Word. It is relativistic by producing infnite levels and crossings in the generation of such variations. The theme of these variations is not to be conceived as a simple unity either. As the theme stands for the creative Word itself, it will meander through

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the variations like the hypothetical omni-event through Deleuzian planes: like a unifed pattern of meaning that allows itself to be deconstructing and reconfguring Reality with every word and sentence that forms part of the infnity of semiotic signs of divine creativity inscribing itself into the scroll of Reality. As for both the Bahá’í writings and Whitehead’s philosophy the creative texture of Reality is composed of an ecological infnity of divine melodies and event-nexuses with their rhythms and harmonies, it seems ftting to structure The Garden of Reality in the form of variations of a theme: the theme of the relativity of Reality in its transreligious instantiation of the process of Reality in which it is harbored and by which it is sustained. The seemingly dualistic division in theme and variations is, however, not meant to repeat a myth of originality for which the theme can have its own pure appearance while its variations are only complications (Deleuze, Difference, 67–9). Although this might be said of the surrelative omni-events of the Manifestation of the divine Self (nafs-i ilahi), which is not accessible beyond, and is always already immanent to the relativity of, the multiplicity of worlds, experiences, and minds (Lampe, Spirit, 206–7), it is appropriate to the status of human feeling and understanding that any theme surfaces only distributed among, collected from, and composed of a multiplicity of relativistic layers of perceptions, conceptions, and the modes of their intersection. Theme and variation do not divide along the line of Reality and appearance. Rather, they differentiate only within the layers of the palimpsest of the texture of a Reality of which our modes of reception and creative reaction are emphases in an infnite process of becoming (AI, 211). We seek the (transcendent) Word from within, in the middle of living, in which its inaccessible unity is not idolized, but released by way of multiplicities in ever-new ways of unifcations in events of composition. One could also use the image of a kind of genetic code of relativity that in the permutation of its elements enfolds different forms of relativity as emphases of their mutual interaction, like the themes of a musical sonata (Goodenough, Depths, 45). Hence, the emergent structure of theme and variation in this book begins in the middle of variations on relativity, as they are intersecting varieties of permutations themselves (TDM, 267). From this code, and its recombination, the middle, the in-between, the relativistic theme will arise with all of its relativistic uncertainties, ambiguities, and the multiplicity of voices, distributed over different intersecting levels of access, modes of conceptualization or their apophatic deconstruction, and many different expansions or magnitudes of their reach. Only in the ever-new mutual reaction and interaction of these variations, the relativistic code will release a complex of developing patterns of relativity, unleashing an “ocean of inner meanings” (TB, 167) through the “infnite variety of specifc instances which rest unrealized in the womb of nature” (PR, 7).

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While this book will proceed with nine variations of the genetic code of relativity (in nine chapters), the code is in itself already a permutation of such “specifc instances” of the recognition of religious and cosmic relativity. The code is its frst variation, as it were. I will present it with three elements that function as the gates to (and mode of) relativity, expressed in the form of three pairs of textual passages, correlated from the Bahá’í writings and Whitehead’s works. While they speak of themselves in relation to a wider background in which they were born, their intertextuality will emphasize three patterns of relativity as the theme for their ninefold variation. As will become clear presently, these sets of planes not only create their own overarching planes of immanence with regard to their contrast but also intersect with the other planes and their own wider and deeper reach.

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3. CONNECTIVITY The frst gate to (and mode or plane of) relativity is connectivity. One of the ways to understand relativity is to picture it as (infnite) connectivity. From the beginning, this view avoids the unfortunate association of relativity with relativism (Margolis, Truth, ch. 1; Berger, Altars, ch. 4). The common view of relativism presupposes not only the lack of an absolute structure but also an absolute lack of any (meaningful) structure, thereby equating the relative with pure chaos (Netland, Pluralism, 60). In this confusion, relativism also appears in its substantialist mode to envisioning this chaos—not dissimilar from Lucretius’ and Newton’s universe—literally or metaphorically to be constituted of self-suffcient atomic units in an empty space, connected only by chance and in valueless permutation. Connectivity not only avoids the materialistic and substantialist implications of such relativism but also indicates a remedy against the invalidating debility of such a view (TDM, ch. 2), which is especially felt under the postmodern human condition of valueless existence without direction, meaningful engagement, and fragmentation (Lyon, Postmodernity, ch. 5). If applied to human existence with its questions of meaning, connectivity searches for the understanding of order, the good life, and the rightness of action. Connectivity indicates a relativity of relation. As a form of relationalism, it becomes a transcendental condition of existence, because it implies that nothing in existence is without relation to something else, the other, the unexpected, the hidden, an infnite background, or everything, in some form or another. This universal connex does not exclude forms of disconnection or irrelativity, however, if we don’t presuppose that relationality is per se merely the expression of a fxed whole or what Leibniz called a pre-established harmony, which always has already undermined and excluded essential (not only accidental) movement, unprecedented (not only

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apparent) novelty, and real (not only occasional) processes of becoming (AI, chs. 12–13). What is more, the basis for this disconnectivity in the midst of connectivity is at the heart of relationality by virtue of the understanding of the “touch” of anything. We would only be stuck in holistic “necessary” relationality (without break or escape) if we could not imagine an escape from mere external (arbitrary, effective) and internal (necessary, formal, or fnal) relationships such as imagined by certain physical and metaphysical models of the universe. Yet, at the center of Whitehead’s concept of “prehension” is always the tension between both perceptive material (effective, material) and ideal (formal, fnal) integration and creative response of any actuality forming relationships and being part of networks of existents and worlds (GPW, §13). All relation is “relation exceeding relation” insofar as any event, which is the becoming from and of relationships and the creative sundering of itself from them, harbors in its core a liberation to itself from the “initial aim” of divine origin through which relationality is established (from God in relation to the potentials of the becoming of a new event in its relational environment, while it has not yet become) and suspended so as to release the event into its own Self. Hence, no event knows its true Self, which it was before it became in the “initial vision” of God of its potentials and which it never becomes as it cannot grasp itself from itself as long as it becomes, but is already always detached from its Self that it will have become beyond its becoming (becoming a superject for others). In other words, we are only “touched” by anything as long as we are hidden to our own Self (ch. 6). In this sense we are, as we will see later, hidden from our Selves as much as, and because, Reality is apophatically hidden from our Selves (Faber, Touch, 47–67). Like the relativity of Einstein’s relativity theory, everything connected is embedded in “one” fabric although nothing is sheltered from its paradoxical relativistic effects (Leslie, Universes, 61). Connectivity satisfes our search for structure and difference, furthers our urge for discovering grades of valuation and relevance, and does not undercut our activities to be based on criteria for informed decisions between better and worse options, the ethical and the unethical, truth and error. As quantum physics demonstrates, this connective “space” is (only seemingly) smooth, but not seamless, with regard to the fabric that includes everything (Ward, Fire, ch. 6). It is irruptive, but not atomistic, with regard to the regenerative effects of novelty on the process (Plantinga, Confict, ch. 4). And it is highlighting, not shadowing, with regard to the excluded. It is porous with regard to the forgotten per se—the infnite background of existence itself (MT, 155). It is also the recognition that in a world that, yesterday, thought that “interconnectivity of human life was a theory,” fnds, today, that “it is an existential fact” (Panikkar, Silence, xix), and that the “human person,” rather than being an isolated atom or

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ego, is a “microcosm constituting the locus for the drama of the universe” (ibid., xviii). Connectivity derives from the word nexus, and nexus is a central concept in Whitehead’s philosophy (Hosinski, Fact, 130–1). It not only indicates a connection that forms some kind of sustained entity—in general without presupposing (but also without hindering any specifc) characteristics except the actual togetherness of a multiplicity in some kind of relational unity. It also structures this relational wholeness in a certain way, namely, as an actual process of the becoming of relations, their varied repetition in new instances of the affrmation of such relationships, and their constant renewal in such new actual instance that Whitehead calls events (GPW, §§9, 15). On the one hand, the concept of the nexus indicates in the most general way that the most basic characteristic of relationality is that anything that exists is in some kind of mutual immanence of which more specifc connections are forms of differentiation that form patterns of activity (AI, 201). On the other hand, every concrete existent’s being is a relational process constituted by its received, gathered, transformed, and unifed relations and by the force of its unique activity to unify these relations anew in sometimes even unexpected ways (PR, 21–7). The structures of the universe, its (natural and cultural) laws, its traits of differentiation, its events of actualization, its sustained things and organisms, are all rhythms and harmonies of such relational processes, unifcations, and differentiations in a “medium of intercommunication” (AI, 134). In it, all of these relational events are, in Whitehead’s parlor, “drops of experience, complex and interdependent” (PR, 18) or “feelings” of Reality (PR, 23). The frst pair of texts, exhibiting this characteristic of connectivity, juxtaposes a succinct statement from Shoghi Effendi, the great-grandson of Bahá’u’lláh and Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith (Stockman, Bahá’í Faith, ch. 9), on religious relativity as essential prerequisite for understanding of “(religious, ultimate) truth” in the Bahá’í Faith, with a succinct statement of Whitehead regarding the relationship of universal connectivity to the rationality (the ability to understand the truth) of cosmic structures, that is, an accessible order of constancy (TDM, 154–60). Although for themselves they operate on different levels, the resonance of these passages will reveal a common impulse in formulating relativity as profound, but rational (or surrational) connectivity that avoids mere “debilitating relativism”—a debilitation, David Griffn feared, all relativism must fall into (Keller, Process, 2)—while emphasizing creative patterns of existence in religion and cosmology. The fundamental principle enunciated by Bahá’u’lláh . . . is that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that Divine Revelation is a continuous and progressive process, that all the great religions of the world are divine in origin, that

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their basic principles are in complete harmony, that their aims and purposes are one and the same, that their teachings are but facets of one truth, that their functions are complementary, that they differ only in the nonessential aspects of their doctrines, and that their missions represent successive stages in the spiritual evolution of human society . . . . (PDC, I) It means that the texture of observed experience, as illustrating the philosophic scheme, is such that all related experience must exhibit the same texture. Thus the philosophic scheme should be “necessary,” in the sense of bearing in itself its own warrant of universality throughout all experience, provided that we confne ourselves to that which communicates with immediate matter of fact. But what does not so communicate is unknowable, and the unknowable is unknown; and so this universality defned by “communication” can suffce. This doctrine of necessity in universality means that there is an essence to the universe which forbids relationships beyond itself, as a violation of its rationality. Speculative philosophy seeks that essence. (PR, 3–4)

Shoghi Effendi’s characterization of religion with a series of coordinated characteristics begins with the “fundamental principle” of the relativity of religious truth. This is a unique statement in the history of religions—maybe only pre-shadowed by the philosophical poetry of the Dao De Jing (Clarke, Tao, chs. 4–8), as well as by the Madhyamika school, following Nagarjuna (Newland, Appearance, ch. 6), and the Suf tradition, following Ibn ‘Arabi (Momen, Religion, 195–7). One should not just read on as if this statement is somehow or in any sense self-evident! So, let me stop and meditate for a moment on the radicalism of this claim, as it is also the most profound claim pondered upon in this book. Various religious and spiritual movements in the history of humankind have indeed to a variable degree brought themselves to accept that their own version, form, character, gestalt, or ritualized expression of their assumed knowledge of ultimate Reality and/or the worship of God, or even only their own ideology of the relations of humanity to the rest of the universe and any ultimate expressions of such relationships, is not the only one true or valid one in face of Reality or God, or not the only one that one could accept or follow without being in grave error or dammed (Smith, Meaning, ch. 6). Yet, this universal claim of the relativity of all religious truth is unheard of (as a religious conviction and confession in the face of Reality/ God), especially if we hear it with the other epithets that Shoghi Effendi adds to explicate the connective character of this transreligious relativity. Neither does this connective relativity hinder “trans-rational” revelation(s), the truth claim and invocation of which is often embattled between literalists and symbolists, nor does it exclude further “rational” determinations of their character. Continuation, progression, harmony in principle, purpose and aim, complementarity and cultural differentiation of doctrines, inscribe to the universal process of religion(s) patterns of relationality that are bracketed

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by divine origin and successiveness in a connected spiritual development of humanity (ch. 9). Not whether, but to what extent this development is an unfolding (of an essence) or an evolution (transforming itself into something else), to what extent it is a process (without teleology) or exhibits progress toward a future society of peace, is in question, and we must remind ourselves, here, that any one-sided exclusion of the respective other element of the pairs of concepts presented in Shoghi Effendi’s text would be missing the point of a profound trans-rational, but still relationally rational connectivity—which I have termed “surrationality” (Faber, Surrationality, 157–77). It should not be lost to the reader, at this point, that by this twofold character of relational processuality as profound and surrational a double transformation occurs, marking a distinct feature of the Bahá’í religion while being an important means of resonance with the diverse religious traditions of East and West Asia—especially if we understand this “rationality” not from the prevalence of Aristotelian logic against the overreach of which Whitehead warns us repeatedly (MT, 142), but from the perspective of the Aristotelian divine Mind and its visionary character (theoria) or Plotinus’ divine Mind (nous) as refection of the unspeakable mystery (Roy, Consciousness, ch. 4). By the superimposition of surrationality onto profoundness, the relative non-directionality of movements of time and space of this processual relativity becomes the matter of the emergence of a superposition of history or Heilsgeschichte on the process of becoming—but is easily also reduced to it. The different rhythms of time are elevated to responsive and mutually resonant patterns of the harmonization of a plurality of religions that becomes expressive of synergetic alignments of (divine) coordination in the service of what Bahá’í language calls “progressive revelation” (Lundberg, Bedrock, 53–67; Schaeffer, Clash, 122–158). Yet, in the context of rhythms of cyclical return without beginning and end, such a history loses the narrow character of teleological linearity and simplifed impression of progress, which is often identifed as a hallmark of Abrahamic traditions and, in general, the Western mind (Haas, Destiny, ch. 1), and regains its multi-directionality, which is more a sign of Dharmic and Daoic religious traditions, in the service of what Bahá’í language calls “unity in diversity” (WOB, 41–2). Bahá’í thought has developed sophisticated considerations regarding the nature of this claim and its importance to a specifc understanding of religion as inherently pluralistic endeavor that is neither a mere acknowledgment of the fact of religious plurality (Eck, America, ch. 2) nor a yielding to secular tolerance in light of the all-pervasive sacrifces and pains of religious animosities and wars (May, Principle, 20). Rather, in refecting divine revelation itself, this relativity of religious truth functions as the most basic axiom of the essence of religion itself. In its specifc form, it is a profound claim insofar as from the religious (not just a philosophical) standpoint religious

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(in its intention ultimate) Truth is not a specifcation of the genus truth, but its most fundamental expression and, hence, that its relativity is inescapable, that is, cannot be reconstructed by any more fundamental (or fundamentalist) claims of absoluteness. Yet, it is still a surrational claim insofar as it does not fall back onto a mere (substantialist) relativism of chaotic desolation and the abandonment of any kind of coordination. It is not indifferent toward valuations of importance, but exhibits relativistic patterns of relationality, of processual structures, of developing values flled with, as Whitehead says, “Divine Eros as the active entertainment of all ideals, with the urge to their fnite realization, each in its due season” (AI, 277). Although this statement cannot be explored at this point regarding the impulses it gives Bahá’ís for the profound and surrational reconceptualization of religious pluralism (Momen, Relativism/Metaphysics, 185–218), it will suffce to say that it has functioned preeminently in the specifc Bahá’í contribution to the interreligious conversation about the ways in which a mutual relativity of religions may contribute to the potential of universal religious peace (Savi, Pluralism, 25–41). Turning to Whitehead’s text passage, we fnd it to be similarly complex in its implications and consequences, as it refects a universal process of relativity as equally profound and surrational statement on the cosmic process and our ability to know its Reality, being inclusive of human phenomena such as science, philosophy, religion, society, and culture. This text passage appears at the end of Whitehead’s methodological remarks on the procedures and requirements of metaphysics as systematic endeavor at the beginning of Process and Reality to understand Reality as being in need of including all kinds and forms of (human) experience in its scheme (Kraus, Metaphysics, ch. 3). Hence, this text is a statement on the universality of existence as such, blending epistemological and ontological considerations beyond any dualistic divide, to one relational whole (TDM, ch. 4). Whitehead’s text passage makes three related claims. First, nothing in existence can be devoid of a process of experience, that is, everything exhibits the universal texture of reality, which is the process of the actual togetherness of experiential relations in events and nexuses forming whatever concrete things exist. Second, nothing is without (being constituted by) such experiential relations, or conversely: anything thought of as non-relational, does not exist in any way that can be known (PR, 22). Since knowing is a way of feeling, that is, of the relational process of the actual repetition and renewal of perceptive and creative rhythms, harmonies, and patters in events and nexuses, the non-relational is unreal, and Reality as a whole is the complex of all such relations in the process of feeling. Hence, connectivity is profound. Third, knowledge of this whole of the universe is only possible as feeling participation in this connectivity such that insight in its structures is itself a pattern the rationality, which is, at best, identical with the relationality of the

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whole itself (Faber, Immanence, 102–4). This means, frst, that rationality is not defned by independent observation of (and through) or direct access to absolute Reality, but by engaged feeling of and within the connected universe, and, second, that it is not limited by a priori logical or natural forms of iron laws, inscribed from a non-relational outside. Instead, the rationality of connectivity is itself a surrational, processive, and progressive movement upheld by the connectivity of the community of existence itself (ch. 6)—but which has its own radical apophatic implications, as we will see (chs. 6, 7). Granted, the universe exhibits a “character” based on the many related layers of actualized patterns of organization and the multilayered complexities of organisms. However, this “character” is not akin to indifferent logical necessity, but rather to an apprehension of “the character of our friends” (RM, 61). It is at this point that, for Whitehead, religion comes into play. Not only has “Science suggested cosmology,” but even more: “whatever suggests a cosmology, suggests a religion” (RM, 141). And insofar as cosmology investigates the reality of cosmic structures, the development of collective harmonious structures is not only expressed by the processive relations of feelings that constitute the whole but the profound character of “an essential rightness of things” (RM, 41) that Whitehead equates with the notion of God. The absence of absolute chaos and indifference toward structures of feeling and the potential for a progression of ever-higher patterns of harmonies and the intensity of feeling is a sign that suggests, for Whitehead, the “immanence of God” (PR, 111) in the process of the world of becoming. Yet, this harmony is not “the harmony of logic” that “lies upon the universe as an iron necessity” but it indicates “the aesthetic harmony” that “stands before it [the relational universe] as a living ideal moulding the general fux in its broken progress towards fner, subtler issues” (SMW, 18). The conceptualization of connectivity in both Shoghi Effendi’s and Whitehead’s texts demonstrates suffciently the frst gate of relativity: a processual relationality that cannot be equated with relativism. Its processuality or nexic temporality is a profound characteristic of the open and moving whole of existence that cannot be “relativized” on the basis of any more fundamental a priori fxed, unmovable structure, or “reduced” to any a priori decreed pyramid of hierarchical frozenness (GPW, §§13–16). Moreover, the suggested progressiveness or telic historication of diverse temporal rhythms into evermore complex forms of rhythms and harmonies and intensities of feeling is a sign of the surrational character of relativity that, insofar as it lives from the “prophetic” immanence of a divine “Attractor” (Bahá’u’llah, Bahá’i Prayers, 164), is neither in its cosmic constitution nor in its religious reaction mere chaotic stumbling in the dark nor an unavoidable clash of plurality, but is in its potentials always a form of organic coordination and development toward an ever-vaster (and ever-more sensitive) embrace of still ever-relativistic

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and pluralistic movements of divine connectivity toward the ever-ongoing realization of universal harmony—but which might be always already the intrinsic motive force of the whole movement (AI, 295).

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4. APOPHASIS The second gate to (and mode or plane of) relativity is apophasis. Michael Sells defnes apophasis as mystical (language of) unsaying (Languages, 1–13). What is unsaid? Reality, ultimate Reality, the divine is unsaid. What is unsaying? It is not the opposite of saying, not not-saying, nor is it mere silence in the face of the unspeakable. It is rather an activity of unspeaking, in the process of saying taking back what is said, even the production of saying itself. Why? Because (ultimate) Reality/God is “outside-in” the sphere of what can be said. How? Not by vanishing, but by actuating and reversing the process of becoming through its inherent fragility and evanescence—becoming as diminishing (Panikkar, Silence, xiii). To what aim? For an awareness of Reality/God beyond language and discursive knowledge, both of which cannot be breached by a mere negating of saying and knowing, but only by (methodically) opening the space of silence in the midst of the procedures, methods, and processes of saying and knowing itself, by unsaying and unknowing them. Although mysticism is a central phenomenon of the world’s religious traditions of the East and West, at least in the West it has rarely, if at all, become the very center of the religious identities of these traditions, but was often contained, marginalized, and ousted (Schuon, Unity, ch. 2). At least as understood by their doctrinal elites, Abrahamic traditions were always suspecting mystical, paradoxical, and apophatic language of perpetrating heretical inclinations. Seemingly pantheistic unifcations of the souls with God in the form of ecstatic experiences could be read as violating a monotheism that sharply divides the divine from the sphere of creation and, even more dangerously, as undermining the dogmatic closedness of orthodoxies, divorcing them from the (irreducible) well of immediate experience, as such experience is unmediated by clerical, learned, or doctrinal hierarchies of truth (Jantzen, Power, ch. 7). What is more, in such experiential and seemingly pantheistic identifcations of Reality/God and the self (of the mystic seeker), so the accusation, not only is the boundary of God and creation annihilated, but salvation deteriorates into self-redemption. In primordial religions, Daoic and Dharmic traditions, however, it is precisely such mysticisms of experience and the unifcation with the divine and/or ultimate beyond the differences of (and within) the world of appearances that form in one or another way not only an essential element of doctrinal formulations (if there are such attempts at all) and

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philosophic refections but of directives given toward immediate experience of Reality as the aim of elevated thought and ethical life (Nishitani, Religion, ch. 1). Far from being self-redemption, such experiences rather relieve themselves of their selves that could claim such self-possession, which is the very ignorance that hinders salvation (Roy, Consciousness, ch. 8). In our time of global connectivity it is, hence, almost unavoidable to follow the estimation of Michael Sells that the apophatic approach to (ultimate) Reality/God may be one of the most promising ways for interreligious conversations oriented toward universal peace between religions and beyond, of humanity (Sells, Apophasis, 47)—although alternative comparative, kataphatic, or participatory views can yield additional insight (Ferrer and Sherman, Turn, 1–80). And it is not incidental that Shoghi Effendi shares the conviction that not only “the core of religious faith” but also the unity of religions lies in the “mystical feeling” that unites humanity with the divine (LG, 1704). In fact, the Bahá’í view of the mystical core of religion as expression of the unity of religions is based on its own apophatic emphasis on the “unity of God” (tahwid-i ilahi), which, on one level, is understood as exclusive singularity (ahadiyyah) that in its essence (dhat) is absolute apophatic hiddenness (ghayb) and absolutely inaccessible (Diessner, Psyche, ch. 1). This divine “identity” (huwiyya) indicates ultimate Reality as unknowable and inaccessible (ghayb al-huwiyya). In the language of Nicolas of Cusa’s and Nagarjuna’s mystical coincidentia oppositorum (ch. 5) and its even more subtle apophatic negation, we should say: Reality in “its” singular essence (haqaqat-i dhat-i ahadiyyat) is beyond name, attribution, and number, and this means paradoxically that “it” is beyond “plurality,” but also “sanctifed above singleness” (SAQ, #27). Whitehead was skeptical of mysticism because of his profound belief in connectivity (the frst gate of relativity of truth) from which nothing can escape and to which the immanence of God and the mutuality of all with all existence is a witness so as to not leave any space for an “arbitrary mystery” found “at the base of things” (SMW, 18). While Whitehead’s mutuality does also emphasize the mutual transcendence of God and the world (PR, 348), he tries to avoid any gaps in the relational fabric of things that would be blind to its rationality—gaps that would instead open Pandora’s box of any kind of imaginings and speculations unwarranted by the relationality of the nexus of the universe. Process theology—the philosophical theology based on Whitehead’s thought as far as it developed mainly under Christian dominion—has, with a few exceptions, not emphasized the mystical element in Whitehead either (GPW, ch. 1)—a defcit that the close Buddhist resonances of, and with, Whitehead’s work have always hindered to be forgotten (PR, 7), but that also has only to be partly countered through approximations of Whitehead by Far Eastern religious traditions (Takeda, Mosa-Dharma, 26–36).

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Yet, there is an essential place for the “mystical” in Whitehead (Faber, Mystical Whitehead, 213–34). It makes its appearance in the profound function of novelty for his whole philosophy of processual organicity. Genuine novelty (the hallmark of creativity) can only be approximated apophatically, that is, it cannot be captured in the connex of things in which it appears, and it cannot, when it appears, be reconstructed from the nexus in which it appears. In short, the novel is the apophatic (ch. 9). Hence, Whitehead can admit that “philosophy is mystical” insofar as “mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken.” Yet, in contrast to a mystical discourse of religions that seeks to approximate (itself to) this experience, it is “the purpose of philosophy to rationalize mysticism.” Nevertheless, he is eager to add immediately: This “rationalization” functions “not by explaining it [the mystical] away,” but serves it by coordinating “novel verbal characterizations” by which society can “maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas” (MT, 174). Hence, the mystical in Whitehead has a social, (one could say) a civilizing function in that it always anew reverses society’s otherwise slow decay into ritualized repetition of the same (SY, 87–8). Such a society would not only drown in sedimentations of orders, it would eliminate the texture of the palimpsest of reality on which it graciously can only exist as long as it lives from the changes that renew it (Faber, Symbolization, 242–255), the mystical impulse that ever more urges it to new harmonizations with the ecological whole and Reality/God (Faber, Intermezzo, 227–9). How, then, could such an apophatic force of renewal not also be part of, or even central to, the becoming, development, and evolution of religion(s)? The second pair of texts, now, will introduce us to the radical relativistic or maybe better: surrelational consequence of the apophatic understanding of reality. Somehow contrary to the relativity of connectivity (the frst gate), apophasis (and its recognition in experience or mystical discourse) always pierces the fabric of relationality (and rationality). As we can never imagine speaking from the place of the essentially unknowable, its “reality” is to let go of, to “(not) be” beyond experience and articulation in an absolute sense. How, then, can we know of “it,” claim to have ecstatic experiences of “it,” or foster “it” as center and medium of our spiritual existence? Since we can never speak from the absolute, which is inaccessible, why should we not with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus be silent of it (Tractatus, prop. 7)? Indeed, any sophisticated refection on apophaticism in any religious or philosophical tradition will show signs of this paradox. In fact, it is a double paradox. As demonstrated, for instance, by the textual logic of Gregory of Nyssa, Plotinus, Pseudo-Denys the Areopagite, and Meister Eckhart in the West and of Nagarjuna and Linji in the East, we can, indeed, not experience or know apophatic Reality except as an experience of “its” non-experience and a knowing of the unknowing process itself (Hart, Experience, 188–206). Yet, this is already the

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expression of another paradox, namely, that we, instead of viewing this Reality “itself” as a mere imagination, affrm that that which is beyond experience and knowability does not exist, that is, “is” not simple “not,” but before and beyond existence (Panikkar, Silence, xxiv). This is what Bahá’u’lláh’s tablets and Whitehead’s texts speak of in the most radical way, that even the purest possible Mirrors of Reality, which Bahá’ís call the Manifestations of Reality, are caught in “its” inaccessibility, and that religion, herewith expressing its apophatic center, only (always anew) begins with, or resides in, this insight.

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So perfect and comprehensive is His creation that no mind nor heart, however keen or pure, can ever grasp the nature of the most insignifcant of His creatures; much less fathom the mystery of Him Who is the Day Star of Truth, Who is the invisible and unknowable Essence. The conceptions of the devoutest of mystics, the attainments of the most accomplished among men, the highest praise which human tongue or pen can render are all the product of man’s fnite mind and are conditioned by its limitations. Ten thousand Prophets, each a Moses, are thunderstruck upon the Sinai of their search at His forbidding voice, “Thou shalt never behold Me!”; whilst a myriad Messengers, each as great as Jesus, stand dismayed upon their heavenly thrones by the interdiction, “Mine Essence thou shalt never apprehend!” From time immemorial He hath been veiled in the ineffable sanctity of His exalted Self, and will everlastingly continue to be wrapt in the impenetrable mystery of His unknowable Essence. Every attempt to attain to an understanding of His inaccessible Reality hath ended in complete bewilderment, and every effort to approach His exalted Self and envisage His Essence hath resulted in hopelessness and failure. (GL, #26) It is not until belief and rationalization are well established that solitariness is discernible as constituting the heart of religious importance. The great religious conceptions which haunt the imaginations of civilized mankind are scenes of solitariness: Prometheus chained to his rock, Mahomet brooding in the desert, the meditations of the Buddha, the solitary Man on the Cross. It belongs to the depth of the religious spirit to have felt forsaken, even by God. (RM, 19–20)

The quotation above from Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet of the City of the Divine Oneness (Lawh-i madanat al-tawhid) is a highlight of apophatic proclamation. It is not a piece of theology (of refection, philosophically, or on revelation), but rather reveals frsthand the impossibility of theology in light of the absolute hiddenness of divine/ultimate Reality. The exemplifcation of the innermost paradox of the desire for mystical unity with the divine and the plain impossibility of the fulfllment of this desire not only for (and because of) human imperfection but even for the highest incarnations of divine unity in the realm of creation (for their respective religions)—such as Moses and Jesus or the Buddha and Krishna—is all the more provocative as it does not presuppose any (alleged) degradation of them to be mere human prophets (as might be perceived, for instance, by Christians to be the Islamic view of

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Heilsgeschichte). On the contrary, Bahá’u’lláh articulates the essence of religion—the unifcation with divine or ultimate Reality (Hick, Interpretation, ch. 1)—in a post-Jewish, post-Christian, and post-Islamic manner in light of their respective high prophetology (such as that of Philo of Alexandria and Ibn ‘Arabi) and high Christology (such as that of the patristic LogosChristologies) by transcending them into absolute apophasis, which may be unrivalled except by the Buddha (Panikkar, Silence, 20–3). Whitehead’s passage above from Religion in the Making resonates strongly with this assessment when it emphasizes the depth of god-forsakenness as being the true beginning of religion. In radical solitariness, yet in light of a universal (surrational, relational) Spirit, we become religious (Faber, God, 179–91). Instead of remaining bound by phenomena of parochial social pressure or imitation, which Whitehead (like Bahá’u’llah, although in different terms) relegates to “herd-psychology” (RM, 16), we are enlightened through this deep (and painful) de-limitation by absolute apophasis, but, at the same time, are released into its surrationality. Paradoxically, the relativistic implications of apophasis are to be found in its absoluteness. First of all, in both texts the “unity of apophasis” is presented as the transreligious essence of religions: in their diversity, as represented by their central fgures (such as the Buddha, Moses, Muhammad, Jesus), they claim their own singularity through the singularity of the Reality (ahadiyyah) to which they are unifed (wahidiyyah) in its absolute apophasis (dhat al-ghayb) (Diessner, Psyche, 6–9; Shah-Kazemi, Ground, 5, 31). Secondly, because of the apophatic absence of any object “Reality/God” (which would otherwise, as object, become an ordinary part of the relativistic fabric), no religion can claim exclusive possession of this Reality and its Truth (alhaqq), which has always already subtracted itself from any positive claim of possession (TDM, ch. 3). Yet, thirdly, this self-subtraction of Reality/God/ Truth should not be confounded with mere hiddenness, mere unknowability, mere non-experientiability—this would be identical with its mere negation (Lambden, Background, 68–9). Its absolute apophatic nature rather “appears” (without becoming a phenomenon among phenomena) in subtractive affrmation of the relativistic diversifcations of religions in which “it” reveals “itself” as unifying, that is, on the one hand, as inaccessible (subtracting) Absolute in the modes of mystical non-experience, unsaying, and unknowing, but, on the other hand, as the Relative manifesting (affrming) as/in (evolution and) history, which is the becoming of “its” apophatic presence (ch. 2). This characterization of the relativity generated from apophasis as subtractive affrmation of diversity has two unique implications. First, since the absolute is inaccessible, and no one can claim its possession by excluding the multiplicity of differing claims about it, no one and nothing has privileged access to Truth/Reality. What is more, any claim of a representation

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of Reality/Truth must defect back its own relativistic position. Since the apophatic absolute cannot be claimed at all, we are left not only with an epistemological relativity of standpoints (Momen, Relativism/Metaphysics, 205) but an essential and existential relativity of our relative nonexistence (Schuon, Unity, 31–2). Apophatic relativity is “absolutely” essential since we lack the ability to access and claim as absolute any (exclusively true) version of Reality/Truth. Moreover, apophatic subtraction has, as Bahá’u’lláh says emphatically, made us aware of the impossibility to know the essence of any creature as well, even more so of Reality “itself” (GL, 26). As in Whitehead, relationality is suspended in apophatic relativity and internally constituted by the disconnectivity in any “touch” (Faber, Touch, 47–67). Hence, this apophatic relativity is existential as it presents itself as the very act of existence itself, the existentiality of existence, existing in subtractive affrmation by an apophatic Reality truly as “its” creatures, “it”/they being “nothing” in “itself”/themselves (PM, 53). Second, however, this essential and existential relativity is not identical with mere relativism under the postmodern condition (Lakeland, Postmodernity, ch. 1) since it is not assuming the mere nonexistence (or absolute irrelevance) of Reality, so that only groundless chaotic ir-relativity would be left to reign. What its states, instead, is that “its” manifestation is a manifestation of apophatic Reality in all existence (SAQ, ##53–4). In fact, this radically apophatic relativity is not exhausted by only a “cognitive relativism” merged with the ontological claim of “ultimate reality” (as a faith stance) (Runzo, Reason, xiii). Extended to a theological relativism, we fnd such a view in Ernst Troeltsch (ibid., ch. 2) and D. Z. Philips (ibid., ch. 6), John Macquarrie (Hick, Metaphor, ch. 15), and John Hick (ibid., ch. 9). Rather, in light of the apophatic “nature” of Reality we must muster the more radical claim of an “ontological apophaticism” as in Raymond Panikkar for whom the Buddha presents us with the radical break from any merely epistemological relativity and extends its meaning (and the meaning and effect of Reality)— much like Bahá’u’lláh (Momen, Religion, 195–9)—to the abnegation of any ontological claim (Silence, 13–5), only beyond which, and through which, Reality “appears” in and as the “radical relativity” of pratitya-samutpada (ibid., 134–44). As for Whitehead’s understanding of connectivity (quoted in Whitehead text of the frst gate of relativity), the apophatic hiddenness of Reality (of the second gate) is not a mere seclusion but the divine form of the affrmation of relational, but surrelative, existence. It comes as novelty to the fabric of existence, to renew it, disturb it, recreate its orders, and redeem its lost and broken web (GPW, §36). In Bahá’í terms, this refects the paradox that ultimate Reality/God manifests “itself” (“its” Self). Yet, since in this manifestation “it” (the apophatic Self of Reality/God) is not “something” but rather “nothing,” “its” Manifestations (the pure Mirrors of Ultimacy) mirror

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only the absoluteness of apophasis (GL, #20), which, although it may appear as omni-event among creatures, cannot be grasped or possessed by them, but only be sensed (sensing its “sent”) in mystical unsaying and unknowing (GL, #151). Since this event appears to be happening in all religions in their spiritual movement of unifcation with Reality, they all will in their own realization refect true mirror images of the absolute, which is inexhaustible (SWB, 100).

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5. INFINITE WORLDS I The third gate to (and mode or plane of) relativity of truth is the infnite multiplicity of worlds. Many religions develop a context for the Earth as being interwoven in an expansive manifold of a vast universe of many worlds or even some kind of multiverse of many universes (Smith, Dictionary, 291–4). Their philosophical refections on such an infnity of vast integrated nexuses of existence (roughly) range from the infnity of one universe, never ending in space and time (as in Jain and Buddhist thought), to rhythmic, cyclical reappearances of the integrated nexuses of the universe (as in Pythagorean, Stoic, and Hindu thought) to infnitely many universes (as in Mahayana thought). Their “order” (or togetherness) can variously appear in the form of some kind of stratifcation of many realms of sub- and super-terranean realms of infnity of time (like hell) or (timeless) eternity (like heaven) or many or even infnitely many layers of spiritual worlds of which the earthly realm is only the lowest, material expression (as in Christian mystical cosmology of Pseudo-Denys the Areopagite, or as in Neoplatonism, Gnostic and Hermetic speculation, or Suf theosophy)—and some current theorists, such as Frithjof Schuon (Unity, xii) and Huston Smith (Truth, 2–4), urge us to understand this “stratifcation” of levels of enfoldment and unfolding as signs of a perennial thread of religious history and an archetypical feature of genuine formulations of human spirituality (i.e., the acceptance of spiritual reality). Biblical and Abrahamic religions, on the other hand, generally tend to confne themselves to a restrictive view of these realms to basically three levels consisting of heaven (including realms of waiting and purgation), underworld (hell), and a material universe, which is fnite in space (or extension) and time (that will fnd its end)—although they were always confronted with (ancient and modern) philosophical alternatives of a multiverse, such as can be found in Pythagoras, Plato, and the Stoics (Rubinstein, Worlds, chs. 2–3). Yet, instead of cyclical views, in Abrahamic contexts, we mainly (in orthodox renderings, less in mystical sub-streams) discover a tendency to draw a fnite linearity of time out from a beginning act of creation to that of a fnal ending in apocalyptic destruction (Bynum and Freedman, Things, part 2), in transcendent fnal salvation or recreation in the eternal kingdom of God (Moltman, Coming, part

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4). Yet, a rudimentary memory of archaic cycles of cosmic epochs (olam/ aion) remains even then, for instance, with the supposition of a world before the deluge (Gen. 1–5) or another word to come after the fnal confagration (Rev. 21–2). It is a distinct feature of both Bahá’í cosmology and Whitehead’s metaphysics to commit to the infnity (SAB, #21) of a multiplicity of worlds (TB, 187) in all of the above senses of vastness and endlessness (GL, #26), cyclic epochs (PUP, #79), levels of (spiritual) existence SAQ, #60), and various degrees of connectivity as well as distinction and opposition (TDM, ch. 7). In quite suggestive form, we can trace the resonances of both Bahá’u’lláh and Whitehead not only with one another’s cosmological patterns but even more so with the philosophical underpinnings of current physical cosmology of the multiverse, eternal infation, and models of repeated rhythmic birth of universes (Susskind, Landscape, ch. 8). This affrmation of infnity of multiplicity (of worlds) has eminent implications for a sound concept of relativity not only in the immediate cosmological context (Leslie, Universes, ch. 1) but regarding any “logic of multiplicities” (Deleuze, Negotiations, 147), be it of physical, mental, or spiritual nature. It is not without real kinship to these realms that we speak not only of universes of form and energy, but also of universes of discourse and the diverse spiritual universes of religions. They all are variations of this very kind of relativity of infnite worlds. The third pair of texts, now, will reveal characteristics of relativity implicit in the presupposition of the infnite multiplicity of worlds of which I will name only three. First, the integrity of a universe, cosmic epoch, or layer of existence, can only be understood properly by recognizing its inherent connection with an infnite background of other such integral unities, which may differ from all others ranging from a repetition of the same (eternal return) to sheer incomparability (GPW, §15). Hence, the patterns of such integrity are always contingent even regarding the most fundamental laws of nature implemented in such universes or cosmic epochs, yet always related to the unknown infnite background of differing integrations (in accordance with the frst gate of relativity: connectivity). Mutatis mutandis, the same would hold true for universes of discourse and the universes of religions and their respective discourses as well as social and cultural habits (Faber, Infnite Speed, 39–72). Second, manifestations of ultimate Reality are to be considered not only relative to these different worlds but, even more importantly, as originating such differentiations from Reality’s “singular” apophatic infnity itself (in accordance with the second gate of relativity: apophasis). Religious elaborations centering on any Manifestation of Reality in human form (as often identifed with founders of religions) must, hence, not only avoid any exclusive claims of fnality regarding one or the other human mirrors of Reality, but even more desist from any anthropomorphism or anthropocentrism,

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inherently and unavoidably appearing through the limitations of the categories within the human mind in trying to grasp such Manifestations (ch. 8). Third, since the apophatic Reality, of which the infnity of worlds are (in one sense or the other) an emanation, creation, irruption, or derivation (which marks “this” Reality as ultimate), cannot “itself” be attributed with either unity or multiplicity (or any other characteristics, for that matter), we can only in an apophatic sense, that is, in a sense of unsaying and unknowing, understand ultimate Reality as “unity” of these manifestations of worlds or mirrors of “itself” in these worlds (TDM, ch. 3). Yet, it is this “unity” or “oneness” beyond unity and oneness that will allow us to refrain from exclusive theological renderings of Reality as either monotheistic or pantheistic or both or neither, or any position in between (ch. 6). In light of infnite worlds as expressions of apophatic Reality, such opposites must become contrasts—not only in an intellectual sense, but even more importantly in an existential sense that reshapes our orders and hierarchies of values and feelings of integrity through apophatic contingency (ch. 8). Here is the fnal set of texts. So by My Logos-Soul (nafs), the Ultimately Real (al-haqq)! . . . In every world, He [the Manifestation of God] is manifested according to the capacity of that world. In the world of spirits, for example, He reveals Himself and becomes manifest unto them [the spirits] through the vestiges [traces, signs] of the Spirit. So, likewise, in [the world of] bodies, in the world of names and attributes and in other worlds which none comprehends save God. All [of these worlds] derive their good-fortune from this Theophany (Manifestation, zuhur). Wherefore, He appears unto them according to the requisite form (surat) in order that He might guide them unto God, His Lord, and draw them nigh unto the Abode of His Cause. (Bahá’u’lláh, Tablet of Manifestation, transl. Lambden, section 2, §2) The universe shows us two aspects: on one side it is physically wasting, on the other side it is spiritually ascending. It is thus passing with a slowness, inconceivable in our measures of time, to new creative conditions, amid which the physical world, as we at present know it, will be represented by a ripple barely to be distinguished from nonentity. The present type of order in the world has arisen from an unimaginable past, and it will fnd its grave in an unimaginable future. There remain the inexhaustible realm of abstract forms, and creativity, with its shifting character every determined afresh by its own creatures, and God, upon whose wisdom all forms of order depend. (RM, 160)

Both of these texts immediately transpose us into a multiplicity of worlds of differing levels, magnitudes, and complex connectivity, all of them contingent in relation to one another and to apophatic Reality, with their own laws and customs of fragile integrity, and exhibiting the impossibility to exhaust or dominate their vast background or the Reality harboring and accompanying their becoming and perishing (Imm., 682). This relativity is sheer multiplicity, variety, inexhaustible becoming, differentiation of form and creativity

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and diversifcation of character. The only Reality that seems to be connecting them is their mutual connectivity itself, before and beyond any more specifc characteristic (frst gate of relativity), and apophatic Reality, which seems to hold them together in their shared mystery of “its” self-subtractive theophany in them (second gate of relativity). We should not fear this seemingly chaotic vastness of variation inherent in the inexhaustible Manifestations of Reality but embrace it as it begins to reveal, the longer we withstand the glance of this vastness, a guidance toward God/Reality through “its” all-pervasive Wisdom (ch. 3)—another name in many religious traditions of the East and West for the actual theophany of apophatic Reality. In the Tablet of Manifestation, Bahá’u’lláh speaks with the voice of the Self of ultimate Reality “itself”—something not uncommon in diverse religious traditions from the East and West (ch. 7). He speaks from the perspective of its theophany in all worlds in their respective capacity, and even more with respect to their incomparable features. Yet, this divine Self also appears as the intertwining of these worlds with regard to their becoming, directed by and toward Reality/God. Whitehead’s passage from Religion in the Making, again, with which he ends his whole book, expresses the same sentiment of divine guidance in all the worlds, although their appearance is in constant becoming and perishing, giving ever-anew birth to new contingent worlds of differing material and spiritual orders and patterns of harmony and intensity. The “aim” of such a variegated universe is not of any teleological fxedness, whether a priori refecting any divine order (or decree) (GPW, §19) or a fnal state of eternal unity (GPW, §39), but a guidance through Wisdom (GPW, §38) toward a nearness to Reality or a “meeting” with God (liqa’llah) (ESW, §§170, 203–5) that because of Reality’s/God’s apophatic hiddenness can never become the satisfed “object” of eternal rest, but instead remains somehow embedded in the whole process of the generation of infnite worlds. The aim of divine guidance in a creation of infnite words is rather apophatic itself: the “Abode” of God’s “Cause” (amr), which is in all of its variety and novelty manifesting itself through the eternal creation of infnite worlds and in their respective form of “being drawn” toward their fulfllment in a new creation (TB, 268). Bahá’u’lláh, in the wider context, indicates this renewal with a cyclical reinterpretation of the (apocalyptic) “Day of God” as the beginning of a new dispensation or theophanic revelation of a new Cause (amr)—although it is eternally “the same” apophatic Cause (Fananapazir, Day, 217–238). And Whitehead, also in the wider context, presents us with the aim of eschatological closeness to the (divine) “Harmony of Harmonies” (AI, 296) as always being an eros of movement luring toward ever-new fulfllment without closedness. Theophanic relativity recognizes the apophatic inexhaustibility of this process of multiplicity.

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6. INDETERMINATION I have emphasized three intersecting gates to, and planes of, transreligious and cosmic relativity—connectivity, apophasis, and the multiplicity of infnite worlds—as themselves relativistic moments of the code of relativity for its coming variations through their permutations. Yet, already in their frst variation (the theme itself, as it were) these gates release themselves a frst global characteristic of the code, namely, that a fundamental feature for any serious approach to relativity will be the ability to shift one’s views from the simple picture of an a priori, telic, cyclically fnal, or eternally fxed world as mirror of an ultimate Reality, of which we can make ourselves an idol (GL, #161), including the “object” God (Panikkar, Silence, xxv), to a mystery that might best be accessed by indeterminacy. Since conventional determinations cannot function as the foundation of our understanding of (ultimate) Reality, we can also avoid the urge for parochial security, that is, seeking refuge in fxed structures of eternal frozenness. The world begins to reveal itself differently when we give up to presuppose determination, or Reality as determined, to be closer to Reality, since only under our acceptance of “its” contingent (“being” beyond) presence/absence as foundational we, insofar as we are always caught in a cycle of mind-closedness, can seek it. Further, since with Whitehead “religion is concerned with our reactions of purpose and emotion due to our personal measure of intuition into the ultimate mystery of the universe,” by the contingency of these intuitions we “must not postulate simplicity” (AI, 161) for this mystery in any non-apophatic sense. Instead, we may trust that the mystery of Reality reveals “its” Self (nafs) in indeterminacies and relativistic processes of indetermination (Faber, Sense, 41–5)—the subtractive affrmation of existence as multiplicity. Indeterminacy is not meant as the opposite of determination. It is not introduced here to claim that any determination of our Selves, forming identities, or of our societies, environments, worlds, and universes, forming integrities of pattern, orders, and laws, is an illusion or must in a fnal analysis be abandoned in order to gain access, or become united with, ultimate Reality. Indeterminacy is also not meant to simply introduce a non-foundational foundation for any order of things or a more fuzzy view of realities in order to claim that non-order, chaos, and upheaval (against settled states of being) are to be preferred over and against any systems of patterned, organized, or organic structuring. The use of the terms “indeterminacy” and “indetermination” simply shall remind us that if we may assume layers of profundity more “fundamental” than the outcome of a process, such a thing, a structure, a fact, an artifact, is the profound immersion of all determination in their process of origination, generation, or emanation. “Divest then thyself of that which debarreth thee from this fathomless crimson sea, and . . . immerse thyself

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therein” (GDM, §83). Indetermination indicates that any determination of identity, character, structure, or law (even natural law), has as its transcendental condition, as it were, the process of its becoming itself. Whitehead calls this “the principle of process”: that how something becomes determines what it is (PR, 23). To see this creativity in every creature, as Bahá’ís and process thinkers alike are asked to do, is to emphasize the process of creativity prior to its evanescent creations. Indeterminacy is nothing to be feared. Instead, it is the very “ground” from which things arise (and perish), by which we state and restate identities and integrities, through which we create (and are created by) structures as they are the stabilized inheritance of becoming, and in which we plant our decisions (Deleuze, Difference, 42). Indeterminacy is the reason that mutual relationality is not an immobile but a moving whole that cannot be reduced to its laws of operation or sets of rules (GPW, §24). Deleuze has made this case with regard to Henri Bergson, who also functioned as inspiration for Whitehead’s processual thinking, namely, that the openness of living beings and universes alike is inherent in relations which cannot be properties of objects (substances) or closed sets. A “whole is not closed, it is open; and it has no parts except in a very special sense, since it cannot be divided without changing qualitatively at each state of its division.” In this sense “the world, the universe, is itself the Open” (Cinema I, 10). And Whitehead—in his movement beyond mathematical models of relationality—recognizes that relations must themselves be understood to be always in the process of becoming (PNK, ix, Preface, 2nd edition). Becoming relations are creative unifcations (“prehensions”) of facts in new events of valuation. They are, in other words, new determinations of a past beyond itself in a feld of creative indeterminacy and the indetermination of worlds of (only seemingly) settled facts by the new event-creations. It is because of such eventive indetermination (the process itself) that every happening is (to a degree) a decision amid realized and unrealized alternatives reaching up even unto the realm of human freedom for the determination of character and reaching down even unto the character of natural laws, as they are all such societal confgurations in their respective felds of creativity or perpetual adventure of indetermination (GPW, §§16, 24). “The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact. It is the fying dart, of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of the world” (AI, 177). Indetermination is also a sign of the “presence/absence” of the Apophatic since the Apophatic resides “itself” always not only passively beyond determination (as all mystical traditions of the world’s religions confrm) but “is” actively inaccessible in the world as its indetermination (ch. 6). Indetermination is not chaos, but occasion—for becoming, change, and progression from fxed pasts, for instance, of evil or guilt, present impasses, for instance

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The Relativistic Code

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of situations of hate, or the future lack of imagination of alternatives, for instance, of peace, justice, and unity (GPW, §§17, 37). The Bahá’í notion of “progressive revelation” is permeated by such divine indetermination: it generates the most profound resource against the closedness of any religious tradition as being sealed off from any future opening toward new events, that is, new revelations. It allows for the possibility of the recognition of a novel Manifestations of Reality. It regenerates the movement of their “meeting” beyond fxed standards of the past—be it even that of the most revered forms of reverence enshrined in sacred law—revealing not only “its”/their own unprecedented novelty but the very contingency of anything besides “its”/ their own regenerating force (WOB, 115–6). It is on the basis of the frst two gates of relativity—connectivity and apophasis—that indeterminacy also implies the third one, namely, the acclamation of multiple (religious and cosmic) worlds of integrity. This multiplicity, always being in the process of indetermination, leads us not only to acknowledge the becoming of any “character” of nature or revelation but to understand the indetermination inherent in the Bahá’í call for the transreligious unity of humanity in which any form of religious existence opens to new social and religious indeterminations of which ultimate Reality is the apophatic aim. The center of Bahá’í “progressiveness” is this indetermination of spiritual and social sedimentations that hinder such a “return” to the creator in all creatures, the return to the creativity beyond all (settled) creation, and to the intricacies of (their) unity in diversity (ch. 4). How better to express this Bahá’í sentiment, as it aims at an unimaginable future of peaceful and just harmonies of conviviality in a cosmos of contingent change, than with the following proclamation by Shoghi Effendi of an active movement of the Bahá’í community toward non-parochial alternatives to religious and social worlds of closedness. [The Bahá’í Faith] repudiates excessive centralization on one hand, and disclaims all attempts at uniformity on the other. Its watchword is unity in diversity such as ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá Himself has explained: “Consider the fowers of a garden. Though differing in kind, color, form and shape, yet, inasmuch as they are refreshed by the waters of one spring, revived by the breath of one wind, invigorated by the rays of one sun, this diversity increaseth their charm and addeth unto their beauty. How unpleasing to the eye if all the fowers and plants, the leaves and blossoms, the fruit, the branches and the trees of that garden were all of the same shape and color! Diversity of hues, form and shape enricheth and adorneth the garden, and heighteneth the effect thereof. In like manner, when divers shades of thought, temperament and character, are brought together under the power and infuence of one central agency, the beauty and glory of human perfection will be revealed and made manifest. Naught but the celestial potency of the Word of God, which ruleth and transcendeth the realities of all

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things, is capable of harmonizing the divergent thoughts, sentiments, ideas and convictions of the children of men.” The call of Bahá’u’lláh is primarily directed against all forms of provincialism, all insularities and prejudices. (WOB, 42)

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Profound indetermination, inherent to the three gates, thresholds, contours, planes, and modes of relativity—connectivity, apophasis, multiplicity— hence, will guide the following permutations on relativity, ranging from metaphysical and cosmological discussions to cultural and political applications, and ecological foundations as far as relationality and relativity are universal conditions of existence as such (TDM, ch. 14). But we will always concentrate on the function of transreligious transformation as an essential element gleaned from its relativity. As in Islamicate philosophy, al-haqq is itself a relativistic, neither simply theistic nor non-theistic, triad of RealityGod-Truth (Savi, Summit, 37); the Bahá’i rendering of ultimate Reality/Truth as divine Will (mashiyyah) functions as an Absolute that is not the opposite of relativity, but “itself” of absolute relativity in which the non-parochial process of indetermination can recognize itself as realization of the movement of the open whole of the cosmic manifold. Nevertheless it is the event of all-haqq that Bahá’u’lláh pronounces (ESW, §§16, 68; Eshragi, Kommentar, 412, 469–7); in its absolute, relativistic horizon, all is new.

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Chapter 2

In A Gadda Da Vida

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What has the symbol of the “garden” to do with the investigation into transreligious truth? The answer may surprise. In a famous classical composition of the band Iron Butterfy, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, that is, “In the Garden of Eden,” the garden is evoked as a symbol of anticipation of the realization of what it means to exist. “In a gadda da vida, honey / Don’t you know that I’m lovin’ you.” The signifcance of the garden is not perfection, but Reality within and beyond all schemes and constructions that veil the treasures of the motivation of (human) existence within a universe. “Oh, won’t you come with me / And take my hand.” This love invites “to walk this land”—a love of, and mediated by, the “land” we pace—in musical meditation closed to the ear of hate, leading to a place in, but not of this world. This garden of reality—whether or not originally a companion to a fight beyond ordinary consciousness—is not a faint image of a (religious) paradise (of a future beyond or after the universe), but instills a deep appreciation of our becoming human in this land, unbecoming of our excuses and escapes to make peace in it—together: “Please take my hand” (Iron Butterfy, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida). 1. CONVIVIALITY The variation on relativity, or the permutation of the relativistic code, central to this chapter will be a refection on the name of the book and its image of the garden, a garden of love. It is consciously set within the context of the absence of religious peace. For Bahá’ís, real internal and external peace is based on a shift of perception from any kind of parochial ethnic and religious prejudice to a new spiritual awareness of unity—the unity of God/Reality, humanity and humanity’s religions (Stockman, Bahá’í Faith, part 1). 79

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Yet, this kind of unity itself is forcefully understood only to becoming manifest as a function of the realized justice in all of its facets. “The purpose of justice is the appearance of unity among men. The ocean of divine wisdom surgeth within this exalted word, while the books of the world cannot contain its inner signifcance” (TB, 66–7). Hence, the context of the image of the garden of Reality is that of a lack. The garden is a counter-image to the lack of peace on all of these levels— of ultimate Reality/God, humanity, and religions—and it is developed in light, despite, and through the contextual awareness of the absence of unity and justice. Nevertheless, the relativity the image of the garden is meant to release wills not to direct action toward restitution of an ideal primordial state, a paradise lost (like the Garden of Eden), nor toward a future eschatological state, a paradise gained (like the Garden of the Apocalypse of John or the heavenly realm of the West of Amitabha Buddha). Symbolically, for Bahá’u’lláh the garden of the fulfllment has already appeared in his revelation, the city has already come down on Mt. Carmel (ESW, §§210–2). It is at the heart of the potential of all divine attributes (GL, #27), especially, love and knowledge (irfan al-haqq), justice and peace, compassion and wisdom, for, and through, us to realize the garden on, and with, this Earth in an evermore intense and enlightened way (GL, #109). More profoundly, the symbol of the garden wants to highlight an underlying, permeating, expansive Reality in which we always already live to affrm or deny it. The garden of Reality, in other words, is (in this sense) a cosmological image of unity in diversity and a symbolic comment on its meaning. It wants to instigate an alternative perception of (ultimate) Reality initiating a reversal of utterance and action from disunity and war, from psychological, social, political, economic, and ecological injustices, and intellectual, ideological, and spiritual deprivation (ch. 9). Far from losing actual diversity, peaceable tension, and adjustable structures, these reversals are to be pursued on grounds of this Reality’s profound pervasiveness. Like the title of Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality, the Garden of Reality alludes to metaphysical verities, cosmological processes, and their implications for truth procedures, which do not dispose of the contributions religions offer them based on their unique modes of experience and refection. Its approach takes Whitehead’s viewpoint seriously that to understand the most basic, all-pervasive patterns of existence, we must be aware of the limitations of such universal claims and, what is more, that they are themselves in process (MT, 81). The metaphysical question of Reality is itself intimately, though in complicated ways, related to that of Truth, as this Reality is in metaphysical terms always one of beings who not only realize but live it in various conscious manners of perception, cognition, and communication (AI, ch. 16). And as, for Whitehead, religions contribute to this

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interaction that constitutes the accessibility of Reality, they also add to the multiplicity of perspectives that populate—Deleuze would say—the “transcendental feld” (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy, ch. 2) of their processual integration, not into a fxed system of thought, but a conviviality of voices. As these voices are never mere abstractions—mere concepts in interaction—but always of fesh and blood, we cannot reduce their togetherness in terms of compartmentalized questions of logics, physics, ethics, or politics, but must, frst and foremost, understand them as processes of persons and societies, which, in Whitehead’s view, are always already complex weavings of temporal, spatial, and valuating events of aesthetic experience (SMW, 105–6). We could say that the physical, biological, and cultural dimensions of these societies (and societies of societies) always contribute to Reality by which they are constituted (RM, 54), and that they are most concretely explored from their aesthetic sensitivities and evaluations of this interactive process of Reality in which they take part (MT, 53). The symbol of the garden alludes to this aesthetic feld of interaction in a profound manner insofar as it does not only hint toward many processes of conviviality and the relativistic relatedness of its processual unity but forces us to acknowledge dimensions of a manifold that cannot exist without the agreement on their worth within all the facts of its ecological cycles (MT, 109–17). The aesthetic worth of multiplicity, eco-logic, mutual relativity, and the permanent state of change, intimate themselves as ruling metaphors for their integration—such as that of the garden. As the very form of this community the garden is flled with many levels and structures of interaction, its (metaphorical or paradigmatic) “rule” is never either meant to attract views of an oppressive unity, which would be defned by the exclusion of these elements, or that of a conglomerate of self-contained, dull substances or spheres of existence, which—like a physicalist universe if it was created after the manner of billiard balls—in their isolation (for instance, religious transformation divorced from economic, social, and ecological transformations) would neglect the importance of the just mentioned modes of interaction. It is this concrete, aesthetic, processual, and mutually relativistic sense of a plurisingularity and inclusive, egalitarian, and encouraging conviviality that the symbolism of the metaphysical “garden” (in the wake of Whitehead) suggests. It also expresses itself in this way in a scriptural Bahá’í text from which its image is gleaned. In a section of the Selections of the Writings of ‘Abdu’lBahá, the son and entrusted interpreter of the writings of Bahá’u’lláh, the founding prophet of the Bahá’i Faith, we read of the “garden of Reality” to this effect. In the meadows of truth they are as sweet-singing nightingales, and in the fower-garden of guidance they are even as brightly-coloured blossoms. With

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mystic fowers they adorn the walks of the Garden of Reality; as swaying cypresses they line the riverbanks of the Divine Will. Above the horizon of being they shine as radiant stars; in the frmament of the world they gleam as resplendent orbs. Manifestations of celestial grace are they, and daysprings of the light of divine assistance. (SAB, #233)

In its complex, meandering, and aesthetically appealing symbolisms, this passage indicates not only the appropriate context for the use of the metaphor of the garden of Reality but it is full of excessive, yet related symbolisms that connect it in a multiplicity of overfowing ways to a good many matters of relevance to the issues and “gates” of relativity. Truths appear as meadows in which they are sung by paradise birds; divine guidance in their inner dimensions overwhelms us like a many- and brightly-colored arrangement of fowers, shining colorfully as the many walks of truth; they are like guarding alleys of trees on the banks of the river of divine creativity and uniqueness; above the many horizons—horizon upon horizon—of existence, they brightly twinkle and gleam like stars and other orbs into an infnite universe beyond ourselves; in their aesthetic wonder and manifold, they make us less envision a self-contained nature, but rather a universe of gratitude, as if grace inexhaustibly showers down on it; they are like the morning light, promising a new day of divine presence and swelling in us the desire for a new future. In a peculiar interfusion of concepts and metaphors of aesthetic, natural, and religious provenience, the garden of Reality integrates a great many of biblical, Islamic, Persian, Indian, Native American, and Chinese, and other visions of earthly images of paradise gardens that are cross-culturally understandable (Buck, Profle, passim; Badiee, Paradise, passim). Yet, this garden does not, as many apocalyptic renderings of the eschatological state of paradise in these traditions would suggest, evoke a counter-reality far removed from this world (Parker, Garden, 3–17). On the contrary, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá—in the passage just quoted—presents us with an internal cosmological picture of a deeper Reality, rolled up in each of its appearances and dimensions, that “if” it was to come forth from “its” hidden pervasiveness would present us with “its” beauty in the here and now. In other words, the garden of Reality indicates not a far-off state of the future post-apocalyptic coincidence of opposites in a realm of fulfllment but awakens us to the inner (batin) Reality of this universe, which by the same token appears as a palimpsest of everdivergent dimensions and levels (PM, #178). Yet, the garden of this Reality is “its” integral fgure—not a perfect transcendent state, but their immanent potential (GL, #27). Therefore, it releases the “natural” power to instigate in us the organic and ecological nature of any profound transformation, not only into transreligious peace but, on the same basis of the relativity of Truth, in accord with all spheres and dimensions of our existence.

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Even if it seems to indicate the mystery of an ultimate Reality, the Reality of this garden is never far from daily experience. Consider the Persian garden, the archetypical paradise garden, as it fourished throughout the empires of the Middle East and India under the Mughals—most famously embodied by the Taj Mahal (Hobhouse, Gardens, passim). Not only did the desire for this earthly representation of the heavenly paradise become visible in the architecture and religious geography of the kingdoms from Archeamenid and Zoroastrian times on, but it was also incorporated as a central feature of Persian cities and even private houses. A quiet, walled-in, central area, it was set to play with shades of trees and the intense fragrance of fowering plants; through it water fowed in ponds or from fountains; generating a pleasure for the eye and the ear, it refected serenity and sounded the murmuring of Reality itself. It was viewed as jahannema—as the image of the world (Encyclopaedia Iranica, Garden, passim). Many Bábi and Bahá’í events and the refective realizations of deeper meaning of sacred history are related to such gardens. It was in a garden in Badasht that the early Bábi community consolidated its discussion of, and fnally the radical break from, Islam under the leadership of two “Letters of the Living” (early apostles) of the Báb—Quddus and Tahirih—as well as that of Bahá’u’lláh, who seems to have designated three gardens for this conference (DB, 288–300; Badiee, Garden, 48). It was in such a royal garden in Istanbul that the learned and radical female apostle of the Báb, Tahirih, was martyred and disposed of in a well (DB, 626–31). It was in such a garden in Baghdad that Bahá’u’lláh, summed by the Sultan (and Caliph) to appear in the capital city Istanbul, set his farewell from the local Bábi community, which gathered under his spiritual guidance, and for the frst time declared his mission as prophet to a small group of intimate companions (Taherzadeh, Revelation I, ch. 16). He names it Ridvan Garden, the Garden of Paradise, and the related most important religious festival of the Bahá’í religion in commemoration of Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration in it, the festival of Ridvan (Momen, Bahá’u’lláh, 60–5). It was such a garden—the garden of Mazra’ih—that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá acquired much later in the area of Bahá’u’lláh’s banishment near Akko in Ottoman Syria (and Palestine) as the conditions of his permanent political imprisonment slightly relaxed (Taherzadeh, Revelation IV, ch. 1). It was such a garden nearby, like a Persian paradise garden surrounded by two small rivers, and also called Garden of Ridvan—that attracted Bahá’u’lláh when he escaped from the walls of his last residence at Bahji, and that was maintained by early Bahá’í’s care for its beauty in symbolic reverence of Bahá’u’lláh (Taherzadeh, Revelation IV, ch. 2). That Bahá’u’lláh called the garden of his frst proclamation in Baghdad and the one near Bahji the garden of ridvan, invokes a whole symbolic universe in this weighty theological meaning, among other things, the spiritual exercise and mystical state of the unity with God in selfess “contentment” pictured as a “garden of paradise”

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(Walbridge, Acts, 232–41). And in archetypical form this physicality is mirrored in Bahá’u’lláh’s identifcation of his new revelation with nothing less than a new garden from heaven: “that within the realms of holiness, nigh unto the celestial paradise, a new garden hath appeared, round which circle the denizens of the realm on high and the immortal dwellers of the exalted paradise” (HW. P, #18). The aesthetic complexity with which the images and bodily examples of the garden conveys an integral view of a Reality that tries to evoke, on its most basic level, an “experientiability” of its graceful wonder, is, however, by no means confned to religious imagery, but also appears right in the midst of Whitehead’s philosophical accounts of the accessibility of Reality at the dim fringes of our every-day consciousness when our heightening and discriminating sense-perceptions and the perpetually working machineries of conceptualization and compartmentalization begin to fade (AI, 285–6). In a Buddhist-like mode of silence (Panikkar, Silence, 14–15), beyond the disturbances of objects of care and subjects of self-inficting business, a deep awareness of our surroundings make their presence noted, not only as signs of a world beyond ourselves but as modes of our own existence (GPW, §42).

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In the dark there are vague presences, doubtfully feared; in the silence, the irresistible causal effcacy of nature presses itself upon us; in the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland, the infow into ourselves of feelings from enveloping nature overwhelms us; in the dim consciousness of half-sleep, the presentations of sense fade away, and we are left with the vague feeling of infuences from vague things around us. It is quite untrue that the feelings of various types of infuences are dependent upon the familiarity of well-marked sensa in immediate presentment. Every way of omitting the sensa still leaves us a prey to vague feelings of infuence. Such feelings, divorced from immediate sensa, are pleasant, or unpleasant, according to mood; but they are always vague as to spatial and temporal defnition, though their explicit dominance in experience may be heightened in the absence of sensa. (PR, 176)

As the experience and imagination of the ingredients of the garden evoke this realm of vague connectivity of ourselves within our surroundings, and as their aesthetic presences deliver (with Heidegger) our suppressed existential moods (Stimmungen), we realize a profound embeddedness in a world that actually speaks with polyvocal diversity of a univocal community. All beings in the garden of Reality begin—with a phrase of Deleuze—to sing in “univocity”—“with the same voice”—of this multiplicity (Difference, 304). “We fnd ourselves,” as Whitehead notes, “in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures” (PR, 50). As the beauty of this garden refects divine beauty and that of its divine mirrors (SAQ, #27)—one of the titles of Bahá’u’lláh was Ancient Beauty

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(SAB, #218)—in order to awaken us to mirror its gracefulness, it becomes also a symbol for the ethnic and religious polyvocity and the hope for convivial univocity within and among ethnicities and religions (PUP, #62). In another passage of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s exploration of the image of the garden with respect to such an intra- and interreligious amity, he boldly admonishes us to follow the divine command to become multiple-colored; to become, in our hearts whole gardens; to become, in our hearts, multiplicities among multiplicities, mirroring divine cultivation of ecological interconnectedness.

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Be like a well-cultivated garden wherein the roses and variegated fowers of heaven are growing in fragrance and beauty. It is my hope that your hearts may become as ready ground, carefully tilled and prepared, upon which the divine showers of the bounties of the Blessed Perfection may descend and the zephyrs of this divine springtime may blow with quickening breath. Then will the garden of your hearts bring forth its fowers of delightful fragrance to refresh the nostril of the heavenly Gardener. Let your hearts refect the glories of the Sun of Truth in their many colors to gladden the eye of the divine Cultivator Who has nourished them. (PUP, #10)

Even more forcefully, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá applies this divine command, as it is mirrored by the divine mediation of Bahá’u’lláh, the Blessed Perfection and heavenly Gardener, to the peace process within and among religions as its inner spiritual reality that cherishes conviviality, a profound appreciation of its variations. In his argument, diversity and difference is meant to be “a reason for unity and not for discord and enmity” (PUP, #10). It is its aesthetic impact that makes the garden an image of Reality appearing in interreligious conviviality as it can be, because in its depth Reality is able to become (in its manifestations) that which “it” already always has enshrined in our heart to be (PUP, #29)—thereby also leaving us with a profound appreciation of the ecological connectedness that transcends mere religious symbolism and presents us with the necessity of comprehensive integration of all spheres of life in the material and spiritual transformation toward the “Most Great Peace” (TB, 126). If the fowers of a garden were all of one color, the effect would be monotonous to the eye; but if the colors are variegated, it is most pleasing and wonderful. The difference in adornment of color and capacity of refection among the fowers gives the garden its beauty and charm. Therefore, although we are of different individualities, different in ideas and of various fragrances, let us strive like fowers of the same divine garden to live together in harmony. Even though each soul has its own individual perfume and color, all are refecting the same light, all contributing fragrance to the same breeze which blows through the garden, all continuing to grow in complete harmony and accord. Become as waves of one sea, trees of one forest, growing in the utmost love, agreement and unity. (PUP, #10)

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Become as waves of one sea! As this alteration of the theme of the garden indicates, we are not bound by its limits either (SAB, #36). ‘Abdu’l-Bahá juxtaposes sea and garden quite often, for instance, in this passage from Tablets of the Divine Plan that directly speaks of the “oceanic feelings” that we should learn to raise to inner and outer awareness in order to accomplish intra- and interreligious conviviality in the form of a prayer for daily supplication: “Thou hast suffered the thirsty fsh to reach the ocean of reality; and Thou hast invited the wandering birds to the rose garden of grace” (TDP, #9). The sea and the garden exhort the “mystical feeling” that, for Shoghi Effendi, forms the center of all religions (DFG, #223). With the impulsive command to mystical unity—as waves of the sea, as fowers of the garden—we are not asked to realize a nonexistent reality, or to follow an unreal imagination, or to hail an utopia (a non-place), but we are asked to remember these symbols as feelings of our maybe suppressed Reality—much like Whitehead’s rediscovery of the sense of being part of a humming community of creatures in rare moments of out letting go of all means of grasping and controlling, self and projection. Yet, this mystical feeling, if it were the center of religious realization of unity in diversity, peace and justice, and “paradise,” as it were, does not fee the world for secluded feelings of joy and bliss, but urges the realization, materialization, socialization, of all its implied layers of historical, material, social, practical, and ethical dimensions of conviviality such a remembrance must release if it were real (PT, #4).

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2. VARIATION AND CONFLICT The image of the variation relative to a multiplicity as it is gathered in a garden of conviviality is, of course, neither meant to blind our perception for the absence of its actuality—since we are still living in any number of states of wars between religions, ethnicities motivated by religions, and religious hate clothed in parochial claims of exclusive possession of ultimate Truth (SAB, #206). Nor does it want to desensitize our theoretical instruments for the understanding and realization of peaceful and just unity from the inevitable confictual nature of multiplicity, even if it is viewed under the name of unity. Tensions are inherent to any convivial body as they energize and recuperate its vivacity and hold its elements, dimensions, and members gathered in a lively process. Any organism in process, be it at an elemental level or holding together its unity through many layers and crossings of high complexity—even a universe as a whole in its openness—will only be able to move, develop, progress, or complexify its integrity if it, at the same time, harbors the ability to stall, devolve, decline, and fall back to less intense complexities, and (eventually) disintegrate.

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For Whitehead, this is the essence of being in process, of being extended in time and space (AI, 237–8). The volatility and fragility of being able to become also mean to be able to unbecome. In fact, it is a sign of the innermost inscription of some sort of freedom in the whole of the universe and in all of its organisms, events, and processes, that its connectivity includes modes of disconnection so as to be able to evolve to ever-more sensitive beings, conscious of their environments, and able to recreate them and themselves in the image of ideal perfections.

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The vast causal independence of contemporary occasions is the preservative of the elbow-room within the Universe. It provides each actuality with a welcome environment for irresponsibility. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ expresses one of the earliest gestures of self-consciousness. Our claim for freedom is rooted in our relationship to our contemporary environment. Nature does provide a feld for independent activities. The understanding of the Universe requires that we conceive in their proper relations to each other the various rôles, of effcient causation, of teleological self-creation, and of contemporary independence. (AI, 195)

To answer the call of freedom with security—or with holistic approximations to determinism of structural wholeness of an “implicate order,” based on hidden quantum variables (Bohm, Wholeness, ch. 4), or holographic patterns (Capra, Tao, 320) or merely “holonomic” mutuality (Grof, Brain, 75–91) without some freedom of “disconnection”—could mean to fall back into repetition of the patterns of the past, a kind of “eternal return” that does not allow for novelty, as in Whitehead, but exhausts itself in the mysterious running off of a pre-established program (Epilogue). But it is an ecological image of interconnectedness that needs higher organisms, like humans, to individually and collectively develop the sensitivity to perceive the multitude of material and spiritual environments in their diverse movements, comprehend their connections and disconnections (SY, 79), and develop differentiated, even divergent, complex, and personally, socially, and ecologically situated answers (Faber, Symbolization, 242–255), which again integrate themselves with the fow of things (ch. 3). As it is a pattern of uncertainty, it avoids (or even resists) such “securities” of structural fxations of ultimate Reality, in the form of a foundation in some kind of a (divine) Mind-Structure (a fxed universal, lifeless law), so much so that - Deleuze interpreted Nietzsche’s “eternal return” as only that of novelty (Deleuze, Islands, 117–27), and that Whitehead alleviated God (primordial nature) of any fxed, pre-stabilized harmony (PR, 48). To seek ritual over venturing into new territory, into new modes of living, could mean to neglect the higher good for self-interest. Cain’s question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is a sign of this devolution of connectivity into repetition of self-interest. But it is the freedom of disconnection that allows for such

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a choice. This disconnection is calling for breaking through the status quo in the breakdown by which a new horizon will become available for a good that is beyond the past’s imagination (GPW, §17). Not that this choice can in any simple way or at all be divided into good and evil alternatives. The tension is between lesser and higher realizations (of complexity, diversity, harmony, and intensity), which are all in themselves good. It only becomes confictual if the realization of such alternatives foregoes the potential of connectivity for any given organism on its level of existence, ideal, and perfection by choosing lesser or narrower modes of integrity over the openings of higher or more expansive connectivity, which draws the organism with its environments into a descent of destruction. This is how Whitehead puts it:

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Evil, triumphant in its enjoyment, is so far good in itself; but beyond itself it is evil in its character of a destructive agent among things greater than itself. In the summation of the more complete fact it has secured a descent towards nothingness, in contrast to the creativeness of what can without qualifcation be termed good. Evil is positive and destructive; what is good is positive and creative . . . Good people of narrow sympathies are apt to be unfeeling and unprogressive, enjoying their egotistical goodness. Their case, on a higher level, is analogous to that of the man completely degraded to a hog. They have reached a state of stable goodness, so far as their own interior life is concerned. This type of moral correctitude is, on a larger view, so like evil that the distinction is trivial. (RM, 96–8)

This depiction of tension and confict is very much in alignment with Bahá’í scriptural sources. Change, volatility, and fragility of, within, and between, organisms are essential to both ascent to divine civilization or descent of humanity into deserted negligibility and nothingness (PUP, #41). The world is in a process of evolution—cosmologically, biologically, socially, and culturally—that is always in demand of higher integrities although they can only be gained by leaving past resting places of stabilization behind (PT, #29). The rhythm of manifestations of the divine is, at the same time, the destruction of secure sedimentations of the past and a venturing toward new horizons. Indeed, the Báb maintains that the Will of God is not only a creative force of freedom in its (inner) “being,” naming the divine Self, but forms the innermost heart of any creature, releasing the impulse of its (the creatures’) freedom and creativeness in which it is called to higher integrities of divine connectivity (Saiedi, Gate, 210–6). And like Whitehead, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá emphasizes that realizations of this freedom are never in themselves evil, but relativistic, more or less living up to the potential perfections of creatures.

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The epitome of this discourse is that it is possible that one thing in relation to another may be evil, and at the same time within the limits of its proper being it may not be evil. Then it is proved that there is no evil in existence; all that God created He created good. This evil is nothingness . . . . (SAQ, #74)

It is the coexistence of the outcomes of such choices and their concurrent realization in the same organism, between organisms, and between them and their environments that creates conficts of relativity, Darwinian competition, and survival-tactics, which themselves seem to be beyond the image of a garden of beautiful variation drawn on above. Yet, the image of the garden that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá presents us with enfolds precisely these tensions and conficts. One has only to exchange the application of the variety of the fowers and their multiple colors from religions to races and ethnicities (as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá often combines them for comparative considerations) to become aware of its radical implications. Given the lack of racial and ethnic peace, we may ask: If the many fowers are ethnicities, how are they to form one garden? If the different colors are indications of the colors of our skin, how are they to be valued as varieties? In fact, such an application may be able to demonstrate the complexity of the image of the garden. While ‘Abdu’l-Bahá maintains the importance of the difference of ethnicities/fowers constituting the garden, the skin/colors are varieties common to all fowers/ethnicities. There is, for instance, no subset of all yellow fowers that would constitute any “natural” integrity; and no group of fowers is bound by any single color either. In the end, it is the variety of fowers and colors that make a garden. Against any monoculture or monochromy, their variety is their unity as a garden. For Bahá’í scripture, the confict between religions is as naught as that between ethnicities (PUP, #140), and races are powerful illusions (PT, #45). But while the tension between them is the sign of a universe of rhythmic becoming and even a necessary for the beauty of the garden of Reality— without constituting any inherent difference of worth between any color or fower—it leads to confict if those differences that actually integrate higher connectivity are transformed into segregated identities (be it of race, class, gender, or religion), equally leaving the garden as a whole and the contrasts between its inhabitants with lesser or smaller integrity (intensity and harmony of a unity in diversity). If monochrome and monocultural identities are perceived and conceptualized as realities, although they are only bad abstractions from real multiplicity, they begin to form hierarchies of worth enmeshed in conficts of competition for the “true” mirroring of Reality (Faber, Democracy, 192–237). For Bahá’u’lláh, this transformation is a sign of the “kingdom of names”—this world of multiplicity engaged in mutually destructive oppositions (Cole, Commentary, passim).

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3. THE KINGDOM OF NAMES In Bahá’í texts, the “kingdom of names” has two related connotations. On the one hand, it indicates everything that is not the apophatic divinity of which we cannot have any knowledge but through “its” names and attributes (Izutsu, Sufsm, ch. 6–7). On the other hand, it takes up the Suf theosophical tradition of dividing the universe up into different levels of unifed integrity (in light of this ultimate Reality beyond name and description) of which the kingdom of names forms the lowest level: that of the manifold of created beings in the process of becoming and perishing (Hatcher, Purpose, ch. 4). For Bahá’u’lláh, it is clear that these divisions have symbolic, spiritual meaning; they are not literal cosmological realities (ch. 5). They are not divine divisions—Reality is infnitely present to any reality—but human modes of hinting at the ungraspable infnity of worlds of God and layers of “nearness” in the process of approximating the apophatic Reality, which is always beyond any human attempt of establishing such a presence (ch. 6). In its frst meaning, the kingdom of names refers to everything that can be named and even to the unnamable insofar as we can still hint to it with signs and words. Yet, nothing, nothing at all, does refer to apophatic Reality “itself” (SAQ, #37). Everything refers back to the kingdom of names, which is not Reality “itself” (Taherzadeh, Revelation, II, ch. 2). Nevertheless, the kingdom of names is, in this sense, the expression of this Reality as everything is or carries the names of God at their innermost essence without ever becoming one of these names themselves (ch. 7), or by making the divine effulgence of these names (at the essence of creatures) identical to God’s Self (Savi, Summit, 13–40). In this meaning, everything in the kingdom of names expresses its essential inner being as an infnite variation (and combination) of those names and attributes (of Reality/God) manifesting a world of multiplicity in which different degrees, forms, and complex compositions, and processes of transformation between them indicate different “integrities” (identities) of existents in mutual connectivity and tension, and also confict (SAQ, #81). In Bahá’í theo-logic, this cosmology carries not only the implication of different levels, grades, and forms of unity in diversity of, and based on, (divine) names and attributes, but also demands that their highest integrity resides in their very manifestation as the kingdom of names, which as divine emanation is then also the referent of all names and attributes of God/Reality (SAQ, #82). The Manifestation of Reality is its theophany (GL, #19). Herein lies the link between the frst and the second meaning of the kingdom of names. We can only perceive Reality in its theophanic Manifestations. Yet, these manifestations are neither identical with the apophatic Reality of which they are primal emanations, nor are they identical with creatures realizing the names and attributes of this divine theophany for which they are the divine acts of

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naming and attributing on the basis of which creatures exist (ch. 7). Hence, Bahá’í scriptures variously come to differentiate the world of Reality (‘alami haqq), which is beyond any names and attributes, from its manifestations in the world of command (‘alam-i amr), in which Manifestations of Reality realize all names and attributes of Reality perfectly, and the world of creation (‘alam-i khalq), in which all divine names and attributes are distributed as in a kingdom of names (in the second meaning) according to the grades of creativity and potentials for perfection that its creatures are associated with or that they choose to adopt (Momen, God, 30). Although Bahá’í writings also draw on different other forms of a more complex symbolic layering of the process of Reality (to which we will come back later, especially in ch. 5), it will suffce here to use this threefold differentiation, which (as referred to in ch. 1) became iconic in the Bahá’í ringstone symbol (Figure 1) (Faizi, Conquerer, ch. 9). It indicates how variety and confict are directly related to plateaus (degrees, levels, stations, maqam) of the integration of unity in diversity expressed by the symbolism of these three worlds (Lepain, Tablet, 45–6). In various of his scriptural tablets, Bahá’u’lláh makes clear that such diversity is not only a sign of the world of creation (‘alam-i-khalq), which is always in a process of approximation to its variously distributed divine names and attributes (and by overcoming opposition between them in their realization). He sometimes describes in rather startling terms how these processes of change and chance, freedom and connectivity, evolution and devolution, cycles and progressions, necessarily express unity in diversity, but misrepresent and activate diversity often wrongly as confict. I will mention three such instances from Bahá’u’lláh’s writings of the transformation of variety into confict and its reasons. First, in his Commentary on a Verse of Rumi Bahá’u’llah meditates on the mystical doctrine of Ibn ‘Arabi of the “unity of being” (wahdat al-wujud), which seemed to have united apophatic Reality with its emanations in the kingdom of names through the utilization of the oceanic feelings such that creation appears as waves on the surface of the ocean of Reality (ch. 7). For some Suf mystics and theosophists this implied that unity in the world of God was to be understood as coincidentia oppositorum of divine names and attributes (Chittick, Rumi, 70–111); yet in the kingdom of names, they would appear as opposites in confict. Hence, based on a certain verse of Jalal ad-Din Rumi (“Because the colorless has fallen captive to color, Moses has gone to war with Moses”) they assumed that both Moses and Pharaoh were manifestations of such divine names in opposition (Cole, Commentary, passim). “In the fnal analysis, they held that the former is a manifestation of the divine name, the Guide, the Great, and so forth, while the latter is a manifestation of the divine name, the Misleading, the Abaser” (Bahá’u’lláh, Commentary on a Verse of Rumi, §13).

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Bahá’u’lláh, however, exposes such a mystical scheme as ill-conceived. Instead of creating a double opposition between the realm of God and the realm of names and, hence, the opposition between divine names within creation—a scheme that only substantializes opposition as necessity of divine emanation—Bahá’u’lláh de-substantializes the unity of divine names by tracing their multiplicity back to the overfowing mercy of the apophatic God into infnite variation—the Reality that “is” beyond any signifcation of opposition, beyond a unity of their opposition, and even beyond a unity of its negation within these oppositions. Opposition, then, comes only into the picture insofar as the names of God are received, not in affrmation but in opposition to their intention: to manifest the living-kindness of God.

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For instance, consider the divine name, “the Self-Suffcient.” In its own kingdom, this name is unifed. But after its effulgence in the mirrors of human existence, the effects of that effulgence appear in each soul according to that soul’s exigencies. For instance, in the generous it appears as generosity, whereas in the miserly it takes the form of avarice. In the ill-omened [sic] it becomes abasement, and in the blessed it appears as good fortune. (Commentary on a Verse of Rumi, §21)

Opposition, here, does not only appear between divine names—as the doctrine of the coincidence and emanation of opposites seems to insinuate—but also within every united divine name (which allows for an infnite variety of realization) as it becomes abstracted to a substantialized “color” (like that of races) caused by the choices of creatures to receive the name’s inherent creativity not as a potential virtue for the realization of a higher good, but as a vice of lower self-interest. Here ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s variegated colors become “the manifold colors of self and passion,” which are not “tinged with God” anymore, but “with base passion” (Commentary on a Verse of Rumi, §25). Second, in one of Bahá’u’lláh’s most weighty works, his Book of Certitude (Kitáb-i Iqan), Bahá’u’lláh comments on the widespread belief among the Muslim learned that the Christian scriptures have been falsifed or corrupted (Fananapazir, Islam, ch. 10). Conversely, Bahá’u’lláh not only is appalled by such a self-serving denigration of the followers of Christ but he detects the reason for such an illusionary projection of an opposition between Christianity and Islam in the misunderstanding of the unity and difference of the divine names. How could God, when once the Day-star of the beauty of Jesus had disappeared from the sight of His people, and ascended unto the fourth heaven, cause His holy Book, His most great testimony amongst His creatures, to disappear also? . . . How could such people be made the victims of the avenging wrath of God,

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the omnipotent Avenger? How could they be afficted with the scourge of chastisement by the heavenly King? Above all, how could the fow of the grace of the All-Bountiful be stayed? How could the ocean of His tender mercies be stilled? We take refuge with God, from that which His creatures have fancied about Him! Exalted is He above their comprehension! (KI, 89–90)

Like the earlier correction above, this discussion is based on the ninety-nine beautiful names of God (Qur’an 17:110), which in Islamic theology were grouped together regarding their contrasting moods or the directions of effects they convey (Savi, Summit, 15–23). Like the kabbalistic distinction of gracious and restrictive names or the perceived tension of divine attributes in Christian theology, for instance, between divine justice and mercy, this differentiation into opposing names and attributes allowed the Abrahamic traditions to address the theodicy-problem by understanding God’s acts as both benefcent and wrathful or even, as in kabbalistic lore, being embraced by God’s hidden essence (Ein Sof), thereby, somehow “uniting” good and evil (Scholem, Trends, ch. 6). Bahá’u’lláh, to the contrary, made an argument against such a use of oppositions, because this would contradict the ocean of the tender mercy of God in which God is always overfowing of allbountiful grace (GL, #19). As in the frst correction of “the Self-Suffcient” in the Commentary on a Verse of Rumi, here, in the second correction of the Kitab-i Iqan it is not the “omnipotent Avenger” that blinded Christianity with corrupted scriptures, but the reception of the All-Bountiful in the mode of the competitive self-interest of Muslim commentators. Again, Bahá’u’llah does not oppose divine names but relates their appearance as opposition to human fantasies and vices. Third, in The Garden/Ridvan of Justice, Bahá’u’lláh addresses in a highly paradoxical way the divine name of the Just One. “This is a tablet wherein God hath sent forth His name, the Just, and hath breathed the spirit of equity into the temples of all created things.” (The Garden/Ridvan of Justice, §1) Indeed, in his Arabic Hidden Words, Bahá’u’lláh reminisces that “The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I may confde in thee” (HW. A, #2). Hypostasizing Justice, Bahá’u’lláh proclaims to her in The Garden/Ridwan of Justice that she was elevated to the highest station among the divine names and attributes. O this Name! We have rendered Thee one of the suns of Our most beautiful names between the heavens and the earth. Shed Thine illumination upon all things created by Thy powerful and wondrous lights, that perhaps the people might gather under Thy penumbra and cast the darkness behind them, and shine with Thy holy and luminous rays. (The Garden/Ridwan of Justice, §2)

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Yet, paradoxically, Bahá’u’llah also warns Justice not to become proud of her elevation, but to remain in submission to God to whom all names and attributes are equidistant, united in their creativeness as it serves the creativity of creatures, that is, their ability to choose to realize divine names as virtues instead of vices. O this Name! Beware lest this station entice Thee away from submission in the presence of God, the Mighty, the Omnipotent. Know that Thy relationship to Us is the same as that of any other, and there is no difference between Thee and aught else created between the heavens and the earth. . . . Beware lest the exaltation of Thy name become a barrier between Thee and God, Thy Lord and the Lord of the Worlds. (The Garden/Ridwan of Justice, §4)

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It is important to note that the paradox lies not primarily in the elevation of some divine names over others, which remains a matter of profound relativity and bound to the diversity of situations of their realization in relation to all others, but in that the very elevation of Justice implies that she recognizes her essence as establishing equality between all divine names in regard to the apophatic divinity. Confict arises not by the act of differentiation of the station of divine names among themselves by God’s Will, but in their realization as vices in the kingdom of names, that is, by investing them with independent power in which creatures desire self-serving righteousness. Bahá’u’llah thus demands of Justice (i.e., really humanity in claiming Justice): See nothing in Thyself save the effulgence of the sun of the commanding Word, which rose from the horizon of the lips of the Will of Thy Lord, the Merciful, the Compassionate. See in Thine essence neither power or might, neither movement nor stillness, save what deriveth from the decree of God, the King, the All-Powerful, the Omnipotent. Move with the breeze of Thy Lord, the Exalted, the Most Glorious, not with the gales that blow from the direction of self and passion. Thus doth the Most High Pen command Thee, that Thou mightest act accordingly. Beware lest Thou be like the one whom We adorned with the ornament of the names in the realm of creation, for when he gazed upon himself and the exaltation of his name, he turned against the very God Who created and nourished him, and plummeted from the highest of stations to the lowest of the low. (The Garden/Ridwan of Justice, §5)

Nor should we forget the radical relativistic implication, here, namely that the infnite variety of divine attributes is itself not only pointing beyond itself toward the apophatic nameless Reality in which all differentiation between these attributes is obliterated (SV, 18–27), as Reality “is” beyond all such characterizations, but without excluding their multiplicity of manifestations either. What is more, because they are rooted in the apophatic Beyond, these attributes do not observe any “order” (or fxed ontological hierarchy) and, when they appear

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(become manifest), exhibit besides their fundamental equality any coordination that expresses the Will and Purpose of God and the unfolding and choosing realization within the infnite variety of creatures (Saiedi, Gate, 203–7). In Whitehead’s conceptualization of God, something similarly extraordinary happens. Whitehead speaks of the “primordial nature” of God as the unity in diversity of all possible worlds with an infnite variety of potentials for the realizations of values within any world by way of which God is the eros immanent to any creature, at its essence, as it were (Hosinski, Fact, ch. 7)—Bahá’u’lláh in his Kitab-i ‘Ahd (the Book of the Covenant) says “Desire of the World” (TB, #15). Since the realizations of these values are the outcome of the becoming of these creatures as processes of valuation (GPW, §23), we fnd Whitehead explicating Bahá’u’lláh’s affrmation of the relativity of the emphasis of divine attributes in their realization in any given creature. Since the realization of creatures is the realization of combinations of values (attributes), they become relative to their own emphases in their valuing up or down (realizing) certain attributes in their combination (PR, 247). Moreover, as God is not dependent on any integration and transcendence of attributes, there is no a priori measure of the coordination of attributes or values (PR, 31), but only the relative importance that their combination constitutes in the essential realization of any given creature (PR, 244). This relativity cannot be relegated just to the imperfection that the variation of combinations of attributes/values implies. This relativity—in the combination of the three gates of relativity (connectivity, apophasis, and infnite worlds)—is a matter of divine perfection and that of divine manifestations (in the implied plural). As all three examples readily demonstrate, the relativity of organisms and organizations as well as that of religions and ethnicities alike—as mirrored in the relativistic divine names and attributes—means that every unity expressed is a diversity recognized and every unity lost is a diversity disintegrating into oppositional atoms of illusionary self-subsistence engaged in rivalry and hierarchical self-elevation. When names and attributes are substantialized, that is, taken out of their connective environment, abstracted from the processes in which they are realized as potentials and virtues, and elevated to irrelative truths, they become irresponsible opposites. Whitehead calls this confictual choice the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (SMW, 51). When, in the kingdom of names, divine names are misplaced, that is, taken to be themselves the divine, not only is the apophatic (beyond-) “unity” of the divine (ahadiyya) denied but the essential relativity of all names, their integrated variety in the unity of the world of Manifestation (‘alam-i-amr), is lost. Then the variation of divine names in the world of creation (‘alam-i-khalq) degenerates into opposites, religious variety changes into competition and war, and truth becomes an antagonistic weapon of self-elevation. The garden of Reality has become a battlefeld.

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4. UNITY AND POLYPHILIA ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s garden of Reality, as a composition of diversity, and Bahá’u’lláh’s theophanic integrity of the variety of divine names and attributes (refecting the apophatic divinity and distributed potentials among creatures) are not to be misconceived as idealistic visions (projected into primordial or eschatological states), thereby escaping their seemingly manifest unreality. They are rather powerful counter-symbolisms conceptualizing and activating peaceful alternatives of unity in diversity against the background of concrete religious violence that the Bábi-Bahá’í community instantly and consistently experienced since its appearance (Smith, Religions, ch. 2). When Bahá’u’lláh writes against religious fanaticism and hatred as “a world-devouring fre, whose violence none can quench” (ESW, 14), he really does so from the entrenchment of the young Bábi-Bahá’í movement in persecution (Momen, Commentary, 281–8). The story of the Báb and his disciples is a history of slaughter right from the beginning and in increasingly systematic and widespread manner throughout Persia and beyond (Amanat, Resurrection, ch. 9). And Bahá’u’lláh writes on the background and scars of his own torture, imprisonment, and exile as well as that of the nascent Bahá’í community (Momen, Bahá’u’lláh, chs. 3–6). Yet, with the potential of an oppositional realization of divine names, Bahá’u’lláh also hints to internal divisions of the community, born from self-interest, the choosing of the narrower good, envy and power-seeking self-aggrandizement, especially stirred up by his half-brother Yahya whom the Báb had granted the divine name Azal, the Eternal (Taherzadeh, Revelation III, ch. 14). Besides opposing such an internal and external fanaticism, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s color-symbolism, alternatively, was most directly directed against racism, especially in America, and ethnic conficts, dividing religions and interreligious understanding (PUP, #126). Bahá’í persecution was a constant reminder of the harvests of its message of peace in a world of opposition (ch. 4). For the Bahá’í community, it never became a mere memory, but numbers foremost among its pressing issues given the ongoing antagonisms to its very existence, especially in its land of origination, Persia; and it became infamously one of the fanatic roots of the rising Islamic Republic of Iran (consult the Bahá’í International Community’s online updates and periodical publications for the current situation and documentation of the persecutions). The brutal slashing of the Bahá’í physician of Jewish origins, Dr. Sulayman Berjis in Kashan in 1950 by eight Shi’i fanatics, for instance, had paradigmatic implications (Mohajer, Slaying, 133–67). Although they confessed to the murder immediately as motivated by religious obligation—Bahá’ís are considered Islamic apostates and are allowed, per religious law, to be murdered without retaliation—they were

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cleared and released. This mechanism of fanaticism was encouraged by the outcome of the judicial procedures by which the companion of Ayatollah Khomeini, Abdu’r-Rahim Rabbani-Shiraz, became freed from prison despite a death sentence for the brutal murder of the Bahá’í leader Habibu’llah Hushmand in Sarvestan in 1948 on the grounds of the alleged religious obligation to execute Bahá’ís. He was advanced member of the Assembly of Experts and later of the Guardianship Council of the Islamic Republic. When the band of eight was freed by the high court in Tehran, democratic forces only scarily opposed this fact. Only the newspaper Jahan-e Ma saw this sentence as a grave violation “of the principles of equity and justice, equality and oneness of all people before the law” (ibid., 154) and as a sign that minorities cannot be defended in such a religiously fanaticized system. This event facilitated also the growth in power of an organization, Fada’iyan-i Islami, whose leader had intervened for the liberation of the murderers. Founded in an anti-Bahá’í sentiment, organizations such as this, like Tablighat-i Islami and the Hujjatiyyah, fostered violent sentiments in the population. Judicial sustenance of religious fanaticism encouraged more political murders—often now motivated or justifed by the alleged Bahá’í identity of the victim (which guarantees it legitimation). When the leader of the eight fanatics, Rasulzadih, a Hezbollah leader, who murdered Dr. Berjis, died in 1981, the newspaper Kayhan praised in a eulogy his anti-Bahá’í and anti-Zionistic activities. A dam was broken. To be suspected a Bahá’í became a reason for cultural, social, civil, and physical extinction. And the law of the land could now be utilized for the glorifcation of murder as a political means. This and similar force-felds of politically exploited fanaticism were the reason that Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and Shoghi Effendi crafted carefully their alternative views of nonviolence, non-involvement in partisan politics, and the abstinence from any form of opposition, even of civil disobedience, so as to address not its symptoms, but the very roots of its appearance: the destruction of unity in difference through antagonism and opposition, the oppression of alternative thinking and living through exclusivist truth claims, and monochromatic misunderstandings of unity masking aspirations of self-elevation to positions of power (GPB, 132). It is for the painful recognition—but even more the constructive avoidance of these horrible infestations of inhumanity and a new form of “constructive resilience” against any destructive or merely resisting counter-acting that would perpetuate the cycle of violence (Karlberg, Resilience, 222–57)—that the Bahá’í notion of unity in diversity, or the oneness of multiplicities (such as humanity, ethnicities, and religions), is formulated and alternatives of peace-making are proposed. By astonishingly similar insights, Whitehead envisions a future progression toward a universal civilization united in peace (AI, ch. 20). It can only be reached by overcoming the coercive forces of opposition, by their habitual

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(but always newly to be won) transformation into contrasts, and by fnding ways to harmonize the tragic pasts with a new future of creative resilience against the effects of the past by which we remain caged in the repetition of violence. Peace has a spiritual depth that goes beyond any military or judicial construct of the absence of war (AI, 285). As “great transitions are due to a coincidence of forces derived from both sides of the world, its physical and its spiritual natures” (AI, 18), they must involve the mitigating powers of religion. Religion (in Whitehead’s understanding) must become the spiritual expression of a civilization of peace, which in turn must be enabled to mirror a religious ideal of divinity that is not crafted after a coercive, blood thirsty despot, but calls upon our deepest motive forces with a persuasiveness that is animated by its divine nature as harmony of harmonies (AI, 169). Despite the cruelties that religions often harbor, instigate, and perpetuate, this, for Whitehead, was the essential development of the philosophical insight of Plato and the example of founders of religion like Christ (AI, 166–9): that all (civilization, peace, spiritual maturity) depends on the discovery of the mutual immanence of all existence, the acknowledgment of its relativity as the condition for a civilizing movement toward physical and spiritual peace, and the aspiration to overcome the inhibitions of the narrowness of Self (Faber, Becoming, expl. 10; GPW, 204–6).

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Thus Peace is the removal of inhibition and not its introduction. It results in a wider sweep of conscious interest. It enlarges the feld of attention. Thus Peace is self-control at its widest,—at the width where the ‘self’ has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality. Here the real motive interests of the spirit are meant, and not the superfcial play of discursive ideas. Peace is helped by such superfcial width, and also promotes it. In fact it is largely for this reason that Peace is so essential for civilization. It is the barrier against narrowness. One of its fruits is that passion whose existence Hume denied, the love of mankind as such. (AI, 285–6)

It is under these conditions that the symbolism of the garden of Reality in its theological and cosmological dimensions is not a naïve escape from “reality” (if it was identifed with suffering and impermanence), but wants—much like the Buddha (Panikkar, Silence, 19–20) and Laozi (ch. 3)—to awake to a depth of Reality, yet wants—closer to Bahá’u’lláh (PUP, #135)—also to release that which harbors the physical nucleus and the spiritual pattern for a future that would unite humanity in a new way—leaving no (injustice in any) sphere of life untouched (PT, ##40–53). And it would give rise to a universal, ecological, and spiritual civilization that is capable of harmonizing its differences beyond confictual antagonisms (on all levels) in a peaceful emphasis of diversity and the integration of ever wider circles of lived harmonies with

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the Earth and beyond (Faber, Justice, 160–78). But the symbolism of the garden as a realization of the Kingdom of God in the kingdom of names goes beyond any of these (social, economic, political, or ecological) materializations (PT, #4), in its motivation and power irreducibly invoking the mystical core of religiosity as its all-pervasive Reality (Parker, Garden, 3–17). It is in this sense that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá speaks of the “ocean of Reality” and prays in one of his supplications for us to see all the members of human society gathered with love in a single great assemblage, even as individual drops of water collected in one mighty sea; to behold them all as birds in one garden of roses, as pearls of one ocean, as leaves of one tree, as rays of one sun. (SAB, #36)

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To counter the suspicion that this imagery of the one ocean and one garden somehow still hides an imperialistic inclusivism or colonialism of unity foregoing transreligious conviviality, let me add a passage from Some Answered Questions that under the artful hand of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s pen tells a quite different story. By the spiritual task of a unity of religions, he really means a polyphonic unity, complex and irreducible to monological unifcations so signifcantly employed by, for instance, the segregational convivencia of multireligious Spain prior to the expulsion of Jews and Moslems in 1492 (Keller, Conviviality, 144–7), but also by historically increasing imposition of restrictions onto the “religions of the book” (other than Islam, which is ironically one of them) under Islamic reign (Fananapazir, Islam, chs. 4–5). Moreover, the search for Reality, as understood by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá—to use a term that has substantially pervaded my own work—is polyphilic (Faber, Bodies, 200–23); and in being that, it is univocal (full of equality and justice). Therefore, man must be the seeker after the Reality, and he will fnd that Reality in each of the Sanctifed Souls. He must be fascinated and enraptured, and attracted to the divine bounty; he must be like the butterfy who is the lover of the light from whatever lamp it may shine, and like the nightingale who is the lover of the rose in whatever garden it may grow. (SAQ, #14)

The Sanctifed Souls indicate, of course, a central tenet of the theophanology of Bahá’ís, which has great importance for its contemporary conceptualization of religious relativity, namely, that it is the multiplicity of divine manifestations in the diverse prophets and sages within and of different religions that “integrate” as a variety the manifest divine (McLean, Prolegomena, 25–67). In their univocity, they are equally important and valuable—they are one in variation, not in opposition (ch. 3). Yet, in the kingdom of names, there are many lamps, many gardens! In all of them dwells Truth (SAB, #233)!

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God only made manifest among the people the grace and loving-kindness of the suns shining from the horizon of oneness. He equated the knowledge of these holy souls with the knowledge of himself. Whoever knows them knows God; whoever hears their words hears the words of God; and whoever affrms them affrms God. But whoever rises in opposition to them has risen in opposition to God; whoever opposes them opposes God, and whoever denies them denies God. (Bahá’u’llah, Commentary on a Verse of Rumi, §§17–18)

Here, unity and plurality are not opposites anymore, and this graceful togetherness is devoid of monologues of mutually external divinities for which we were to fght. Opposition is not a divine emanation from oppositional coincidence into manifest confict, but an antagonism to the integrated variety of divine names in the divine manifestations as well as the univocity among these suns shining from the horizon of unity (KI, 142). In these texts, the many mirrors of grace induce a profound feeling and an existential awareness of a divine love for this manifold of the garden. Reality rains down; it loves overfowing! Meister Eckhart speaks of love boiling over (ebullitio) (McGinn, Thought, ch. 5) and Thomas Aquinas, in picking up on Plotinus, invokes the infnite diffusion of the Good (bonum diffusivum sui) (Elders, Metaphysics, ch. 7). Reality loves multiplicity (Faber and Keller, Pluralism, 58–81)! Divine love is polyphilia (TDM, part 2)! Polyphilia, the divine love of and in the manifold, is not only a notion that indicates the polyphony of voices within the univocal process that is guided by progressions of harmony, but it is the indicator of divine love itself (TDM, ch. 11). The Harmony of Harmonies, which is one of the names Whitehead uses to indicate the divine (AI, 285), is always before the opposition of unity and multiplicity by working through their perversion within a movement of overcoming it. It is a movement of graceful bounteousness by which it also appears as a reconciliation of conficts (GPW, §29). Unity is a process of grace and redemption—as Christian theology says—or mercy and compassion—with the bismillah that begins the Qur’an—that is coextensive and inexhaustibly allowing for renewal, at the same time. And for Bahá’u’lláh, as for Whitehead, it is a movement of the divine cycle of love (GPW, §30): of the Manifestation of apophatic Reality as creative divinity in which all attributes/virtuals (potentials and virtues) of the world of creation are already integrated, but are unfolding in the realization of the creatures, and are oscillating in ever-new cycles of generation and reconciliation between them—as symbolized by the three worlds of the Bahá’í ringstone symbol and their vertical connectivity by the movements of apophasis (subtraction) and manifestation (affrmation). It is here that Whitehead resonates with the mediation of the world of Manifestation between the apophatic world of God and the realm of names

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as it connects them through the rhythms of harmonizations in ever-new revelations (Momen, Study, 81–94). It is these manifestations, who, like Whitehead’s God (!), form the integration on the diversity of divine virtues, the rhythms of their divine offering for the world, and the reaping of their actualizations or failures to do so. I will have to come back to the radical insight enshrined in this equation between Manifestation and Whitehead’s God later (chs. 6–7). Here, I remain concentrated on the oscillations of harmonization, which are the basis for a history of “progressive revelation” and repeated unifcations in diversifcations—they are expressions of a deep divine motive, the motive of polyphilic love (TDM, ch. 11). In Whitehead’s words: For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and foods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands. (PR, 351)

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‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in his important Commentary on the Islamic Tradition “I was a Hidden Treasure” (Tafsír-i-Hadith-i-Kuntu Kanzan Makhfíyyan), to which we will also return later (chs. 6–8), situates the motive force of love right at the relativistic center, in between the three gates of relativity—and as a variation of its threefold code. In his emphasis, the manifestation of the apophatic divinity out of love, the relativity of all created beings in the creative stirrings of love, and the bounty of infnite worlds stream from, and unite in, polyphilia. Since in the Hiddenness [Apophatic Depth] of the Huwiyya [Ipseity] (ghayb-i huwiyya) there came about a Love-induced impulse (ḥarakat-i ḥubiyya) and a predilection of the [Divine] Essence (mayl-i dhātī), the Perfection of the [theophanic] disclosure and uncovering (kamāl-i jalā’ va istijlā’) was necessitated (iqtiḍā’). (Commentary on the Islamic Tradition “I was a Hidden Treasure,” §1, transl. for me by Stephen Lambden)

In an enigmatic but fascinating rendering of the motive of creation, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá confrms the paradoxical Islamic tradition, originating in Ibn ‘Arabi’s work and showered with many commentaries over the centuries of Islamic mysticism and Suf theosophical thought (Savi, Summit, 25–31), that apophatic Reality is a “Hidden Treasure,” imagining “its” infnite bounty beyond narrow delimitations of the oneness of God (as devoid of multiplicity). Other than the monistic rendering of the “unity of being” of many Suf commentators (ibid., 13–5), discussed in this Commentary, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá

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(like Bahá’u’lláh) refutes monism not primarily on the ground of divine apophasis (Brown, Doctrine of Unity, 1–29), but because of his alternative vision of mutual immanence arising from the deepest motive of creation, or any “steering” of movement “in God” as being nothing but love (Brown, Beginning, 24). This means, that apophatic Reality is the innermost Reality of everything by the impulse of love, a love that “necessitates” the overfowing of divine perfections (the world of God) as integrated infnite variety of divine names in the world of manifestation (the world of manifestation) and as potential for variation in the kingdom of names (the world of creation). Polyphilia! To (always anew) regain “it” (the Reality of/as Love) is the process of the extinction of opposition in affrming the plurisingularity of the Manifestations of Reality (ch. 7) in whom, Bahá’ís believe, the differentiated world of religions to be a univocal garden of Reality. O Lord, shower upon them all the outpourings of Thy mercy, rain down upon them all the waters of Thy grace. Make them to grow as beauteous plants in the garden of heaven, and from the full and brimming clouds of Thy bestowals and out of the deep pools of Thine abounding grace make Thou this garden to fower, and keep it ever green and lustrous, ever fresh and shimmering and fair. (SAB, #8)

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5. SUBTRACTIVE AFFIRMATION In Whitehead’s more technical terms, we encounter this apophatic polyphilia by viewing three elements of his thought together. The outcome of this synthesis is what I have called subtractive affrmation (TDM, ch. 3), which again demonstrates why the apophatic gate can “secure” the polyphilic nature of the other two gates (ch. 1). Here, I am not interested in important consequences, which will be reviewed later (ch. 6), but the constitution and becoming of the apophatic-polyphilic dynamics from viewing “together” those three elements of Whitehead’s thought: the “epistemological” importance of “coherence” (ch. 1) at the beginning, and being axiomatic for, Whitehead’s central work Process and Reality; the “ontological” conviction of “mutual immanence,” being central to Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas and his late work “Immortality” (chs. 6 and 8); and the motivation of the concept of “Peace” and “Harmony of Harmonies” in Whitehead’s work by what I have called the “theopoetic difference” (GPW, 144), which is also a non-difference of reconciliation (GPW, 126), between God and the world (PR, 346–8), which again is based on the difference between power and love (TDM, ch. 11). As these three elements play a thoroughgoing role in the whole book, I will at this point only introduce their connection to the present theme of the apophatic ground (or groundlessness) of polyphilia, which again is the basis

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for the understanding of meaningful, but radically open relativity (ch. 3); transreligious multiplicity (ch. 4); and the multiplicity of words of existence, discourse, religious integrity, and irreducible diversity (ch. 5); as well as polyphilic pluralism (ch. 6). First, Whitehead’s philosophic method wants, like Kant’s epistemology, to unite empirical (empiricist) and rational (rationalist) strains of philosophy, which have drifted apart in preceding centuries. For that reason, he admits fve epistemological criteria, two of them empirical (applicability and adequacy), two of them rational (logic and coherence), and their transversality in a universal relationality, which is also a means for the rationality of the whole “system” (ch. 5), by which Whitehead wants to comprehend all experiences to be admitted and understood together in one universal philosophical vision of the multiplicity of the world (PR, 3–4). At this juncture I am only interested in two points: frst, that such a “metaphysics” does not want to begin with abstract principles (the frst principles of Aristotle), but wants to fnd universal categories or concepts of togetherness of all experiences, which presupposes and demands that always new experiences can be added (PR, 4). Novelty, hence, is of such importance that no system can know all of its principles, if it fnds any, and not of the “true” range of their universality either (PR, 8), as always new experiences, events, as it were, can create a new universal horizon for the whole relational/rational endeavor (Prologue). Then again, logic is not a major criterion, as it can be experientially (by events and new horizons) restructured (Epilogue), but only to the extent that not any fantasy whatsoever must be admitted to be an experience that necessitates the change of the “system” or “sympathic synthesis” of understanding (ch. 9). Yet, the most interesting element to be mentioned in our context is the criterion of “coherence” (PR, 4, 6). Whitehead describes it in such a way that it actually is not just a “rational” criterion, but also an “empirical” one, and one that escapes simple dualisms, and, in fact, formulates Whitehead’s nondualism as oscillation (ch. 3): that all categories, notions, concepts, ideas, experiences, and so on, can only be understood if they are connected in such a way that they, frst, are mutually presupposing each other, and second, are not derived from one another. The frst element states that nothing can be a frst principle, concept, experience, and so on, if it is not admitting all others as its presupposition; that is, anything that is considered does not come into view as isolated fact or idea or experience, but as already always universally related. Hence, any conceptual restriction is an abstraction from this vast background (MT, 108). The second element states that this mutuality is not based on the unfolding of logical implications, but that the related facts, events, concepts, and so on, constitute a mutual novelty for one another, which, as it cannot be reduced to any simple unity, is a multiplicity that must be experienced, but never just deducted. Coherence is not just a measure for abstractions

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(like concepts and ideas, principles and reasons) to be mutually dependent, whether we know the vast background of such mutuality or not, but demands that they must ground in actual events of novelty. Hence, their understanding cannot be reduced to any analysis of them as mere implied elements, because they exhibit actual creative independence from their reduction to logical abstractions. Coherence is a surprising synthesis, surpassing any analysis; it is (of) an event. This is the reason why Whitehead’s understanding of the world does not ground in logic, but aesthetic (Prologue), in events and not in concepts or principles—and that God must be understood not as a principle (PR, 342–3), but as event (PR, 12–3). Second, the epistemological coherence correlates with the ontological mutual immanence (AI, 201), which again is the basis for the relativistic gates of connectivity (ch. 4) and multiplicity (ch. 5). As more will be said about it later (distributed throughout the chapters of the book), I reserve only two points of explanation to the current question of apophatic-polyphilic relativity. Firstly, mutual immanence communicates relationality and novelty, as does coherence; it is ontological coherence. Hence, it harbors relationality as process, as movement of the All, as mutual transcendence of events and horizons that no abstraction can capture (GPW, §§16, 24). Necessarily, this process of Reality-in-becoming must imply the apophasis of novelty, and the apophasis of the absolute unknowability of any beyond this relational fabric of nexus of events of becoming (PR, 4). What does not relate, even as novelty, cannot be articulated at all; here the mystical and the apophatic meet (Faber, Mystical Whitehead, 213–34). Second, the articulation of such a multiplicity in connective becoming, punctuated by the discontinuity of evernew events—so Whitehead in his lecture “Immortality”—must use insights and abstractions of understanding of the other elements, be they events or abstractions, to make any reasonable claim on anything (Faber, Multiplicity, 187–206). No articulation can be hermetic, creating all categories of understanding from its own horizon (MT, 173). The language used to articulate their elements, essence, importance, and so on, must always be all-related, even in the moments of novelty (Imm., 684–7). It must “recognize” the excluded; it must make reference to the other, strange, foreign, and disconnected, mandatory. Insight is already always a transgression of horizons (RM, 60). Therefore, it is legitimate, for instance, to relate Whitehead’s mutual immanence to the Buddhist dependent co-arising (pratitya-samutpada), or Reality (al-haqq) to the apophatic, but creative Godhead of mystical lore and the universal Buddha-body (dharmakaya) (chs. 6 and 8). Third, the understanding of (the divine Reality of) Peace, Harmony, Love, and related notions in Whitehead (AI, ch. 20) rest on the mutuality of all worlds, concepts, principles, and realities, in this sense of mutual immanence, transcendence, and transgression. In ultimate terms, Whitehead articulates

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this mutuality of multiplicity and unity, whether in an epistemological, ontological, or spiritual sense, with the mutual difference and indifference between God and the world (PR, 348). As more will be said about this in/difference throughout the book in appropriate contexts (chs. 5–7), I shall again concentrate here only on this one implication: that Reality is manifest in this mutual in/difference between God and the world as reconciled non-difference (GPW, 82), which is not overcoming, but always initiating the process of a world in becoming in its own multiplicity (primordial nature) and returning it in its actualization into compassionate harmonization (consequent nature) in a cycle of love (ch. 5). In this cycle of love, God and the world are neither ever different from one another nor identical with one another since the creative process of mutual “coherence” between God and the world, as a process of mutual novelty and relationality (PR, 348–50), is not identical with apophatic Reality either, which constitutes the love of this multiplicity by always subtracting “itself” (“its” Self) from all potential identifcations with any creative or destructive powers. Reality is always only appearing in subtractive affrmation of/from this creative process by being never of it, but beyond all categories, the love for it that cannot be identifed with anything in the creative process (GPW, 327). I have called the mutual in/difference between God and the world “transpantheism” as its “coherence” is neither indicating theism (all unilaterally originating in one side: God) nor panentheism (in any simple sense of only God comprising the world), but means a transgression of any unifcation by novelty and apophatic subtraction, (not before, but) beyond the “identity” of God and the world in pantheism (TDM, ch. 13). I call this in/ difference (ch. 6) also “theopoetic” (GPW, 82, 144) as it describes the mutual poetic creation of this process of mutual “coherent” transgression between God and the world (ch. 6; Faber, God in the Making, 179–200). The relativity of religious truth and its transreligious embodiment in the image of the garden of Reality exhibits these three elements of Whitehead’s thought in such a way that they, in fact, describe what ‘Abdu’’l-Bahá fnds the defning characteristic of polyphilia: that in this garden “multiplicity is the greatest factor for coordination” (SAB, #225; ch. 8). I can now rephrase the three elements of subtractive affrmation gleaned from Whitehead as the apophatic-polyphilic movement of Reality “itself” for the endeavor of the garden of Reality in these terms: First, the subtractive affrmation of apophatic Reality in favor of multiplicity expresses the “coherence” of all experiences, events of becoming, but also possibilities, potentials, abstractions of understanding, and insight in Reality, as open to novelty, while being bound by relationality in process in which Reality can only appear as multiplicity and its affrmation, as novelty and its affrmation, as relationality and its affrmation. Second, since there is no way to access what is beyond relationality as such, apophatic Reality subtracts “itself” from the process of becoming

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by, thereby, affrming the mutuality of all becoming (ch. 3). Hence Reality in-sists in the process only as mutuality and novelty insofar as this multiplicity becomes the expression of this polyphilic love, its unity in diversity, its directionality toward Harmony and Peace, but never as opposition or in isolation or with superiority or through fragmentation (chs. 6, 8). Third, Reality invites transreligious relativity as the love of the manifold (polyphilia) insofar as “it” is never identical with any of its creative movements. The patience for, engagement with, admittance of the excluded, the other, the oppressed is, hence, a mandatory presupposition for a process of creativity that does not succumb to its movements of divisive power. Mutual immanence knows always that the love of Reality is only love, and never (identical with) any of the mutually immanent powers of creative or destructive forces (GPW, Postscript). This is the “theopoetic difference”; it is in my view the reason that Whitehead does not identify God with Creativity (PR, 346). To detach God’s love from any power is to say that Reality is apophatic, but loves the world in its infnite multiplicities as it is engaged in a process of harmonization, intensifcation, mutual immanence, and “coherence.” When ‘Abdu’l-Bahá names love as the impulse of the apophatic Reality to emanate (in) multiplicity, as he does in the quote from his Commentary (§1) mentioned in the preceding section, so does he also say that apophatic Love is never any of the powers we project onto God, as they always remain in mutual immanence with one another and in isolation exhibit the powers we should not identify with Reality (TDM, ch. 11). But as these powers indeed become expressions of mutual immanence, they begin to refect the apophatic love that is not any (identical with any) power, not even (identical with) “omnipotence” (which is another human projection of fragmented powers onto Reality), by overcoming the powers of opposition and destruction. In their mutual relativity they then become the mirror of the apophatic love that is thereby immanent (only) in this mutuality of relationality and novelty, and of (the two gates of) connectivity and multiplicity. In this sense, the garden of Reality is the garden in which Reality is mirrored in multiplicity, as it becomes the very means of harmony (SAB, #225).

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Laozi, Oscillating

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1. RESONANCES If it comes to an awareness of the relativity of religious truth, which Shoghi Effendi postulates to be at the heart of the Bahá’í Faith (ch. 1), the possibly most ancient and complex realization not only of a practice of relativity but of a theoretical consciousness of its (one might almost say) “necessity” is the philosophical and religious movement that stands associated with the name of the ancient Chinese sage Laozi (Watts, Tao, 36). Although current scholarship has gone beyond the division in philosophical (dao jia) and religious (dao jiao) Daoism (Fischer-Schreiber, Dictionary, 176)—after all, their mutual grounds of development are too closely related and sometimes inextricably mingled (Robinet, Taoism, 1–24)—it makes sense to differentiate between its more philosophical heritage and its religious expressions on the basis of a common ancestry in Chinese life and thought reaching back into pre-history, but also developing, through the philosophical impulses, into a (changed) religion (Wong, Taoism, ch. 3). It is in the midst of these traces, of ancient shamanism, ancestor worship, ghost fear, and reverence that the increasingly differentiated schools of thought culminate in a philosophy introduced under the name of Laozi (Wong, Taoism, ch. 1). Philosophy here—as is also true for ancient Greek philosophy—does not indicate mere thought, but a way of life, and its hero is not considered a mere thinker, but a wise human being, a sage, even a holy fgure (Fung, History, chs. 1–2). Meaning a person and a book—Laozi and the Laozi or Dao De Jing—both are not only of great age but also of unknown identity and origin (Robinet, Taoism, 25–30). Yet, with both of them, a new pattern of existence had entered human life in the development of society (Fung, History, ch. 9). Over the centuries of ancient China, they gathered a power of clarity and 107

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pervasiveness throughout Chinese society that cannot be attributed to any other stream of thought except Confucianism and Chinese Buddhism, which are themselves not independent of it either (Clarke, Tao, ch. 2). And all of them, despite their mutual difference, were growing out of the mixture of Chinese religiosity that shared a few common presuppositions of enormous cultural, philosophical, and religious impact (Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, ch. 7). Like the threefold genetic code of relativity—connectivity, apophasis, multiplicity of worlds—and its permutations (like indetermination and polyphilia), Chinese thought and life began to center around variations of concepts such as the Dao, Yin and Yang, the power of yielding (wu wei), an infnite cyclical generation and evanescence of nature (ziran), an allpervasive force of perpetual movement (qi), and the quest for perfection in the form of the perfect human being (zhenren) (Blofeld, Taoism, 1–19). This complex concept of change (jing) (Robinet, Meditation, 19–29), which had probably its most ancient expression in the Yi Jing (Grigg, Tao, 3–10), in its later form already including the comments of Confucian sages if not of Confucius himself (William and William, I Ching, 8–46), found its most profound cosmological expression in the two Daoist classics, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi (Fung, History, chs. 9–10). Although even their relation is as unclear as their internal literal unity, both Laozi and the Laozi gained the status and public recognition of an event of Chinese identity such that their long-standing reverence and implementation made them both divine: Laozi became a divinity (Robinet, Taoism, 50; Kohn, God, passim) and the Laozi—except for the Zhuangzi in Chinese Buddhist reception (Mair, Wandering, xliv)—the scripture of virtually unrivaled importance for any further philosophical discussion and religious practice of Chinese religion and society (ibid., 182–93). What appears as a change in direction away from process thought and the Bahá’í religion by retreating into ancient times is really but a diving into relevant patterns of relativity of a past in which they have gained the mind’s light of day (Fung, History, ch. 6). Laozi and the Laozi connect us to one of the earliest still extant traditions that not only developed a notion of the relativity of Truth and religions but utilized this discovery for mystical insight, ethical imperatives, and social development alike, far beyond any restricted applicability to the Chinese spirit and life (Needham, Science II, ch. 10). In fact, they explicated one of the earliest visions of a society of peace that implied humanity as such, a world civilization (Robinet, Taoism, 54). Their implicit and explicit presence in both process and Bahá’í thought is a current and relevant matter since through the ages they exhibit the same impulse, namely, how religious truth, if it is recognized in its profound relativity, can energize the development of a universal civilization grounded in a selfconscious realization of peace (Chew, Religion, ch. 7).

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The resonances of early philosophical Daoism with process thought are indirect, but profound (Odin, Beauty, 57). Although Whitehead was not in any way copying its writings or ideas—they were just arriving in the West in his time in any critical measure—he must have known some of its precepts, not least from the frst serious recognition of Chinese thought by Leibniz who played an important role for Whitehead’s development of a concept of cosmological and cultural harmony (Perkins, Leibniz, ch. 4). Yet, while Leibniz was more engaged with a frst recognition of Chinese philosophy, mostly related to Confucius and his perceived ethical nobility, Whitehead seems much closer to Daoist principles of an aesthetic foundation of civilization— as can be witnessed in Adventures of Ideas (Martin, Beauty, 118). Whitehead must have felt comfortable enough in his closeness to Chinese thought so as to even postulate that, in its “general position, the philosophy of organism,” especially as it was built on notions of creativity, event, process, organism, and harmony, “seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought” (PR, 7). Although Whitehead does not use any technical terminology associated with Laozi or philosophical Daoism, generations of scholars have made these connections obvious (Xie, Whitehead, passim). One of the frst to recognize this connection was Joseph Needham who, in his monumental work Science and Civilization in China, mused that Whitehead’s philosophy can be traced back to Zhuangzi (Science II, 291–303). Among Chinese philosophers or scholars of philosophy today who know Whitehead circulates the saying that Whitehead was a Chinese philosopher in a Western body and that one has to read Whitehead with Chinese eyes to understand him deeply. Like Laozi and Daoist philosophy in general, Whitehead understands philosophy as “an attempt to express the infnity of the universe in terms of the limitations of language” (Schilpp, Philosophy, 14). And it is Whitehead criticism of alphabetical languages, when they become substantialized in a metaphysical scheme from their pattern of sentences, composed of subject and predicate, that speaks directly to the great challenge to read the Laozi or other classics of Chinese philosophy with its pictorial language (PR, 13). Yet, this variance also hints already at the very difference of patterns through which Chinese philosophy was able to capture the fux of infnite reality as a process of unceasing creativity beyond the human capacity to stabilize it in any form that would conspire with its infnite mystery (Fang, History, 14–5). It is this relativistic resonance of approaches to Reality—and not the structure or philosophical terminology—that inspires a deeper understanding and the mutual relevance of Whitehead and Laozi (Chan, Philosophy, 636–7). One may suspect such interaction also to generate new insights if their mind-set is searched with questions of religious truth and the development of a peaceful civilization in mind (Wang, Process, chs. 5–6). It is maybe a sign of the

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relevance of such research that while the Center for Process Studies at Claremont has developed as host of Whiteheadian thought in the West since the 1970s, many centers have been established at Chinese universities within the last decades (Xie, Whitehead, 7–14). The relationship of the Bahá’í Faith to Chinese religions in general and Daoism in particular is even more indirect (Chueng, Teachings, 189–212). Although an event like the appearance of a new religion always generates waves of expansion from its place of origin over a period of time, it is not without interest to notice that the frst appearance of Bahá’ís in China dates from the 1880s during the last years of the lifetime of Bahá’u’lláh (who had made his claim of universal prophethood public in the 1860s), namely, through a trading offce of the Afnan family, the family of the Báb, in Shanghai (Afnan, Genesis, 319). While under Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Bahá’í religion expanded from its Iranian-Iraqi Shi‘i places of origin over Syria to Egypt and Sudan in the South, to India and Burma in the East, and Europe and America in the West; early believers had already reached China (WOB, 84). It was only incidentally that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá did not, as he had planned, visit China, at least its Western provinces, in the 1920s (Hassall, Country Notes, passim). Yet, we still have a record of the expression of his intention in which he directs the interest of the Bahá’ís toward China with a loud call. In the so-called Tablet of China, he shouts: “China, China, China, Chinaward the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh must march!” (Star of the West, vol. 21, 261) ‘Abdu’l-Bahá also mentions the prerequisites for such a mission.

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The Bahá’í teacher of the Chinese people must frst be imbued with their spirit; know their sacred literature; study their national customs and speak to them from their own standpoint, and their own terminologies. (ibid.)

In other words, not only should Bahá’ís “expand” the presence of their religion (which in itself could be misunderstood as an imperialistic or at least unilateral move) but Bahá’í categories must themselves be in a process of expansion in order to gain the capacity of a more universal receptivity widened beyond the limitations of their cultural and linguistic origins in a Persian-Arabic-Mediterranean milieu (Momen, History, passim). They must meet the Chinese spirit from the inside. This, in turn, also relates Whitehead’s categories to Bahá’í thought in a surprisingly new way, namely, as an internal process of conversation mediated through Chinese thought patterns. The more the Bahá’í categories become transformed into categories of Chinese philosophy and religion in thought and life, the more we can assume them also to begin resonating with Whitehead’s philosophy and vice versa. In the end, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s comment is a sign of the transreligious process in which the relativity of (religious and philosophical) Truth is housed and that it releases.

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Such transreligious resonances will, however, be endangered by any kind of rigidness in the simple application of categories modeled in the West when assuming them as identical for the East without noticing their internal differences. This relates especially to these three felds of resonance; their pattern is of importance rather than their conceptuality: the (common pattern of resonance in their) different approach to Reality, not as confict of opposites but as oscillation between contrasts; the (common pattern of resonance in their) different view of ultimacy, not as expressing, releasing, or aiming at a static system, but at a constant process of approximation; and the (common pattern of resonance in their) different interactions between philosophy and religion, between religions, and between East and West, not as confictual alternatives, but as mutually immanent movements of incompleteness of a multiplicity of levels and realms of existence in interaction (Clarke, Tao, chs. 2–3). All three of these more holistic modes of thought in Whiteheadian, Bahá’í, and Daoist lore, seeking mutual immanence rather than opposition, seeking suggestiveness, not decisiveness (Wang, History, 6–14), represent yet another permutation of the genetic code of relativity. Nevertheless, Daoist philosophy, especially of (the) Laozi, comes also with specifc challenges to Whiteheadian and Bahá’í understandings of things that will deepen and amend our understanding of relativity. The next sections are devoted to their elaboration.

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2. OSCILLATING CONTRASTS One of the most profound differences of thought patterns between West and East arise from their different employment of abstractions as driving forces of the conceptualization of Reality. In general, as analyzed with Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness (SMW, 51), in the West abstraction is conceived as (if it was) concrete reality while the particularity of concrete reality often, on this basis, is perceived as (if it only was) a variation of instantiations of this abstract “reality.” Whitehead calls this inversion of reality and appearance, and the implicitly generated division between reality and appearance, the substantialization of abstraction (TDM, ch. 2). It is one of Whitehead’s most important insights that concrete reality cannot be reconstructed from its abstractions (PR, 19–20). Hence, Reality is not to be considered as a stable recurrence of repetitions of characteristics within events and processes—such a “substance” is not reality, but abstraction—but as a repeated choice of events of realization: Reality is in the events of the becoming of Reality (actual entities) in which not only abstractions provide for alternative realizations (eternal objects) but in which also the past (actual) history of realizations reside (GPW, §12). In every new occurrence, the new

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event is a process of unifcation of potentials (for alternatives) and actualities (of the past), a fusion, a process of contrasting the conficts of the past and the alternatives of the future (PR, 23–7). The essence of an organism of such events and processes is not a substance, but the (living) becoming of the character of self-constitution over the span of their decisions to repeat or recreate their past in light of stable abstractions, which are, in turn, their possibilities and potentials for realization (GPW, §13). Applying these categories to the philosophical outlook of religions, as we move from the West to the Far East, we recognize that the Occidental, Mediterranean, Persian, and (partly) Indian religions tend to think in terms of opposites, while the Far East, especially (some forms of) Buddhism and Daoism, tend to operate through contrasts (Clarke, Tao, ch. 8). The same is true of Bahá’í thought. We have already seen earlier (ch. 2), how Bahá’u’lláh tries to overcome the rivalry of opposites (as seemingly constituting reality) not only as a matter of thought but as a necessity of the development of a civilization of peace. Opposites are a matter of choice to oppose unity in diversity, as represented by the variety of divine names and attributes and integrated differently by the Manifestations in different religions. Opposites are not “real” (not in the sense of effcacy in the world, as which they are very real, but in the sense of essential or even ultimate reality), but abstractions from varieties utilized to steer confict (GPW, 227). Here, we may instantly think of the form in which Eastern philosophies and religions think of this world of opposites to be an illusion (Chan, Philosophy, 336–7)—not that this illusion is very “real” in its karmic effcacy. While the confict is effective illusion, the underlying Reality is not oppositional, although it yields illusory choices to occur the overcoming of which, then, is indicated by the insight of their illusionary nature (Fung, History, ch. 21). Opposition is the absence of Truth, which is, in turn, understood as that Reality in which divine variety is contrasted (Chen, Tao, ch. 2). Consider Bahá’u’lláh’s concomitant refection (ch. 7): For instance, consider a person who . . . affrms and recognizes all the divine names and attributes and whatever the preexistent Beauty testifes to, he bears witness to that, for himself and by himself. In this station all descriptions are true and current in regard to him. . . . For in him nothing can be seen save the divine effulgences, as long as he remains in this station. . . . After he rises in opposition, however, that effulgence that had been the basis for describing him, and all the other related attributes, depart to their own habitation. Now that individual is not the same person, for those attributes do not subsist in him. (Commentary on a Verse of Rumi, §6)

For Whitehead, reality is a process of realization of the actual togetherness of a multiplicity unifed in contrasts instead of isolated abstractions (PR, 214),

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which are nothing but abstractions and destructive opposites that abstractions become in giving them power over the process of becoming (TDM, chs. 1–2). As universal peace is also important to the intention of Whitehead’s thought, he even understands God and the world within creation as “contrasted opposites” (PR, 348) in the mutual movement of oscillating one into another (chs. 5–6), creating ever-advancing cosmic and world-civilizing harmonies as a process of “divinizing” the world advances (GPW, §46).

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God and the World stand over against each other, expressing the fnal metaphysical truth that appetitive vision and physical enjoyment have equal claim to priority in creation. But no two actualities can be torn apart: each is all in all. Thus each temporal occasion embodies God, and is embodied in God. In God’s nature, permanence is primordial and fux is derivative from the World: in the World’s nature, fux is primordial and permanence is derivative from God. Also the World’s nature is a primordial datum for God; and God’s nature is a primordial datum for the World. Creation achieves the reconciliation of permanence and fux when it has reached its fnal term which is everlastingness—the Apotheosis of the World. (PR, 348)

In comparison, it is a distinct feature of the philosophy of Laozi to avoid any stabilizing opposites in favor of an oscillating movement of (conceptual and cosmological) felds of interaction, which only in their extreme abstraction (for our consciousness) from this process appear as opposed (Watts, Tao, 32–4). As for Whitehead, for whom “opposed elements stand to each other in mutual requirement,” which in “their unity, [events] inhibit or contrast” (PR, 348), Laozi knows of mutual inhibition or affrmation of the elements forming contrasts. Yet, for Laozi, that which contrasts (or inhibits) is not something in mutual requirement of the other, but is in itself the process of becoming its opposite. This potentially different depiction, not of processes oscillating between different opposites, but of processes oscillating within seeming opposites, refects a specifc Daoist understanding of the Dao as a way, as being nothing but oscillations, not between anything in themselves (Fung, History, 97). And in this “no-thingness” (wu) of Reality, which includes its opposites as “true nonexistence” (zhen wu), and is this oscillation (Robinet, Taoism, 194–5), lies the unity of the world. This ultimate processual Reality is itself only apophatically present in its movements (GPW, 259). The Dao “is a sort of nonsense syllable, indicating the mystery that we can never understand—the unity that underlies the opposites.” It indicates “a reality that we apprehend deeply without being able to defne it” (Watts, Tao, 27–8). Reality/Dao/Way cannot be conceptualized without losing its integrity as an oscillating process (Chen, Tao, 52). Tao/Reality is—as in the Bahá’í understanding—in an absolute sense apophatically unknowable (Chew, Tao,

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11–39) and its names are—as for Bahá’u’lláh (Chueng, Teachings, 199)— only infnite varieties of an infnite, nameless Reality emanating an infnite process of “its” self-manifestation. A name that can be named Is not The Name Dao is both Named and Nameless As Nameless, it is the origin of all things As Named, it is the Mother of all things

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(Laozi, verse 1; trans. by Starr, 14)

In order to avoid in the explications of the apophatic Dao the loss of the movements of oscillation and mutual coinherence, which would, in fact, represent a reiterated (false) “reality,” isolated from the implicit fow of the Dao or Reality, we are asked to rediscover the connective, ecological “Harmony of Harmonies” in “it”—Whitehead’s code for the mutual fow between God and the world (AI, 296). It is not the identity with God, here, but, like in the Whitehead quote above (PR, 348), the fow of mutual immanence (ch. 2) between God and the world—Whitehead addresses with the Platonic khora (ch. 6)—that is akin to the Dao as Mother of all things. Such “daoic” connectivity may be less akin to holistic renderings of “implicate” order, as in David Bohm’s quantum interpretation—since Bohm’s understanding of implication is very much based on hidden variables (Bohm, Wholeness, ch. 3), and, hence, furthers a reintroduction of causality in the spontaneous fow of things, which their harmony in the Dao and in Whitehead signals (Epilogue)—even if Bahá’í authors may fnd the holistic model intriguing (Medina, Faith, 34–49). But the Dao’s movement of implication and explication and the universal ecological connectivity of the explicated multiplicity on the basis of the apophatic nature of the hidden Dao (as well as Whitehead’s khoric interchange of God and the world, all levels of existence, and all things) against all oppositions, binary structures, and fxated hierarchies, may be closer to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s rendering of the mutual immanence of all things that is not just a repetition of a higher order on a lower level, or an “implicate,” but (divinely) fxed order on a cosmic screen—as could be falsely assumed, if we forget the “Dao-like” movement between all of these element (ch. 2). Absolute repose does not exist in nature. All things either make progress or lose ground. Everything moves forward or backward, nothing is without motion. . . . Thus it is evident that movement is essential to all existence. . . . We have seen that movement is essential to existence; nothing that has life is without motion. . . . Divine perfection is infnite, therefore the progress of the soul is also infnite. (PT, #29)

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Rather, the divinely ordained movement of all things—in the Will (activity) and Purpose (form) of God (Saiedi, Gate, 202–10)—is not a matter of external imposition, but—as in Whitehead (AI, 119–21)—immanent to them by the univocity of all things and all potential hierarchies of stations, levels, and complexities (ch. 5), in the movement within the infnite horizon of the apophatic Dao/Reality breaking through all of them and in univocity establishing itself (only) as aesthetic order (RM, 99) by the mutual interaction of all planes of immanence.

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[There] are spiritual truths relating to the spiritual world. In like manner, from these spiritual realities infer truths about the material world. For physical things are signs and imprints of spiritual things; every lower thing is an image and counterpart of a higher thing. Nay, earthly and heavenly, material and spiritual, accidental and essential, particular and universal, structure and foundation, appearance and reality and the essence of all things, both inward and outward— all of these are connected one with another and are interrelated in such a manner that you will fnd that drops are patterned after seas, and that atoms are structured after suns in proportion to their capacities and potentialities. For particulars in relation to what is below them are universals, and what are great universals in the sight of those whose eyes are veiled are in fact particulars in relation to the realities and beings which are superior to them. Universal and particular are in reality incidental and relative considerations. The mercy of thy Lord, verily, encompasseth all things. (TOU, §7, italics added)

Following the Dao’s apophatic-polyphilic movement of all-pervading harmonizations beyond fxated order, beyond binary oppositions, and in reversal of assumptions of isolated substances, we must conclude (from the two quotes above) that this movement itself is not pre-determined like the succession of frames in a flm, but in the interplay of everything with everything in the actualization of creative events of becoming, spontaneous (badi‘) and surprising—in God’s Wisdom (ch. 1)—in the indistinction of “its” (apophatic) and their (polyphilic) self-manifestation (ch. 7). Hence, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá renders connectivity profoundly relativistic like the “ecology” of the Dao in at least three senses (ch. 6): frst, connectivity is relative to the mutual movement of all things and planes of existence, allowing for creative novelty; second, connectivity is fractal as this movement creates patterns of oscillation and unity between all things and planes; and, third, connectivity is relativistic, as it equalizes oppositions, upsets hierarchical binaries, and overturns fxed orders of necessity and contingency, because, now, all except apophatic Reality is contingent (upon “it”). Because of its importance for the understanding of ultimate relativity, I will revisit the implications of this “daoic” connectivity in relation to the folded unity of cascading multiplicities (ch. 5) and the infnite relativity of magnitudes (Epilogue).

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3. MEANINGFUL REGRESSES Another differing thought pattern that implies for its understanding a shift from Western to Eastern categories is a philosophical and religious outlook that, like “some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, . . . makes process ultimate” while “western Asiatic, or European, thought . . . makes fact ultimate” (PR, 7). The challenge of Daoism to any (Western) conceptualizations of Reality that imply stabilized abstractions as a means of grasping “its” truth (or “it” as Truth), rendering them somehow real or more real than the processes between them and in themselves with their spontaneity that cannot be reduced to abstraction and stability, is staggering (Chan, Philosophy, 296–9)—although there are exceptions (in the West) since not only nature but the space of thought abhors vacuum (Fung, History, 87–91). While the meaning of dao is mysterious—and rightfully so—it was, in the history of its interpretation related to a variety of contexts. It meanders through the worlds of metaphysical thought, physical cosmology, mysticism, personal and social ethics, and the formulation of human society—all at once—always instigating a new understanding and practice of life. In all of these areas, it introduces us to a mystery that demands philosophical insight and a religious response. Yet, its most outrageous feature, as presented in the Dao De Jing, is that which Western observers would hastily qualify as its bottomless relativism (Clarke, Tao, ch. 8). At least from the currently rampant reductionism of “relativism” to the phenomenon of the postmodern social condition (as born in and exported by the West) with its capitalism, disorientation, the loss of seriousness, the fat plays of commodifcation, and so on (Lakeland, Postmodernity, ch. 1), the Dao De Jing reminds us of a much deeper strain of relativity than our reduced perception from the limitation of our horizon to the (globalized) West today. However, to understand the deeper Truth it reveals, this impression of its profound relativity is the challenge. In approaching the Dao, we must consider its relation to several other concepts describing each other meaningfully. First, Dao means a way, a method, a whole. It is a manifold, that is, there are always only many daos. All activities, actions, and happenings have their own unique daos. Yet, there is neither one exclusive Dao nor merely many daos. Rather, the Dao is an enfolding whole of related daos (Hansen, Theory, ch. 6). Second, as the title of the Dao De Jing indicates, Dao is related to de, which means virtue. “Dao De Jing” then means Book of the Way and of Virtue. In fact, the received text is partitioned in these two parts, the Dao Jing and the De Jing, the order of which has changed over the history of its preservation while the partitions within these parts remained virtually unchanged (Chan, Daodejing, 1–29). Alan Watts translates de as “skill at living” (Tao, 46); Chad Hanson prefers “virtuosity” (Introduction, 33). It indicates activities of learning, the

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learning of skills, until they become seemingly natural (such as learning to skate). Third, to act “natural” introduces us to the underlying term “nature,” ziran. It means that which operates by itself. The universe is understood as a “democratic organism” (Watts, Wisdom, 116) that, through the Dao, acts on its own, through its internally connected rules of change. Nature is that which is perfect as it is (Clarke, Tao, ch. 4). It indicates, like Whitehead’s “creativity,” that which is “self-so” (Watts, Tao, 41–2). Fourth, to act from the Dao, actualizing De, and following Ziran, one must desist from acting forcefully. This is indicated by the term wu wei. Not (forcefully) acting (against nature) means to act in harmony with the inner rules of change and their tendencies in any situation (Chan, Philosophy, 136–7). Fifth, when we follow the Dao in this way, that is, in not developing desires against nature (Hansen, Introduction, 25), one becomes zhenren, a perfect human being (Robinet, Meditation, 42–8). When the Shiji, the Book of History, mentions Daoism around 100 B.C.E. for the frst time, it was already established as a school different from other competing schools of thought and wisdom (Hansen, Introduction, 9). In fact, the Dao De Jing seems to have originated in critical reaction to codifcations of Confucianism (Chen, Tao, 15–8), that is, it had not only a philosophical outlook but an ethical and social impulse differentiating itself from the Confucian understanding and organization of society (Hansen, Daoism, 3). Against the perceived imperialism of the Confucian social and ethical norm system, which stratifed society with an immovable structure, Daoism aimed at its utter relativity. Although all Chinese philosophical and religious systems used the Dao as a profound matter of cultural heritage, the Daoist’s interpretation directly tried to upset the Confucian emphasis on unity as one fxed hierarchical system of thought, ethics, and society. Instead, in the Daoist rendering of the unity of the Dao, it appeared as profoundly relativistic Reality—a mystery that cannot be expressed in language; that is all-present in everything without ever being anything; that we perceive dimly with every breath, but which cannot be named (Kohn, Philosophy, 3–10). In its novel and critical epistemological turn, Daoism asks: How do we know that there is only one natural pattern that society must just follow? What are the criteria for such a presupposition? And do we have access to this one, right, constant, heavenly Dao to justify our one social/human Dao? The text of the Dao De Jing makes the radical claim that Dao is not “something,” but the criterion by which we follow nature/norms. Yet, this Dao is in itself not normative since it cannot be justifed, that is: every justifcation on a metalevel of discourse raises the same questions and, hence, leads into an infnite regress of daos, one norm justifying the other without bottom or peak. Since every dao (criterion) is always only another dao in need of a justifcation, there cannot be one social norm system all people must follow “by nature.”

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And since the heavenly/natural dao is relative, pluralistic, anarchic, and complex, it can also not force any particular social norm and, hence, allows for many societies to coexist. It allows for many worlds with different rules (Hansen, Daoism, 9.1.1). The paradox of this relativistic Reality is artfully presented in the frst verse of the Dao De Jing: “A dao (way) that can be ‘daoed’ (walked) is not The Dao (The Way)” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, no. 1, trans. by Jonathan Starr, 14; partly changed). In its critical meaning, the Dao, the Way, is a method. It is not the depiction of an object or the description of an external Reality, but a prescription of (different kinds of) norms, always meant to be an instruction for the realization of virtue and virtuosity. It does not answer what or why something is, but how it can be done. One follows a dao. It is a way of doing things (for instance, how to cut wood?) with the natural dao. Nevertheless, the paradox is this: One cannot follow the Dao! If one follows the natural dao— if one “daos”—one cannot follow any “right” dao (Hansen, Daoism, 9.1.1). Hence, the implication, only if one does not follow one normative dao, one follows the Dao. One has to become spontaneous (ziran) like (and in) the Dao (Clarke, Tao, 98). However, this profoundly paradoxical and relativistic character of the Dao must not be confounded with (Western pessimistic concepts of) relativism (ibid., 175–84). It is not saying: “anything goes,” since it is an expression of nature (ziran). It is not saying: “all opinions are equally valid,” since it is normative in nature, an exercise of virtues (de). In fact, its relativistic character is in itself the wisdom of Laozi that leads, if followed, to perfection of ethics, society, and human existence, the perfect human being (zhenren). In this sense, the Daoist criticism of Confucian hierarchical fxations, which claimed higher knowledge of the right way things are and ought to be, promulgated a very different understanding of the refection of Reality into human affairs (Clarke, Tao, ch. 5). It stands for equality of all people, an anarchic view of political power, small and livable communities, distributed powers, highly nonnormative (non-deontological, but situational) virtue ethics of individual responsibility and mutual dependency, and it is based on natural needs rather than socially constructed desires (Hansen, Daoism, 3). Besides, the infnite meta-levels of the Dao do not indicate mere chaos, but an enfolding of levels between the Dao and the spontaneous act of the zhenren—something that will reappear with the infnite cascading worlds in the Bahá’í context (ch. 5) and its interpretation as magnitudes of omnirelativity (Epilogue). But maybe most importantly—as in Whitehead’s conceptualization of peace as striving for transpersonal (and expressing divine) harmony (AI, 292) and as in Bahá’u’lláh’s use of the image of water for the constant fow of divine revelation, especially in his Book of the River (Sahify-i Shattiyyih) (Saiedi, Logos, 29–31)—against the seeming “neutrality” of the Dao in the appearances of

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daos and their potential confictual nature to be reconciled on an ongoing basis, the leading principle of the Dao is bound up not with the (steroid, warlike, confictual) force of the yang, but the giving, patient, and humble power of the yin to let-be, like water, to be constantly fowing despite resistances, seeking non-action (wu wei) and peace. The best way to live Is to be like water For water benefits all things and goes against none of them It provides for all people and even cleanses those places A man is loath to go In this way it is just like Tao.

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(Laozi, verse 8; trans. by Starr, 21)

While the Dao with this normative multiplicity of regresses may be a major challenge to many of the Western presuppositions of thought patterns (Clarke, Tao, ch. 7), the potential of language, the relation of epistemology and ontology, cosmology and ethics, and the almost unavoidable striving for determination of terms, names, ways, rules, norms, laws, structures, and ends, the Dao answers thoroughly the three gates of relativity—connectivity, apophasis, and the multiplicity infnite worlds (ch. 1)—and explicates further their (hitherto employed) permutations of indetermination, polyphilia, and oscillation (ch. 2). The cosmological and social striving for ever-new harmonies of the creative process, instead of fxed realizations of perfection that would stop the processuality of emanating Reality (sought by many philosophies of “being” and religions that promote “fnal states”), resonates profoundly with process and Bahá’í thought, as do the values of radical equality in society, distributed (political and religious) powers, freedom from tradition in one’s search for Truth, situational virtue ethics, the multiple ways to implement the infnity of virtues, and the infnite approximation of the divine mystery in spiritual matters (PT, part 2). The search for Truth and unity under the auspices of the Dao shifts from propositional reductions and the dogmatics of orthodoxies to infnite worlds of meaning and inexpressible mysteries (Chew, Tao, 11–39). “Myriads of mystic tongues fnd utterance in one speech, and myriads of hidden mysteries are revealed in a single melody; yet, alas, there is no ear to hear, nor heart to understand” (HW. P, #6). How deep and mysterious this unity is How profound and great! It is the truth beyond the truth,

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the hidden within the hidden It is the path to all wonder, the gate to the essence of everything! (Laozi, verse 1; trans. by Starr, 14)

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4. MUTUAL INCOMPLETENESS The apophatic use of language in relation to the infnite Reality Beyond cultivates a process that hinders the arrest of essentializations of categories into fxated opposites and hierarchies. The shift from Western to Eastern patterns—as witnessed in Bahá’í and process thought in relation to Daoist philosophy—must avoid presupposing confictual relations (instead of contrasting connections) within at least three areas: between philosophy and religion, between religions, and between religious and civil life. All three of them are to be conceptualized under the assumption of an essential incompleteness of any of their related elements. It is through this assumption that the three gates of relativity express themselves: connectivity always means a multiplicity in relation to an infnite movement, process, or progress; apophatic unity always releases a multiplicity of approximations, ways, and calls to the unattainable; and the infnity of worlds renders incompleteness a necessary cosmological character in which its multifariousness is beyond any simple, reductive, or oppressive unifcation (TDM, chs. 2–3). As with indetermination and polyphilia, which avoid mere relativism (ch. 2), incompleteness does not oppose or indicate the lack of perfection (Faber, Immanence, 91–107). Rather, it implies that that there is always a multiplicity of perfections—each integrated in its own realm, station, position, or grade—as in the infnite permutation of concretely fused divine names and attributes in different creatures and different evolved levels of creation for Bahá’í thought: “Divine perfection is infnite, therefore the progress of the soul is also infnite” (PT, #29); and as in the infnite mixture of potentials and possibilities in events, nexuses, and societies in process thought: “Perfection at a low level ranks below Imperfection with higher aim” (AI, 264). Incompleteness does not lack fulfllment, wealth, or satisfaction, but avoids isolation, substantialized abstraction, and the very opposition of abstractions like perfection and imperfection. Rather, like the Buddhist pratitya-samutpada (Chan, Philosophy, ch. 20), incompleteness highlights the essential mutuality of the connective, apophatic, and multifarious multiplicity of (or emanating from) Reality. I will address the three (potentially confictual) areas of shifting regarding the mind-set from Western opposition to Eastern contrasts, mediated through

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Laozi, in reverse order. First, how to avoid oppositions between religious and secular life? Religion in the West has increasingly become defned as a section of human life that cannot only be differentiated from other sections (such as politics or private life), but as being somehow suffciently “independent” from civil and communal life, which has again enabled a view for which to ignore religion as a merely private matter has become even a peak accomplishment of civilized (secular) society. Note that this is neither the view of Daoism (Fung, History, 102–7) nor that of process and Bahá’í thought (Hayes, Peace, part 2). Although this development was heavily infuenced by the necessity to depart from the devastating inner conficts and wars within Christianity (during the time of the Reformation and the Enlightenment) and its external exclusivism against other religions (especially other Abrahamic traditions since antiquity) alike, none of the three traditions under investigation here understands human life modeled after such a division. While the Bahá’í Faith fully accepts the civility of society and the freedom of, and from, (its) religion(s) in it (ATN, 158), its concept of religion originates not in this occidental context (as a presumed Western colonial invention), but with the Islamic notion of din, and relates even further back to the Zoroastrian notion of daena (Ekbal, Daena, 125–70). As Wilfred Cantwell Smith has worked out as early as in the 1960s, din does not indicate an organized system of religion, its institutionalized orthodoxy, or legal code, but a personal faith as lived in the integrity of one’s whole life (Smith, Meaning, 82). In its existential wholeness, din (in this original meaning) does not swallow the different expressions of human life such as physical, biological, social, and mental spheres, but it pervades all of them, not as another (independent) sphere of life, but as the expression of the connective, apophatic, and infnitely diversifed Reality itself. It becomes the immanent motor for the development of a divine civilization by realizing the divine names and attributes as human virtues and potentials in all spheres of life (PUP, #29)—in the breakthrough to, and the realization of, the spiritual self (Ekbal, Daena, 135). It is this resonant spirit in which Bahá’u’lláh’s rendering of the meaning of din (besides later dogmatic limitations and cultural accretions) is revived: All men have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization. The Almighty beareth Me witness: To act like the beasts of the feld is unworthy of man. Those virtues that beft his dignity are forbearance, mercy, compassion and loving-kindness towards all the peoples and kindreds of the earth. . . . The Great Being saith: O ye children of men! The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men. Suffer it not to become a source of dissension and discord, of hate and enmity. (GL, 214)

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This holistic view of religious existence is also the reason that Whitehead avoids isolating religion as a stratum of human life among others. In Religion in the Making, religion (in its origin) reaches not only back into the recesses of the evolution of humanity but even into the animal realm, in which he detects its emergence in the overfow of energy that is not bound by primary material interests such as food and shelter (RM, 20–1). What is more, it is religion that stands for the new reality of humanity (of being human, if you will) as it releases the free play and rhythms of enjoyment unbound by mere necessities (RM, 20). It is, hence, the holistic expression of aesthetic awakening of human self-identifcation, of the intensifcation of modes of feeling (and consciousness), of cosmological curiosity (the appearance of rationality), and mental freedom of research (freedom from limitations in imagination and mind) that binds it to the arts and sciences, ethics, and (the construction of more human) social organization (RM, 99). In Adventures of Ideas, religion need not even have to be named religion anymore (or if it is identifed as such, it is already particularized into many religions) as it expresses the development of human civilization toward a Peace as itself a process of, to, and within, the Harmony of Harmonies—both of them epitaphs of the divine in this civilization (AI, 271). And in a more technical language, Process and Reality makes the case that there is no specifc religious experience beside other kinds of experiences, but that it really indicates rather a global qualifer of all human experiences, events and processes, as it is initiated in the divinely offered “initial aim” by which, for Whitehead, all experience begins or comes to be (PR, 244). This profound implication of religion in the aesthetic grounding of any experience is, paradoxically, also the reason that Whitehead calls for a “secularization of the concept of God’s functions in the world” (PR, 207), that is: Whitehead asks us to consider the disentanglement of religion as based at the bottom (or initiation) of any experience from its prison within specifc religious experiences—not in order to follow the modern secularism in the call of its (religion’s and religious experience’s) disappearance in favor of (and by transforming them into) other more secular expressions of ultimate Reality (if such even is still in question), but in the precise sense that the concept of God has a global cosmological function that cannot be expressed in the (confictual) opposition of sacred and secular experiences. The activity of God, in Whitehead’s sense, is immanent in all experiences of whatever kind and level (PR, 224–5), as it is itself a moment of the initiation of the very process of becoming of any event (PR, 67), which again is a process of contrasting (PR, 24). Second, how to avoid opposition between religions? The claim of an exclusiveness of religions against each other is a horror and tragedy in Bahá’u’lláh’s (GL, #43) and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s view (PUP, #97). Conversely, universal revelation and the unity of all religions is their sacred aim (PT,

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#40). Although Islam, from which the Bábi-Bahá’í religions sprang, was (in its Qur’anic sources and generally in its early history) inclusive of its Abrahamic forerunners, the religions of the book, avoiding forced conversions, it developed yet another exclusivism in terms of a completed system that is closed to future renewal—perfected in the seal of the prophets, Muhammad (Fananapazir, Islam, ch. 12). Conversely, the Bahá’í religion not only understands itself as post-Islamic revelation in the full sense of “revelation” (wahy) that Islam would only grant the Prophet Muhammad to have brought in its fnal form (Momen, Islam, chs. 1, 3). What is more, the Bahá’í religion also knows—in a historic reversal of the most profound categories of the religious past—of itself as incomplete insofar as every era of revelation, and the religions it instigates, will, in the end, be renewed by another Manifestation (Sours, Station, ch. 6). In this, the Bahá’í universe of discourse regarding religion(s) resembles more the mutual incompleteness of the “three religions” of China associated with the names of the Buddha, Confucius, and Laozi (Wong, Taoism, ch. 6), than it fts the claims of fnality of Islam or Christianity, which end revelation in Muhammad and Christ, respectively (Smith, Meaning, 85). As the recognized mutuality of Chinese religions (to which we will return in the next chapter) has helped to avoid the religious wars in which the Western and Middle Eastern religions have fallen (Gentz, Religion, 22), correspondingly the Bahá’í religion consciously strives for a peaceful unifcation of religious differences (beyond the boundaries of the separate religions) in which unifcation effort it knows of its own incompleteness, that is, that it will become part of an indefnite process of which it is maybe the currently most universal, but by no means the fnal expression of renewal (May, Principle, 1–36). For Whitehead, religion in the singular is an evolving phenomenon that only exists in the multiplicity of its expressions and their unique experiences with which they contribute to the progress toward a universal civilization— although they will always also be bound by the civilizations from which they emerge, which they transform, and in which they settle (AI, 26). The more religions develop from their own unique experiences into universal phenomena, each singularly uniting mysticism and universal worldviews in their own way, they might not only—although with much pain—overcome the parochial limitations of the formation of specifc societies in space and time in which they are originally couched, driving them toward a spiritually unifed human civilization (Faber, Religion, 167–82). In some sense transcending themselves in their self-inficted limitations, they are also freed to integrate in an enlightened way their singularity with that of all others seeking universal expression, that is, enclosing them in a unifed, but necessarily relativistic (i.e., surrelational) worldview of mutuality—not as a competition of the “better” universality, choking all others under its reign, but discovering the

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transreligious relativity of their birth, development, and praxis of progression with one another (ch. 8). This again, for Whitehead, necessitates the service of philosophy negotiating a peaceful, relational, (but in this sense) rational cosmological scheme between them (Faber, God in the Making, 179–200). Third, how to avoid opposition between religion and philosophy? While Daoism developed distinct philosophical modes of thought (dao jia), they were not meant to exclude any religious importance (dao jiao), but were both meant to be implicated in the striving for perfection (zhenren), thereby utilizing thought as a means to consciously sustain a new way of life (Kohn, Philosophy, ch. 7). While the considerations of the Dao De Jing are distinctly not religious in the sense of an organized social endeavor of ritual, doctrine, and professional priesthood, they give their admonitions and guidance for individual life and social organization from an intense interference between philosophical thought and the mystical evanescence of the thinker in order to yield to a consciousness of the Reality of the Dao that would facilitate such a new way of life (Chen, Tao, ch. 2). In that, it is, as in Buddhism, the way of no way, the way that cannot be walked (Panikkar, Silence, ch. 5). It is a Way that releases us to a universal relativity of all expressions of religious identity and the fxation of this identity with categories constructed by the (human or divine) mind (Wong, Taoism, ch. 4)—opening itself to the apophatic Beyond by which this relativity returns to the inexpressible and is released in its peaceful transreligious multiplicity (Clarke, Tao, ch. 6). A mind free of thought merged within itself beholds the essence of Tao A mind filled with thought identified with its own perceptions, beholds the mere forms of this world

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(Laozi, verse 1; trans. by Starr, 14)

Although Whitehead—in the context of Western religions—differentiates philosophical thought from religious revelation and mystical experience, he never opposes them as irreconcilable. Rather, he “secularizes” the mystical as present in any insight into the unprecedented. As the “use of philosophy is to maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system,” it is “the purpose of philosophy . . . to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated” (MT, 174). And in Whitehead’s account of “rational religion”—meaning all religions of roughly the last six thousand years of historic consciousness (or the “Adamic cycle” in Bahá’í parlance)—insofar as they developed a universal worldview, they are precisely therefore not devoid of engagement with thought (RM, 28–37). Conversely, these religions

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include and aim at “that metaphysics which can be derived from the supernormal experience of mankind in its moments of fnest insight” (RM, 32). Bahá’í writings, again, understand philosophy and wisdom (mostly, but not exclusively, hikmat and ‘aql) as an integral feature of religious existence (Savi, Defnition, 58–70). Yet, they are not identical with it either. On the one hand, the “reality of man is his thought” (PT, 17), which (in one interpretation) means that the human being is naturally homo philosophicus—thinking and striving for wisdom—because before all we are “honored . . . with intellect and wisdom” (SDC, 1). Since humanity is created in the Mind of God, that is, the Mind (‘aql) is God’s frst creation (SDC, 2)—since Reality is even beyond the Mind (ch. 6)—the Bahá’í scriptural witness values the sages who have achieved this “splendor, deriving from wisdom and the power of thought” (SDC, 1) with highest reverence (SDC, 89 [141]). On the other hand, because of the apophatic nature of the divine as it “appears” or “lives” in the human heart, they also understand that the “Essence of the Divine Entity and the Unseen of the unseen is holy above imagination and is beyond thought” (TAB III, 562). As philosophy always is open to both mind and heart (the seat of revelation), philosophy can be divine (hikmat-i ilahi), that is, concerned not only with matters of the kingdom of names (and limitations) but divine Reality in relation to the world (PT, #54). In this capacity, philosophy, for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, is already an expression of a threefold unity: of humanity, of East and West, and the love between hearts beyond all differences (Savi, Defnition, 58–70).

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The most important principle of divine philosophy is the oneness of the world of humanity, the unity of mankind, the bond conjoining east and west, the tie of love which blends human hearts. (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, BWF, 244)

Not dissimilar to Whitehead’s view of philosophy, mediating between science and religion (PR, 15–6), it seems here that its acceptance and development is one of the implications and means of the unity of humanity. As Bahá’í revelation does not allow the univocity of humanity to be divided into disconnected hierarchies of independent levels (like levels of mind and matter) and opposing realms (religious and secular realms) of human existence (ch. 5), so also are thought (mind) and inspiration (heart) not in confict with another—or must always (again) become reconciled as they are in principle never apart (KA, ¶170). The unity in difference of philosophy and religion avoids the isolation of either mind or spirit from becoming a factor of division, opposition, and isolation. Conversely, their “unity” is even an expression of the effort and practice of contemplation and mystical union (PT, #54). Further, because of this impulse of unity, philosophy also, in Bahá’í understanding, is meant to be a means of the reconciliation and unifcation of Eastern and Eastern thought patterns and modes of the articulation of mystical experience, an awareness of which is the content of the current considerations. Yet, such awareness—if

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it does not fall again into opposites—must not exclude Western modes of thought either, but must forge new contracts between themselves and with Eastern patterns (Momen, Approach, 167–88), for instance, by overcoming Western Aristotelian categories as inevitable basis of philosophical inquiry (Epilogue) such as Whitehead has proposed (PR, 30). Finally, spirit, mind, and heart, here, form a unity, resembling the Chinese concept of the presence of the spirit (shen) in the mind-heart (xin), which—as in the Bahá’í writings (PT, #31)—is realized in the universal Mind and the sage (or prophet), the perfected human being (Kohn, Philosophy, 109). To think with the heart means not to isolate thought and feeling, one from the other. As for Whitehead, thinking is a mode of feeling, here; there is no opposition between intellect and inspiration.

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Just as the phenomenal sun shines upon the material world producing life and growth, likewise, the spiritual or prophetic Sun confers illumination upon the human world of thought and intelligence, and unless it rose upon the horizon of human existence, the kingdom of man would become dark and extinguished. (PUP, #40)

From the perspective of the inspired intellect—or a sense of inspiration that only appears in the emptying of the intellect—the “relationship” between Reality/Dao and world remains a mystery beyond simple opposition (caught up in a binary dualism of sorts), but also beyond simple identity (bound by in a pantheism of sorts). This surrationality of the surrelationality of ultimate Reality with that to which it is ultimate can only be approached with the mystical awareness of the limitations of any language to express unity other than in its apophatic sense, but also only with the recognition of its presence to the multiplicity it yields—which again leads all of these “forms” of thought (philosophy) to tolerate many schools of thought, so paradigmatic for Eastern religious contexts (Chew, Tao, 21–7), and the embrace of the relativity of religions, so paradigmatic for Suf thought (Corbin, Alone, 195–200). The mutual incompleteness of the multiplicity that this unity releases is only an expression of this inexhaustible mystery. It escapes all attempts of naming or identifying it, as it “abides” (is/is not, neither, both) beyond any state (object) or subject to know it, and all thoughts are, in ultimate Daoist-Buddhist analysis, dreams of the mind (Philosophy, 341). But the Dao, which is beyond these differentiations, can patiently tolerate all of its projections (wu wei); and while not succumbing to any of them, it is not far from any of them either (chs. 6–7). Tao and this world seem different but in truth they are one and the same The only difference is in what we call them (Laozi, verse 1; trans. by Starr, 14)

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5. THE MANY WAYS OF TRUTH AND UNITY The triangulation of process and Bahá’í thought with Daoist philosophy led us to discover three further permutations of the three (initially so named) gates to relativity as inherent in all three of them. First, the gates of relativity are united in processes of contrasting, in which opposites become always engaged in, or are discovered to always have been, rhythms of mutual oscillation (TDM, ch. 13). This, again, is a process that only all three gates of relativity together necessitate: instead of abstractions creating opposites, contrasts reveal a profound connectivity between the elements contrasted of which abstractions are only late simplifcations. Instead of the urge to stop such a process, freezing it in a fnal picture, contrasts oscillate indefnitely in ever-new arrangements and even novel, unexpected concretizations motivated by the apophatic mystery of novelty and inexhaustibility. And instead of losing itself in a simple holistic unity, the ongoing movement of contrasting and oscillating always yields a wealth of alternatives and a multiplicity of possible realizations at any point of its development (TDM, ch. 8). Second, the paradox of a meaningful regress follows the Dao by not being able to “identify” it with any fxed system of metaphysical structure, cosmological set of (natural) laws, or ethical codes. This paradox is a direct expression of its apophatic nature by which Dao/Reality is not only always transcendent to any attempt of grasping “its” nature or character properly (rendering such attempts always improper) but, what is even more, is also eminently immanent to “its” realizations (Fung, History, 298). Since the Dao always remains in a movement of contrasting that avoids fxed abstractions (Chew, Religion, 54–7), but knows of extremes only to be in themselves (limits of) movements, “its” contrasting is the moving connectivity of the whole. Yet, it is only moving because this nexic relativity cannot be fxed into one system of movement either. Instead, it always remains a movement of the realization of genuine alternatives, diachronically (one after another) and synchronically (as a diversifed feld of parallel developments). Third, in not characterizing reasoning and inspiration as independent features of human existence (or even by reducing one to the other), all three traditions follow in their own way the example of the philosopher-martyr Suhrawardi in inherently connecting philosophy and revelation (Prologue), but in an (always paradoxical and) uneasy way: neither being mere alternatives or collaborators, nor being identical, but being a complex development in apophatic unity of one inherent spirit as it diversifes itself (Walbridge, Wisdom, 13–6)—as expressed in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s “divine philosophy” and Whitehead “rational religion.” Without collapsing them both, mutual immanence of mind and spirit is the “home” in which connectivity is fostered by the apophasis of a mystery that mind and heart seek. In being conscious of

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the infnite ways they are enabled to interact in the universal process, that is, creation, they harbor a hint at the infnite worlds in which they might appear together (ch. 5). The same is true for the unity of religiosity (din). It not only hints at the unity of religions, as they are all somehow the cultivation of ever-new forms of their mystical composition, but at a mysticism that does not disqualify any number of levels and stations or plains of immanence in which it unfolds by yielding and letting (others) be. Experience does not hinder language, living does not hinder thinking, grace does not hinder laws, ethics does not overrule aesthetics, and ecstasy does not hinder philosophy. With Nicolas of Cusa, we could conceptualize this relativistic movement as (divine) contraction (Cusa, Writings, 337–8). Again, this happens at the boundaries of the three gates of relativity: what is connected is not the same; what is apophatic is creative (of differences); the multiplicity of “worlds” or (physical, biological, personal, social, cosmological) realms of existence with their integrity is an implication of mystical grounding. Nevertheless, in this mutuality of traditions and accesses contrasting tensions will remain—as again another means for other creative movements. The maybe most interesting difference between process, Bahá’í, and Daoist thought (and mysticism) might be the modes in which the above-developed elements of relativity—contrast, regress, and incompleteness—integrate (in) them differently. The Dao De Jing, although it expresses a difference between Reality (Dao) of the world and the world itself (the many daos), neither divinizes Reality nor personalizes it as a divinity (Chew, Religion, 25–8). Contrarily, process theology knows (for the most part or in most of its directions) a divinity that is neither identical with ultimate Reality (which is conceptualized by Whitehead as Creativity) nor with the world, although it is not in any simple sense a divine person either (ch. 6). And while for Bahá’ís divinity in its apophatic sense is ultimate Reality, it is not identical to the divine person(s) in which it mirrors itself (its Self) in the world (GPW, §28)—a position taken by the divine Manifestation(s) (Momen, God, 23–4). While Whitehead resonates with Daoist thought, but adds God to the picture, yet sometimes confgured in the image of the Dao (Suchocki, God, 254), Bahá’í thought differentiates (the apophatic) God from God’s personal Manifestation (the Will of God), which is not identical with ultimate Reality either (Saiedi, Gate, ch. 7). We will come back to this complication later comparing Whitehead’s God with Bahá’í Manifestation(s) (ch. 7). This tension implies another one of no less importance. While Daoist philosophy may be part of a genuine religious heritage that does not—in general, although not without some transreligious coinherence (Küng and Ching, Civilization, 31)—express itself through prophetic persons and literature, but sages and wisdom literature (Chew, Religion, ch. 4), Whitehead allows

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for both to be different, but correlated, while Bahá’í revelation—after the example of Ibn ‘Arabi (Corbin, Alone, 120)—integrates wisdom as ground and the inspired expression of its revelation, which again is at once of prophetic and mystical nature (ch. 7). This seems almost as a full reversal of conditions. Thus while, for Whitehead, divine inspiration can work equally through philosophical and/or religious means—differentiating wisdom from revelation only as modes of the same process—Phyllis Chew, in her book The Chinese Religions and the Bahá’i Faith, contrasts sharply between both of them as characteristic difference between Western (and Middle Eastern) and (Far) Eastern religions.

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Thus, while the Bahá’i Faith is established as a revealed religion brought by a prophet-messenger, the Chinese religion is not. The Chinese religion is a unique instance of a religion without revelation, a religion with the sage as a central fgure rather than a prophet. (196)

This leads to a third interesting contrasting tension. In the late development of religious Daoism (dao jiao) not only is the Dao divinized, for instance, in the Three Pure Ones, but also is its own original perfect instance of wisdom, Laozi, revered as a divinity, as part of the Three Pure Ones (Blofeld, Taoism, 95; Kohn, God, 78, 122, 221, 268), and the Dao De Jing becomes viewed as religious scripture, not only to be read and meditated on but to be revered and chanted for salvation’s sake (Robinet, Taoism, 163–5; Kohn, God, part 2). This development seems to converge with the two other traditions. While now the apophatic Dao becomes differentiated from the divine image, Laozi, like Whitehead’s Creativity from God, seems now also to refect a Bahá’í Manifestation of Reality. However, Bahá’ís have never identifed Laozi as a Manifestation (although the reason may itself not be reduced to one clear motive) (LG, #1694). And while, for Bahá’ís, Manifestations always initiate the religions/revelations they stand identifed with, conversely, Laozi over a millennium transformed from a fgure of wisdom into a divinity. And while for Whitehead revelation remains a unique divine experience that cannot be serialized in any simple way, it also remains in its highest expression a mode of the Wisdom of God without the necessity of its personal divinization. These tensions only demonstrate the modes of relativity explored in this chapter. If we want to avoid their mere opposition, we must realize their contrasting oscillation and the very constellation from which we gain insight in their different ways to approximate Reality. As the three traditions—Daoist, process, and Bahá’í thought—despite their common interest to address ultimate Truth of Reality and despite the recognition of their common aim of universal peace still cannot be reduced to one another, they not only demonstrate their mutual incompleteness in their respective conceptualization of

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apophatic Reality (the hidden Dao) but even more that meaningful approximations need the multiplicity of regresses into “it” (the many daos) that invigorates an ongoing permutation of “its” constitutive elements (ch. 9). None of them may claim to be the Way/Dao, but insofar as all of the relativistic elements remain in mutual inhabitation, the many ways/daos will become the very expression of its apophatic connectivity. At this point, this approach of, and to, process and Bahá’í thought (in light of Daoism) harbors important implications for our understanding of their claim that (religious) Truth is relative. Any analysis of the terminologies of these traditions—for themselves or in comparison—that feeds on opposites will result in a failure to recognize their very intention to avoid opposites by relativizing them into contrasts. Furthermore, as their intention is to circumvent oppressive binaries (as described by Jacques Derrida) and dialectical modes of confictual movements (such as used by Hegel), thinking in, and living from, oscillations favors the recognition of the mutual incompleteness of seeming opposites, which in fnal analysis are but illusions created by the elevation of abstractions. Instead, their seeming counter-movement toward and into one another is really a movement of ever-new regresses into the apophatic nature of their unity in Reality of which these stabilized, substantialized abstractions are but a means of choice between potential alternative directions of future realizations (TDM, ch. 13). Most importantly, however, since stabilized opposites further categorize in terms of either/or, it is not actually the concept of Truth per se that forces us into simple alternatives of true and false, but a limited arbitrary adoption of a binary logic that by no means is destined to refect cosmological reality—and by implication ultimate Reality (TDM, 191–8). As such binaries are created from a certain pattern of choice—opposites—the truth they reveal is relative to that pattern, not absolute. Opposites do not “represent” Reality. Conversely, as Daoist (like Buddhist, Upanishadic, and Advaita Vedantic) concepts are built on contrasting both/and conceptualizations of Reality, we must ask ourselves whether or not the family resemblance of process and Bahá’í thought reveals similar relativistic patterns of ambivalence, multiplicity, and complication. That Truth “itself” is not bound by oppositional alternatives is confrmed by mystical logic in the East and the West (for instance, of Plotinus, Ibn ‘Arabi, Meister Eckhart, Nicolas of Cusa, Nagarjuna, and Dogen). Hence, it is not only Laozi’s view that Reality is not divided in (conceptual or real) binaries of the substantially real and its insubstantial appearances (Marby, God, chs. 1–2). The inherent progressiveness of Whitehead’s process and Bahá’í thought also allows us to acknowledge processual modes of becoming, which can only be accessed by relativistic methods: by a multiplicity ways (meth hodos), by daos. There are always only many ways to Reality (even if it is the one and only Way), a polyphony and polypoetic of

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upaya (TDM, ch. 5), never intended as a means for a mere aim to be reached, but a way always to be walked anew (PT, #29). In his Way to God (Risalah f’l-Suluk), the Báb concurs: Know ye that the paths to God are as numerous as the breaths (anfás) of the creatures, and that there is no soul (nafs) but one (wáhida), and that there is no religion but the one religion (dín wáhid), and it is the Cause of God (amr Alláh). (The Báb, Risalah f’s-Suluk/The Way to God, transl. by Lawson, in Lawson, Epistle, 237)

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It is not without a refection of Ibn ‘Arabi’s famous “God created in all faiths” (Momen, Religion, 196)—to which I will return later (chs. 6–8)—but with an interesting twist that this polypoetic complexity of images of Realty/God/ Truth of the Báb does primarily meditate neither on the shortcomings of any imagination or conceptualization of Reality, as John Hick’s pluralistic thesis implies (ch. 6), nor the limitation of any creature’s realization of divine attributes, as the school of ‘Ibn Arabi proposes (Corbin, Alone, 112–21), but on the necessity of divine bounty to always, beyond “itself,” appear in uniqueness (ch. 8). It is the height of mystical insight (irfan, ma‘rifa) not only to recognize the impossibility to access the nameless apophatic essence of Reality (GL, ##1–3) but also to recognize that it is, in fact, the “Form of Reality” (surat al-haqq) itself that appears in its appearances and manifestations (Corbin, Alone, 198)—at the heart of all existents—without, in such a subtractive affrmation to be identical with it (ch. 7). Rather, it is a refection of the apophatic unity of Reality/God/Truth itself that can only appear in the uniqueness of all appearances. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá makes this point when he says: Now observe that in the sensible world the divine appearances are not repeated, for no created thing can be identical with another in every way. The sign of Divine Unity is present and visible in all things. If all the granaries of the world were flled with grain, you would be hard-pressed to fnd two grains that are absolutely identical and indistinguishable in every respect: Some difference or distinction is bound to remain between them. Now, as the proof of the Divine Unity exists within all things, and the oneness and singleness of God is visible in the realities of all beings, the recurrence of the same divine appearance is in no wise possible. (SAQ, #81)

Consequently no (manifestation of Reality and no) religion can be the same; every manifestation and religion expresses differences not only because of circumstances but foremost because of the infnite uniqueness of Reality which, in its bounty, never repeats itself in its appearances. I will come back to some of the implications in the contested felds of religious strife later again (ch. 8). At this juncture, the point I want to make is this: it is with a

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profound “divine (natural) necessity” that only an infnite manifold of daos, ways, religious path, can express and claim to be the Dao, the Way, the Path. If you want to follow the Dao, you cannot except by following these paths, diversify, multiply, and appreciate the diversity of the garden of Reality as only in mutual relativity revealing the face of Reality/God/Truth in “its” gestalt.

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Syncretic or Sympathic?

The frst three chapters were concerned with the variations and permutations of the concept and actual operation of relativity in a cosmological and religious context. The next three chapters will concentrate on the importance and infux of relativity in the transreligious process. Instead of presenting the genetic code of the three gates to relativity in ever-new recombinations, however, each of the coming chapter will concentrate on one of them (without excluding the others completely, since they are inextricably linked). We begin with connectivity (this chapter), alternate it with infnite worlds (ch. 5), and end with the apophatic approach (ch. 6). This new journey through the three gates can also be seen as an introduction to, and critique of, religious pluralism, as it is not identical with, but related to, the theme of relativity—and differencing it from the fallacy to identify it with mere (religious) relativism. Especially since diverse theories of religious pluralism are often either identifed as absolutism or relativism, not only by positions that avoid this label but by way of mutual accusations, the theme of relativity tries to make sense of these accusations, offering some constructive proposals infuenced and expounded by process and Bahá’í thought and, as in the frst three chapters, also taking into account resonating wisdom traditions. With the following remarkable statement, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has given us a clue for the direction this investigation into transreligious relativity will take: “The differences among the religions of the world are due to the varying types of minds” (SAB, #31). 1. CONJECTURES Whitehead understands different religions, as they have come to craft comprehensive cosmologies and universal worldviews, through their connectivity 133

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for which philosophy plays the vital role of a medium of rational (intellectual, conscious, methodical) coordination of their spiritual impulses (as discussed in the last chapter). On the other hand, since these religions have their genesis in unique spiritual experiences of Reality (RM, 32)—the same universal Reality philosophy is concerned with (RM, 42)—they will not (have to) give up their singular perspectives in the common philosophical discourse, but instead may enrich it (Faber, Origin, 283–9). In fact, there is a reciprocal relationship, or a mutual incompleteness, between the two approaches and, enfolded in it, a common interest in formulating a comprehensive, although never closed (progressively opening), worldview. It is this connective and contrastive procedure that contributes to the exclusion of competition (or the self-exclusion of unrelenting competitioners and exclusionists) and contention and is meant to function as a powerful instrument for the attempt to establish interreligious peace. Since neither of these spheres—of philosophy and religious traditions—is without ever-advancing insights and practices, this peace is not understood as the fnal outcome, but rather as a site and method of progression toward mutual understanding without losing the manifold of specifc integrity along the way (ch. 3). Bahá’í thought comes to the same conclusion (McLean, Prolegomena, 25–67). With Whitehead it shares the commitment to the receptivity toward different religions as divine in their unique origins and as connected through an advance of the revelation of the mystery of Reality throughout time for which the ever-new becoming or ever becoming-new of religion is a sign—a sign of its emanation from apophatic Reality (Momen, Relativism/Metaphysics, 185–218). It also shares the view that both religion and reason (intellect, consciousness, methodology) are not opposites caught up in a process of mutual disturbance (although mutually disturbing enrichment), which would just repeat the age-old debate on faith and reason. In fact, their connection is not viewed as an antagonism of opposing forces or abilities on the same level, as both are surrational in relation to intention, intuition, insight, and their experiential basis, that is, as both of them strive for connectivity of reasons, elements, and perspectives, but also know of their transcendent overfow into the aesthetic, not just logical, nature of harmonization (ch. 1). Rather, reason (logos, nous) is at the heart of religion as it is the heart of philosophy (theoria) in a critical way, such that, since we are “gifted with the power of reason,” we cannot “unthinkingly follow and adhere to dogma, creeds and hereditary beliefs which will not bear the analysis of reason in this century of effulgent reality” (PUP, #52). Both religion and philosophy converge in (the broadest sense of) reasonability, and “rational religion” becomes rational precisely through the connectivity as explored through philosophy (RM, 32). Here, reason itself is not understood in the narrow sense of a truth-procedure or system, but as the surrational (but methodical) awareness

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of universal connectivity. Much like the central religious insight and philosophical medium of Buddhist thought of the coincidence of enlightenment and reciprocal co-origination (pratitya-samutpada), for Whitehead “rationality” is the awareness of universal “relationality,” perceiving the universal connectivity of the universe (PR, 4). And so is for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá “religion . . . essentially reality and pure reason” (PUP, #44), discovering “the essential connection which proceeds from the realities of things” (SAQ, 158). As “Philosophy consists in comprehending the reality of things” (SAQ, 221) and “Reason is the discoverer of the realities of things” (PUP, #103), so becomes religion if it appears “at variance with . . . reason” nothing but a “human invention and imagination unworthy of acceptance” (PUP, #44). If, however, the many religions and philosophies appeal to reason—refecting cosmic relationality—for their connectivity, why should any religion of such a conviction of intellectual and spiritual harmonization be stigmatized as syncretistic—as the Bahá’í Faith has been (and still is), at times (Salem and Fossett, Religion, 242)? Is it the fact of its relative novelty in the history of human religiosity? Is it the fact that it emphasizes the unity of connectivity of the divine, humanity, and religions? Or is it the fact that such connectivity, if it is conveyed from the perspective of some kind of systematic unifcation, seeking out reasons of relationality, seems to be artifcially superimposed on a spastic refex of a chaotic universe? And how would we know that such disconnection is more real than connectivity? Interestingly, the prejudice of syncretism is not in the same sense perceived of philosophy. Its relative novelty, if a new philosophy appears, is not considered a sign of its artifciality, but of its originality. Its power of unifcation of preceding patterns of thought, often scattered and seemingly irreconcilable, is not perceived as weakness, but as a sign of its robustness. And its novel ways of seeking for reasons (of this newly found connectivity) is not prejudiced in a pejorative context of the negligence of the chaosmic contingency, but as release of a consciousness of the many folds of the universal nexus of becoming. A new insight is a light in which the unreasonability of the state “before” this insight seems to vanish into irrationality and the “former” inconceivable becomes reasonable. Although it is understandable that the category of syncretism is used today to describe the postmodern human condition (in the West) through the lens of which it seems that, given the total commodifcation of all spiritual matters, new possibilities of religious engagement look (in David Lyon’s words) like “liturgical smorgasbords” and “doctrinal potlucks” (Rosauer and Hill, Meditation, 20), the category of syncretism is less one of reasoning with regard to religion today than it is a harbinger of prejudice (Shaw and Steward, Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism, 1), often promoted in the apologetic interest of established religions (performed by some of their elites and leaderships, or experts thereof, with their vested interests) for which the potential inner and

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outer turmoil of the novelty of another religion seems unbearable and dangerously unsettling of their integrity (van der Veer, Syncretism, 196–211). With Michel Foucault, we may assume that the intricate interplay of power and knowledge prescribes certain kinds of knowledge as fostering certain kinds of ignorance (Power/Knowledge, ch. 6), heightened with threats of the devastating consequences of losing identity and even belief, in order to secure positions of power for one’s own religion (or a specifc cultural expression of it) among its competitors or of its elites within it—as if religions were locked in a Darwinian struggle for survival. This mechanism is, in fact, well-documented for the painful struggle of the Báb against the suppressive violence of the Shi‘i ulama, the elite of clerical leaders and jurists upholding the religio-political status quo under the Qajar shahs of 19th-century Persia, against the emerging Bábi religion, which then through several complex constellations transcended into persistent attempts to annihilate the Bahá’ís in Iran until this day (Amanat, Resurrection, ch. 9). Since the claim of the Báb to be the Qa’im, the riser of the eschatological reckoning, and, in the renewal in Twelver Shi‘i imamology, the hidden (twelfth) Imam redivivus (Saiedi, Gate, 1–28), included the traditional Islamic (Shi‘i) expectation that spiritual and political power would rest with this fgure (and not the eschatologically returned Imam’s temporal religious and political representatives), such a proclamation alerted not only the political regime but its most important ecclesiastical ally, the Shi‘i class of the learned mujdahids, leaving them without further legitimacy (Cole, Modernity, ch. 1). Their violent reaction was to secure a status quo by annihilating the novelty that they otherwise believed to be (and stay) in their future or “above” (in a kind of heavy realm), but (hopefully) never will become an actual advent in history (or even as its end). One of the instruments of such ideological destruction was (and is) propaganda propelling the irrelevance of the new movement. It can reach from attempts of reabsorption, degrading its claim of novel integrity that has left the parent religion to be overreaching as actually only representing a heterodox sect, instead of admitting the much more coherent and founded status of a minority (Sedwick, Sects, 195–240), to attempts of highlighting any element that would make the integrity of the new religion appear as a mixture of heretical strains or being without inner core of its own, or just being irrelevant, or an invention because of its novelty (Hartney, Syncretism, 233–48). This strategy deprives the nascent movement of its integrity, instead displaying its alleged syncretistic emptiness, its irrational and dangerous madness, or its inconsequential lack of distinctive inherent unity—and this might still be the least violent strategy (Iran Press Watch, Trial, passim). Furthermore, such instruments and strategies don’t really differ from the ones used to discriminate higher from lower races or civilized from savage ethnicities (PT, #40).

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In the end, such (at least) mental and spiritual militarism is believed to always succeed if it can suffciently delegitimize the integrity of the novel “other.” This “othering” reconstructs the other from the same, essentializing religions as mutually external entities (Shaw and Steward, Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism, 1–26), pitching one against the other “entity,” and, if it can help it, tries to demonstrate this “constructed” entity as but a horrible, blasphemous, destructive, deviant, or irrelevant variant of itself. Syncretistic propaganda justifes both the denial of an inherent unity, overarching its diverse elements, and the denigration of novelty, reducing it to a dark evil or a perverse deviation from the decent and bright norm. In such a “transformation,” if it is successful, deviant races or ethnicities or religions alike remain as nothing more but unfortunate mutations, impure recombinations, or retarded fallout products of advances toward the light. In the end, pressed into this corner, these unfortunate “entities” are now without any essential integrity, need (as potential member of a rejuvenated community of religions), or importance beyond being unfortunate, tragic, and educational examples of something that race, ethnicity, or religion should never become: syncretistic cretins, grimaces in the mirror of (obvious) perfection. As syncretism is not a neutral category of any serious comparative studies of religion today (Tishken, Religions, 303–20), but rather hides an agenda of destruction, we will recognize its irrelevance even more by situating it precisely in this comparative context. When textbooks of comparative religious studies designated the Bahá’í Faith as even “syncretistic by intention” (Stockman and Winters, Guide, 159), but syncretistic anyway, they gloriously invested their own tradition or the ones held legitimate in comparison to be spared from such an accusation, because they either refer to these other (venerated) religious traditions and communities as having demonstrated over time their internal power of survival as a measure of their non-syncretistic identity or by (thereby) demonstrating their unfamiliarity with the history, writings, life, and self-understanding of the Bahá’í Faith. In fact, any closer attention to these aspects of its existence will reveal quite the opposite: that the Bahá’í Faith is neither by its own consciousness nor by any meaningful defnition devoid of its internal integrity of initiation, history, scripture, way of life, and thought (Nijenhuis, World Faith, 539; Chryssides and Geaves, Study, 101–3). Most centrally, the Bahá’í Faith fnds its identity in the becoming and refection on an event of revelation, centering on the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, from which everything else follows: its relation to the cultures in which it developed and the impulse of a universal harmonious, peaceful, and essentially nonviolent civilization that it propagates. As Whitehead has shown, it is the prerogative of an event to constitute what could be called inherent coherence and integrity, not of the infuences from which it necessarily

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gathers itself, nor the ones it releases beyond itself. That is, as every event is a gathering of the diverse history out of which it arises and from which it constitutes itself to its own unique togetherness (of these elements), it can be analyzed into its elements of becoming—disparate and contingent as they may be—but it cannot be reconstructed from them since its point of unity is the very novelty of the unifcation the event creates (Shaviro, Criteria, ch. 2). The hallmark of creativity, by which for Whitehead “the many become one” (PR, 21), is integrity beyond (the) mere (ability for) analysis, which may be used to unravel the elements before they came together, but also be misused for the accusation of their syncretistic markings. Yet, without the novel unity of the event, these markings are like a dead body without life, in themselves impossible to be used in order to grasp the unity of event’s integrity (GPW, §12). Such creativity could be demonstrated in many ways, but might be said to be pointing to a unique (religious) experience (of revelation). It is not without or before or besides, but only from the integrity of this event of experience of a new revelation (Faber, Origin, 273–89). As Whitehead affrms, the “relevance of its concepts can only be distinctly discerned in moments of insight,” released from, and by being drawn into, the originating event, “and then, for many of us, only after suggestion from without” (RM, 31). Neither the infuences of the surrounding culture, of its religious movements and rituals, nor the language borrowed and employed (from them) can signal the creative event itself. Incidentally, such infux is not taken to upset the integrity of other religions such as Christianity or Buddhism, both arising in a culture and religious context—Judaism/Hellenism and Brahmanism/Hinduism, respectively—to which they, after their birth, remained related but also in considerable tension. As Larry Hurtado remarks for Christianity: It wasn’t syncretism, but “a new hermeneutical standpoint from which to interpret” (Hurtado, God, 123) the religious heritage in and from which Christianity arose that made it the event that it became, based on a “powerful religious experience of revelatory force and content” (ibid., 167). The same could be said without reserve, for instance, of Mahayana Buddhism or Sikhism: They are not collections of the infuences of the religious traditions from which they emerged, but take a unique new standpoint, arise as a new event of integrity, from which these infuences receive a new import and interpretation (which did, of course not hinder critics of the parent religions of these traditions to reduce them to their parent parameters in order to expose them as unsound syncretic concoctions). Hence, the conjectures of syncretism regarding the Bahá’í Faith is not only unft to capture its birth as a new religion from others, or any religion, for that matter, as that would be true for the history of religions in general. But it is also absurd in light of their presupposition that apodictically blinds us to sense the novelty

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of its event, a blindness, which is then taken as evidence for the absence of inherent integrity. In the words of Robert Stockman: If by “syncretism” a scholar means the Bahá’ís themselves believe their religion is a blending of the best from other religious traditions, this understanding of Bahá’í self-identity is incorrect. If by “syncretism” a scholar means the Bahá’í Faith is a simplistic mixture of ideas from other religions, with no core of truths that are its own, this is a hasty generalization, and often is partly based on inadequate explanations of the Bahá’í religion by its members. If by “syncretism” a scholar means the Bahá’í Faith is a complex product of original thought and original recombination of ideas already present in the world, then all religions are syncretisms and nothing new is being said about the Bahá’í Faith. If by “syncretism” a scholar—consciously or unconsciously—means the Bahá’í Faith is an epiphenomenon unworthy of study, then such a label impedes scholarship and interreligious dialogue. (Guide, 162)

If one religion is to be considered syncretic, all religions are syncretic, as there is no religion that came out of nothing. In a wider sense, everything is a recycling of its past, without (more or less) hindering the novelty of the new cycle (Veer, Syncretism, 208). Every religion gathers itself in a situation as an event that bears the marks of its parent traditions and cultures in which it arises and from which it, mostly by a process of self-recognition of its uniqueness, becomes aware of the event that constitutes the novelty of its “independency” (as event) from the infuences that, from now on, do not constitute more than their situation, their background, instead of their boundary. To enter the heart of a (new) religion, one must fnd the event in the situation.

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2. TRANSRELIGIOUS FLOWS One of the relevant reasons why the Bahá’í Faith was, without serious investigation, considered syncretistic (even by its own design) is the fact that it understands the whole history of religions as one network of divine communication and revelation (Ferrer, Future, 14–5). This network manifests as a multiplicity of distinct areas and cultures of wisdom traditions around the world. This global history of traditions is viewed as internally connected within one “eternal” religion (KA, ¶182), but differentiated in time through the emergence and progression of human existence on Earth and related to its evolutionary, geographical, economic, intellectual, social, and spiritual development (Lample, Revelation, ch. 1). As this self-understanding assumes a mutuality between divine presence and human reaction (in a wider ecological context) that develops over time and space, has a complex history as well

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as local and temporal niches of diversifcation, it was easy to mistake this Bahá’í vision of religious connectivity as an attempt to “collect” religious traditions—maybe somewhat like the artifcial “divine religion” (din-i ilahi) launched by the Mughal king Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Akbar II in late 16thcentury India (although such a syncretic endeavor seems to me always better than the religious wars raging at the same time in Europe). Yet, to envision such a unity in diversity of religions in their diverse evolvements that the Bahá’í Faith is entertaining, as demanded per its own revelation and exploration, is not a simple collection and selection process—as this endeavor is assumed (too easily if not always) to mistake similarities with sameness and difference with irrelevance, picking out the gems of different traditions (Faber and Keller, Taste, 180–207). But this Bahá’í vision of a religious unity in diversity is, instead, a rather sophisticated form of negotiating the organic web of inner- and interreligious connections in light of an event through which all of their assumed connectivity (whether syncretic or organic, exclusive or inclusive) is understood from a new hermeneutical standpoint, primarily of apophatic unknowing and its polyphilic implications (ch. 6). In other words, without the three gates of relativity we would misunderstand unity as uniformity or as an oppressive generation of discriminating rules of internality and externality—much like the illusory rules of race unity and difference (PUP, #227). By taking the three gates and their permutations into consideration, however, we gain a vastly different picture of such a unity in diversity, namely, one in which syncretism is only the dead body of phenomena, while the spirit in which they, in different religions differently, come together, is believed, perceived, and reasoned to be a movement of a much more profound sympathy, namely (as in Whitehead), of the universe as the ecological environment of humanity, and vice versa. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá characterizes this sympathy not only as a human virtue of the highest order but as the most fundamental force of the universe for which we are drawn to “observe that all composite beings or existing phenomena are made up primarily of single elements bound together by a power of attraction” (PUP, #89). And Whitehead understands “the primitive element” of actual, creative togetherness of any kind as a mutual immanence, meaning: “sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another” (PR, 162). Since for both Whiteheadian process and Bahá’í thought the apophatic divine is understood as being present in the form of a connectivity of the great “attractor” (Keller, Face, 196–8)—“O Thou my Attractor!” (PM, #165)—and “Divine Eros” (AI, 183) in all events, nexuses, and societies, it is not surprising that this sympathy is also at the center of their respective understanding of the relation between religions, their relative attraction, and fuency one into another. In their understanding, the integrity of religions constitutes itself

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from and through modes of confuence in ever-new manifestations of divine attraction throughout the history of religions. Consciously or unconsciously, religions are connected through such transreligious fows of received elements of other religions into and their creative reconstitution throughout their life as well as a life on its own even beyond the life span of a single religion. This is what I call “transreligious” connectivity (Faber, Diskurs, 65–94). We discard or dismiss these fows only at our own peril, thereby (deliberately) hiding not only the true connectivity of religions throughout the history of humanity but also its vast ecological cosmic nature of which religions are only a complex expression (Baier, Studies, 373–92). A few examples of such modes of transreligious fows and confuences may suffce. One of the oldest expressions of religiosity throughout the religious life on Earth is probably some kind of “primordial religion” (Sharma, Perspective, 1–20)—some would say: religion before the “axial age” (as the novelty of this new age was geared toward some kind of salvation of or from, instead of living with, the cosmos)—in which local reverence of ancestors and healing procedures of shamans come (often) in combination with some concept of a universal divine (sometimes as sky quite literally) “overarching” all existence (Eliade, Patterns, 46–8). Despite the false conjecture assuming polytheistic reductions in its assessment of these early expressions of religiosity, namely, that they refect only local cultural of ritual articulations of these features, we can actually—and without the need to fxate any human “nature” as its reason—fnd a universal fow of symbols and practices from Far Eastern to Ameri-Indian expressions and diverse Eurasian forms. It does not really matter whether the same general elements in early archaeological fnds, texts, and descriptions of cultural modes of articulation and celebration of humanity were accumulated and exchanged along the movements of early human populations around the world (Smith, Religions, ch. 9) or express deep human evolutionary outcomes, whether one should assume a historical accumulation of archetypical fgures and mythical forms as well as symbols or their successive and synchronistic historical unfolding (Campbell, Hero, 1–43), or the resonance between these two planes (Eliade, Images, 120–1). Much of the same pool of symbols and their physical representations are used: healing rituals, divinations, remembrance of ancestors, stories of creation, a universal divinity, and the charging of natural elements with religious import: the water of life, the fre of rebirth, the tree of life, the garden, the gate, the bridge, the river, the mountain, the celestial order, the sea, the sun and moon, the closeness of divinity, and the infnite distance of the horizon (Smart, Religions, ch. 1). One of the most intense forms of transreligious fow appears in the (partly consciously pursued) integration of the “three teachings”—Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism—in China throughout their concurrent appearance

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(Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, ch. 7). Far from being a neutral, conscious mode of mere tolerance, conversely often rising to forms of superiority of the one or the other tradition over the others relative to political interests throughout time, these traditions became inextricably linked in the cultural mind of the Chinese peoples (Gentz, Diversity, 123–40). They could be lived together in a single religious life or socially systematized as mutually incomplete expressions of the unknown ultimate. They integrated elements originating from the other traditions in their own self-identity and developed their different expressions in conscious internal reconstitutions of their “unity” by such integrations (Clarke, Tao, 22–8). They accepted a common basis—the Dao and Harmony (and their theoretical, practical, cultural, ethical, and social implications)—in their own way, namely, by instigating ever-new differentiations of, and culminations into, new movements, and always in relativity to the other traditions (Schmidt-Leukel and Genz, Diversity; Wong, Taoism, ch. 6). While Daoism, which was already a reaction to Confucianism, developed into Neo-Daoism (Fung, History, chs. 18–20) and became reintegrated into it through Neo-Confucian thought and life patterns (ibid., chs. 23–26), Chinese Buddhism is unthinkable except by following the fault lines of sympathetic Confucian and Daoist categories of life and thought, whether in the form of Hua-Yen, Tien Tao, or Chan Buddhist variants (ibid., chs. 21–22). Abrahamic traditions often deliberately distance themselves from such transreligious communalities, cross-fertilizations, and symbolic transgressions by retreating to forms of exclusivist claims of truth (Hilberg, Truth, ch. 4) of which they, each of them for themselves, claim to be the superior, if not the only, expression (Kepel, Revenge, chs. 2–4)—but this is in situations of rivalry not confned to Western Asian traditions either (Fletcher, Monopoly, ch. 2). Nevertheless, beneath the orthodox restrictions of symbolic transmigrations lingers, still visible, a polydox complexity (Keller and Schneider, Polydoxy, 1–16), which is impossible to be erased from the internal identity of the respective religions (Kurtz, Gods, ch. 3). Two movements between them—and others around and (partly) within them, such as that of Hermetics, Gnostics, and various (later so-called) heterodox or heretical groups such as the Mandeans or Manichaeans (Riley, River, chs. 1–3)—can exemplify the impossibility to avoid certain forms of transreligious fows of symbols, doctrines, or rituals even under such exclusivist conditions as Abrahamic self-perceived orthodoxy (Doane, Myths, passim). One kind of such a cross-movement of symbols happens, because no given religion (or stream), be it of (or within) Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, or only of (or within) the less successful of the surviving streams, could avoid integrating its respective predecessor in some way or another. Christianity is built on the life, teaching, and actions of a Palestinian Jew, and had to fnd ways to relate not only to this fact but to the whole religious background,

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which had to be integrated in the form of the “Old Testament” (and Jewish Christianity), respecting the prophets of old as well as the divine expressions throughout the life of the Hebrews and the Jewish people and the divine names under which such experiences were accreted: El, Elohim, YHWH (Hurtado, God, 1–16), as well as the diverse fgures subsumed under the new event of Christ (Dunn, Christology, passim). The same is true for Islam, as it accepted the prophets of old and understood itself as standing in this very tradition, even as its last expression. Not only were “religions of the book” respected for their revelatory presence of the same God (Askari, Relationship, 37–47), but their stories were reconverted so as to become part of the new identity: Abraham, the friend of God; Moses on Sinai, the one who conversed with God; Joseph, son of Jacob, the patient prophet of patient faith; and Isa, son of Mary, a word from God (Jomier, Bible, ch. 10–12). This feat was partly accomplished by the projection of one’s own religion into, and as “present” in, the past of the parent religion (McCready, He, 90–1) or, conversely, by appearing as its prophetical fulfllment (Fananapazir, Islam, ch. 2)—and this import always remains a matter of confict and conversation (Swidler, Duran, Firestone, Trialogue, ch. 1). Another kind of cross-movement is that of symbols fowing between these and surrounding religions (Doane, Myths, part 2). While the symbols could not be ignored, they were often discriminated from one’s own superior or true use. The baptism of John, the transformation of the pascha, the gifts of the spirit, the appropriation of the qiblah, were all readily transreligious accepted transformations, but also always differentiating the new religions from their inherited internality: the Mandeans remained with John the Baptist instead of with Jesus (Lupieri, Mandaeans, chs. 6–7); the Jews remained oriented toward the pascha instead of the Eucharist, and Jerusalem (or East) as mizrah instead of Mecca. Other symbolisms were harder or impossible to accept as living ancestors: Isis and Horus, Mother and Child, confgured like Jesus and Mary, the Mother of God (Loverance, Art, 117); Osiris and Mitras, dying gods (Momen, Religion, 271), confgured like Jesus on the cross, dying and resurrecting for our sins (Livingston, God, passim); Ishtar and Sophia, confgured as female sides of God or as forms of divine presence in the valley of this Earth, as shekinah wandering with the people of God (d’Este and Rankine, Shekinah, passim). One of the most striking symbols wandering through the Abrahamic traditions and many of the surrounding religious movements was the Glory of God (kabod), which Ezekiel in his mystical vision saw on the throne of God in human form (Ezekiel 1:26) (Joice and Rom-Sholini, God, passim). She wanders as shekinah with the Israelites into exile. She demonstrates our distance from God as fallen Sophia in gnostic texts. She becomes identifed with the primordial divine Wisdom (and the Word) that was with God (John 1:1) and

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with us as “divine weakness” (1 Cor. 1:25) against Jewish and Hellenistic conceptualizations of Jesus, but might also have gestated the suffering divine Son in Manichaeism. She wanders through gnostic and kabbalistic concepts of the perfect heavenly human being, Anthropos or Adam Kadmon (Quispel, Gnostica, ch. 26). Her theophany of YHWH on Sinai (Gen. 19–24) appears in Islamic theology as the Will (and Mind) of God (Lambden, Mysteries, 74–92) as well as nur or haqiqah muhammadiyyah (Glassé, Encyclopedia, 347) and similar expressions in Suf philosophy (Corbin, Alone, 167–75; Momen, Concept, 3–7). She became a vital element in claims of new revelations after Christ in the fgure of the parakletos (John 14–6) in different groups like the Elcesaites and Manicheans, and was reinterpreted as hidden sign of the coming of Muhammad (Lambden, Prophecy, 69–124). She has deep roots in the Zoroastrian tradition of the light and fre of God and the seed (khwarenah) by which the future savior (saoshyant) will be infused (Kazemi, Fire, 45–123; Momen, Concept, 2–3). In fact, as Bahá’í scriptures are conscious of many of these confuences, she became the very name of God for Bahá’ís, the bahá’ of God, appearing in the most great name Allah-u-Abhá (abhá is the superlative of bahá’) as manifest in Bahá’u’lláh (bahá’ Allah) (Lambden, Word, 19–42). The most fascinating appropriations of religious symbolisms happen where different strains of migration of peoples come together in frontier societies in which different religions and cultures live together and sometimes clash. Ancient realms of central Asia, such as Bactria, Sogdiana, and Gandhara, where in the form of Hellenism, Greek, Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Hindu cultures mixed, created strong cross-religious confuences. Hellenistic religions, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, local traditions, and (later) Christianity, Manichaeism, and Islam (along the Silk Road) cross-pollinated and transformed the appearance of religions in diverse cultures (Elverskog, Buddhism, ch. 1; Foltz, Religions, chs. 3–5). Statues of the Buddha seem to have originated in this area; identities of gods of the East and West have been fused; religious fgures were mutually interpreted and integrated; and new religious identities were launched (Woodthorpe, Greeks, ch. 4). More often than not, however, such cross-fertilizations were a matter of fear, aggression, and became an instrument of exclusive truth. A powerful example comes from the Kalachakra Tantra, refecting the Islamic invasion in central Asian countries and an aggressive rule in India that contributed to repeated destructions of Jain and Buddhist temples and monasteries and radiated the fear of repetition. In an early instantiation of comparative lists of prophets that will lead up to the eschatological war, the Kalachakra brings together Hindu and Buddhist manifestations of Vishnu/Krishna and of the Buddha in the form of the bodhisattva Manjushri, on the one hand, and the Western/Islamic chain of prophets including Moses, Jesus, Mani, and Muhammad, with the eschatological instantiation of the Mahdi, the

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eschatological fgure in Sunni Islam, on the other (Berzin, Introduction, ch. 3). It imagines the last Kalki ruler of the legendary kingdom of Shambala manifesting the Buddhist/Hindu messiah, fghting against the aggressor under the false messiah, the Mahdi, and winning this battle for a fnal peace on earth (Newman, History, 54–8). Not only does this vision integrate Buddhist and Hindu eschatologies in genealogies of recurring “incarnations” of Vishnu and the Buddha in face of a common enemy (ch. 9). What is more, by drawing a parallel between the true manifestation of eschatological victory against the series of false prophets from the West, a systematization of cycles of divine Manifestations becomes a common element of their traditions, even against their will (Faber, Religion, 170–1). Whether out of sympathy, fear, or imitation, widespread transreligious confuences of religious symbols happened, and still happen, either unconsciously or consciously. If identifed, they are either welcomed as a means of the beauty of an underlying harmony of religions and humanity or, in case of their shocking discovery, despised as similarities only disguising the devil’s seduction of believers to deviate from the true path (Freke and Gandy, Mysteries, ch. 1). For Whitehead’s philosophy and Bahá’í revelation, these confuences are a matter of beauty and harmony, not as a fxed structure underlying the diverse phenomena and symbolisms but as a process that cannot be divorced from the sympathy pervading the universe and the world of humanity, always luring and attracting toward divine harmony. For Whitehead, God’s sympathetic attraction of diverse religious symbolisms signals

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the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of [God’s] conceptual harmonization . . . [by which God] is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by [God’s] vision of truth, beauty, and goodness. (PR, 346)

In Bahá’í thought, these transreligious symbolisms, being in the process of ever-new harmonizations, are not meant to indicate a merely metaphorical reality, less real than our physical or literal or historical reality, but a complex landscape or an infnite sea of symbolizations of the apophatic Reality out of which sympathy always recreates its permutations anew (Buck, Profle, passim). Nevertheless, they need not exhibit meaningless paroxysms, but like the meaningful regresses of the Dao, can express attraction toward intensity and harmony since, as Whitehead comments, every creaturely “act leaves the world with a deeper or a fainter impress of God” (RM, 159). While we could stop at this point and set our base camp of religious pluralism at the assured resonance between the “elusiveness” of the Absolute paired with its “desirability” (Reat and Perry, Theology, ch. 1), for Bahá’ís, their confuence in rhythms of renewal (by new religions) indicates that “Divine Revelation is . . . progressive and not spasmodic or fnal” (WOB, 115). Against absolute

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fnality and against mere aimless relativism, the Bahá’í notion of “progressive revelation” means that religions’ diverse manifestations are attracting themselves toward a divine harmony (as it is its groundless ground and—only then—immanent Reality) that, for Bahá’u’lláh, includes the (divine) urge toward, and the (heart’s) recognition of, the (apophatic, relational, and surrational) unity of religions as the burning issue of the Day of God now (TB, 129–30). In the ever-new confuence of transreligious processes, we encounter “an eternal body of permanent images (city, tree, gate, door, garden, bridegroom, bride) that is ceaselessly renewed through Progressive Revelation” (Woodman, Metaphor, 12) through a “metaphorical understanding of the Word” (ibid., 9) that

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is carried forward (the word meta-phor means a carrying across) to include the revelations of Muhammad, the Báb, and Bahá’u’llah in a divine “process” that in accomplishing itself must never allow accomplishment, however impressive, to arrest the process forever. Metaphor, as the unveiling of new meanings within a given or literal meaning, can no more be arrested or exhausted than can God as the unknowable source of life. “Veil after veil may be undrawn,” Shelley writes, describing the infnite world of metaphor, “and the inmost naked beauty of meaning never exposed.” After “one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effuence which their peculiar relations enable them to share,” he explains, “another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and unconceived delight” . . . . Metaphor as the progressive revelation of a ceaseless unveiling has never been better described. (ibid., 9)

This “progression” is neither conforming to the Western notion of progress, which appeared in the wake of the Enlightenment progress out of the warring faiths into the supposedly calm (and more peaceful) realm of (secular) reason, nor, consequently (encouraged by this development), the progressive subjugation of nature and human society under the technological development in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. For ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, here, “progress and barbarism go hand in hand” (SAB, #225). It does also not correspond to the Hegelian or Heideggerian progression of the Spirit (Geist) or Being (Sein), respectively, to the perfect expression of a fnal State (in both cases that of Germany) as incarnation of the Spirit or Being (Derrida, Spirit, passim) with its totalitarian and inhuman implications. Nor does it play into historical materialism, permanent revolution, and the perfect State of Marxism. All three notions of progression have, convincingly (if not bluntly and visibly today), been refuted by Critical Theory and postmodern thought (Best and Kellner, Theory, passim). The “progression,” in our context, is one that avoids—with Whitehead (PR, 111)—any fnal aim (GL, #53), as it is infnite (in a cosmological sense). At the same time, “progress” does not live from

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a (divine) providence that works by force instead of attraction (GPW, §39). And it does not abandon this world of becoming for an ideal utopian state either—as has also been acknowledged by critical presentations of “progressive religion” today (Buehrens and Parker, House, ix–xxiii). Its (divine) attractor has a direction, a purpose, but one that cannot be pinned down in any mechanistic manner of steps of advance and achievement. Rather it exhibits the marks of life in a world of becoming with all of its fragility (TDM, ch. 9). Cleansed from its Western notion of progress—something the Eastern cultural, if not religious, mind has only been able to resist in stunned arrest (Haas, Destiny, 54–63), and that postcolonialism, especially if related to, and performed by the means of, religion, has thoroughly unmasked as sheer grasp of political and economic power (Pui-Lan, Imagination, passim)—we can maybe recover the deeper mystical meaning: that of the hidden (batin) and the manifest (zuhur); of the resurrection (qiyama) and return (raj’a); of creation in cycles of ever deeper involvements with, and evolvements of, the apophatic and polyphilic oscillation of Reality/God/Truth; endless, but evolving; always new and in creative conversation, but diminishing its brute physical forces, spiritualizing understanding (jnana) and acting (karma) with love (bhakti), transforming into an all in all (panta en pasin); never fattening out or curving into itself, but pulsating within a vision (similar to Teilhard de Chardin) of a pleroma of God and the world in Reality: pan en pleroma (TDM, 449–52). As “creation signifes nothing less than the Manifestation (zuhur) of the hidden (batin) Divine Being in the forms of beings” (Corbin, Alone, 200) and “Resurrection (Qiyama) must also be taken in the intrinsic sense of a new spiritual birth of this world” (ibid., 206), so is, for the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh (MacEoin, Messiah, 694)—making themselves understandable by the pattern of thought prepared by Ibn ‘Arabi and Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i (Amanat, Resurrection, 59)—every new revelation, religion, and Manifestation (mazhar-i ilahi) anew, but also deeper, becoming-manifest (zuhur) of the hidden (batin) meaning of the (formally) manifested pattern of Reality (Momen, Prophetology, passim) in preceding revelations and their scriptures and messages (Saiedi, Gate, 53–66). The term used by Bahá’u’lláh to indicate this progressiveness (and translated by Shoghi Effendi as “progressive revelation”) is fa-lamma balagha al-‘amr (GL, #31), literally: “the ‘maturation’ of religion, capturing within it a sense of both commonality and progression—analogous to the maturation of an individual” (Fazel, Approaches, 43). The metaphor and symbolism of maturation is one of organic life, growing into its potentials. But since these potentials (as divine virtues) are infnite (PUP, #38), their realization is not fnding itself caught either (as in evolutionary biology) in a mechanical working-out of programs or (as in Hegel) in a dialectical spiraling into a fnal state (the end of history), but is—again with Whitehead (Griffn, God,

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282–91)—liberated from such limitations and (in the great cosmological picture) is self-directing itself toward infnite, but ever-more peaceful, realizations of harmony and intensity (GPW, 62–75). This ecological “progressives” is also indicated by Bahá’u’lláh’s warning that it does not identify with “material” civilizational progresses, which would be nothing but a self-defeating illusion, but means intensities of (personal and collective) spiritualization (GL, #164). Such a spiritualization again is, with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, not one of mere becoming and perishing, but, a movement of the spirit, always infnitely approximating Reality in the realization of divine potentials (PT, #29); not just after death, individually and regardless of the web of spiritual connectivity, but, as Bahá’u’lláh says, in the universal community and mutuality of the living and the dead in this and the next world (GL, #81). As this is, in fact, an infnite process (McLean, Prolegomena, 39), progress loses its aura of unilateral directionality (which the nomination of “unity” toward the unity of religions might seem to imply) and becomes indeterminate, multidirectional, and polyphilic (Buck, Universalism, 188–92). It is the mystic seeker, and we can add: the mystical community (Momen, Mysticism, 107–20), then, that Bahá’u’lláh encourages and that he promises to be enlightened (and be able to live) by this purpose directed into the manifold. He in this station is content with the decree of God, and seeth war as peace, and fndeth in death the secrets of everlasting life. With inward and outward eyes he witnesseth the mysteries of resurrection in the realms of creation and the souls of men, and with a pure heart apprehendeth the divine wisdom in the endless Manifestations of God. In the ocean he fndeth a drop, in a drop he beholdeth the secrets of the sea. Split the atom’s heart, and lo! Within it thou wilt fnd a sun. (SV, 18–19)

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3. MULTIPLICITY We are getting ahead of ourselves. Even if we concede that any form of meaning is an expression of some kind of direction and that action (in its most valued sense) is always purposeful (even in an ecological sense), we must not necessarily frame this fnding to presuppose teleology in any simple sense, as it is often assumed by opponents and defenders of such harmonious purposefulness alike (Haas, Destiny, 16). And even if we accept that creative confuences are a fact of recorded human history (in any area) that exhibits some kind of unity and complexity, be it in cultural and religious expressions of social organization or be it in any cosmic structurings, we need not necessarily presuppose any simple notion of (divine) design either (Griffn, Reenchantment, 212–18). Yet, that the multiplicity of existents gathers itself,

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that there is order of some kind (or, in fact, many kinds) and not mere chaos (which we could then not even witness) can hardly be doubted (GPW, §15). And since we are ourselves children of such cosmic processes of structuring, we may at least not a priori rule out the meaningfulness of our search for possible aims of creative processes, such as beauty (AI, 295), or for directions processes of structuring might exhibit (GPW, §19), because they are already engrained in the very fabric of (physical) existence (Ward, God, ch. 7). To “apprehend the rationality of things,” Whitehead insists, “is the hope of rationalism,” which is, as we already saw, relationalism (PR, 4). This “hope is not a metaphysical premise,” to be sure, but nevertheless “the faith which forms the motive for the pursuit of all sciences alike, including metaphysics.” This faith is “an ultimate moral intuition into the nature of intellectual action” and the “point where metaphysics—and indeed every science—gains assurance from religion and passes over into religion” (PR, 42). As this hope and belief is based on an experiential widening of our perceptivity to the relationality, attraction, and sympathy of the universe as a whole, excluding nothing, the very connectivity itself (AI, 201) this universe might reveal in accessing it with this hope of rational/relational discovery “never shakes off its status of an experimental adventure.” Against any “static dogmatism,” this adventure is in this sense “progressive and never fnal” (PR, 9). If dogmatism is to be avoided in order to understand the connectivity of transreligious processes of ever-new confuences and in order to discover a meaningful assumption of some kind of purposefulness that reveals itself only by avoiding presuppositions of both chaotic paroxysms and fnality, the vital philosophic question becomes: How are we to understand the connectivity of multiplicity (Faber, Whitehead/Speed, 55–64)? If the confuent multiplicity of religious symbolisms in rhythms of ever-new unifcations, in events of togetherness and integrity, can neither be gasped by viewing it as disconnected appearing-together of syncretic contingencies nor as fnal unity that bring the process of confuence to a halt altogether: How are we to understand the very relativity of the togetherness, process, and progress of religious multiplicity? What, then, is (religious) multiplicity (Faber and Keller, Taste, 180–207)? Let me begin by saying what it is not: It is not an amorphous many. Neither is it chaos that has to be feared or tamed, nor is it something that in the fnal analysis should be like Plato’s me on, which is for unconceivable reasons tolerated by the Good, or is a metaphysical evil that escapes our understanding like the mysterium iniquitatis. Neither is multiplicity a mere many, nor is it the (dialectical) opposite of oneness, unity, or even the One (Reality, God, Truth). It is neither error nor evil. Nevertheless, especially in religious contexts, multiplicity is often “identifed” with precisely that which it is not: it is considered the opposite of the One; it is condemned as relativism,

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opposed to the one truth; it is conceived as that which in illegal and immoral ways escapes order and hierarchy (as if that is something bad per se), and it is feared for this characteristic; it is avoided like a pestilence or cancer of egotistic interest and the survival of the savage or beast as opposed to integral order, compassion, and mutual sustenance; and it is shunned as if it was an expression of the orgies of Bacchanal feasts (TDM, ch. 2). Indeed, multiplicity functions as unveiling mirror of uneasy truths. It serves as plane of projection for our fears and refects their destructive power. More often than not, its depreciation reveals innermost motives of urges for control—of controlling the meaning, direction, and integrity of the understanding of the world (by the masses) in order to manipulate the organization of society (favorably to certain oligarchies of status, prestige, military power, or money), contributing to the hierarchization of religion (for its religious or clerical elites) and the simplifcation of truth (hiding the mere exertion of power). Multiplicity is annoyingly all-pervasive, however. It always reappears if suppressed, and its very suppression by false (forces and biased) unifcations of reality and truth—themselves hiding interests, purposes, and gains for their own particular sake—only creates the very totalitarian orders that the fear helps to sustain (Faber, Democracy, 192–237). Multiplicity is opposed to opposition as opposition is in reality oppressiveness. It hinders the closure of oppressive oppositions to advance to metaphysical or religiously sanctioned dualisms of fear: that our behaviors (toward the powerful) will decide whether we are inhabitants of heaven or hell, whether our thoughts and actions are good or evil, whether our desires are constrictive or destructive. It opposes the unjust rule of the better ones over the masses, the multiples, the subjects, and the disenfranchised. It hinders the vicious invisibility of the dualistic “lines” threading not only our thought but the very fabric of the body politic: the color-line, the truth-line, the orthodoxy-line, by which one can only be on one of two sides: the inside of the right color, the right truth, the right orthodoxy, or the outside of the minority (of the wrong color and ethnicity), of the fatal error of the infdel (who is criminalized and often persecuted to death), or of the heretic enemy within (Faber, Sense, 36–56). Multiplicity is, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari note, about minorities and minority thinking (Plateaus, 105–6). Multiplicity is not a thing, structure, or concept, nor their collection, but an activity of becoming-minor, becoming-process, becoming-connective (Faber, Intermezzo, 212–38). Multiplicity is compassion, a becoming-with-the-least (TDM, ch. 8). Of course, like “being”—as already Aristotle admitted (Vatimo, Interpretation, 46)—multiplicity can also be used in multiple senses. It is itself not necessarily a “unifed” concept leaving space for its own inner multiplicity (TDM, 17–24). Nothing can be simply excluded. Hence, some interpretations may indeed incline themselves to the paradigm of mere leanings toward “the

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many” so as to operate more under the image of a billiard ball universe, such as (for the most part) that of the ancient atomists Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. In this image, one only knows of, and needs for, the explanation of anything a multiple of matter-particles and empty space operating one on the other (Write, Cosmology, 33)—excluding any purpose, domination, or divinity (ibid., 184). But even in such a universe, things are far from simple. The collisions and interactions of particles create complex structures (as they are meant to explain also human complexities). Visionary as the ancient atomists were, they were fnding a space for the unexpected (the rise of novelty), thereby escaping any materialist simplifcation of the mere recombination of matter, which became only prevalent in the pre-relativistic area of mechanistic materialism then favored by 18th- and 19th-century physics and philosophy (SMW, ch. 6). Lucretius’s clinamen, the inclination of atoms to unpredictable movements, introduced an indeterminacy and irreducible multiplicity (of the relation of causes and effects) of movement in an otherwise strictly mechanistic universe, which—as does Whitehead’s Creativity in all events (PR, 21)—set a subtle direction of the whole process toward openness (of orders) and (irreversible) temporality (of complexities of value) as opposed to mere chaos, or a directionless zero-sum game, or mere determination and fnality (Serres, Birth, 4), mere mutual determination or fxed destiny (Deleuze, Logic, 269–70). Other interpretations again incline themselves to some kind of opposition of multiplicity to unity, oneness, and the One in one or another sense or in their entirety. They may be based on mathematical imagery as in Whitehead and Alain Badiou. For Whitehead, a (mathematical) multiplicity “consists of many entities, and its unity is constituted by the fact that all its constituent entities severally satisfy at least one condition which no other entity satisfes” (PR, 24). Multiplicity is not a unity in itself and “has solely a disjunctive relationship to the actual world” (PR, 30). Nevertheless, the actual world in which a new event enters is a disjunctive multiplicity in the processes of unifcation and reconfguration of that multiplicity, which thereby is in permanent fux (PR, 21). For Badiou, disjunctive multiplicity is pre-mathematical and inconsistent, only being the theoretical projection of that which is made consistent in mathematics by numbers and (set-theoretical) sets into a chaotic nothingness that cannot be grasped since it resists any (mathematical) unifcation (Badiou, Being, ch. 3). Yet, in either case—and although Badiou by his own standards does not accept Whitehead or Deleuze as thinkers of multiplicity (Badiou, Deleuze, 100)—multiplicity enters any actual “uni-verse” either as driving a process of ever-new confuent unifcations, thereby escaping the assumption of any fnal state, or in resisting with patience its suppression by totalizing unities that bring the process to a halt (Badiou, Thought, 1–28). Thereby, the function of multiplicity is still that of a direction beyond mere chaos toward processes

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and rhythms of unifcation beyond any fnal halt, and of deliberate or unavoidable diversifcations beyond any suppressive exclusive unities of power to which it only can relate as the liberating awareness of a greater beyond, always being beyond any unifying simplifcation (Faber, Bodies, 212–3). Multiplicity is probably characterized in a better way through togetherness, process, and progress. This can take differing forms. Yet, all of them harbor critical resistance against forms of false unifcations (biased by particular interests), the line-drawing of power, and oppressive exclusion of minorities in thought and practice, conceptually and ethically (TDM, ch. 8). One of the best characterizations of this function of multiplicity can be found in Deleuze’s reminiscing on Whitehead whom he views as “an empiricist, or a pluralist,” that is, a thinker of the adventure of multiplicity, insofar as Whitehead does assume that the unifcations and simplifcations are abstractions from the actual process of becoming. But “abstraction does not explain but must be explained” and, hence, “the search is not for an eternal or universal, but for the conditions under which something new is created (creativeness)” (Deleuze, Regimes, 304). Here, Whitehead’s relationalism/rationalism of relativistic connectivity in process recovers multiplicity suppressed by “socalled rational philosophers” for whom “abstraction is responsible for explanation,” and understands reality from the “the abstract [that] is realized in the concrete.” Hence, they

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speak of abstractions such as the One, the Whole, the Subject, etc., and seek the processes through which these abstractions are embodied in a world made to conform to their requirements (this process can be Knowledge, Virtue, or History . . . )—even if it means experiencing a terrible crisis each time they realize that rational unity or totality turns into its contrary, or that the subject engenders monsters. (ibid., 304)

The suppression of multiplicity creates the very “chaos” that the (false) unifcations try to exclude from their “rational” order, while in fact it is only a simplifcation legislating with the highest authority of reason (or the Logos, God, Truth) the halting of the very processes of confuence and the pulsations of renewal and the unprecedented, which in their own turn allow for purposefulness beyond spasms of irrelevance and totalitarian fnality. Hence, against any simplifying caricature of multiplicity in the mirror of a mere plurality of in themselves already fnalized things, entities, substances, or atoms and of a totality of settled structures without movement and life—the two inclinations reviewed above—Deleuze points out that The states of things are not unities or totalities but multiplicities. That does not simply mean that there are many states of things (where each state would be a whole) or that each state of things is multiple (which would only be an

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indication of its resistance to unifcation). The crucial point from an empirical point of view is the world “multiplicity.” Multiplicity indicates a group of lines or dimensions that cannot be reduced to one another. Every “thing” is made up of them. A multiplicity certainly contains points of unifcation, centers of totalization, points of subjectivation, but these are factors that can prevent its growth and stop its lines. These factors are in the multiplicity they belong to, not the reverse. In a multiplicity, the terms or elements are less important that what is “between,” the between, a group of relationships, inseparable from one another. Every multiplicity grows from the middle like grass or a rhizome. (ibid., 304–5)

Multiplicity is in-between-ness (Faber, Intermezzo, 232–3). Its relativity is that of a togetherness of beings-in-between, of “interbeing, intermezzo” (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 25), as Deleuze and Guattari proclaim much like Thich Nhat Hanh (Interbeing, passim), of pulsating processes of ever-new unifcations and releases into new multiplicities, and of a progressive directionality toward the implications of these two movements toward harmony of diversity and intensity of contrasts (PR, 27), as Whitehead suggests. Multi-pli-cities are foldings (pli, the fold) and processes of “folding, unfolding, refolding” (Deleuze, Fold, 137). They are, with Nicolas of Cusa, complications (a folding-together) of many folds into the One and explications (folding-apart) of the One into many folds—easily imaginable in the art of origami (TDM, ch. 13). The religious import of multiplicity should now become obvious. It is the middle way between extremes of totalitarian unifcations and the debilitating relativism of meaninglessness, a middle way exceptionally explored by the Buddha and the School of the Middle Way of Nagarjuna (and many other Buddhist schools) with its relativistic logic avoiding the Western simplifcations of binaries (Garfeld, Wisdom, 342–60; Abe, Zen, ch. 7). Yet—demonstrating its unity in difference—this middle way is also ascribed by Bahá’u’lláh: “seek ye the Middle Way” (KA, ¶43), and by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: seek “the mean between the two extremes” (SDC 126 [192]). Multiplicity understood as a diversity of processes of meaningful religious confuence, then, is the “good between the two evils,” (ibid.): the evil of truth without fuency (orthodox totalitarianism) and the evil of fuency without truth (substantialized relativism). While the former reduces multiplicity to a “truth” that controls its fuency with oppressive binaries of exclusion, the latter simplifes multiplicity to a fuency that foregoes meaningful valuations of differences. Conversely, multiplicity counters the investments of power with attractions of connective love. The greatest gift of man is universal love—that magnet which renders existence eternal. It attracts realities and diffuses life with infnite joy. If this love penetrate the heart of man, all the forces of the universe will be realized in him, for it is a divine power which transports him to a divine station and he will make

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no progress until he is illumined thereby. Strive to increase the love-power of reality, to make your hearts greater centers of attraction and to create new ideals and relationships. (DPh, 111–2)

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4. COINHABITATION Multiplicity is connectivity, and in the transreligious process it is unity in difference. Its complication is that multiplicity is neither one without many nor many without one; and it is also not a duality of both (one and many) as abstractions in opposition taken from the manifold that this dualism hides. Of course, we will not get rid of the differentiation of concepts that seem to be structured in a dual (or binary) fashion. As Whitehead keenly observes, our mind in the process of understanding is bound to work with such abstract simplifcations (PR, 224). Yet as unity in difference, these dualities don’t function as binaries—in the sense of Derrida’s oppressive dualism (Gutting, Philosophy, 293–4). Instead, they function as limits (of discourse) of which, and prior to them, all phenomena are somehow mixtures (Faber, Negotiating Becoming, 36–43). As mixtures, dualities yield an emphasis for certain abstractions (as we have seen above) in order to allow our mind to understand (rationally/relationally) the concrete phenomena it analyzes. Their synthesis, however, is not a syncretic mixture of these abstractions, but that of connective events and series of events (organisms), initiated and led (ahead of themselves) by sympathy in which, as Whitehead proposes, always anew “one” is created of many and released into a new many enriched by the one created and released (PR, 21): that is, in the creative unifcation, nevertheless, “feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another” (PR, 162). In other words, the actual togetherness that is analyzed with dualities is only a posteriori dissected into these dualities (in their analysis) while in an actual event this connective togetherness of confuences cannot be reconstructed by the elements into which it is analyzed as if it was being constructed from them. Hence, the event of transreligious confuence is also always uniquely one, creatively new, holding its perceived elements (of the traditions of its situation) together as actual contrasts. As a new whole and seen from its novelty as event, the reality of a religion is one and unique not by (analytic) syncretism, but by (synthetic) sympathy. Every such event, every new religion, as it were, is a creative confuence that, hence, cannot be analyzed into the elements we discern as infuences. Yet, these connective infuences, although only connected in an event, form themselves a feld of mutuality, a web, a community, a landscape, a site, from which new events may arise. This is itself an affuent feld of connections and

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potentially new connections to be drawn on or receiving the new connections made by new events as potentials for connective futures yet unknown. Different philosophies from Plato onward have identifed the reality of this feld as receptacle (hypodoche) or place (khora), most recently reappearing in Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and—Whitehead (TDM, ch. 5). Already in Plato, it is neither one nor many, neither intelligible (like the forms and ideas) nor sensible (like matter and things), but indicates (more than being defned as) the very connectivity itself of the becoming of all of them, their place or space, their “within,” their being in-between (Timaeus 48e–53-c). Whitehead recovers this feld of mutual immanence in such a way that it could be understood as the very mark of “unity in difference,” because it

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is in fact an emphatic doctrine of real communication . . . between ultimate realities. This communication is not accidental. It is part of the essential nature of each physical actuality that it is itself an element qualifying the Receptacle, and that the qualifcations of the Receptacle enter into its own nature. In itself, with the various actualities abstracted from it, the Receptacle participates in no forms . . . . But he designates it as “the fostermother of all becoming” . . . [and] “a natural matrix for all things.” It receives its forms by reason of its inclusion of actualities, and in a way not to be abstracted from those actualities. The Receptacle, as discussed in the Timaeus, is the way in which Plato conceived the many actualities . . . as components in each other’s natures. It is the doctrine of the . . . mutual immanence of actualities. It is Plato’s doctrine of the medium of intercommunication. (AI, 134)

It is from the perspective of this “medium of intercommunication” that the claim of a connected and connective feld of symbolizations in the process of progressive revelation (of new events of interreligious confuence) is made. That it is a feld of sympathy, or even of the force of love (uniquely differentiated on its respective physical and spiritual levels), is engrained in Whitehead’s proposal that the creation of the world, that is, the world of civilization (AI, 26), is a process of evolutionary progression from the reign of mere physical sympathy and antipathy of forces of push and pull to that of spiritual sympathy of peace, the “victory of persuasion over force” (AI, 83). Here, the Bahá’í teaching of the education of humanity (PUP, #108)—similar to Irenaeus of Lions’ paideia (Behr, Asceticism, 133)—in order to reach a “unity of humanity” is only another name for the same process. The insight into a direction toward peace, in Whitehead and Bahá’í thought, is really the realization that the spiritual forces of connectivity must emerge from forms of coercive processes of nature, this event being the birth of humanity (Saiedi, Birth, 1–28). Humanity is not born yet—as long as it has not found this unity in difference that is peace—although the event of the emergence of human

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beings is already enshrined by the “initial aim” of peace from which it is held together (ch. 9). Nader Saiedi has put it this way: Human history so far has been primarily a history of dehumanization. We humans have perceived neither others nor ourselves as human beings and therefore we have treated each other as objects and animals. . . . According to the wordview of the Bahá’í Faith we have arrived at a turning point in the evolution of human history. This turning point is primarily the moment of the birth of the human being. (ibid., 1)

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For Whitehead, the birth of humanity runs through the conceptual illumination in which Plato discovered that “the divine element in the world is to be conceived as a persuasive agency and not as a coercive agency” (AI, 166). It progresses to the point at which “the recourse to a doctrine of mutual immanence” (AI, 168) allows us to discover the unity of diversity as the connective feld through which humanity is able to direct itself to nonviolence and peace through the recognition that the spiritual power of humanity resides not in the brute forces of nature, but “dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love. And it fnds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world” (PR, 343). What is more, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá resonates with the same emphasis on a magnetic force of sympathy, the mutual attraction of the force of love, and interconnectedness, “by which every part of the universe is connected with every other part” (SAB, #137), constituting a universal feld of “unity in difference” in which we may truly become human, because Let us give another, more subtle proof: The innumerable created things that are found in the world of existence—be they man, animal, plant, or mineral—must each be composed of elements. . . . For all beings are linked together like a chain; and mutual aid, assistance, and interaction are among their intrinsic properties and are the cause of their formation, development, and growth. It is established through numerous proofs and arguments that every single thing has an effect and infuence upon every other, either independently or through a causal chain. In sum, the completeness of each and every thing—that is, the completeness which you now see in man, or in other beings, with regard to their parts, members, and powers—arises from their component elements, their quantities and measures, the manner of their combination, and their mutual action, interaction, and infuence. When all these are brought together, then man comes into existence. (SAQ, #46:6)

In extension of the physical evolution of humanity, it is the spiritual meaning implied here that is of interest: In the recognition of the mutuality of all beings in their sympathy, humanity is truly born as a civilization of peace.

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It is from this ecological meaning that the transreligious process of the unity of religions fows: as “mutual aid, assistance and interaction” of religious integrities in a khoric feld of unity in difference in which “due to the composition of the elements, to their measure, to their balance, to the mode of their combination, and to mutual infuence” and only when “all these are gathered together” (SAQ, 207, Barney translation), humanity begins truly to exist. It is in the context of this feld of connectivity that we may appreciate that Bahá’u’lláh understands humanity to “have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization” (GL, 214). It is by engaging this connective feld that we can situate W. C. Smith’s hope that religions may “become aware of themselves as incipiently or potentially members of the total cooperate religious complex of mankind, composed of different but no longer separate religious communities” (Meaning, 200). And it is by recognizing this medium of intercommunication that for Keith Ward divine “revelation”—without addressing here whether this notion is ftting not only to Abrahamic traditions but also relevant to Hindu and Buddhist ways of liberation (Panikkar, Silence, 90)—appears as a process by which

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Divine communication is shaped to the interest and values at a particular time: Its ultimate concern is the existence and nature of the supersensory good, a fnal goal of supreme worth. This content is expressed within a culture and history which facilitate a specifc form of development. This suggests two important features of Divine revelation, in general. First, not all human interests and values will be equally receptive to the sort of thing God wishes to communicate. . . . [And second,] Divine communication might not be perfectly received and understood. . . . Bearing these two features in mind, one might think that God will communicate different things to different people, and will in all probability be able to communicate more ultimate Divine purpose to some people more than others.” (Religion, 24–5)

As far as Bahá’í thought agrees, we may say that in and from this communicative feld a pattern of the unity in diversity of religions arises: of a mutual immanence of revelation and reception; of reception as creative, but sometimes misunderstood and culturally limited response; and of new revelation as creative divine response to human receptivity and limitation, yet directed toward “self-giving love to reveal [God’s] nature” (Ward, Religion, 25)—in which humanity is truly born. This pattern allows us to recognize that human beings are always being-in-between, thereby becoming human (Faber, Intermezzo, 212–38). We have always already been coinhabitants of many religions in their fuent integrities and transreligious relativity—not as a troubling fact feared by orthodoxies and not as syncretic mixture degrading into mere relativism, but as human form of inhabitation of the process within a

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creative feld of resonances and connections that harbors the whole history as potentially and actually furthering the always renewed process of becoming human by interacting with a divine dimension, being touched by the kingdom of heaven, becoming enlightened by nirvana, or better: being released by apophatic Reality of which this whole process “is” a manifestation. It is with regard to this feld of transreligious connection that we may understand religion as multiplicity, as folded continuum, that nevertheless (or precisely therefore) can be understood as Religion in the singular (KI, §182), as for Whitehead “process”—although always being multifarious (PR, 338)—can be named in the singular (AI, 150), because it speaks univocally, with one voice, with immeasurable distance or nearness, of the apophatic Reality it symbolizes and actualizes. It is in this sense, and not by any false, oppressive, or naïve unifcation, that Whitehead talks of Religion (without simplifcation) as such; that it is in its actual multiplicity and infnite process

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the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing fux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the fnal good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest. (SMW, 191–2)

In this relativity of the multiplicity of religions in time and space, as it were, as the ever-new confuences of progressive (peace-tending) revelations, together in succession or in multiple formations simultaneously (depending on the state of global connectivity and integrity) and their mutual renewal through their mutual reception, that we coinhabit the multiplicity of religions insofar as they refect with one voice “our one ground for optimism” apart from which “human life is a fash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience” (SMW, 192). It is with this one voice, not that of uniformity, but that of a multiplicity that mirrors the apophatic mystery itself, that Shoghi Effendi points to the everconfuent unity in difference of religions (and their transreligious processes) as expressing that “core of religious faith” that “is that mystical feeling” (LG, #1704; italics added) uniting humanity in divine Reality. The unity in difference, that is, the “multiplicity” of religions (in its presently developed meaning) is apophatic and polyphilic; its polyphilia is not syncretic, but sympathic. Here, the frst order of unity is creative receptivity—the movement of events and nexuses, organisms and societies in the wide cosmic sense that Whitehead conveys: this is, in its widest sense, the unity of the universal depth and width of potentials with the universal perceptibility (Whitehead says prehensibility) of actualizations of events (GPW,

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§13). This, for Whitehead, is the unity of “two natures” of God (PR, 87–8). The creative primordial nature and the perceptive consequent nature (ch. 5), which process thinkers have called the creative-receptive love of God (Cobb and Griffn, Theology, ch. 2), emphasize the primal unity of religions from their ultimate dimensions as compassionate and omni-perceptive: the suffering of Christ, the compassion of the Buddha, the universal perception of the Siddha (Donaldson, Cosmologies, 79–82). But this unity also emphasizes the creative affrmation of multiplicity (beyond any rigid limitation and oppressive stopping point), the divine love for the manifold (TDM, 1–16). Hence, the manifold of religions as sympathic ways to new events and gatherings of these events into nexuses and societies of ever wider order, as they discover their vast cosmic background and ecological interwovenness (TDM, ch. 14) of which they—whether as events, nexuses, or societies—are only minute, although important, moments, as they transform hidden (batin) Spirit into manifest (mazhar) Spirit (Taylor, Reality, chs. 3–4). Of course, like the multifariousness of the understanding of multiplicity, the inherent urge to realize this “unity-multiplicity” and its coinhabitation can be sought in many ways, too, such as by way of the perennialism of the likes of Huston Smith (Truth, passim), the monomyth of Joseph Campbell (Hero, passim), the interspiritual approach of the likes of Wayne Teasdale (Heart, passim), the comparative approach of the likes of Michael Sells (Languages, passim), the participatory approach of the likes of Jorge Ferrer (Turn, passim), or by a world theology of the likes of Edmund Perry (Reat and Perry, Theology, passim)—all of which, in some way or another, take recourse to the apophatic unity in the multiple appearances of religious expressions, similar to the Bahá’í Faith’s central conviction (LG, #1704) and to (my understanding of) Whitehead (Mystical Whitehead, passim). None of them has been charged with syncretism, as they enlighten us about the sympathies throughout the religious reality of humanity. But then again, the constructs of these scholars are condensed visions across religions and not core beliefs of a religion itself, such as the Bahá’í Faith manifests, which, hence, should be even less considered syncretic. Preceding these more current and much later similar recognitions of mystical bridges between religions (Fazel, Dialogue, 12–4) in the interspiritual movement (Teasdale, Heart, chs. 1–2), the apophaticpolyphilic sympathy of all religions is the Bahá’í Faith’s primal insight and the primal demand (Reat and Perry, Theology, ch. 1) of (surrational) intellect and spiritual practice, scriptural evidence and revelation, alike. One of the, maybe, most outstanding personal journeys into such a sympathic unity of religions is that of Raymond Panikkar. It is not syncretism that led him to proclaim “I left Europe [for India] as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be Christian” (New York Times, 9–6–2010, A20), but his deep conviction of the

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sympathic coinhabitation of (all) religions. Although he does not fall into a progressive (or dialectical) scheme of religious evolution (striving for a fnal aim), his search has a direction, namely, to fnd the breaking point of all traditions in their internal logic where they transcend themselves into the mystery (Silence, 108). His endeavor is guided by “unifying” and, better, seeing through, the “cosmotheandric”—the interwoven divine, the cosmic, and the human (Rhythm, chs. 6–7)—dimensions of religious existence or human existence as such (Lanzetta, Basis, 91–105), mediated through the ontological apophaticism of the Buddha, the Buddha’s silence not only on God but also on the cosmos and humanity, on objects and subjects of religious experience (and experience as such). This endeavor is led by an attraction to the Beyond of any logos—the identifcation of thinking with Being (Panikkar, Silence, ch. 1)—and a letting-go of all patterns for (and into) pure experience, but without losing one’s word; rather transforming it into a spiritual opening (Experience, ch. 2). Without “slipping into an amorphous syncretism,” Panikkar seeks “to achieve . . . basically a positive integration of . . . [religious] traditions” (Silence, 6). While he feels that “prophetic fgures and thinkers have appeared” since the Buddha, Zarathustra, or Confucius, he can fnd “scarcely any of [their] stature . . . [or] in a position to guide, ‘sublimate,’ . . . or at least to assist at the birth of, the ‘new humankind’ still in gestation.” Nevertheless, he longs for the contemporary appearance of “a gauging force [that] is still wanting, one that could intuit the direction, this change might or ought to take” (ibid., 93). Might the direction of the unity of religions and humanity, the direction of peace, that Bahá’u’lláh imprints on our consciousness not be in that position—to release this force of universal sympathy all religions somehow expect to create an event of transformation (Sours, Station, ch. 6)? In this global and pressing situation today, to mediate humanity into the recognition of the sympathic unity of religions, humanity, and the Earth, might just be “the supreme [kulliyyih] Manifestation” (ibid., 48–9) of apophatic Reality, pointing “beyond” the All (kullu shay) to the mystery we seek, and encouraging us to fnd new patterns for “it” to be lived (GPW, §40). 5. THE INDISTINCTION OF SUFFERING For Panikkar, the Buddha has pointed toward the inherent reality of universal connectivity (pratitya-samutpada) as samsara, as suffering, “the permanence of impermanence,” not excluding himself (Panikkar, Silence, 54–5). But the Buddha also pointed to the unconstructed (asamskrta), the uncreated (ibid., 39), the incommunicable, and the untouched (ibid., 22–3) Reality (beyond any construction). However, even, and precisely, its recognition leads us back into this suffering (ibid., 91)—in the form of the experience (bodhi) and the

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presence of the Buddha (mahabodhisattva). For the movement of humanity toward itself (for Bahá’ís toward the unity of humanity) through the lure of religion toward sympathy, nonviolence, peace, and mutual immanence (for Bahá’ís toward the unity of religions), this reversal is of utmost importance, as it recognizes the coinhabitation of all religions by the universal predicament, universally symbolized by the Buddha and generally experienced in the suffering of and in the world of becoming. Yet, it would not be enough to stop here, that is, to identify the “ground” for interreligious harmony by referring to the common reality and human experience of (its own and all sentient beings’) suffering (Knitter, Earth, ch. 4) instead of making God or ultimate Reality, salvation or liberation, the common denominator of transreligious relativity (Fazel, Approaches, 44). Rather, we must ask how the insight into the universality of suffering relates to the presentation, exemplifcation, and radical living of its reality by the Buddha (mahabodhisattva)—and any equivalent fgure—as the manifestation of both the predicament and its overcoming, thereby releasing again the recourse to Reality in the question of salvation. Whitehead takes an important step in this direction, an inevitable step for Bahá’í thought, too, by avoiding the mere abstract charging of this process of (or direction out of and into) suffering with vague concepts of salvation, indicated by vague visions of unity and peace. Instead, he situates the process of becoming human in the midst of suffering in a truly human Manifestation—be it the Buddha or the Christ (RM, 19), or Bahá’u’lláh or any other Manifestation, for Bahá’ís (SAQ, #59)—in which this suffering releases its unavoidability, as it becomes the expression of both the human predicament and the liberation through universal perceptivity, through divine suffering (PR, 351), as it were, becoming manifest in the midst of the predicament as “its” Manifestation. For Whitehead, this is paradigmatically and symbolically visible in the “brief Galilean vision of humility fickered throughout the ages, uncertainly” (PR, 342), that is, the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of his agency in the world. . . . [T]here can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and selfforgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the fnal despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory. (AI, 167)

Suffering is not only a matter of the predicament from which humanity seeks liberation or salvation but it is, in one way or another, differently for the Buddha and the Christ, the experience of Reality “itself” in relation to the world that they manifest. This view, not incidentally, resonates strongly with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s for whom the “Bahá’í Movement is very closely akin to, I think I might say is identical with, the spiritual purpose of Christianity”

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(ABL, 17); and Shoghi Effendi adds with regard “to the position of Christianity . . . without any hesitation or equivocation that its divine origin is unconditionally acknowledged, that the Sonship and Divinity of Jesus Christ are fearlessly asserted, [and] that the divine inspiration of the Gospel is fully recognized” (PDC, #269). And for Bahá’u’lláh, this Manifestation of true humanity signals that “one indeed is a [human being] who, today, dedicateth himself to the service of the entire human race” (TB, 167). Yet, paradoxically, although humanity is “eagerly anticipating the coming of the Promised One, [we] have nevertheless denied Him,” have “denounced Him and pronounced the sentence of His death” (GL, #35) such that this Manifestation manifests the reality of suffering as enlightenment, equally exhibiting the human predicament and the way of salvation. Whitehead’s characterization of Jesus as the Manifestation of “peace, love and sympathy” through tenderness and suffering is, therefore, very much present in Bahá’u’lláh’s writings.

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Refect how Jesus, the Spirit of God, was, notwithstanding His extreme meekness and perfect tender-heartedness, treated by His enemies. So ferce was the opposition which He, the Essence of Being and Lord of the visible and invisible, had to face, that He had nowhere to lay His head. He wandered continually from place to place, deprived of a permanent abode. (GL, #23)

The Bahá’í writings acknowledge and mirror such suffering of divine messengers also in the Shi‘i reverence of Imam Husayn (the grandson of Muhammad), whose martyring is remembered and imitated every year in the sacred calendar of the Shi‘a similar to the remembrance of the passion of Christ (Momen, Introduction, 240–4). In fact, Bahá’u’lláh, through his birth name Husayn ‘Ali (names are of symbolic eminence), relates himself—for instance, in the Tablet of Visitation for Imam Husayn (Lawh-i-Zíyárat-Namih-i-Imám Husayn)—not only to Husayn’s suffering (Buck, Symbol, 11) but also to that of the frst Shi‘i Imam ‘Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad, who (in Shi‘i understanding) was disenfranchised from the right of leading the Muslim community after the death of Muhammad and, like his son Husayn, was martyred (by the party of the Kharijis who, at frst, were his supporters, but split after the Battle of Siffn). In fact, it is this martyrdom within its own community of faith that signals the departure of the Shi‘i party (Momen, Introduction, chs. 2–4). In turn, this scarred religious landscape became the religious background and site for the Báb’s and Bahá’u’lláh’s claim to fulfll its promises of the return of the last (the Twelfth) Imam (Amanat, Resurrection, chs. 1–2), of the Imams ‘Ali and Husayn, and of Isa (Jesus) in Sunni tradition, all of which were expected to appear in an eschatological event that would reform, renew, or (in some traditions) even replace Islam (Momen, Introduction, chs. 7–8). What is more, with ‘Ali Muhammad being the name

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of the Báb, who was murdered by the shah with agreement of the Shi‘a clerics (Amanat, Resurrection, 394–404), both Husayn and ‘Ali in Bahá’u’lláh’s name mirror for him in his suffering the suffering of all messengers of God— exemplifed in the Abrahamic traditions (KI, 4–22)—identifying himself with Imam Husayn (Buck, Symbol, 68), in the Surah al-Sultan with Jesus/Isa, his suffering and blood (ibid., 293–94n23), as well as the patriarch/prophet Joseph who became the other major symbol (Lawson, Figuration, 221–44), if not paradigm (Stokes, Story, 25–42), for the ousted prophet, even by his own family or community of faith per se (Lawson, Tradition, 135–57).

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Consider the past. How many, both high and low, have, at all times, yearningly awaited the advent of the Manifestations of God in the sanctifed persons of His chosen Ones. How often have they expected His coming, how frequently have they prayed that the breeze of divine mercy might blow, and the promised Beauty step forth from behind the veil of concealment, and be made manifest to all the world. And whensoever the portals of grace did open, and the clouds of divine bounty did rain upon mankind, and the light of the Unseen did shine above the horizon of celestial might, they all denied Him, and turned away from His face—the face of God Himself. Refer ye, to verify this truth, to that which hath been recorded in every sacred Book. (KI, 4)

Here, Bahá’u’lláh opens a radical new possibility for understanding the multiplicity (unity in difference) of religions from the sym-pathy, the together-suffering (gathering in suffering), of their messengers for true humanity-to-come—out of love for humanity (PUP, #89). While the respective (parent) religions themselves, in which these messengers occur, and the well-formed religious identities, which these messengers help to retain through the history of the respective religions, became disengaged from the transreligious feld of connectivity and, hence, the mission to contribute to the birth of the human being, it is—in Bahá’u’lláh’s rendering—the Manifestations of truly human existence that speaks with univocity, one voice (GL, #22). The religious communities, conversely, appear in disarray, united only in a common hostility toward their own messengers of humanization and between one another by electing and elevating one messenger over and against another, thereby confrming only themselves in their superiority and fnality instead of giving birth to humanity. It is the one voice of the messengers that in their revelation of the apophatic Reality are bound together in painful revulsions of dissociation by religious fanaticism as it makes all suffer the refusal of the many-fold(s)-of-one. Not one single Manifestation of Holiness hath appeared but He was afficted by the denials, the repudiation, and the vehement opposition of the people around Him. Thus it hath been revealed: “O the misery of men! No Messenger cometh

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unto them but they laugh Him to scorn.” [Qur’an 36:30] Again He saith: “Each nation hath plotted darkly against their Messenger to lay violent hold on Him, and disputed with vain words to invalidate the truth.” [Qur’an 40:5] (KI, 4)

Bahá’u’llah, instead, teaches a unity of the divine Manifestations in their suffering under the mutual claims of superiority and exclusivity by which religions become “one” only in the murder of the Manifestations of divine unity (mazahir-i ilahi). Here, transreligious multiplicity gains a breathtakingly new perspective as the birth of true humanity is mediated through the mutual relativity of the Manifestations as condition for the peaceful confuence of religions, unraveling the mutual religious denigration (and blank denial) of divine origin, its disconnective exclusivism, and mutual absolutism. Bahá’u’lláh, instead, emphasizes this mutual relativity of the Manifestations of true humanity in their suffering under absolutizing religions even to the point of their indistinction.

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Even as He hath revealed: “No distinction do We make between any of His Messengers.” For they, one and all, summon the people of the earth to acknowledge the unity of God, and herald unto them the Kawthar of an infnite grace and bounty. They are all invested with the robe of prophethood, and are honored with the mantle of glory. Thus hath Muhammad, the Point of the Qur’an, revealed: “I am all the Prophets.” Likewise, He saith: “I am the frst Adam, Noah, Moses, and Jesus.” (GL, #22)

Here, the confuence of religions becomes an expression of true humanity when the recognition of the mutual relativity of their “essence” begins to actually mirror the connective relativity of the Manifestations. With Juan Cole, we can follow this “poetics of pluralism” of “I am all the Prophets” into Bahá’u’lláh’s vision of the dying Imam Husayn who was brutally martyred by the Umayyad government in 680 C.E. (Momen, Introduction, 28–34). Not only does Bahá’u’llah identify his suffering from religious and political persecution with that of Imam Husayn, but in him with the martyrdom of all prophets, by reshaping their narrative as relatively indistinct from another, that is, as that of the one Manifestation in all of them (Cole, I am, 447–76). It is worth, here, to quote a lengthy passage of Bahá’u’lláh to that effect. Praise be to Thee, O Lord My God, for the wondrous revelations of Thy inscrutable decree and the manifold woes and trials Thou hast destined for Myself. At one time Thou didst deliver Me into the hands of Nimrod; at another Thou hast allowed Pharaoh’s rod to persecute Me. Thou, alone, canst estimate, through Thine all-encompassing knowledge and the operation of Thy Will, the incalculable affictions I have suffered at their hands. Again Thou didst cast Me into the prison-cell of the ungodly, for no reason except that I was moved to whisper into

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the ears of the well-favored denizens of Thy Kingdom an intimation of the vision with which Thou hadst, through Thy knowledge, inspired Me, and revealed to Me its meaning through the potency of Thy might. And again Thou didst decree that I be beheaded by the sword of the infdel. Again I was crucifed for having unveiled to men’s eyes the hidden gems of Thy glorious unity, for having revealed to them the wondrous signs of Thy sovereign and everlasting power. How bitter the humiliations heaped upon Me, in a subsequent age, on the plain of Karbila! How lonely did I feel amidst Thy people! To what a state of helplessness I was reduced in that land! Unsatisfed with such indignities, My persecutors decapitated Me, and, carrying aloft My head from land to land paraded it before the gaze of the unbelieving multitude, and deposited it on the seats of the perverse and faithless. In a later age, I was suspended, and My breast was made a target to the darts of the malicious cruelty of My foes. My limbs were riddled with bullets, and My body was torn asunder. Finally, behold how, in this Day, My treacherous enemies have leagued themselves against Me, and are continually plotting to instill the venom of hate and malice into the souls of Thy servants. With all their might they are scheming to accomplish their purpose. . . . Grievous as is My plight, O God, My Well-Beloved, I render thanks unto Thee, and My Spirit is grateful for whatsoever hath befallen me in the path of Thy good-pleasure. I am well pleased with that which Thou didst ordain for Me, and welcome, however calamitous, the pains and sorrows I am made to suffer. (GL, #39)

In their indistinction of suffering, as presented, here, in Bahá’u’llah’s Surah of Blood (Surat ad-Dam), the Manifestations of Reality become the medium for the healing of the world of suffering, because they counter warfare with a prospect for peace. In light of their sym-pathy—by suffering warfare, disconnection, and absolutism—“unity” becomes de-substantialized from, basically, being an idol, positing idol against idol, to being transreligious fuency in the horizon of the indifference of all the Manifestations of Reality that reverts the perversion of exclusive superiority (PM, #118). On the one hand, the redemptive suffering of the Manifestations of apophatic Reality displays—as in Whitehead (AI, 166–9)—a divine nonviolent response in the healing process of religious violence and warfare: “The Ancient Beauty hath consented to be bound with chains that mankind may be released from its bondage, and hath accepted to be made a prisoner within this most mighty Stronghold that the whole world may attain unto true liberty” (GL, #45). On the other hand, transreligious relativity may become the “means for the salvation of a greatly suffering world” (WOB, 47) by countering absolutism as one of its root causes. The attraction of the Manifestations is their sympathy, and their sympathy is attraction to universal mutual transreligious connectivity. Apophatic unity and polyphilic multiplicity of the Manifestation(s) are two sides of “the same” Reality. Their unity is itself utterly apophatic. Their polyphilic relativity can only be understood in their apophatic confuence. The multiplicity of religions is only the extension of this process if it foregoes and reverses a mere unity of

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exclusion and a mere plurality of opposition and renews itself as a multiplicity of attraction so that from it may fow the polyphilic force of apophatic Reality.

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If thou be of the inmates of this city within the ocean of divine unity, thou wilt view all the Prophets and Messengers of God as one soul and one body, as one light and one spirit, in such wise that the frst among them would be last and the last would be frst. For they have all arisen to proclaim His Cause and have established the laws of divine wisdom. They are, one and all, the Manifestations of His Self, the Repositories of His might, the Treasuries of His Revelation, the Dawning-Places of His splendour and the Daysprings of His light. Through them are manifested the signs of sanctity in the realities of all things and the tokens of oneness in the essences of all beings. Through them are revealed the elements of glorifcation in the heavenly realities and the exponents of praise in the eternal essences. From them hath all creation proceeded and unto them shall return all that hath been mentioned. And since in their inmost Beings they are the same Luminaries and the self-same Mysteries, thou shouldst view their outward conditions in the same light, that thou mayest recognize them all as one Being, nay, fnd them united in their words, speech, and utterance. (GDM, 33–4)

This connective relativity is indeed a shock as the “heaven of every religion hath been rent” (GL, #18). Yet, it is through this shock from absolutism that religions are redeemed of their disconnection from the divine relativity (in the “indifference” of its Manifestations) in which they were always already related and to which, in “its” apophatic nature and polyphilic embrace, they have (again) to be reconciled in their transreligious confuence (Faber, Religion, 167–82). It is not monopoly, but religious multiplicity that must always be rediscovered. It is under the layers of “conficting claims and narratives that the attentive reader soon discovers within and between the sacred texts of the world’s religions” and “the doctrinal and philosophical underpinnings of interreligious confict”—as Ismael Velasco has so keenly observed (Reconciliation, 97)—Bahá’u’lláh’s “motivating thrust of His vision for humanity” as a vision beyond this existential, cultural, social, intellectual, and religious challenge of exclusivism, oppositional superiority, and mutual extinction. Hence, “what might be described the ‘logic of reconciliation’ . . . constitutes the heart and soul of a Bahá’í hermeneutic” (ibid., 101). For Bahá’í thought, then, transreligious unity in difference means no simple manifold, but “the reality of reconciliation between the religions of the world” (PUP, #110). In that, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá ponders, the human being will be born, so that the roots of enmity may be destroyed and the foundations of love and affection be established; that the hearts may be flled with love and the souls be attracted; that wisdom may advance and the faces become brightened and illumined; that there be no more wars and strifes and that reconciliation and peace appear; that the Unity of the world of man may pitch its tent on the

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“apex of the horizons,” so that peoples and parties become as one nation, that different continents become as one continent and the whole earth as one land; that the sects of antagonizing and dogmatic religions be unifed; that the world of creation be adorned and all the people of the earth abide in unity and peace. (TAB I, ix)

On the maybe deepest level, suffering is not only an expression of divine suffering but becomes a sign of the radical difference of the way by which Reality wants us to reconcile in the unity of peace with God/Reality through the Manifestation (Logos, Will, Mind) and its “incarnations” in human form, namely not by any violence, but by Creative Love and Compassion (ch. 8). And the deepest reason for this divine suffering is not any lack of power—since power is anyway a poisonous category to address Creativity, Love, Compassion, and Peace (TDM, ch. 11)—and, in fact, not any lack at all, but a different way to name divine emanation of worlds from Love as the innermost motive force of existence (ch. 2). The divine suffering of the Manifestations in human form is, then, not only an expression of the violence of a not-reconciled world attacking divine nonviolence and persuasiveness, divine attraction instead of oppression, mistaking it for “weakness” (ESW, 6), but an expression of the very fabric of existence itself. Whitehead’s mutual immanence (AI, 201) and Buddhist co-origination (pratitya-samutpada) expect connectivity not to be based on substantialized particles in interaction but to hint at relationality to come forth from mutual reception, perception, or, with Whitehead, prehension (GPW, §33). No event/dharma exists for itself, but by the prehension of others (ch. 7). All events/dharmas are constituted (in one or another way) by the whole universe, which is its heritage, and the expectations of all events projecting their creative synthesis into a new future, which are perceived as visions, feelings, and desires. In fact, every event begins with prehensibility: of its world (physical pole), its potentials (mental pole), its divine initiation (subjective aim), and its projection into a future beyond itself (superject) as well as the desires of other events. The existentiality of existence is its prehensibility by which connectivity is always before all else of aesthetic nature, that is—with the Greek aisthesis—perceiving and harmonizing. In Whitehead’s universe, “acting” does not mean that a subject acts from its identity out into a world, but frst and foremost, that any subject of acting is constituted by its acts of creative synthesis of all of its prehensions in modes of harmonization and intensifcation (PR, 24–5). Hence, all acting is frst and foremost prehensive, receiving the other (GPW, §13). The divine expression of acting as such is Compassion: the divine act of perceiving everything without exception, and in as comprehensive a form as possible, that is, without negation or exclusion, but not without the measure of divine Wisdom (GPW, §35), signifying God as Eros of initiation and as Harmony

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of Harmonies (AI, 295). The consequent nature is this divine prehensibility in actu. It means that God is God not because God has the power of dominion, oppression, coercion, and destruction but because nothing besides God has the ability omni-prehensive aisthesis.

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The perfection of God’s subjective aim, derived from the completeness of his primordial nature, issues into the character of his consequent nature. In it there is no loss, no obstruction. The world is felt in a unison of immediacy. The property of combining creative advance with the retention of mutual immediacy is what in the previous section is meant by the term ‘everlasting.’ The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage. (PR, 345–6)

Reconciliation in the consequent nature of God is the “omnipotence” of Compassion; it transforms not through force, but through suffering of all it receives in its completeness (GPW, §39), with all the immediacy of unison by which God does not exclude anything without breaking apart by the prehension of the suffering of all existents (Faber, Apocalypse, 64–96). Instead, divine Compassion is redemptive suffering, reconciling activity (PR, 350); it is the reconciled non-difference of everything in (the consequent nature of) God (GPW, 93). Hence, when Whitehead speaks of the “becoming” of God, we ought never to hear “change” or “becoming-God,” but that God is omniprehensive, redemptive, reconciliatory. The becoming of the consequent nature, then, is, indeed, the basis for divine love to desire a world of multiplicity in becoming in the frst place (ch. 5). And it is the very reason for the inevitability of following such a love with the aesthetic and ethical imperative of (always) becoming (ever-more) prehensive, perceptive, realizing our very constitution by the other in peacefully reconciled diversity. Whitehead’s consequent nature is a symbol not only of the indifference of suffering of divine Manifestations for the (divine way of) reconciliation, and their indifferent all-perceptiveness revealing the depth of their suffering of the world (ch. 7). But even more, it is the reason for the indifference of suffering in all creatures and the indifference of compassion as basis for the existential reality, social inevitability, and transreligious imperative of relativity: the absolute relativity of the Compassion of Reality/God and the compassionate relativity of our very constitution from such a profound connectivity to realize itself as unity in multiplicity at peace. It is enlightening, then, if we “perceive” Bahá’u’lláh’s understanding of God’s mercy and compassion, with which the frst surah of the Qur’an begins, as the very presupposition and encompassing horizon for creation (GL, #142; PM, #159), because God is the all-perceiving (GL, ##1, 19) and, hence, omnirelative (ch. 9).

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Chapter 5

Be Transreligious!

Swami Vivekananda, an important instigator of, and participant in, the awakening of the life-force of a new religious consciousness (in India, Europe, and America), at about the same time of the Bahá’í efforts to promote peace between religions as a religious truth, points at the coming investigation into (the truth of) transreligious truth, when he says:

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The messages that are coming down to us from the prophets and holy men and women of all sects and nations are joining their forces and speaking to us with the trumpet voice of the past. And the frst message it brings us is: Peace be unto you and to all religions. It is not a message of antagonism, but of one united religion. (Vivekananda, Soul, V/1)

In the previous chapter, transreligious relativity was introduced as eventive togetherness, as process and progress, in complex rhythms and harmonies of confuence in which religions express a genuine connectivity one with the other and the whole religious landscape of the history of their mutual becoming. This relativity is also a critical deconstruction of religious absolutism as demonstrated with their messengers’ reconciliation (in the indistinction of their suffering under religious divisions) revealing their events, or revelations, as their sympathy one with the other, signaling the transformation of the sedimentations of compartmentalized religious consciousness that seemingly hermetically closes the eventive process and progress up by installing walls of imaginations of superiority and fnality around them (PUP, #120). This transreligious process is, again, steeped in the apophatic transcendence (ahadiyyah) the sympathic unity (wahidiyyah) of which (Diessner, Psyche, 6–10) lays its reconciliatory attraction over the many layers of confict, works through them, unsettles their fxations, and demonstrates a fundamental 169

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polyphilic mercy (al-rahman) and compassion (al-rahim)—like “the clouds of His bountiful favor [that] have overshadowed the whole of mankind” (GL, #5). It is between these limits of relativity of connectivity and apophasis that the category of transreligious processes unfolds its multiplicity of planes and levels, which will concern us in this chapter—as the relativity of (infnitely) many worlds.

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1. THE CATEGORY “TRANSRELIGIOUS” In order to understand the category “transreligious” here, on the basis of what was said about it already (Faber, Diskurs, 65–94), and in differentiation from now emerging attempts of an “open” or “transreligious theology” (Martin, Theology, ch. 1), we must return to its character of multiplicity. As a heuristic instrument for approaching the infnity of multiplicity, their layers and crossings, we can begin by asking in which different forms and kinds of “unifcation” multiplicity appears in the generation of cosmological and religious integrity. Basically, we can discern three such functions of unity in which the relativity of multiplicity demonstrates itself. In fact, they are only reformulations of the three gates of relativity: connectivity, apophasis, and infnite worlds. Nevertheless, as we will see presently, the introduction of these forms of unity of multiplicity must meander through a somewhat complex terrain. First, a connective unity of multiplicity is closest to Whitehead’s use of the Platonic receptacle (hypodoche) or place (khora). It is a unity of relational processes of events forming rhythmic nexuses of connectivity—as explored in the last chapter. This unity is always a process of unifcation and multiplication. It is a sphere of intercommunication in which, that is, in the concrete actualization of togetherness of relations in events and nexuses of events, structures are formed and embedded (GPW, 321). Here, unity of multiplicity is always one of (at least) three forms: that of the impermanent events; or that of structures propagated by these connected events, like the waves on the surface of the sea; or that of a unity of the life history of the whole multiplicity of all differentiated connective processes over the measure of their existence. Whitehead has demonstrated this threefold connective unity with the life of Julius Caesar. There are therefore three different meanings for the notion of a particular man,— Julius Caesar, for example. The word “Caesar” may mean “Caesar in some one occasion of his existence”: this is the most concrete of all the meanings. The word “Caesar” may mean “the historic route of Caesar’s life from his Caesarian birth to his Caesarian assassination.” The word “Caesar” may mean “the common form, or pattern, repeated in each occasion of Caesar’s life.” (SY, 27–8)

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All three connective methods hold for any natural or historical, cultural or social, religious or cosmological unity of multiplicity: Event (in its uniqueness), life history (as a whole), and pattern (embedded in this history and reconfgured by the processual connection of its events) constitute the frst level of transreligious processes insofar as the “trans” here refers to a beyond (regarding relationality and process) within connectivity. This does not mean that the “unity” of transreligious multiplicity transcends the level of interrelatedness in order to project itself as something outside of it. Rather, its khoric unity of moving, relational, processual openness is always already embedded in itself as it reproduces or creatively reconstitutes itself over and over again in a process of “creation without beginning or end” (KI, 167). It is the “essence without essence” of the open whole of the process of becoming. Like the Buddhist sunyata (in one of its interpretations), it is not only empty (as its essence is pure communicability) but even empty of (any essentialized) emptiness, self-emptying without “self,” and, hence, the polyphilic manifestation of apophasis (Abe, Zen, 86). I will revisit this khoric non-substantialism later again when it must be applied to ultimate Reality (ch. 6) and its Manifestations (ch. 7) as well as the understanding of the human self (ch. 8). Second, unity may transcend the plane of immanence in which multiplicity is connective so as to become its ruler. This is the most problematic of transcendences since it is traditionally identifed with, and today (especially in postconstructionist discourse) heavily criticized as, unilateral reconstruction of multiplicity from an independent unity that is in no way involved in the processes of connectivity (Schneider, Monotheism, chs. 2–3), that is, in the openness of its processes and the sympathies of mutual perception and recognition of the events and processes that (in Whitehead’s universe) constitute the world in becoming (TDM, ch. 2). This “unity”—disposed of its fundamental character of “elusiveness” recognized in virtually all religions (Reat and Perry, Theology, 22–3)—is associated with mechanisms of power of suppression and the rule of a controlling law. For many philosophies (of religion) and process theologies, its icon became symbolized with classical theism (Keller, Face, 52–4) and its insistence on monological divine kingship as well as its fundamental apathy toward the impermanence of the world (Caputo, Weakness, ch. 9), its suffering, and its struggles for ever-new instantiations of higher virtues in the effort of becoming human (Case-Winters, Power, ch. 7). In a sense, the “trans” insinuates that the birth of the human being has an either/or switch: all or nothing. Becoming per se is identifed with the fall from perfection while perfection is unreachable, binding the struggling creature to a code of permanent failure (Panikkar, Silence, 111–4). From this perspective, the variability of multiplicity, without which it was not multiplicity, carries only the stigma of deviation, unruliness, chaos, and evil (TDM, 165–7). In general, this approach mirrors the suppression of

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multiplicity, its division in unity (pure oneness) and plurality (mere manyness), or it marvels in the dualism of hierarchical and power-stricken binaries invented to control both the intellect and the masses by a few, “the learned” and “the better ones” (TDM, ch. 2). Whitehead characterizes this approach to unity of multiplicity with these words:

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So long as the temporal world is conceived as a self-suffcient completion of the creative act, explicable by its derivation from an ultimate principle which is at once eminently real and the unmoved mover, [this is their constellation:] The notion of God as the “unmoved mover” is derived from Aristotle, at least so far as Western thought is concerned. The notion of God as “eminently real” is a favourite doctrine of Christian theology. The combination of the two into the doctrine of an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys, is the fallacy which has infused tragedy into the histories of Christianity and of Mahometanism. When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers. . . . But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar. (PR, 342)

We can discern three forms of this kind of “trans”-religious unity: derivation, imposition, and reversal. As the world of multiplicity is perceived as unlawful chaos in need of control, a metaphysical or religious principle is introduced from the transcendence of which this multiplicity not only receives its lawful unity ad extra but from which it becomes totally derived (Keller, Face, ch. 3). Plato’s Ideas played (at least in his middle phase) this role: multiplicity is only a variation or deviation of the Idea, which is as the “really real” beyond, but ruling, the world (Deleuze, Difference, 66). God in classical theism played this role of the eminently real and unmoved perfection, unilateral controlling in apathy (apatheia) the world (Moltmann, Trinity, 21–30). In Whitehead’s assessment, this ruling entity is constructed as despot of imposition after the image of ancient imperial habits and is used to legitimize the exertion of their power (AI, 169). In so doing, we have confounded human desire with power and divine persuasion and civilization with impulses of animality (Faber, Indra’s Ear, 174–8). In elevating, instead of creative relationality, entities of imperial derivation, we have reversed the connective unity of multiplicity (in “classical” Derridian analysis) into binaries of ruling entities and subjugated pluralities (TDM, 273–4). In consequence, as Whitehead urges us to realize, this “trans” has created unities of religious superiority, exclusivity, and warlike oppression of the other—through warring Caesars and their controlling lawyers—as legitimate means of “interreligious” encounter (Avalos, Words, chs. 4–5).

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Third, the elevation of entities of substantialized superiority (extracted) from the process of connectivity can only be avoided by another level of transcendence, namely, that of apophatic unity (GPW, §40). Since it is in its essence unknowable, the inherent substantialism of the second “trans” is utterly avoided (Faber, De-Ontologizing God, 209–34). Instead of presupposing a transcendent entity, crafted after “a sublimation from its barbaric origin,” which “stood in the same relation to the whole World as early Egyptian or Mesopotamian kings stood to their subject populations,” we must recognize the utter imagination of this kind of projection (Panikkar, Silence, 120–43). And instead of the presupposition of this entity as an irrelational substance, “for his own existence requiring no relations to anything beyond himself” (AI, 169), we must release any fantasies of determined entities of power as symbolizations of “the fall,” as it were (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy, 43). The apophatic alternative consists in the impossibility to identify God with any positive term, as it would always become part of another binary (Panikkar, Silence, 129–34). Hence, in an apophatic gesture, Whitehead proposes similar to the mystical “fourfold” logic of Nicolas of Cusa and Nagarjuna—neither this nor that, nor both, nor neither (Corless, Speaking, 107–27)—that in our thought imaginations can only be avoided if we realize that our language must be upset in its tendency to assign positive characteristics to God and their opposites to creatures. Hence, when Whitehead formulates his famous “six antitheses” (GPW, §31), he makes God and the world indistinguishable with regard to mutually exclusive characteristics (Faber, Intermezzo, 227–9). In fact, if you listen carefully to their way to impress the mutual immanence of God and the world on us, you will—besides the outrageous propositions thereby made (Gregerson, Varieties, 22)—realize that there is nothing in them that can distinguish God from creation. It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fuent, as that the World is permanent and God is fuent. It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many. It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently. It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World. It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God. It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God. (PR, 348)

In the gesture of the coincidentia oppositorum, Whitehead’s six antitheses claim the utter impossibility to discern God from creatures by assigning binary

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characteristics. This does not mean, however, that the distinction is irrelevant or that God and the world are confounded or the same (ch. 6). Far from it, this indistinction is apophatic unsaying at its best: it conveys the non-difference of absolute transcendence and immanence of God as impossible proposition in a language that cannot help but differentiate them as if they were entities— against which new language strategies must be developed (Sells, Apophasis, 47–65). Here, following Paul Tillich’s warning, “God” is neither an entity among entities nor the ground of all entities (an avoidance which in Whitehead is indicated by both creativity and khora), but utterly apophatic Reality (TDM, ch. 6). Similar passages of apophatic mutuality and indistinction appear in the Bahá’í writings, for instance, when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá reasons: Therefore if we should imagine that the creation is accidental we would be forced to admit that the creator is accidental whereas the divine bounty is ever fowing and the rays of the Sun of Truth are continuously shining. No cessation is possible to the divine bounty, just as no cessation is possible to the rays of the sun. This is clear and obvious. (PUP, #139)

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In addition, this whole apophatic approach resonates well with the implication of the mystical inaccessibility of Reality/God, which for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá upsets any method of discovery if it is used in other ways than as an indication of the utter inability to gain positive insight of divinity. Then how could it be possible for a contingent reality, that is, man, to understand the nature of that pre-existent Essence, the Divine Being? The difference in station between man and the Divine Reality is thousands upon thousands of times greater than the difference between vegetable and animal. And that which a human being would conjure up in his mind is but the fanciful image of his human condition, it doth not encompass God’s reality but rather is encompassed by it. That is, man graspeth his own illusory conceptions, but the Reality of Divinity can never be grasped: It, Itself, encompasseth all created things, and all created things are in Its grasp. That Divinity which man doth imagine for himself existeth only in his mind, not in truth. Man, however, existeth both in his mind and in truth; thus man is greater than that fanciful reality which he is able to imagine. (SAB, #21)

As any positive assignment of characteristics to God as mere projections of the human mind (Momen, God, 14–17), the “trans” of apophasis hinders effectively the imitative rulership of any elevated entity as it is prone to be used to claim religious exclusivity and superiority by attaching to it defnable essentialities in binary opposition. In this sense, the apophatic “trans” relativizes the absolutistic tendencies of the second “trans.” In fact, in between the “trans” of the frst (connective) and third (apophatic) order the second

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“trans” (of absolutism) is (apophatically) overturned so as to give back itself to “its” multiplicity of regionalized characterizations, which can now function as mutually immanent and transcendent singularities of which no exclusive claim can be made anymore. In a complete transformation, the second “trans”—between connectivity and apophasis, but now devoid of a “ruler”— has mutated into a new manifestation: the infnite multiplicity of worlds. In a more formal sense, we can now say that the category “transreligious” conceptualizes (at least) these three ordinates of transreligious discourse: frst, the inherent interconnectivity and fuency of multiple religions between themselves through mutual coinhabitation of (experiences, patterns, and histories of) religions as being an essential moment of their integrity (ch. 4); second, a virtually infnite multiplicity of intersections and levels of interactions, of (in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s language) “planes of immanence” (Philosophy, ch. 2), in which the integrity of religions is formulated internally and externally as consistent (within themselves) and fuent (as their own process of becoming for themselves and with others), at the same time, without ever coming to a halt in a stabilized One; and third, the apophatic inaccessibility of their unity, which must be affrmed in order to avoid determining essentialist claims that would elevate any partial characteristic or event to a “ruler” of absolute identity. All three meanings of “transreligious” have been present in the development of religions and the thought of, and about, them throughout the ages: the third meaning (apophasis) is as old as the insight into the mystical heart of religions (Rg Veda X, 129), even in their prophetic forms (Lambden, Background, 37) that has patterned and challenged the identities of these religions from the perspective of utter transcendence (Schuon, Unity, ch. 3); the frst meaning (connectivity) is more attuned to modern gestures of perennial philosophy, which seeks to name some common characteristics of all religions transcending their particularity (Smith, Truth, chs. 3–4); the second meaning (infnite worlds) is leaning toward a more postmodern understanding of religions in their mutually intersecting and transcending movements (Boesel and Ariarajah, Multiplicity, 85–216), although it has also a deep relation to the perennial agenda of a certain spiritual “stratifcation” of Reality in “its” (self-)expression in the oscillating movement of unifcation and multiplication (Smith, Truth, ch. 3), especially expressed in renderings of spiritual planes in related transpersonal holisms (Wilber, Spectrum, ch. 3). And as suggested, these meanings are not mutually exclusive either given their complex togetherness as modes of the genetic code of relativity. Rather, these multiple forms of relativity convey themselves as a multiplicity of levels and layers of religious integrity that again symbolizes the infnite multiplicity of worlds, the interaction of which saves from any simplistic reduction and premature closure. It is to this paradigm of infnite worlds that we will now turn.

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2. MYSTIC COSMOLOGY The symbolism of infnite worlds used in the Bahá’í writings is quite extensive (Savi, Quest, ch. 3). Bahá’u’lláh formulates the basic assumption thus: “Know thou of a truth that the worlds of God are countless in their number, and infnite in their range. None can reckon or comprehend them except God, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise” (GL, #79). Yet, this multiplicity is not meant to convey mere chaos. On the contrary, it allows for several orderings, relative for diverse aims, into, for instance, two, three, four, fve, and (other) manifold layers of integrity (Momen, God, 29–31). As mentioned earlier (ch. 1), these “realms” are not isolated entities or levels of self-contained worlds, but interrelated planes of consistency with their own, although somewhat symbolically simplifed, self-related composition, but also (to their uniquely different degree) porous integralities of others (Cole, in Bahá’u’lláh, Commentary on the Surah of the Sun, 24–26n2). Nevertheless, differences between these realms or worlds remain. They enfold their own integrity and provide their own station for perfections native to them—even to such an extent that despite their resonance with one another no “similarity” of name, form, appearance, and characteristics remains (Lepain, Introduction, 402). More interestingly, the same symbolism is—as in many religious traditions in their predominantly mystical philosophical explorations (Schuon, Unity, ch. 3)—used to convey a deeper understanding of the resonance between stations of mystical experiences and cosmological structures (Savi, Summit, 332–41). As the respective mystical and cosmological categories already oscillate within and between different religions (Campion, Astrology, ch. 1), this transreligious relativity (of integration and diversifcation) is all the more remarkable as it answers another fundamental relativity of transreligious processes, namely, that of the (seemingly irreconcilable) diversity of manifestations of Truth/Reality in and between religions. Nevertheless, even in this sheer manifold of divine approaches and approximations—from epiphanies to theophanies, from holy presences to distinct absences, from natural to historical connotations, from visions to refections, from sages to holy fgures, from ominous signs to immediate experiences, and from initiators or mediators or symbolic embodiments of Reality/God (Macquarrie, Mediators, passim) to future saviors (Momen, Religion, chs. 4, 10, 11)—we fnd always modes of unifcations, movements of return to the divine (or of the divine to the world), different modes of unifcation of the plethora of divine phenomena, mediated through oscillating movements between planes of integration and differentiation. In other words, the insight, answering to the “universes of difference” visible in the processes of mediation of divine presence (in and between diverse religions), directs us back toward the relativity of (infnite) worlds (or layers or planes) that itself forms a pattern of

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cascading “potential” multiplicities in different stages or of different intensities of unifcation and diversifcation. This pattern is a unique mode of “unity in diversity” as it is itself the mediator—in the form (vertical movements) of emanation and return—between utmost diversity (multiplicity) and utmost unity (apophasis) in degrees of mutual approximation (connectivity). From the outset it should be kept in mind that the cascading pattern of “potential” multiplicity is neither a species of simple layered hierarchies (of realms or worlds), for which it is often (from a perspective of powerdiscourse) falsely mistaken—such as the use of the cosmological and spiritual hierarchies of the Areopagite could be mistaken for justifcation of the “hierarchical” organization of society (Jantzen, Power, 95–109)—nor does it simply mirror “fat multiplicities of n dimensions” of which Deleuze and Guattari say that this would mean “the possibility and necessity of fattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency” (Plateaus, 9). Although it is still true that all “multiplicities are fat, in the sense that they fll or occupy all of their dimensions” (ibid., 9), the potency of the cascading pattern of multiplicities indicated here does not mean ‘n’ dimensions, but “an ‘unrepeatable’ . . . to the ‘nth’ power” (Deleuze, Difference, 1). Each level of such a “potentialized” multiplicity (of the movement of integration and differentiation) manifests a higher or lower power, but in the sense of more or less extension, expansion, and width of infuence and being infuenced. It can symbolically be presented by two of its limits (which, as we know, are for themselves mere abstractions): the limit of the singularity of emanation or reabsorption, which indicates the highest pivotal point of potency (potentiality, possibility, virtuality), that is, the point from which the unmanifest Reality manifests itself (like saguna brahman) and conversely where the Manifest becomes ir-real in the Unmanifest (like the return to nirguna brahman), and the other limit of the sheer multiplicity of exhausted possibility, of actualizations, of materializations, in which the manifest Reality seems to have been absorbed into death (of potentiality, movement, and life), only to “resurrect” again as multipicity’s driving force (TDM, ch. 8), often fguring in the gesture and gestalt of love (ch. 4). However, the “unity” emanating from this singularity and the “unity” of the whole of such a patterned potency-multiplicity—that of the whole process cascading up and down, outward and inward, expanding and contracting, through that pattern and that of the pattern as a whole image itself—has, as all multiplicities, ceased “to have any relation to the One a subject and object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world” (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 8), because the apophatic “One” is not anymore (and can never become) part of any equation of distribution of oneness and plurality. The apophatic singularity becomes only part of such an equation if we betray its absolute inaccessibility and, instead, confound it with a generalized, imperialistic,

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colonizing, and subjugating entity-One (of the unreformed second kind of relativity discussed in the previous section) that always lurks for populating everything with “its (substantialized) Self” such that the “middle ground” of patterned relativity, which only comes to the forth when “it” remains empty (sunyata), would betray and expel multiplicity for the false unifcations of hierarchical layers (Faber, Democracy, 209–11). With this warning against any simplifcation of the multiplicities of cascading “potency” in mind, we can now bring the symbolisms of mystical, cosmological, and transreligious relativity-patters of worlds into mutual resonance. To say it again: What is interesting in such resonances is that, frst, the three “ordinates” of transreligious discourse manifest the genetic code of the three “gates” of relativity; second, mystical “stations” resonate with cosmological “layers” (Smith, Truth, 62); and third, these two pairs resonate one with the other, too (Wilber, History, 118–9). Together these multiplicities demonstrate a twofold pattern of potency that not only instantiates the relativity of the gate of many worlds through the whole pattern of layers, levels, stations, and ordinates but also situates this relativity of infnite worlds in its own (threefold) pattern (of the three gates of relativity), as it presents us with the middle ground between (the relativity of) the levels (layers, stations, or ordinates) of connectivity and apophasis. Additionally, this three-folded pattern (of gates) relates to the requirements of any “system” or coherent ordering (created by thought or assumed to be real) in its differentiation between ground, whole, and aim, or ontology, cosmology and eschatology, respectively. As long as, in such a “system,” God is assigned the function of ground, we are in the realm of the identifcation of God and Being; if God is assigned the function of the whole, pantheism of some sorts results; if God is shifted to the function of the aim of the system, the danger of absolutism (discussed before) is only avoided if it is not reifed, but always beyond reach as the apophatic Beyond of any system (Faber, Whitehead at Infnite Speed, 66). For Whitehead, these functions are expressed by creativity (ground), the manifold of the world, and God (aim), respectively (GPW, §34). This triad will have an important implication for the “status” of the God of Whitehead in relation to the manifest Reality—to which I will return in the next chapter. For my purpose, here, it suffces to remind ourselves that because of the apophatic groundlessness of the whole “system” of thought proposed as the “absolute” around which the three gates of relativity are circling, relativity becomes inescapable and profound, because the ground of existence can proceed in creative relationality without end and the aim of the whole process is always in the process of coming, the whole can be released into an infnite multiplicity of worlds. Hence, the most profound differentiation is captured with the twofold pattern engaged with the dynamic of the “differentiation” between unmanifest

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Reality and “its” becoming manifest (Momen, God, 10–7). It indicates the apophatic unknowability of ultimate Reality in any emanation or manifestation, including the multiplicity of the worlds and their connectivity—or, more simplifed, the differentiation between God and all things (ibid., 30). It includes questions of emanation, creation, and revelation (Corbin, Alone, ch. 3). And it is important for any qualifcation of Reality/God to be made beyond utter silence, always bearing “its” mark, or better: “its” unmarking (Panikkar, Silence, 130–4). Its symbolic realization or its “place” of origination (depending on one’s viewpoint) can be found in the resonant differentiation of the esoteric and exoteric reality of human existence (Schuon, Unity, xii), its spiritual and material reality (SAQ, #29), respectively, which renders this differentiation accessible and plausible. I will not go into more detail at this juncture since this differentiation will concern us in the next chapter, which will raise the question of different religions’ understanding of ultimate Reality as impersonal and personal, nirguna and saguna brahman, dharmakaya and maya, the nameless and the named Dao (Griffn, Pluralism, 47–8), or, as John Hick says: personae and impersonae (Hick, Interpretation, chs. 14–16)—and how to think of it in terms of Whitehead and Bahá’í thought in their potential contribution to the implied assumption of a justifed religious pluralism. Insofar, however, as this twofold pattern also addresses the claim of the oneness of God in relation to the multiplicity of religions, it will be folded into the discussion of the fve-folded differentiation later in this chapter. The threefold differentiation was already introduced (ch. 1) and will also concern us later again when the question of the Manifestations in different religions will be raised (ch. 7). In our context, it is, nevertheless, important to recognize that this threefold distinction correlates closely with the three gates of the code of relativity: the unmanifest Reality, or the “world of God,” as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says (SAB, #29), correlates with the gate of apophatic silence; the realm of Manifestation, or the “world of command and revelation,” correlates with the gate of connectivity (Lepain, Worlds, 50), indicated in the Bahá’í ringstone symbol (ch. 2) not only by the horizontal middle letter ba but also the vertically crossing ba; and the realm of creation correlates with the gate of (infnitely) multiple worlds—although the last two can, under certain conditions exchange their function (as we will see later). In fact, all three “worlds” can embrace all three gates in their own way, because, as already mentioned before, such a cascading manifold is not meant to be substantialized. Instead, we must keep in mind that its planes are porous in their own way to the respective other (as the gates of the genetic code of relativity are), and that the relation between them exhibits two further characteristics. On the one hand, as a symbol of the whole of existence, they indicate another multiplicity of worlds; on the other hand, all of these worlds

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repeat in themselves all three characteristics (gates), that is, they have an upward apophatic dimension and a downward connective dimension, and so exhibit in themselves another multiplicity of dimensions and worlds. In fact, understood in this way, this threefold symbolizes the movements of downward unfolding and upward enfolding between apophatic unity and manifest multiplicity—much like that of Nicolas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, and Giles Deleuze (TDM, ch. 13). And as a whole (vertically) as well as considering its planes in themselves (horizontally), this threefold reveals the mutual immanence or coinhabitation of the three gates of relativity, and, hence, also a dimension of inaccessibility and mystery in each of them (Diessner, Psyche, ch. 1). All worlds inhabit or are inhabited by a plurisingularity, or, as Deleuze and Guattari say, divergent lines of fight (Plateaus, 9), namely, as the tension between the three gates of relativity. This characterization of the cascading movements already gives us a hint regarding the multiplicity of religions in the (apophatic) unity of Reality: as Reality unfolds into these worlds, religions—as “its” lines of fight must differ even if they are essentially about the oneness of Reality. The fvefold differentiation is a good example of these characteristics, and I will use this scheme to explore the three “trans” of the transreligious movements presented above. It is an expansion of the threefold cascade, that is, a further internal differentiation, although not completely identical with it. While ‘Abdu’l-Bahá often used the threefold cascade to explain matters of spirituality (SAQ, #82), he is, of course, aware of the fvefold cascade (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Commentary, 4–35), not the least since it was explicitly explored or implicitly presumed by Bahá’u’lláh in several of his tablets (Ma’sumian, Realms, 11–7). It is important from the outset to keep in mind that Bahá’u’lláh uses the fvefold differentiation of worlds in a symbolic manner, because “in reality” the worlds of God are infnite (LG, #1707; Lepain, Introduction, 402). Hence, the differentiation is of heuristic, pedagogical, and explanatory value, and not a literal account of an ontological fxation of the structure of existence (Lepain, Tablet, 58–9). In time and tradition, it is not a novelty, but reaches back deeply into Suf cosmology and spirituality, probably going back to the time and circumstances of Ibn ‘Arabi and his circle (McCarron, Cosmology, passim) and is still used in current perennial pluralistic and relativistic expressions of Sufsm (Schuon, Truth, xvii–xviii) or is infuenced by it (Smith, Unity, ch. 1). For this tradition—corroborated by newer holistic models of the evolution of consciousness (Wilber, Theory, ch. 9)—the cascade expresses a mystical cosmology coordinating cosmological levels of existence with spiritual and mystical states the wayfarer must wander through or envision when on the spiritual path (Schimmel, Dimensions, ch. 3). The Bahá’í description of the fve spheres is also complex and allows for a multitude of interpretations.

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In Bahá’u’llah’s version, this scheme spans between the absolutely apophatic and undifferentiated (or trans-differentiated) Godhead and the material world (McLean, Prolegomena, 53–61). The most unfolded level is nasut, the world of humanity, creation, change, and physical becoming and perishing. Beyond this world of change, malakut names the realm of the everlasting kingdom of God. Beyond this “heavenly integration” of the (material) universe (of change and chance), jabarut indicates the divine trans-historic dimension of divine revelation and the divine decrees, but also that which Michel Serres has called an archangelic space (ch. 4). Still subtler is the elevated realm of lahut, the world of the manifest divinity itself, or the sphere variously designates as Logos, Wisdom, Spirit, Word, Mind, and Will of God (Momen, God, 23–6). And what can be more subtle and elevated than that? Only the world of hahut, the inaccessible realm of the unmanifest Godhead of which we must fall silent (Panikkar, Silence, ch. 10)! The most basic pattern of unfolding and enfolding of this fvefold—as suggested earlier in this chapter—maybe best read as the cascading “potentiation” of either an “upward” apophatic integration of the world(s) below or as a “downward” polyphilic diversifcation of the world(s) above. In every realm, the same movement repeats within another level of potency of “unity in diversity” or “diversity in unity”—either diffusing unity in diversity until only multiplicity remains or collecting and enfolding multiplicity into unity such that this unity transcends the folds it gathers, but holds them also in a potential state of differentiation (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Commentary, 8–20). The classical philosophical and mystical scheme of the coincidence of opposites found in Meister Eckhart and Nicolas of Cusa, but also recapturing in new ways the emanation scheme of Plotinus, holds (GPW, §40). In the apophatic “direction,” unifcation becomes cosmic and mystical union beyond any opposition, and beyond that, the expression of undifferentiated divinity and, hence, nothingness (in terms of anything that could be said or pointed to). The closer the plateau to the apophatic Godhead (hahut), the more it expresses divinity such that “its” manifest Reality is only in the nothingness of the medium in which divinity appears. Upward, the medium increasingly refects nothing but God/Reality in “its” purity. The perfect coincidence, that is, the perfect “form” (morphe) and “image” (eikon)—to use the Greek parallels of the New Testament (McCready, He Came Down, ch. 3)—of this apophatictheophanic dialectic is the mutual immanence of non-difference and difference “in” God, classically referred to as the divine Mind, Will, Word, Wisdom, Will, and Spirit of God (GPW, §38), or the pure Manifestation of God (lahut). The reverse implication must be drawn out immediately: The closer a level is to the reality of (material) creation (nasut, also called ‘alam al-khalq), the more it refects the differentiation into diversifed, historically embedded, horizontally unique, temporally and spatially regionalized events

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of divine revelations, the unique potentials of different divine theophanies and religions, as well as Manifestations in the physical world (Cole, Manifestation, pp. of n68–108). We will have to come back to this important pattern of relation of all worlds or spheres of existence to Reality/God in the next two chapters, as it touches on (how to articulate) the relation of ultimate Reality to the world of creation (ch. 6) and leads to a deeper understanding of religious fgures of great importance throughout religious history as divine Manifestations (ch. 7). But for now, we can realize that such a scheme of mystic unifcation and cosmological differentiation immediately implies important transreligious consequences. I will draw out only four of them, all of which allowing for transreligious transferences between religions, be they intertextual regarding their scriptures or trans-symbolic regarding their articulation of experiencing and categorizing Reality. First, the polyphilic movement of the appearance of lahut in nasut was at least as much cherished by the Andalusian and Persian Suf mystic cosmology (Corbin, Alone, 3–38) as it was feared and ousted by Islamic orthodoxy since it seemed to have left open a path for (the introduction of the notion of) divine “incarnation” (hulul) (Momen, Introduction, 55, 66), especially in Shi‘ite movements (Parrinder, Avatar, 196–8). But it also paved the way for the Shi‘ite, Suf, and Bahá’í notion of Manifestation (as process: zuhur; as event: mazhar) (Savi, Summit, ch. 11) as well as it opened a space of transreligious conversations, for instance, with the trikaya doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism (Derrett, Dimension, 85–6), perhaps only differing regarding the status of the reality of the physical world (Xing, Concept, ch. 6). In any case, this is how Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in transreligious inter-symbolization understand the common humanity (and the physical reality) as well as the unique regionality of all personal theophanies (mazahir-i ilahi) among which they variously (but at least) count Zoroaster, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, Krishna, the Báb, and Bahá’u’lláh (Cole, Manifestation, p. of n2). All of them are profoundly different on the physical, historical, and human levels (nasut) so as to express different religious experiences and revelations (in Whitehead sense), live in different social and cultural circumstances, and develop as different personalities (GL, #22). The implication would be that religions, as they were gathering themselves around these religious fgures as point of their identity, are true in their differentiation without taking away from their unique universal relevance, and they are equal because of, and one in, their manifestation of their divine origin as way of grace and to salvation (PDC, #264). Second, in the apophatic movement, which is indicated by the diverse spiritual and divine levels, the same Manifestations or the founders of religions, frst, transcend history and the world of becoming as they integrate the

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worlds of opposition into worlds of contrast, that is, into a sphere of coinherence beyond time and space in any ordinary sense (malakut). Further, they coinhere in one another (jabarut), as they are themselves transpersonal and trans-historical realities of universal relevance. And fnally, in a coincidence with ultimate Reality (lahut), they come to be recognized as the expression of the same divine Wisdom and Spirit, Will and Mind of God (Cole, Manifestation, charts I and II). The transreligious implication is obvious: All religions can be understood, in their mystical unifcation (beyond all opposition), as true insofar as they coinhere on their levels of trans-historical integrity and in one another insofar as they coinhabitate the same divine sphere of origin (GL, #22). In this sense, the oneness of religions is presupposed in their divine transcendence that does not neglect their historical, social, cultural, and spiritual diversity (Ferrer and Sherman, Turn, 29–49). Many of the scholars of religion—some of them steeped in different and multiple traditions at once, such as Huston Smith (Truth, ix) and Raymond Panikkar, with his cosmotheandric vision (Experience, ch. 3)—have taken recourse to threefold (or manifold) of cascading worlds to address this apophatic enfolding of religions. Third, the reason that this cascade can be mystical and cosmological at the same time is due to the inherent ambivalence of its “potential” to express at once cosmic (external) or mental (internal) states (PUP, #93). With Nagarjuna, the upward apophatic movement through the cascade expresses “two truths” (Thakchoe, Debate, 72–7; Jones, Nagarjuna, 135–58, 180)—the truth of the ordinary view of the objective world with subjective states, and the “ultimate truth” that comes to the forth when we abandon the dualistic assumption of an objective world, which again is an illusion created by subjective states, and of a subjective world, namely, that there is a self that seems to grasp this objective worlds while actually creating it, for a non-dual view beyond these categories (Abe, Zen, ch. 4). However, by moving beyond these divisions, the mystical “state” that this movement indicates as some kind of clear consciousness being the “essence” of human identity (Teasdale, Heart, ch. 3) must also be assumed beyond the dialectic of consciousness and reality (Harvey, Mind, ch. 12). Hence, in this “state” we cannot decide whether, for instance, nirvana names a mental state or indicates a realm of existence beyond samsara; the very difference would be constructed and, hence, not indicative of Reality (Williams, Thought, 140–52). This same ambivalence— or with Nagarjuna we could also say, this identity of nirvana and samsara (Kluge, Buddhism, 38), of the non-dual and the dualistic spiritual state (of mind) and realm (Winters, Thinking, 84–7)—necessitates that we refrain from a defnition of the apophatic integration not just of the extremes of the physical world of difference and opposition (nasut) and the world of divine identity (lahut) beyond all opposition and, really, difference (in any simple sense), even of the unmanifest undifferentiated Reality (hahut) from all else, but also

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of the internal apophatic dimension of all realms as “opposed” into either mystical states or spiritual realms “in which” (as some kind of objectifable reality) such consciousness would be sustained. On the contrary, all of these cascading “spiritual stations,” respectively, in relation to one another and as a whole movement, indicate an infnite movement beyond all reiterated and sedimented dualistic categories (Teasdale, Heart, 48). As in Dogen’s rendering, in the ultimate we never reach any end point or rest (Abe, Study, 83–6). For ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, this is a sign why there must be immortality (for such a station, consciousness, or realm) and (and as) infnite progress, at the same time (PUP, #123). Like the insight of Nagarjuna and the conviction inherent in later Buddhist meditative practice: if you believe you have reached enlightenment, nirvana, the fourth state of meditation (dhyana), you have found yourself only being thrown back into the process again—and infnitely so—as can be witnessed in the “turn” back from a state of mystical union, if it is reiterated, into the depth of separation, indicated in the Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet of the Holy Mariner (vs. 18–20 in Sours, Tablet, 69–73). Hence, this “indifference,” as movement of “indifferentiation” (GPW, §40), now, seems also to be well ft to render understandable that no religious system, necessarily formulated around certain categories and practices, can ever reach the Truth of this ambivalent (non-)identity without being refected back into the infnite movement of approximation (and working indefnitely through the ever-new reiterations hindering it to attain Reality). Hence, no religion can claim possession of Truth in any fnal or exclusive mode that is not itself an infnite process of, or progress into, the Reality of this non-difference (SAQ, #64). Fourth, insight into the mystical integration of historical differentiations and oppositions between religions had always, when it was realized, contributed to a discovery of a liberating character, namely, that all religions in their apophatic enfolding (beyond themselves) in their own depth, are intimately related, and sometimes even that all religions in their differences are polyphilic expressions of the infnite wealth of divine incomprehensibility. The apophatic side of this insight has convinced many scholars and practitioners of diverse religions that all religions—in the worlds of the Swiss Vedantist philosopher and Suf initiate Frithjof Schuon (Unity, ch. 3)—exhibit a “transcendent unity” in their appeal to an ultimate non-dual Reality. Further, it was this same insight, which demonstrates such a dramatic transreligious resonance within the deeper layers of different religions, that led Huston Smith, being a Methodist scholar of religions, especially of Vedanta, Zen, and Sufsm, to proclaim that not only are all religions in their core mystically one—confrming Shoghi Effendi’s respective statement (ch. 1)—and, therefore, exhibit a common apophatic intuition, but also that in their respective mystical resonances the spiritual identities of practitioners of all of these religions seem to be closer, one to the other, and have more in common

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one with the other than they have with practitioners of their own religion if they have built their religious identities more around different rituals, self-differentiating doctrines, and historical and cultural dissimilarities that oppose any such transreligious explorations (Mind, ch. 3). Such a perennial view was not only proposed by Western scholars of transreligious mysticism, such as Aldous Huxley (Philosophy, vii–xi), but also, for instance, by Eastern holy fgures such as Sri Ramakrishna from a Hindu perspective and, from a Suf perspective, by Hazrat Inayat Khan from the venerable Chishti order, who was also initiated in the Quadiri, Naqshbandi, and Suhrawardi orders (Stavig, Admirers, 887). On the polyphilic side of this insight we fnd sages, practitioners, and scholars of different degrees of commitment to their own religions while forcefully promulgating the mystical unity of all religions—fgures such as Sri Ramakrishna’s disciple, Swami Vivekananda, who promoted this view at the frst Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 (Adiswarananda, Vivekananda, ch. 2), or the Oxford scholar of comparative religions and second president of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (East, Lecture I and II), or Mahatma Gandhi, drawing from the Bhagavat Gita (Gandhimohan, Gandhi, ch. 3). The maybe most vigorous Hindu proponents of the polyphilic activity of ultimate Reality through cascading plateaus as an evolutionary process contemporary to Bahá’u’lláh were Sri Aurobindo and his female companion, Mirra Alfassa, “the Mother”—who had interesting connections and encounters with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Afassa, Mother, 316–7)—both of whom believed in the progressive manifestation of Reality through the spiritual spheres in the religious identities of all religions, but progressively so in a movement toward universal peace of a unifed humanity (Satprem, Aurobindo, passim).

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3. THE CYCLE OF LOVE How does this multiplicity of worlds, insofar as it expresses transreligious movements of the relativity of truth, relate to Whitehead’s understanding of the world in process? This is an interesting question since a closer investigation of the process view of the world in becoming does not only present us with another dimension of the symbolism of the cascading multiplicity of spiritual worlds but rather will allow for a surprising mapping of the Suf background of the respective Bahá’í tradition (Savi, Summit, chs. 2, 10) onto Whitehead’s conceptualization of the relationship between God and the world with the unprecedented effect of reconfguration of the spiritual universe of Whitehead’s cosmology (Faber, The Mystical Whitehead, 225–9). Conversely, however, such a mapping will also arouse a new understanding of the cascading oscillation between unfolding expansions and enfolding

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contractions of divine Reality within the universe with its layered physical, mental, and spiritual harmonies and overtones as a cyclical fow of life through the veins of existence motivated by divine love and engaged with any magnitude of existence from “God” to “the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space” (PR, 14). Thereby, both the arboreal image of layered planes of immanence will in one cycle of love be connected to the rhizomatic image of a multiplicity of worlds in diversifcation and becoming (GPW, §30). While this section, in continuation of the preceding one, is dedicated to the more spatial and vertical imagery of multiple worlds, the next section will move to the transreligious implications of the more temporal and horizontal imagery of the sheer infnity of worlds. These aspects are, of course, intersecting through the fact that in such an infnite multiplicity no defnite order, whether vertical or horizontal, upward and downward moving or cyclical, can be presumed, and that both movements are always mirrored one in the other (TDM, ch. 7). Before I proceed with the considerations of the cascading folds in Whitehead’s universe, however, I want to set the stage with a comment on the presumed differentiation within these cascades (especially in their threefold and fvefold symbolization) between physical and spiritual dimensions or worlds in both Whitehead and the Bahá’í writings. First of all, we should avoid capturing the difference between the material and the spiritual worlds from the perspective of a hermeneutics of opposition (so prevalent after Descartes), as if they were mutually exclusive of one another (GPW, §9), while we should keep in mind that these “worlds” of spiritual and material nature, as all worlds, are in their symbolic engagement by Whitehead and the Bahá’í writings not viewed as monolithic either (TDM, ch. 7). In other words, these worlds, spheres, or plateaus of existence always appear both in mutual resonance and oscillation with one another (SAB, #188) and they are internally differentiated into further physical and/or spiritual layers such that they are internally and mutually only united in apophatic differentiation from ultimate Reality (Lawson, Authority, 137–70). In other words, the symbolism of spirit (or mind or soul) and matter (or body or physicality), as all other differentiations between worlds, is not meant to imply unrelated, mutually closed off planes of existence, but—to evoke a term from Gilles Deleuze again—planes of (internal) consistency or immanence by which they are one in a rhizomatic, intersecting, mutually relevant, but always becoming and living movement of encompassing (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy, ch. 2). Deleuze uses the image of a bird conveying the path of its fight, in its movement always presenting its view to itself as one landscape, but always moving along over undiscovered areas, constantly renewing its consistency in continuity with the areas that drift out of sight (ibid., ch. 1). Hence, think of such material and spiritual realms, spheres, and planes as constantly intersecting dimensions of

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such a landscape of worlds held together by infnite speed—mocking eternity as standstill (nunc stans), but really being of infnite living momentum. Such a world, plane, or sphere

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is like a bird as event. [It] is defned by the inseparability of a fnite number of heterogeneous components traversed by a point of absolute survey at infnite speed. (Ibid., 21). . . . Movement of the infnite does not refer to spatiotemporal coordinates that defne successive positions of a moving object and the fxed reference points in relation to which these positions vary. . . . Movement takes in everything, and there is no place for a subject and an object . . . . It is the horizon itself that is in movement: the relative horizon recedes when the subject advances, but on the plane of immanence we are always and already on the absolute horizon. Infnite movement is defned by it’s a coming and going, because it does not advance toward a destination without already turning back onto itself. (Ibid., 37–8)

Within the horizon of such an infnite movement, neither is subject and neither is object, be they physical or mental or spiritual, defned on their own (as substances of incomparable and incompatible essence), nor are they differentiated other than as elements in the respective horizon in which they may take on one more than the other characteristic, but always leaving the horizon of the plane that constitutes the consistency of such a viewpoint intact that conveys this differentiated landscape beyond such differentiation. Now, Whitehead like Deleuze, but in other symbolizations, insists that any bifurcation in physicality and mentality or spirituality is only an abstraction from the events in which they form a unity of consistency, a consistency that makes such an event always a horizon of its heterogeneous elements it gathers to its own becoming their unity by such a conveying integration (SY, 20–1). Not only does the most concrete constitution of the universe, from which more complex orders of organisms (and even universes with their natural laws) arise, come from such events (and not substances with their unchanging essences) but these events are in themselves always already gathering physical and mental dimensions of becoming in a movement of mutual immanence in which only conceptual abstractions can discern binaries like matter and mind, event and society, physical biology and ideal potentials, becoming and being, particularity and universality (Faber, Uniting Earth, 56–80; GPW, part 2). The body pollutes the mind, the mind pollutes the body. Physical energy, sublimates itself into zeal; conversely, zeal stimulates the body. The biological ends pass into ideals of standards, and the formation of standards affects the biological facts. The individual is formative of the society, the society is formative of the individual. Particular evils infect the whole world, particular goods point the way of escape. The world is at once a passing shadow and fnal fact. The shadow

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is passing into the fact, so as to be constitutive of it; and yet the fact is prior to the shadow. (RM, 87)

Bahá’í writings, although they seem sometimes to be taken by some observers to highlight the difference between the physical world of change and the spiritual realm(s) of eternal bliss, in fact, support their mutual “pollution” (Hatcher, Connections, chs. 5–7). As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá emphasizes in his Tablet of the Universe, “earthly and heavenly, material and spiritual, accidental and essential, particular and universal, structure and foundation, appearance and reality and the essence of all things, both inward and outward—all of these are connected one with another and are interrelated” (TOU, §7). All realties are enfolded in one another (SV, 55) and are the folds of the mind (ABL, 95) and spirit in everything (ABL, 95). On the one hand, they refuse any creature or higher-level entity (of the threefold or fvefold cascade), and be it the highest sphere other than the apophatic Reality itself, that is, the Mind, World, Wisdom, or Will of God (lahut), and its Manifestations, to be confounded with Reality/God (hahut). And on the other hand, they convey an understanding of this apophatic Reality (hahut) to be at the heart of any creature or worlds or sphere of existence, physical or mental, spiritual or divine (KI, §105). On the frst aspect, we fnd the language of the Bahá’í writings to claim Reality only for the apophatic Reality “itself” such that nothing (else) “possesses” existence (UR, 214). On the contrary, everything, that is, every sphere of existence, whether physical or mental, spiritual or divine, is in its existence and classifcation profoundly relative (Kluge, Buddhism, 128–9). Hence, as long as we are not falling into the fallacy of identifying Reality with any defnable entity (which can only be a conceptual abstraction), but insist on its apophatic nature, the implication would seem to be that no layer of existence can be more different from any other than they are together—material or spiritual—infnitely different from the apophatic Reality (SAQ, #79). This means that all planes of reality, irrespective of the emphasis of their nature to be more spiritual or mental or physical, still speak univocally of Reality (SAB, #8). On the second aspect, we fnd that, since Reality in Bahá’í scripture is closer to any existence than this creature is to itself (GL, #93), Reality is in “its” apophatic nature never far from any creature (KI, 99); in fact, we have no measure to differentiate “its” intimacy relative to any realm of existence—other than its non-difference. This polarity of apophatic subtraction from, and polyphilic affrmation of, all worlds in their physical, mental, spiritual, and divine dimensions (TDM, ch. 3), will occupy us again in the next chapter on ultimate Reality. For now, we may conclude that for both process thought and Bahá’í thought the mutuality of characteristics such as physicality and spiritual reality has avoided any simple or substance dualism between incompatible worlds, such as can

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be found in the division of the world of extension (res extensa) and of mind (res cogitans) of the Cartesian universe, which has only led to the disbandment of mind and spirit in the late 19th century (Greenway, Belief, ch. 2); to the “wars” between science and religion (Haught, Nature, chs. 1–2); the seeming incompatibility between civility and spiritual civilization (Huntington, Who We Are, chs. 11–12); and—despite resurgences of desecularization (Berger, Desecularization, 1–18)—the abandonment of religion as civilizing force of peace (Pinker, Angels, ch. 5). Instead, Whitehead begins to describe the universe as that of events, of collections of the universe in becoming of unifcations in a multiplicity that upholds or changes patterns or structures, which constitute the emergence or decomposition of organisms such as elementary particles and stars, human beings and cultures, the Earth and a universe, only different in emphasis physically and spiritually (AI, chs. 12–13). In order to understand Whitehead’s differentiation of worlds, as resonating with the threefold and fvefold cascades of physical, spiritual, and divine plateaus, but relating them in a cycle of love, we must be aware of three presuppositions. First, since the world is not constituted by substances of incompatible essences of either physical or mental (or spiritual) nature, but of events of becoming, reality is gathered and concretized in the polarity of a physical and a mental pole. While every event gathers itself through its internal relations to the world out of which it arises (with all of its mental and physical, spiritual and divine dimensions) as its actual heritage, it constitutes a novel unity of this world by a certain amount of creativity, that is, potentials to either repeat its past or renew it by realizing alternatives not yet realized, but realistically possible (Hosinski, Fact, chs. 3–5). The frst aspect is symbolized by the image of a physical pole, the ingathering of actual events of the past of the actual world (conveyed like a bird) in which the new event arises. The second aspect names the space of potentials and possibilities of this past insofar as they may not be realized yet, or the unprecedented novelties of a different future if they would be realized by the event instead of the potentials presented by its actual past (Rose, Whitehead, ch. 2). Whitehead calls this dipolar movement of all events creativity: “The many become one and are increased by one” (PR, 21). Second, God is symbolized as event (Cobb and Griffn, Theology, ch. 3). This may be unfamiliar for now, especially in the context of substantialism that has dominated the theological utilization of philosophical categories in the Western versions of the Abrahamic religions, but it is just an implication of the fact that none of our categories with which we may try to capture divinity are beyond the necessary symbolization (falling short) of the unspeakable (Tillich, Theology I, 239). And if the metaphysical scheme is always renewed, especially in concordance with religious intuitions and experience, as Whitehead claims (RM, 31), this paradigmatic shift of means of categorization is

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inevitable and only expressing the renewal that we have already found to be part and parcel of the development of thought (PR, 4)—even more so if this categorization is developed in the context of a turn toward developing resources for a future civilization of peace. So, if God is to be understood in terms of an event, this means, on the one hand, that even God exhibits this dipolarity between physical and mental poles (PR, 345), but that nevertheless God, on the other hand, is not just one event among others (PR, 18). Here is why (TDM, chs. 3, 13). God’s mental aspect—Whitehead calls it the primordial nature of God (PR, 32)—is not just a “place” of potentials, possibilities, alternative realities, or possible scenarios but the “mother” who harbors all possibilities, potentials, alternatives, and possible worlds as such, as unrealized (Hosinski, Fact, ch. 7). Furthermore, this primordial nature is not reactive to a physical past in which an event arises; rather, since it is infnite, an infnite multiplicity, it is bound by no world, but the necessary presupposition for the realization of any actual world (PR, 345). Through the primordial nature, God becomes—as was already mentioned—the eros of all becoming events that, in their very origination induces them with their own potential to become their best version (AI, 244). Hence, the primordial nature is not only a reservoir of potentials and infnite worlds but a divine event, actually uniting and proposing potentials to any event in its own becoming as values to be realized (Leue, Foundations, ch. 3). The relation to the Suf and Bahá’í understanding of the names and attribute of God, which are meant to be realized as virtues (ch. 2), will become obvious later (ch. 7). God’s physical aspect—Whitehead calls it the consequent nature of God (PR, 31)—names not just the physicality of any event out of which it gathers itself, but, in light of the world-independent primordial nature, the infnite ability of God to perceive and receive the actual world as it has become (has become a fact of history) into God’s own being (Hosinski, Fact, ch. 8). Again, since this ability is infnite, it carries within itself the images of compassion, judgment, and salvation, as God, in receiving actual reality, does not just store it, but evaluates it in light of its own realized or unrealized potentials, but also relates it to all other events perceived “into” God (PR, 345–6). The consequent nature is the kingdom of God, in which all events in both their physical and spiritual dimensions are transformed into spiritual realities within divine realms (PR, 351). The consequent nature is the presence of God in the world in the form of the presence of the world in God (GPW, §38). “This is God in his function of the kingdom of heaven” (PR, 350). Third, the spheres of the world in becoming and both of the natures of God are bound together in creative movement, the motivation of which Whitehead fnds to be—love (TDM, ch. 11). That is, what relates these realms of the

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world in becoming, the primordial nature and the consequent nature is divine love instigating mundane love and the creative cycle of love (PR, 350–1) in which the mundane love is taken up again into God’s compassionate and saving nature in order to be released again into the world of becoming in the form of new possibilities for a more intense, more harmonious, more peacerealizing, more unifed, more beautiful world without, as love, forcing any realization, and suffering the defciencies of actual realizations, even in the pervasion of the negation of its very motive (Suchocki, End, ch. 8).

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What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and foods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands. (PR, 351)

All realms are related internally by the fow of them and their populations of events, organisms, and characters, through one another in a universal cycle that differentiates itself by degree, not nature; or better: while the horizons that form them as planes of consistency are absolute in themselves (in the Deleuzean sense) and, hence, cannot be restated in terms of one another, their absoluteness is relative to one another as the fow between them allows these spheres to appear one in the other as compassionately perceived and transformed, but also creatively originated and released (as many become one and are increased by one). It is not their characteristics as physical, mental, spiritual, or divine that ultimately differentiates the absolute horizons as relative to one another, but the mode of integration of this fow through one another (TDM, ch. 14): as gathering of potentials to one valuation in the primordial event and the creative multiplicity of infusions of motivations into the fow of worlds; as the gathering of a multiplicity of events to a universe in the multiplication of gatherings of impermanent events; as one gathering of the multiplicity of worlds-become in the multiplicity of its compassionate renewals. This cycle of love is infnite in beginnings and endings, never beginning or ending, always beginning and ending anew (GPW, §35), but always fnite in its concrete actualization as events, events of love, carried by all events as their heart, as a potential for renewal and expansion. What this understanding of the interrelationship of God and the world reveals is, if nothing else, at least, the inner potential of a presence of God in the world (and of the world in God) that, indeed, harbors the potentials for the transformation of the world of becoming (RM, 155–8) in the actualization of a peaceful society of the future that this book is proposing from the outset (GPW, §46). Before I draw the conclusion of this section regarding the resonance of such a cyclical realization of physical, spiritual, and divine worlds in Whitehead,

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all of them offering their own infnite multiplicities (of possibilities and worlds, realizations of value and actualization of novelty, of compassionate transformations and revelations), with the threefold and fvefold differentiation of worlds in Bahá’u’lláh, I must mention that the fow between them, and even their cyclical infnity of movement (without beginning and end), is by no means beyond the Bahá’í vision of the cascading plateaus. Not dissimilar to the misunderstanding that Plotinus created a “hierarchical” world of emanations of the One into Mind, Soul, and (their exhaustion, namely) matter (Sells, Languages, ch. 1), one would misunderstand the Bahá’í differentiation of the threefold and fvefold cascading worlds, although they present us somehow with a vertical symbolism, as this symbolism is not meant to impose on us a “hierarchical” ordering, but binds these “worlds” together by an infnite cyclical movement (Kluge, Neoplatonism I, 149–202). Similar to the yogic and Buddhist training of our breath, these worlds are exhalations and inhalations of the apophatic Spirit they manifest (Majumdar, Plotinus, ch. 8). While this Spirit, since its relationship to any world cannot be defned, is present in all worlds as much as Reality is beyond duality, the cascading worlds as a whole, despite all the differences between them, are not erected as a stratifcation of impenetrable layers, but they actually perform a rhythmic process of emanation and return (Hines, Return, Section 4; Sells, Apophasis, 61–2). In ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s words, they are engaged in an “arc of descent” and an “arc of ascent” (SAQ, #81) in which the Spirit unfolds to the utmost depth of physicality—to the “spirit of minerals”—and ascends to the heights of spirituality, the realm of the Word of God or the Holy Spirit, in which all worlds gather as one and from which all worlds originate always anew (Saiedi, Gate, 104). In this oscillation, humanity is entrusted with the turning point (Saiedi, Logos, ch. 2)—the last unfolding of materiality and the frst refolding of spirituality (Buck, Paradise, 308). Now, this is an established and deep theological proposition, that the material worlds are terminated at the end of the arc of descent, and that the condition of [the human being] is at the end of the arc of descent, and at the beginning of the arc of ascent, which is opposite to the Supreme Center. Also, from the beginning to the end of the arc of ascent, there are numerous spiritual degrees. The arc of descent is called beginning, and that of ascent is called progress. The arc of descent ends in materialities, and the arc of ascent ends in spiritualities. (SAQ, #81:9)

The differentiations of unfolding the Spirit into material worlds—of minerals, plants, animals, and humans (or other respective creatures of other regions and worlds)—is mirrored by the ascent of humanity (from these material realms) through higher realms of the Spirit—the human spirit (mind/soul/ intellectuality), the spirit of faith, the Holy Spirit, the Most Great Spirit (SAQ,

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#55)—in which the descent must somehow be thought of as being enfolded and sublimated—spiritualized. Hence, the whole cascade of worlds is not only a vertical image, or even only a vertical movement of enfolding and unfolding, but at the same time a horizontal image of an infnite rhythm of the mutual immanence of all worlds, whether their emphasis is physical, mental, spiritual, or divine. That this cycle, in Bahá’í writings, is motivated by love is clear from Bahá’u’lláh’s utterings, like this: O SON OF MAN! Veiled in My immemorial being and in the ancient eternity of My essence, I knew My love for thee; therefore I created thee, have engraved on thee Mine image and revealed to thee My beauty. (HW. A, #3)

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There is an even more striking resonance between Whitehead’s cycle of love and the Bahá’í cycle of the descent and ascent of the Spirit, coinhering in all worlds while never leaving its apophatic abode, that can be gleaned from the way both of them relate this world of impermanence, becoming and perishing, to the kingdom of heaven (in Whitehead’s sense) or nirvana or everlastingness, deathlessness, and perfection (Kluge, Buddhism, 136–9). In some sense, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, in this cycle of mutual coinherence, everything is at home in both worlds at once—a formulation with a long Suf history (Savi, Summit, 282)—the material and the spiritual world, this word and the world to come: “For physical things are signs and imprints of spiritual things; every lower thing is an image and counterpart of a higher thing. Nay, . . . all of these are connected one with another and are interrelated” (TOU, §7). And: we “exist both in this world and in the world to come” (SAQ, #67). Whitehead formulates their processual transparency in this way: There is a kingdom of heaven prior to the actual passage of actual things, and there is the same kingdom fnding its completion through the accomplishment of this passage. But just as the kingdom of heaven transcends the natural worlds, so does this world transcend the kingdom of heaven. For the world is evil, and the kingdom is good. The kingdom is the in the world, and yet not of the world. (RM, 87–8)

Bahá’u’lláh resonates with the hadith engaged by him: “He who is a true believer liveth both in this world and in the world to come” (GDM, §65). And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains that this cycle does not differentiate as hierarchy of closeness to the apophatic Godhead since “the divine nearness is an unlimited nearness, be it in this world or the next one” (TAB I, 204). Whitehead answers this mutuality of the presence of the kingdom of heaven in this

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world and us in it beyond this world with the almost eerie, but independently reached conclusion in continuation with the Bahá’í view.

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An enduring personality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up their predecessors. The correlate fact in God’s nature is an even more complete unity of life in a chain of elements for which succession does not mean loss of immediate unison. This element in God’s nature inherits from the temporal counterpart according to the same principle as in the temporal world the future inherits from the past. Thus in the sense in which the present occasion is the person now, and yet with his own past, so the counterpart in God is that person in God. (PR, 350)

Finally, I can now come to the surprising conclusion of these explorations in the resonances between Whitehead and Bahá’í writings on the multiplicity and mutual coinherent movement of all worlds, especially in the form of the threefold and fvefold cascades of physical, spiritual, and divine worlds. The threefold differentiation of the infnite worlds into the worlds of God, God’s Command/Manifestation, and creation (Savi, Summit, 282–8), in one of its interpretations favored by Ibn ‘Arabi, is close to Plotinus’ divine hypostases of One, Mind, and Soul (Collinson, Plant and Wilkinson, Thinkers, 54), yet has shifted one level below. Since Plotinus’s One is apophatically removed, the cascading worlds in Ibn ‘Arabi, in the reading of Henry Corbin, relate to Mind (Intelligence), Soul (Imagination) and the physical word, respectively (Alone, 189). The importance in Corbin’s reading that this cascading plateaus of worlds has is related to something that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá also highlights: namely, that while philosophers have tended toward a dualism between God and the world, or intellectual and physical worlds (implying the old dualism between mind and matter), the prophets have insisted on three worlds, intermitting a spiritual world between the abstract intellectual worlds of Mind and (Platonic) Ideas and the physical world of impermanence and matter (SAQ, #82)—even as Ibn ‘Arabi’s world of Imagination (the “Imaginatrix”), the native home of spiritual union between form and matter, intellect and physicality (Corbin, Alone, 153–4) or ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s spiritual world of similitudes and signifcances and meanings (PUP, #99) or ‘alam al-mithal or malakut, the divine kingdom (Savi, Summit, 34). More will be said on this view later, regarding the apophatic origin of divine emanations (ch. 6) and the nature of “its” Manifestations (ch. 7). It suffces here to relate the importance of the intermediary world in this reading: namely, that it is a symbol for the coinherence of both intellectual Ideas (the abstract forms of the world) and the physical actualizations of becoming, as it actualizes and enlivens Mind’s concepts while at the same time elevating the physical actualizations to their spiritual essence, perfection, and everlastingness. As it signifes the kingdom

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of God in this world, but also the world to come, it also mirrors the realm of Whitehead’s consequent nature of God, a world of divine reception, compassion, and salvation (GPW, §39). So do all spheres of Whitehead’s threefold differentiation into—not God and the world (with its unavoidable dualism), but into—primordial nature, consequent nature, and the physical world of impermanence (GPW, §34) mirror the Suf and Bahá’í threefold (ch. 6). As Whitehead’s primordial nature captures Ibn ‘Arabi’s intellectual side of the divine Mind (as the place of all possibilities and potentials, Ideas and forms) and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s divine world of the Mind and Will, Word and Wisdom of God, so does Whitehead’s consequent nature suggest Ibn ‘Arabi’s spiritual world of elevation and salvation and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s kingdom of heaven as well as the world of the trans-historical and united divine Manifestations (of the Logos), and so is the physical world for all of them the place not only of physicality and impermanence (or creativity) but of the actualization of the divine and spiritual worlds or its spiritualization (or the creation of value). Indeed, by way of this mirroring, we can say that the vertical movement of inhalation and exhalation and the horizontal movements of cyclical interference between the spheres or worlds may lead us to the insight that the coinherence of all worlds is motivated by the movement of divine love that realizes itself not only in the global absolute horizons of these worlds (in Deleuze’s understanding), as they constantly interfere and move through one another, but in every event happening in this (and any) world, as it is in its identity always more than itself, namely, the physical actualization/manifestation of its spiritual dimensions that this threefold differentiation enfolds (GPW, §34). In Whitehead’s striking words: [God] is the binding element in the world. The consciousness which is individual in us, is universal in [God]: the love which is partial in us is all-embracing in [God]. Apart from [God] there could be no world, because there could be no adjustment of individuality. [God’s] purpose in the world is quality of attainment. [God’s] purpose is always embodied in the particular ideals relevant to the actual state of the world. Thus all attainment is immortal in that it fashions the actual ideals which are God in the world as it is now. Every act leaves the world with a deeper or a fainter impress of God. [God] then passes into his next relation to the world with enlarged, or diminished, presentation of ideal values. (RM, 158–9)

As soon as this pattern is recognized, the mirroring of the fvefold differentiation of hahut, lahut, jabarut, malakut, and nasut into Whitehead’s spheres of creative becoming will be even more striking. Nasut is obviously the (human) world of events and organizations of them into organisms and societies that always already integrate physical and spiritual dimensions in their becoming,

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as was mentioned before. Malakut is the realm of transformation and resurrection of nasut as in Whitehead’s consequent nature of God. It is intimately related to the world of becoming (as it infuses itself in every new event as its mirror of perfection possible in every moment), but also to the world of possibilities and unrealized potentials, the angels of our better nature, the ideals and forms of perfection: this is jabarut, Whitehead’s primordial nature, the world of global potentials, and sometimes, with traditional biblical and in Islamic literature interpreted as the world of archangels, invested with the global dominion of regions of the worlds to be governed by divine principles and orders (Momen, Relativism/Metaphysics, 4). In the fascinating postmodern reading of Michel Serres, which comes closer to Whitehead’s understanding of this aspect of the primordial nature, this sphere presents us with a “chaotic multiplicity” of “the archangelic space-time, the enormous cloud, without clear edges, of angels who pass, a great turbulence of passage. A swarm” (Genesis, 118). The Báb and Bahá’u’lláh call this sphere the mala’ al-A’la, the “concourse on high” (SWB, 72; GL, 69), similar to the biblical elohim (Ps. 8:5), those who are in God’s presence and close to God, literally, al-muqarrabin, the karubiyun (KI, 50–1), the biblical cherubim (Ez. 1:6–10) (Lambden, Angelology, passim). Like the wings of the Cherubim, which are a multiplicity that hides the face of God, in Serres’s reading, this multiplicity is the numinous noise that, at the same time, makes worlds possible. Indeed, for this aspect of the primordial nature Whitehead uses the image of an unruly multiplicity of unrealized possibilities, ideas, forms, and potential worlds in the state of sheer malleable complexity of potential relations (PR, 45) allowing for any world to be realized if these possibilities were to be grasped by any event in the world process (supposing that its actual world would allow for such a realization), indicating that they don’t have their measure of decidedness in themselves (they are not their own Lord). Instead, Whitehead relegates any ordering of this multiplicity to the other aspect of the primordial nature, namely, that of the actual and creative divine valuation process in which this multiplicity is ordered according to divine Wisdom and Will (PR, 31). This is the aspect that Whitehead names the Wisdom of God (PR, 345–6). It is lahut, the sphere of the divine Mind as Will and Wisdom of God, in the Bahá’í writings (Brown, Discussion, 22–7). As this Wisdom/ Will of God is the act in which the relationships between potentials are established (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Commentary, 12)—without which there would be no “relationships of diversity and of pattern, [as they] are their relationships in God’s conceptual realization,” so that “apart from this realization, there is mere isolation indistinguishable from nonentity” (PR, 257)—this primordial “complete envisagement” (PR, 44) is also the self-creative act of God as an event (PR, 88) the origin of which is the mystery of existence as such (Faber, Mystical Whitehead, 227–8), only mirroring with unanswerable opaqueness

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the unknowable hahut, the unmanifest Reality beyond any characteristics (ch. 6), beyond Wisdom and Will, and which only arises in the event of this selfenvisaging (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Commentary, 11). Although more will have to be said of this multiplicity of worlds of the Spirit, the Brahman, the breathing in and out of existence, in the last section of this chapter, and beyond this: “its” stillness (nirvana) and silence, in the next chapter, I will end this section with three important groups of conclusions. First, all of the cascading spheres manifest in this world (SAB, #163), and in all of its events. Hence, nothing happens in this world of becoming without the interference of (all of) these worlds, as in all of its experiences it gathers their physical realization or diminishes their manifestation (RM, 159). Religious experiences are only an emphasis of those worlds’ transparence in all experiences, only heightened by the ability to feel these worlds consciously and act accordingly (Savi, Summit, 284–8). Their appearance in our intuitions, imaginations, and symbolizations, is the appearance of the Spirit in physical actualizations, diversifed by the different events, organisms, societies, cultures, and religions. Hence, all of these experiences are relative to their own multiplicity, to their infnities, symbolized by the infnity of these spheres in themselves, and to the fniteness of their actualizations in different spiritualities and religious communities. None of them can be excluded per se as they are unifed in their apophatic upward movement of enfolding inclusion and diversifed in their downward movement of unfolding cascading. Since they are also—as witnessed with Whitehead’s cycle of love—motivated by an onward movement (GPW, §17), they are relative to their mutual coinherence (AI, ch. 12), an ever more so to be discovered future of mutual immanence, thereby not losing their diversity, but gaining it as relativistic multiplicity, ever more becoming what they are: the folds of one fabric, “waves of one sea, leaves and fruit of one tree” (PUP, #50)—one garden of Reality. Second, the mutual symbolic transfer between the threefold and fvefold cascading spheres mediated by Whitehead’s complex and internally diversifed concept of God as well as God’s creative mutuality with the world reveals some astonishing features. While the cascading spheres may seem to initiate the image of a hierarchy, as imaged (imagined) with Whitehead they rather exhibit a mutuality of cyclical movements in which none of the divine spheres—be it the primordial envisagement of the Wisdom, the multiplicity of forms in the primordial nature, the salvation of the consequent nature, or the reciprocal creativity and infnite compassion of God with the world of impermanence—can claim to be the origin or peak of a hierarchical divine being (FPT, §27). All of them exhibit the signs of a love that lives of and for mutuality in God and beyond. Nevertheless, there remains a difference between the physical world and the spiritual nature of the divine spheres as

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well as with the “physicality” of the divine event in all layers—the Earth of Heaven (Corbin, Body, ch. 2)—and the “spirituality” of the physical world (Saiedi, Gate, 204). Never does God become the world in this mutual creative and compassionate cycle (GPW, §25). Rather, the divine spheres exhibit their own “absolute horizon” (in Deleuze’s sense) in which they remain different from one another, bound together by the enfolding and unfolding acts of the event of God. While the “world” (nasut) always becomes and perishes, the consequent nature of God (malakut) is the everlasting integration of what has become, while the forms of the primordial nature (jabarut) are eternal, that is, independent of any of their actualizations, only relative to one another by the primordial envisagement (lahut), the relational event of God’s Will and Wisdom, which is itself disappearing in the mystery of self-creative origination beyond any access (hahut). And while the physicality in this world of becoming creates facts of a past that cannot be denied, their integration within the kingdom is not physical in this sense, as it allows for a transfguration of them into God’s compassionate relationality, in which God is all in all (1 Cor. 15:28), and guided by God’s Wisdom. Nevertheless, the spiritual and divine realms are “physical” in the sense that they are acts of the divine becoming (not change), the event, as it symbolizes the creation of relations and relativity (without which nothing would exist) as divine processes of perception, reception, and unifcation (PR, 345–6). While the spiritual side of this world of impermanence is the unfolding of the Spirit, but always comes as an implication to be explicated, conversely, in the divine worlds, the physical actualizations of the Spirit in its myriads of creatures is enfolded in its spiritual meaning and everlasting life. It is, therefore, only in the multiplicity of religious experiences and religions that this spiritual process and cycle of love can prevail.

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4. INFINITE WORLDS II I have begun the discussion of mystical cosmology with the proposition that, in the apophatic and polyphilic movements of Reality, transreligious relativity is also expressed by the Bahá’í concept that “the worlds of God are infnite” (PUP, #19). Until now, I have further explored the symbolization of this proposition in terms of the heuristic differentiation into divine, spiritual, and material spheres of existence, their multiplicity, internal infnity, and mutual relativity as witnessed by Bahá’í thought and Whitehead’s philosophy. Yet, I have also mentioned that this infnite multiplicity implies another reading, namely, as for the Dao, that of the univocity of infnite worlds beside any respect for their relativity structured by potency (ch. 3). This was implied by Bahá’u’lláh’s claim “that the worlds of God are countless in their number,

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and infnite in their range” (GL, #79). It is also implied by both Bahá’u’lláh’s and Whitehead’s assumption that the world, not being God or any of the divine spheres, has neither beginning nor end. It is Whitehead’s view that “the creation of the world is the incoming of a type of order establishing a cosmic epoch. It is not the beginning of matter of fact, but the incoming of a certain type of social order” (PR, 96). Hence, it cannot have an end either, because “the immensity of the world negatives the belief that any state of order can be so established that beyond it there can be no progress” (PR, 111). This corresponds with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s expression that “the realm of existence has no beginning” and lasts “from the beginning that has no beginning to the end that has no end” (SAQ, #41; Brown, Beginning, 21–40). Today, this assumption does not only rest on Whitehead’s view that the world is a multiplicity that cannot be united in one scheme, being, order, or idea, instead indefnitely unfolding in different schemes, orders, beings, and ideas, but also on current physical cosmology with its diverse conceptions of a multiverse—ranging from the quantum physical interpretation of a splitting universe in every moment of the breakdown of the wave function of Hugh Everett (Barrow and Tipler, Principle, 193) to the bubble bath universe of Leonard Susskind (Landscape, ch. 11), and to the eternal infation of Alexander Vilenkin (Worlds, chs. 8–10)—and the philosophical conviction of the actual infnity of all possible worlds of David Lewis (Worlds, 96–102) as well as the infnite worlds in the Mind of God of John Leslie (Universes, ch. 4) and Keith Ward (Fire, ch. 10). My current interest, however, is not to discuss the viability of the concept of the multiverse in general (Rubinstein, Worlds, ch. 6) or in Whitehead as such—which I have done elsewhere (TDM, ch. 7)—but its impact on the question of the relativity of religious truth, the truthful diversity of religions, and the appeal to transreligious engagement. I will shortly introduce the reasoning of Whitehead, however. The assumption of an infnite multiplicity of worlds, all of which exhibit at least some characteristics of the event character of becoming insofar as it describes an internal polarity of mentality and physicality as well as the cyclical interaction of this world of becoming as a whole with God (in the different divine spheres already discussed), wants to highlight the philosophical necessity that no actual world can be alone or in itself stabilized as the only or last one (PR, 95–7). Rather, what is necessitated is the fundamental assumption that God and the world are indefnitely “the instrument of novelty for the other” (PR, 349), with God by incarnating as eros seducing to new possibilities to be realized (AI, 198) and the world by their unique actualizations becoming part of God’s consequent nature (PR, 346). Any realization of potentials, infused by the primordial nature in the beginning of each world event, carries with it the suggestion of novelty, as it opens the horizon for an new course of activation, but also of order of some kind (or of all kinds), as the activation

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of these suggestions (with the ones of the past that present themselves as reality check of what in any given situation is possible or impossible) leads to patterns of internalization and repetition over the course of any life thread of events organizing themselves as relatively stable organisms (AI, 198–9). Whitehead calls such patterns “social orders” (PR, 34), as they are not pretemporal substantial essences, but modes of acceptance of all events of a society (be it a biological organism or a culture of such organisms) of such patterns as their common identity (PR, 34). It is thus that order exists from the natural laws to the rites of cultures and religions to individual idiosyncrasies, namely, as a common affrmation of realized potentials to be given ever anew a chance of being the future of the respective organization (AI, 258–9). The universe is a nested, layered, mutually interfering complex of such societies from the smallest to the largest organization, but it is, on none of these levels, fxed by essences, always able to listen to the infusion of novel directions, alternatives, growth and development, or decline and decomposition (GPW, §15). Hence, the universe as we know it, is just one possible multiplicity of interacting patterns of relative stable orders and always upsetting surprises of novelty, building together a “cosmic epoch” that has had a beginning when relative stable orders were moving in and that will have an end when such orders drift out of existence and are replaced by others—without beginning and without end (PR, 36). In this sense, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá also claims, God was never without a world (PUP, #139), but did not necessarily have this one (Griffn, Reenchantment, 137–8). While some process thinkers understand the relationship of such cosmic epochs as a single series (Cobb and Griffn, Theology, 144)—somehow congruent with the life of Brahma (Haas, Destiny, 47–8) and current cosmological views on a bouncing and pulsating universe (Walker and Wickramasinghe, Big Bang, ch. 1)—I see a more complex picture emerging in Whitehead’s text (TDM, ch. 7). Besides the higher spiritual or divine realms already mentioned—like the apotheosis of the world into the kingdom of heavens (the consequent nature) or the realm of pure possibilities (in the primordial nature), Whitehead is aware of several other criteria for the multiplicity of such worlds. One criterion emerges immediately when we have understood that the relationship of events not only creates patterns of stability but also spans a space in which they arise, the khoric space, the medium of intercommunication (AI, 201). Hence, temporal and spatial relations are highly contingent on these relations between events and the patterns they incarnate and are not a priori settings like absolute space and time in Newton’s universe. Rather what temporality and spatiality mean is always contingent on the events that span them to nexuses that can allow or inhibit the existence of certain (natural) rules, organisms, and social organizations in them (Kraus, Metaphysics, 63–7). The consequence of this spatiotemporal contingency is nothing less

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than the necessity that we cannot presuppose any temporal or spatial order that preordains the relationship of the multiplicity of different universes with their different rules, besides that they are all somehow gathered within and released from God’s Mind (in both the primordial and consequent aspect). Another criterion arises from the suggestion of Whitehead that there is “no reason, of any ultimate metaphysical generality,” why in another universe (cosmic epoch) there should “not be novelty without loss of a direct unison of immediacy among things” (PR, 340), a universe in which life does not mean perishing. This is a tall measure, but it surely demonstrates the metaphysical honesty of Whitehead regarding the profound relativity of (other) potentially actual worlds, however different from our own (GPW, §39). It is at this point that we may ask an important question: In what sense is this multiplicity of worlds related to God and what difference does it make if there is such a coinherent relationship of these universes with God that Whitehead proposes? First of all, let’s repeat that God is, as Whitehead says, “in unison of becoming with every other creative act” (PR, 345). Further, God is not proposing all kinds of potentials for all kinds of actualizations of all kinds of worlds, but suggests them to all events in becoming as a uniquely arranged “initial aim” (PR, 67) in orders that refect the Wisdom of God (PR, 346). Hence, God is not interested to see all possible worlds actualized, but only the ones that refect this Wisdom globally and in any drop of experience (RM, 155–6). And what is God’s measure for such valuation in Whitehead’s view? It is the twofold realization of intensity of experience and harmony of coordination in every event and society regarding its past and environment, and regarding its potential future to actualize more of both intensity and harmony in itself and with all relevant environments of its existence (GPW, §45). The stakes are high, here, since in some sense, all events, societies, organisms, and world regions are related to all others; nothing is without importance for the whole process of becoming, as this whole process ripples back into any of its events (PR, 192). What do intensity and harmony mean? Intensity is the measure of the ability of any event, organism, or society to receive its past and environment in such a way that it can gather it in itself with all of its tensions, oppositions, and conficts in a harmonious way. The more it can transform the opposites of its past and environment for itself and for the future of its own impact beyond itself into, what Whitehead calls, “contrasts”—harmonious unifcations—the more intense will its experience, self-constitution, and future beyond itself in other events be (PR, 83–4). If it fails to “contrast,” it either degrades into numbness, exclusion, or pain of existence, or vanishes in triviality (AI, 259–64). Harmony, then, is a measure of the stature of this transformation that is all the more relevant as it radiates out from the singular integrations of events, organisms, and societies to their future and environment, transforming them in more harmonious ways

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without losing the intensities it transmits (PR, 109). Since God is in unison with all becoming, Whitehead calls God both the “absolute standard of intensity that is the primordial nature of God” (PR, 47) and the “Harmony of Harmonies” (AI, 285). But what is the divine measure of this divine intensity and harmony? While both intensity and harmony, at frst glance, seem to be without any direction and, hence, suggesting not much more than a chaotic multiplicity bathing in a disturbing relativism, there are some restrictions to be noted. And they are as important as is that which they do not defne. Indeed, to begin with what they omit: no restriction is laid on divine intensity and harmony, at this point (PR, 345). In a sense, since divine intensity and harmony are absolute, they cannot be measured by any of our moral standard, which are always relative to our world and must disclaim knowing the apophatic Absolute as such. Further, while God may order and suggest potential directions, alternatives, or reiterations of actualizations of value as they express divine Wisdom, neither is any event hindered to deviate from such suggestions and do otherwise as it is bathed in the realm of infnite (although also infnitely many irrelevant) possibilities (Leue, Foundations, 91–106); nor does God exclude any such realization—to the better or worse (PR, 244)—from being received into God’s consequent nature. While any fnite event, organism, and society may choose to exclude certain oppositions arising in its path in order to survive, hereby reducing the level of its intensity and the scope of its harmonization (PR, 41), God’s absolute receptivity (the all-receptivity of the unison of becoming in which God holds all processes and worlds together) receives all actualizations (PR, 345). Hence, God is “the fellow-sufferer who understands” (PR, 351) the best and worst of motivations, actions, and the impacts they have on the world; and God experiences them in even greater intensity than any event for itself since God knows them in all of their relationships to all worlds and the measure of absolute (world-independent) Wisdom (Suchocki, End, ch. 5). In this sense, for Whitehead as for the Bahá’í Faith, God is closer to all beings than any being is to itself or its Self (GL, #90). Finally, Whitehead urges us to “conceive the Divine Eros as the active entertainment of all ideals, with the urge to their fnite realization, each in its due season” (AI, 277). God’s intimations seem to be aesthetic rather than ethical in nature since they seek the realization of always new possibilities as of yet unrealized in any world and always in favor of aesthetic diversity and adventure instead of repetition and rigid order (PR, 105). All three of these non-restrictions are profoundly relativistic and must be taken seriously as such (Sayer, Wert, chs. 4–5). Yet, we fnd Whitehead also specifying profoundly commanding restrictions to this aesthetic relativism without, again, undermining their relativity or taking it back. They are basically three. First and maybe most importantly, Whitehead notes that it “is not true that God is in all respects infnite,”

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because, while God “gains [God’s] depth of actuality by [God’s] harmony of valuation,” there is a limitation to it: “The limitation of God is [God’s] goodness” (RM, 153). Since it is God’s Wisdom on whom “all forms of order depend” (RM, 160), this Wisdom is the expression of Goodness as much as all forms suggested by God for realization will depend on the goodness of their divine ordering. God does not intend all possible worlds, even the worst we can imagine (and God for sure can imagine much worse than we can) to be realized, but worlds expressive of this goodness, which is as much an aesthetic as it is an ethical restriction (AI, 295). Second, we have already introduced earlier in this chapter that God’s innermost motivation is God’s love of the world (PR, 343). While this love is polyphilia, the love of the manifold, it is restricted by being love, and not any other mode of multiplication or by hiding any other motivation for diversifcation (TDM, ch. 5). As it unfolds in a cycle of unfolding and enfolding, divine love must be able to love not only what it unfolds but also what it receives from the worlds folding back into God’s own nature (PR, 346). Third, the beauty of intensity and harmony is no fnal measure of achievement, even if it is, for Whitehead, the “self-justifcation” of existence (AI, 285). Rather, it is the primordial fact that God is the absolute realization of this beauty (AI, 295–6), that is, the absolute measure of intensity and harmony, by which any limited and particular aesthetic realization of them (and there are only such limited concretizations that count as actual realizations, and not merely ideal fantasies) is transposed into God’s nature of goodness and love. And this is what Whitehead names peace (AI, 292–3). While peace is a reality, maybe indicating Reality as such and at its utmost (AI, 284–5), it can only be realized through the process of becoming in this world of impermanence if we allow this world to make true decisions that advance toward its realization (PR, 43). In other words, the world process has always a direction toward the realization of this peace (AI, 295–6). Hence, God’s activity and the multiplicity of worlds actualized will always exhibit this drive, even if it were to go against it. A fnal note regarding the infnity of worlds is in order, here, since Whitehead was obviously not the only philosopher who has thought about it deeply. Hence, I must briefy comment on at least three others—David Lewis, Keith Ward, and John Leslie—in order to refect on their communalities with, and differences from, Whitehead’s position. David Lewis proposes an actual infnity of all possible worlds. He assumes that anything we in our world call possible is in fact realized in another actual world (Plurality, chs. 1–2). This proposal shares the radical multiplicity of worlds, probably not being (and having no necessity to be) governed by any other means than the infnity of possibilities themselves. Yet, in this reading of things, possibilities are in reality not even possibilities, but only alternative actual realities. There are no possibilities, but only infnitely many actual worlds (ibid., 97–101). For

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this reason, not only does this proposal not intend to accept any Reality that in goodness, love, and peace infuses itself into the infnite worlds as their eros and compassionate context, but withholds itself from differentiating possibilities as mere abstractions from actualizations as events of becoming. By doing so, it deprives itself not only of any meaningful alternatives to this world in and beyond itself (as all worlds are already realized, just not here), that is, any direction possibly be taken by motivations of goodness, love, and peace, to transform the world, but also instills in us the horror that any abomination we have ever heard of and can ever think of (and beyond) is realized somewhere. (I need to pause at this thought for a moment!) In escaping any restrictions, such as goodness, love, and peace, this view leaves us neither with any aesthetic motivation for existence nor any ethical drive for change since it has for the better or worse already happened somewhere anyway (TDM, ch. 7). Hence, there is also no necessity to ask for religious truth, even less for transreligious relativity and multiplicity, since there is really no truth other than that all “truths” are realized somewhere, and even if so, are irrelevant for any further discussion. Besides, it seems not only to be questionable whether all possible worlds could be actualized but whether they would even be compossible for actualization at all. As Keith Ward correctly remarks: “If we think of all possible worlds to be in the mind of God, but originating in love, not all worlds can be compossible with this actualized possibility, for instance, a world without (not knowing of or outside) the Mind of God or one reigned by utter evil (Ward, God, 44–7). Both Keith Ward and John Leslie (with some recognition and affrmation of one another’s work) developed the prospect that this world is a thought in God’s Mind and, for that matter, only one thought of infnitely many. If we presume that God’s Mind is free of any restrictions, that is, omniscient of all possible worlds (Ward, Fire, 37), divine thinking means being (Leslie, Immortality, 6). Both, however, lay certain restrictions on this infnite creativity of divine thinking into being. Both of them agree that divine thought is restricted by divine goodness (ibid., 10) and Ward adds the motive of love to widen his notion of the rational mind of God to that of a compassionate divine person (Ward, ibid., 256). We will have to recur to the underlying understanding of God as Mind and Person in the next chapter, but in our context several characteristics of their proposals of infnite worlds are worth mentioning. While both thinkers take recurs to the goodness of God, Leslie has made the unique argument, which he relates back to Plato’s Idea of the Good, the Sun of all existence of all spheres, that Goodness in itself is the motivation for existence which cannot be reduced to, or derived from, any other reason (Leslie and Kuhn, Mystery, ch. 7). If it is good to exist, if it is better to exist than not to exist, then even God exists only because of the self-propagation of Goodness into being (Immortality, 18–22). That there is something (at all),

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is, because it ought to be (ibid., 2). It is a marvelous argument and one could even read Whitehead’s claim that God is limited by goodness in this way, namely, that it is goodness through which God exists. Further, since for both Ward and Leslie the Mind of God is thinking thoughts, on the one hand, God would think only good thoughts, and these thoughts would actually hinder any evil worlds coming into existence (Jim Holt, Why, 197–215; Ward, Fire, 37). On the other hand, all of these thoughts would remain only in the Mind of God, however real they might be (Leslie, Immortality, 16–34). Here, Ward and Leslie depart, as Leslie confrms this implication, but Ward augments it by his Christian heritage of a creator God who beyond thought is love and, hence, must love that which is not only God’s thought but a reality on its own—even more so if this reality is meant (at least in human beings) to be personal as relating to a personal God (Ward, Fire, 133–4). Despite all similarities with Whitehead, some differences remain. While we can understand the primordial nature as the Mind of God (as God’s Logos and Wisdom and creative Will), and while we can also understand Whitehead’s consequent nature as the world being in God, nevertheless, the world, the multiverse, is neither God nor merely God’s thoughts, nor is the actual world as received into God merely an expression of God thinking being into existence (GPW, §45). Even if Leslie admits that because of Goodness a thinking God must actually exist, being “more than a mere possibility” (Leslie and Kuhn, Mystery, 106), for Whitehead the primordial nature (as the place of all possibilities) without the receptivity (of physicality) of the consequent nature still is “defcient in actuality” (PR, 350). Hence, the thoughts of God that are meant to be intelligent themselves, that is, God thinking beings such as human beings into being (Leslie, Immortality, 39–42), must have a certain independence on their own while remaining thoughts of God. And while Ward realizes that there is to be more to a person than intelligence, namely a personal relationship of love that demands a certain kind of externality to prevail (Ward, Fire, 257–8), it is only in Whitehead that we realize that no event, organism, and society, and even a world and all worlds, for that matter, in their own becoming of themselves was ever only a thought of God (PR, 20). To the contrary, in mutual immanence, God and the world also remain mutually transcendent; and any world happening owes it to its existence to its own actualization as its own decision of unifcation of its relationality (PR, 86); and all events together with God create the world and their future in the cycle of love together (Keller, Mystery, ch. 3). While Leslie remains caught in a unilateral concept of divine Mind closer to notions of omnipotence of classical theism (ibid., ch. 4), although he presents his position as pantheism (Leslie, Immortality, ch. 1), Ward has gone a good way toward a more open theism or panentheism of personhood and relationship (Fire, 111–2). But only Whitehead’s has constructed a metaphysical model

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that values the radical relationality of all reality as such (Mesle Philosophy, chs. 5–8), that is, the mutual becoming of God and the world in infnite variations. This unison of becoming treats nothing as mere thought, but as series of actualizations, as only facts can be, having realized their values in their own responsibility and, in effect, for all of existence (TDM, ch. 13). Ward, of course, knows of this all-gathering of the world into the consequent nature of God for which the world is beyond the power of God in its factual becoming and own realization of values, such that God only suggests its directions, not forces it, but can receive it in the power of absolute compassion (Fire, 254–7). It is not without irony that Ward has developed his extended notion of the creative and receptive loving Mind of God directly from Whitehead (World, 62–72)—although he rarely admits it, but there is no one else from whom it could have developed (ibid., 162–4). The line at which he stops is precisely where Whitehead coincides with the Bahá’í revelation, as it insists on the everlastingness of the world process while Ward explores the infnity of worlds mitigated by the orthodox Christian assumption of the original creation and the eschatological consumption of the creation process (God, 186). While Ward limits the multiplicity of the worlds by their relationality with God beyond this physical universe (Fire, 243–4), Whitehead’s polyphilia admits the seriousness of existence beyond God in a multiverse, but in mutual immanence and everlasting becoming (TDM, 445–52). In the end, Ward remains ambivalent whether he might lean toward the more orthodox Christian understanding or embrace Whitehead’s view (in full compatibility of the understanding of God’s insistence on the infnite worlds even in their physicality that Bahá’u’lláh expounds) since even if the thermodynamic wasting of order physically might imply the dark night of the endgame of this universe, “the good experiences of fnite beings will never be lost, for they will be known and remembered by God for ever” (Fire, 255). Even if “it seems unlikely that the fourishing of all sentient beings could be realized within this cosmos,” Ward deems it “quite possible” that “the eternal intelligence of God could bring persons to live again in other realms beyond the physical confnes of this cosmos” (ibid., 257). Here, we have just one confict and opposition that raises the question of its own transreligious relativity— which will be the theme of a later chapter (ch. 8): Why should we prefer one solution over the other, one interpretation over the other, one revelation over the other? Indeed, such a decision will have to be made on the basis of the question of value, of Goodness. In accordance with Leslie, who was more interested in certain religious questions as a philosophical matter, not a religious one (informed by any religious experience or religion), such as questions of immortality (Immortality, ch. 4), Ward answers with the goodness of existence and its divine origin without either losing the relativistic implication

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of a plurality of revelations of this goodness or falling into a mere relativism (Religion, 50–110). Yet, in concurrence with our analysis of Whitehead, Ward proposes that we must consider “the whole range of Divine manifestations in the world, the whole phenomenon of religion in human life, in its many varied forms, the whole array of human speculation about and alleged experiences of the Divine” (ibid., 39). In evoking William James’s refections on religious experiences, we must differentiate “a ‘living option’” from one that merely “seems, psychologically, to be attractive,” and consider it because it is “a commanding, challenging disclosure of value which actually presents one with a morally signifcant decision of whether to respond to it positively or not” (ibid., 27). Hence, in Ward’s view, the revelation of the Mind of God (in view of the implied love of God that overfows the idea of the Mind) in different religions must be understood as “a Divine communication shaped to the interests and values of a particular society at a particular time” the “ultimate concern” of which is nothing less than “the existence and nature of a supersensory good, a fnal goal of supreme worth” (ibid., 25). The worlds of God are manifold, but if Goodness rains in all of them, not all are equal, equally desirable, or even realizable. If infnity is the infnity of Goodness, the worlds of God will be neither horizontally nor vertically indifferent to values realized in their respective “absolute horizons” (in Deleuze’s sense), but they will be transcendentally (both as transcending movement and as condition for their realization) bound together by, and suspended in, the cycle of love. If God is “the Lord of all worlds”—as the Báb (SWB, 151), Bahá’u’lláh (PM, #109), and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (SAQ, #81) often invoke God— then all worlds are in the dominion of the polyphilic goodness, diffusing itself infnitely into movements of multiplicity without losing its origin, even if it must remain apophatic. It is in this sense that Bahá’u’lláh calls God “the Sun of Reality” (SV, 38). 5. SKILLFUL SUSPENSIONS (BE MULTIPLICITY!) As I draw this chapter to a conclusion, I will engage with a few transreligious resonances by which the polyphilic multiplicity of worlds exemplifes the relativity of these truths. But frst, in general, I want to emphasize one thought in three aspects on what this chapter wanted to achieve. First, transreligious relativity is a contracted form of the relativity of multiple worlds as religious experience is a contracted form of experience as such and as the religiosity of human beings is a contracted form of the religiosity of all things. When Whitehead speaks of the “secularization of the concept of God’s function in the world” (PR, 207), this is what he means: he means to say that God is not only active in humanity or their religious experiences but in any and every

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event (RM, 105), as all happening’s eros promoting the Wisdom of God to be realized (AI, 42), but also as God’s Compassion accepting the respective realizations (and failures) back into God’s dominion (RM, 154–5). Second, this contraction is based on the organic contrast between breadth and depth: universal distribution only gains intensity if it is restricted by local complexity (AI, 209). The creation of regions of intensity and harmony, deeper than the triviality of mere contrast between past and future in processes of repetition, is based on limitation of values realized, the arising of their confictual diversity, their transformation into contrasting integrations, without losing the perceptivity of/to their multiplicity (AI, 272). This would be true for the rise beyond mere naturalness of consciousness (AI, 271) as well as for culture and religion (AI, 42). But this depth necessarily goes hand in hand with the more intense suffering of the inherent diversity as confictual (AI, 266). It is, in fact, God who feels this most intensely, being in unison with all becoming (PR, 346), but—as the process thinker Bernard Loomer says (Loomer, Size, 43–50)—with the “stature” of God to be able to cope with it (FPT, §7). In the ability of infnite Compassion (the consequent nature), God transforms confictual depth into harmonious breadth without losing contrasted depth (GPW, 159–60). This corresponds to Whitehead’s idea of the transformation of beauty (depth, even if confictual) into peace (depth transformed into harmony) (AI, 284–5). Hence, since the multiplicity of diverse religions and their specifc religious experiences grounding them are such regions of depth, Whitehead’s beauty-to-peace transition (without losing beauty) would be a model for the contractions mentioned to give us a direction of transreligious processes. Finally, third, transreligious processes between religions: beyond any mere relativistic ambivalence and indirection, the transreligious fow is contracted and directed by the relation of such regions of intense experiences that religions are in the realization of values, even more so by the intensity and harmony by which these values are of Goodness (RM, 88). While goodness does, as the work of Whitehead, Leslie, and Ward demonstrates, not in the slightest hinder the infnity of worlds in which it is realized, it also excludes an infnity—somehow similar to Cantor’s magnitude of different infnities (Maor, Infnity, ch. 9)—infnities of worlds in which depth of experience, harmonization, the evolution of a consciousness of beauty and peace, as well as a contrastive universalization of these modes of actualizing value in a cycle of love, would be impossible or defcient. The transreligious movement of the mutual fuidity of religions is neither only an arbitrary factual happening in the history of religion (Müller, Lectures, 90) nor a philosophical category invoked in order to understand this factual historical movement. Rather it is, in light of the aesthetic nature of existence (based in value creation, transformation, and direction), itself a performative act of the Good it promotes. Precisely as the old neoplatonic

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maxim claims that Good (as the Sun of Reality), in and of itself, overfows (bonum diffusivum sui), we are urged to live religion transreligiously. To be transreligious is not only a fact of processual reality or a category of refection but it ought to be! It is good; it is an imperative: Be transreligious! The transreligious Good, its imperative, is modeled, here, after Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s profound series of metaphysical imperatives: “Don’t be one or many, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick even if standing still” (Plateaus, 24)! We are reminded of the “infnite speed” by which Deleuze and Guattari declare movement to become infnite (Philosophy, 21)—as explored earlier in this chapter—but also of Bahá’u’lláh’s and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s adaptation of the Suf image of a semiotic universe (ch. 1) in which the letters convey energy and all letters come from the point that enfolds the frst (still hidden) letter of creation, alif, the straight line down (Saiedi, Gate, 222–3). It is also the point, in which—in this semiotic universe (Cole, Word, 145–63)—all letters of creation are enfolded. But as infnite movement, it is endowed with all potentials, which, as energies, are never meant to remain in themselves, but are to be realized and actualized in the infnite worlds of creation (Marshall, Tablet, passim). And since this point is the divine movement of becoming manifest, for Bahá’u’lláh it indicates God as manifest in all Manifestations, but especially in the Báb who carries this title, to be the “Manifest and Luminous Point” (TB, 101). In this indifferentiation between creative act and Manifestation, Bahá’u’lláh can then say: “This Point is the focal center of the circle of Names and marketh the culmination of the manifestations of Letters in the world of creation” (ibid) from which all creations stream. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s understanding of multiplicity, as being itself an “assemblage” that “in its multiplicity, necessarily acts of semiotic fows, material fows, and social fows simultaneously” (Plateaus, 22–3), presents us with a “running the lines” that, at the same time, pictures the multidimensional movement following all “lines of fight” together (ibid., 298). As they diverge into different directions, there remains a resonance between the diverse dimensions of them, such as language, society, and materiality—all of them plateaus, worlds, planes of immanence, intersecting layers of reality—almost like a quantum superposition (Keller, Cloud, ch. 4). They ought to be multiplicities, not mere unities or many ones (TDM, ch. 8). As in Whitehead, any unity is a multiplicity in the process of unifcation that when it unites fades into one enfoldment of the world in a new multiplicity of becomings of other enfoldings. As the Sun of Reality releases infnitely many forms and ranges of worlds (PUP, #93), cascading or circling, resonating or osmoting (TDM, 423–7), it also must be understood to induce many experiences of its infnite apophatic inexhaustibility in many universes, on possibly many, even near infnite,

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worlds in each, and in and on any world in always new variations of symbolic mental and spiritual worlds (ch. 7). Many religions are an imperative! But so is their origin, the Good, because of itself, an imperative! There ought to be many religions, as there ought to be the one Good from which they fow! As there is the infnite diversity of rays of the Sun of Reality—to stay in this symbolic image (SAB, #19)—there is diversity and translucency, refecting difference and resonance at the same time (TDM, 464–9). Bahá’u’lláh compares the diversity of religions with the “colors [that] become visible in every object according to the nature of that object. For instance, in a yellow globe, the rays shine yellow; in a white the rays are white; and in a red, the red rays are manifest” (SV, 30–1). And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá highlights the resonances in these differences with “the splendors of Divinity [that] shall be visible through the translucent mirrors of pure hearts and spirits” (PUP, #5). As God/Reality is providing aesthetic values incarnating in any event, so each religion in its diversity “insists that the world is mutually adjusted disposition of things, issuing in value for its own sake” (RM, 143–4). But because the “actual world is the outcome of the aesthetic order, and the aesthetic order is derived from the immanence of God” (RM, 105), God is “the measure of the aesthetic consistency of the world” (RM, 99)—fusing the diversity and divergence of religions with the one cycle of love. This becomes even more obvious in Bahá’u’lláh’s semiotic use of the cascading worlds explored above. In his Commentary on the Surah of the Sun, for instance, referencing Surah 91 of the Qur’an, Bahá’u’lláh explores the symbol of the sun to take on in all worlds of God, symbolized by the fvefold cascade between nasut and hahut, a different meaning appropriate within the horizon of this world (Cole, Commentary, 9). Similarly, Bahá’u’lláh explores the meaning of “all food,” referencing another Qur’anic verse (“All food was lawful to the children of Israel save what Israel made unlawful to itself before the Torah was sent down. Say: Bring you the Torah now, and recite it, if you are truthful”; Q. 3:87), in The Tablet of All Food (Lawh-i-Qull Ta’am) by projecting it onto the fvefold cascading plateaus of existence (Ma’sumian, Realms, 11–17). The details of this interpretation are not of importance in our context. But what this kind of semiotic rendering of meaning in different worlds demonstrates is that the “absolute horizon” (in Deleuze’s meaning) in which the same symbol occurs, changes its meaning, that is, differentiates according to the respective world it appears in, without losing the translucency of all the meanings by being enveloped by all the worlds in which the symbol appears as (apophatically) one. All three examples of differentiation and translucency—one Goodness and infnite values, one Sun and infnite colors, one Symbol and different meanings in different planes of immanence and consistency—again allow us to seek out the resonances of a symbolism in different (absolute) horizons, represented

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by different religions, without claiming their inherent apophatic oneness to be sameness or the polyphilic differentiations to be emptied, but also without losing contractions and directions of meaning inherent in this cyclical movement of enfolding and unfolding of infnite interpretations. It is, of course, easy to confound such resonating relativity of meaning and interpretation either with simple comparison without transformation—confounding transreligious fux with a foundational sameness that voids differentiations—or with infnite malleability without apophatic oneness. When Bahá’u’lláh speaks of “the changeless Faith of God, eternal in the past, eternal in the future” (KA, ¶182) or when perennialists such as Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith, Frithjof Schuon, and John Hick invoke the mystical oneness of religions, a superfcial glance might fall into the frst trap, forgetting that they consistently refer to the apophatic unity that pervades the differences. And when St. Paul declares that to “the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews,” to “those not having the law I became like one not having the law,” and to “the weak I became weak, to win the weak” (1 Cor. 9:20–2); and when the Laozi declares the Dao to be one only in the infnite patience for the multiplicity of daos (ch. 3); and when the Buddha in the Lotus Sutra (ch. 3) declares to Sariputra that the teaching of enlightenment must appear to everyone within their mental and spiritual world modulated through skillful means (upaya) or reminds us of the all-sidedness of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara’s form by which he appears to the seeker (ch. 25); and when Bahá’u’lláh confrms that “in every Dispensation the light of Divine Revelation hath been vouchsafed unto men in direct proportion to their spiritual capacity” (GL, #38)—one might be misled to fall into the second trap, forgetting that these upaya are claiming divine/ultimate authority (TDM, 141–7). On deeper refection, it is becoming clear that the translucency of these movements is not indicating either trap, but that it appears as consequence of the “skillful suspension” (TDM, ch. 4) of meaning, which is not performing games of rootless indirections, but reveals—somehow akin to Krishna’s lila (Schweig, Dance, 166–72)—the divine play of polyphilic approximations, gatherings of the eros and the “desire of the world” (KA, ¶1) to “its” non-dual “indifference” which is only of nonviolence, conciliation, harmonization, and peace (TDM, ch. 12). It must not surprise us, then, that we fnd such resonances between different spiritual universes of diverse religions to become translucent to one another, without either claiming their identity, as they remain different worlds with their own horizons, or undermining their respective integrity, as long as this integrity is not substantialized to self-suffcient closed universes (Scharfstein, Fallacy, 84–97). In other words, against simple perennial identity of alterity—as criticized by the participatory, pluralistic model of apophatic unknowability of Reality (Ferrer, Theory, 92–5)—or its syncretic circumvention (Barasch, Syncretism, 37–54) and postmodern substantialization of

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mutual cultural closedness and essentialized relativism (Rosemont, Relativism, 36–70): in all difference, a semiotic bridge is always possible (Assmann, Translating Gods, 25–36) and total strangeness is impossible (Panikkar, Comparative Philosophy, 116–36). This is, in my understanding, the deeper intelligibility of Bahá’u’lláh’s paradigmatic claim that the yielding of humanity to one common (auxiliary) language is one of the “signs for the coming of age of the human race” (KA, ¶189). It is also the reason that in a semiotic universe the language we use to express not only Reality beyond reach, unnaming it, but “its” polyphilic infusions as language of love. To Bahá’u’lláh, it matters how we overcome the violence of mutual opposition by language clothed in wisdom (hikmat) and without manipulation, but by the exploration (bayan) of a divine semiotic of reconciliation (ESW, §13). It must not surprise, then, that the Bahá’í ringstone symbol—indicating the threefold worlds of God, Command/Manifestation, and creation—resonates deeply with the tripartite spiritual Suf cosmos of the school of Ibn ‘Arabi with its differentiation between intellectual, imaginal/spiritual, and material worlds; that it resonates with the hypostases of Mind and World Soul as well as the material universe of Plotinus; and that it leads us into a fascinating journey through the tripartite multitude (tridhatu) of samsara and the higher realms of formed and formless of Buddhist spiritual cosmology, that is, worlds of desire (kamadhatu), worlds of divine forms (rupadhatu) and formlessness (arupadhatu), neither of them being apophatic Reality (Lamb, Cosmology, 260–1). We do not have to be surprised, then, that many of these spiritual worlds appear in Hindu and Buddhist religious streams under diverse names such as abodes of divinity (brahmaloka) (King, Philosophy, 204–9); angelic and archangelic beings and hierarchies such as those appearing in the mystical worlds of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Golitzing, Christ, 8–37) or in Islamic philosophy and Suf mystical thought (Corbin, Alone, 10–2); and the biblical heavenly hosts (sabaoth) of Yahweh (2 Sam. 5), as Elohim (Ps. 8) and the powers, thrones, dominions, and principalities (Col. 1:15–17). And we need not be surprised, then, that we fnd many cyclical accounts of infnite worlds or series of worlds in different religions either: from the diverse cycles of the life of Brahman and perfect and imperfect world ages in Asian religions (King, Philosophy, ch. 9); the remembrance of a golden age in roman culture (Vigil); the rudiments of several world ages (olamim) in biblical accounts of the world before the food (Gen. 5–6), the current world, the age/kingdom to come, as well as the world of eternal fre (Rev. 21–2); the rhythms of confagration in Stoicism (Salles, Chrysippus, 118–34); Pythagoras’ revolving heavenly harmonies; and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s cycles of universes that he correlates with cycles of divine revelation (SAQ, #41), all having four seasons from spring to winter (SAQ, #14)—even as the biblical term “eternity” indicates a vast eon (olam) or relates God’s life “from

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eternity to eternity” (Isa. 43:13; Ps. 90:2) to the multiplicity of ages, “from eon to eon” (LXX: apo aionos eos tou aionos). Even more interesting is the mapping of vertically cascading planes of immanence onto horizontal perspectives or equally valuable ways within or even, typologically, as emphasized by different religions (Teasdale, Heart, ch. 4; Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, 230). Such is the case with the Bahá’í threefold or fvefold cascading in relation to the yogic ways of salvation in the tradition of the Upanishads and the Bhagavat Gita, as all of them are ways for themselves or in combination leading to liberation (moksha) and God- or self-realization (atma-bodha) beyond the illusion of our separated ego-self (King, Philosophy, 63–71): nasut is translucent to the way of karma yoga (acting without expectation of reward); malakut to bhakti yoga (the way of losing one’s Self in the person of the divinity); jabarut to jnana yoga (abstracting oneself from all dualistic categories, hence, all categories); and lahut to raja yoga (depending on context the reaching of samadhi, jivamukti, advaita, and sunya), especially in its non-conceptual form (asamprajnata-samadhi)— while hahut, the apophatic Reality (sat) is always inexpressible (anirvakaniya) in the experience of satchitanada (pure being, pure consciousness, pure bliss) beyond all (Sharma, Philosophy, 172–8). That these plateaus are not just levels, but ways, is also highlighted by Bahá’u’lláh’s differentiation of paths wayfarers would trace. But they are not just different ways either, because they are intimated by their character and the spiritual station in relation to one another. And when confronted with spiritual universes in the image of the one sun, the variety of light beams, and the confictual ways objects refect the light, Bahá’u’lláh evaluates their differences as a matter of more or less integration of their multiplicities in the horizon of apophatic ecstasis. Thus when the wayfarer gazeth only upon the place of appearance—that is, when he seeth only the many-colored globes—he beholdeth yellow and red and white; hence it is that confict hath prevailed among the creatures, and a darksome dust from limited souls hath hid the world. And some do gaze upon the effulgence of the light; and some have drunk of the wine of oneness and these see nothing but the sun itself. (SV, 33)

Furthermore, we are not even bound by the usual symbolic division into vertical realms with their occasional horizontal and cyclical transition, but can also learn to view these infnite worlds as enfolded in one another. One of the most striking of these mutually enveloping foldings of worlds in the Bahá’í writings is enshrined in the proclamation of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that The worlds of God are in perfect harmony and correspondence one with another. Each world in this limitless universe is, as it were, a mirror refecting the history and nature of all the rest. The physical universe is, likewise, in

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perfect correspondence with the spiritual or divine realm. The world of matter is an outer expression or facsimile of the inner kingdom of spirit. The world of minds corresponds with the world of hearts. (PUP, #93)

It is precisely such mirroring that the mutual translucency between diverse religious imaginations will emphasize (without denigrating the differences of planes of consistency in which they appear)—much like material, organic, ecological cycles seem to mirror each other even if the materials are divergent, such as volcanism (crusts of metals and stone, pressure, magma) and kryovolcanism (crusts of nitrogen and other ice, pressure, eruption of hydrogen and methane) or convergences in evolution despite causal independence (Conway Morris, Runes, chs. 4–5). It is not only that worlds mirror each other but, even more: that we, in some signifcant way, are meant to live “in all the worlds of God” (SAB, #84), and—as in Whitehead (PR, 350)—in some of them, like the physical realms and the spiritual realms (of the consequent nature), we always already live at once, as they “are the exact counterpart of each other” (PUP, #4). And we live in them like the symbols of meaning in Bahá’u’lláh’s semiotic multiverse of different planes of immanence appear in their own integrity throughout the worlds, but always in and as distributed multiplicity. This is maybe nowhere more obvious than in a quite different cascade of worlds: not upward into “indifference,” but downward, as it were, from waking consciousness into that of dream, then sleep (death), and fnally universal consciousness—which Indian mysticism has called the “fourth state” (turiya avastha). This fourfold cascade appears in the Mandukya Upanishad, but reaches back into pre-historic Shamanistic religious experience, echoing from afar in the oldest of Upanishads, and also into later transreligious translations exploded by Tibetan Buddhism (Sumegi, Dreamworlds, 44–6). I will revisit this account of worlds of consciousness later again (ch. 7), but must at this juncture relate the characteristic of this mode of cascading of our enveloped existence into multiple forms of consciousness as another important account of the transreligious manifestation of the at-one-ness of differentiation and translucency among different planes of immanence and between diverse religious traditions, at the same time (Teasdale, Heart, chs. 9–10). It is when we awake to the “fourth state” that we would realize the non-difference of atman and brahman or samsara and nirvana, without the necessity to deny the enfolded levels of existence (or illusions or play of imaginations or Buddha-bodies or Krishna’s lila) and the non-dual transcendent realization of the mutual immanence of subjectivity and objective world, of existence and consciousness, while we might still rest in dimensions of sleep, dream, and waking self (Lakshamjoo, Shaivism, ch. 11).

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Bahá’u’lláh demonstrates this downward non-dual universalization and mutual enveloping of internal and external worlds in a fascinating account of the worlds of God as essential for the experiential realization of the multiplicity of worlds and their transreligious translucency in his Tablet to Vafa (Suriy-i-Vafa). After confrming the “truth that the worlds of God are countless in their number, and infnite in their range,” Bahá’u’lláh refers to “thy state when asleep,” which he proclaims to be “the most mysterious of the signs of God amongst men” (second to fourth state). Instead of dismissing the status of the dream world (second state) as merely subjective fantasy, he ascribes to it the character of a “world [that] hath neither beginning nor end.” In fact, it is a sign of both an enfolded plane “within thy proper self” that “is wrapped up within thee,” and the reality of transcendent states (third and fourth state): as “thy spirit, having transcended the limitations of sleep” (third state), and “having stripped itself of all earthly attachment, [it] hath, by the act of God, been made to traverse a realm which lieth hidden in the innermost reality of this world” (fourth state). It is in this state of universal consciousness that we become aware of the multiplicity of the worlds: that “the creation of God embraceth worlds besides this world, and creatures apart from these creatures,” although the vastness of multiplicity remains always beyond any grasp. While God has in “each of these worlds . . . ordained things which none can search except” God, “the All-Searching, the All-Wise,” yet by divine admittance has enfolded them in this world, “thou mayest discover the purpose of God, thy Lord, and the Lord of all worlds,” because in “these words the mysteries of Divine Wisdom have been treasured” (TB, 12). In closing, this image from the Mandukya Upanishad can explicitly symbolize transreligious experiences of the mutuality of cascading worlds and their inherent multiplicity among themselves and between any of the planes, as well as the mutuality of their cosmological (external) and mystical (internal) meaning both as a universe or state of mind/spirit. Religious diversity, through the transreligious process (or even imperative), seeks the “one” apophatic Reality/Truth in its multiple appearances, without ultimately becoming attached to them (and their limitations). Its very “reality” may be best described as multiplicity of mutually pervasive, but differentiated horizons of spheres of existence and related states of consciousness, but integrated in “one” universe within the infnite horizon of Reality/God, which is creating, sustaining, and permeating their movement in diversifcation and integration as “its” exhaling and inhaling. In tracing the modes of consciousness in diverse religious traditions for the realization of the “unity” of the mystic seeker with the infnite horizon of divinity, as in Rumi, or one’s internal atman as being apophatically “identical” with brahman in the turiya state, as in the Mandukya Upanishad, one has reached the “limit of unity” that cannot be limited to any tradition. This “limit” is (in any tradition, being the “being”

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of this tradition) one’s continuation of existence in love (Chittick, Path, 247). Being “neither inward nor outward,” here, in this state or from this horizon of “existence,” we approach Reality as “beyond the senses and the intellect [being] none other than the Lord. . . . He is infnite peace and love” (Mandukya Upanishad 7: UP, 204). Nevertheless, the other states of existence or consciousness are “real” in their own horizons. Within them, the world (consciousness, religion, and Reality) appears differently, but appropriate to the respective horizon. From another horizon, these states or what appears in these respective horizons may, however, seem to either be illusory or unimaginable, but certainly limited to (or under the limitation of) their own plane of immanence, and limited as the integration of (only the) horizons that appear within itself, but oblivious of the ones surpassing it. In the same sense, we fnd that Bahá’í scripture approaches Reality/God/Truth as the infnite horizon surpassing all limited horizons and, hence, being imperceptible by them, but still (in a pantheistic image) encompassing them all (GL, #29). We are bound by the (respective) levels of mind and consciousness, religious integrities and cultural contexts, by which we perceive and review the world; by the type of mind (the mixture of divine attributes) with which we perceive and review the world; and by the fact of our mind being mind. Despite its potential inherent plenitude of divine attributes to be explicated, our mind is and remains bound to being human, to being localized on this Earth with its specifc evolution, which localization “moulds their bodies and states of consciousness” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in Taylor, Reality, 144–6), and to being mind, as mind is not able to comprehend what is beyond it (GL, #148). It is in this sense that Bahá’u’lláh, with the Mandukya Upanishad, formulates the (limited) “reality” or “relativity” (or “illusion”) of the states of mystical journey (SV, 29) and the impossibility to adequately discern whether they are subjective states of consciousness or their own cosmic reality. In any form, the cascading limitations or de-limitations of horizons appear to present the world to us in a certain manner, but always wrapped and warped in this (or one) world (GL, #82). And it is in the same sense that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá formulates the paradigm of the cascading horizons of “reality” relative to diverse planes of existence: The reference to the differences of minerals, plants, animals, and humans in the same world becomes an analog for an understanding of the immanence of (all) spiritual or divine worlds in this, but limitless (PUP, #93), universe (DPh, 117–23). As, for instance, a plant cannot imagine the world of the human mind, so can we not imagine the spiritual worlds beyond, which does not imply that they do not exist in this same world (PT, #29), but only that they are hidden within it beyond our horizon of perception or imagination, and of which we can become aware as we progress in our spiritual consciousness, even beyond or after death (Median, Faith, 45–6). Hence, we

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are asked to unfold our mind/spirit in a mystical, ethical, and social sense by striving to become (apophatically) “unifed” in the higher spiritual horizons beyond, but by integrating the diverse material and mental worlds and horizons. By striving for theopoetic unifcation, for the theosis (to use a term of Eastern Orthodoxy), for the divine horizon in us, the “apex of consciences and the secret of divine guidance” (SV, 91), and (maybe) the state of the nafs al-jabarutiyyah, we might be approaching the pure consciousness of the Manifestation, the nafs al-lahuttiya and qudsiyyah (Savi, Summit, 332), from which all other more limited horizons become transparent in unison, but also even as nothing, while still existing in their own right (SAB, #150). It is in this “station” (maqam)—we will later revisit its “reality” as that of the “luminous mind” (ch. 7)—that we lose the impetus for isolating our selves and our religious horizons into scenarios of opposing diversities, but instead begin to “perceive” the compassionate translucency of ours selves with everything (pratitya-samutpada) and “see” the wisdom of Reality beyond our limited religious identities (GL, #22). By deconstructing the illusory isolation, we may fnd (like a treasure, the hidden treasure of divinity) an unconstructed horizon (Epilogue) in which these limited horizons of self and religious identity move in mutual fuency and shine in complimentary beauty in “one” delightful garden of Reality/Truth (SAB, #233). Be multiplicity! Be transreligious! Herein lies hidden the Wisdom of the Compassion of Reality . . . .

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Apophatic Ecstasies

This last chapter in the series of the three middle chapters of this book will now turn directly to the implied and pervasively referred to proposition that the unity in which relativity is relational and polyphilic is nothing else but the apophatic Reality itself on which all relationality and polyphilia are predicated, but only insofar as “it” manifests itself within the infnite multiplicity of worlds and their mutual translucency as well as “its” infnite divergences (TDM, 464–9). It is the frst and the last gate of relativity, as it were, different from the other two, as it cannot be addressed directly in any meaningful way and, hence, is the absolute origin of relativity—not as fxed measure (McLean, Prolegomena, 41–4), but as absolutely beyond the One, the Two, and the Many (TDM, ch. 2). This chapter is concerned with the implications of this proposition for the transreligious relativity of truth insofar as the interplay, interference, of the absoluteness of unmanifest Reality and “its” manifestations have led religious experience and discourse to discover deep resonances between diverse religions and have allowed for transformations between them (Cobb, Dialogue, ch. 2). We will consider this “non-dual dual nature” of ultimate Reality/God as well as the philosophical renderings of “its” relativistic Truth in forms of symbolizations of Reality/God (as there can only be symbolizations of “it”), but also compositions of religious pluralism safeguarding this unique, but unavoidable subtractive affrmation of Reality/ God/Truth (TDM, ch. 3). Bahá’u’lláh has left us a theopoetic icon of this concept: There is but one reality and one essence that is expounded in the worlds of outer form, and, at each of its stages, is described by a specifc name . . . in accordance with the degrees of its particular manifestations on the plane of this limited world. (Bahá’u’lláh, unpublished Tablet, in Brown, Perspective, 41–2) 219

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1. THE NAMELESS NAME The title of this chapter “apophatic ecstasies” is another way to address the inner dialectic of subtractive affrmation (chs. 1–2) of Reality, that is, “its” apophatic and polyphilic nature—yet, it indicates its reversal. Subtraction always begins in the midst of multiplicity (Be multiplicity!) to sense the selfsubtraction of the unknown—like mystical “unknowing” drawing us into the unknown and unknowable (Keller, Cloud, 70), unnaming “it/self” (“its” Self) in all of “its” polyphilic expressions. Conversely, the ecstasies of apophatic Reality indicate that “it” cannot remain just unknown, because there would be nothing at all to know and not to be known. Instead, “it” bursts into being (ebullitio) like the self-overfowing Good (bonum diffusivum sui), releasing “itself”—with John Scotus Eriugena (Cooper, Panentheism, 49)—“out of (divine) Nothingness” into ecstasies of existence. The ex-static is that which ex-sists, that which stands out from nothingness. It is as such that the ecstasies of mystical unifcation are modes of reunion with that which is beyond ex-sistence, in which our ex-static ex-sistence “holds itself out into the nothing” (Heidegger, Metaphysics, 109), which—for Meister Eckhart—means that “it” is “the divine Nothing that is also all things” (McGinn, Thought, 105). In this sense, as we will see later (in this chapter and in the next one), do all things in-sist in Reality, which is nameless, and cycle through “its” unfolding and enfolding, exhaling and inhaling movements (ch. 5). The nameless cannot be named. What can be named is not the nameless. This is Laozi’s rendering of the subtraction of Reality from all existence (ch. 3). Insofar as “it” is named, “it” is already a duality, namely, indicating both the name of the unnamable: the Dao, the way that cannot be walked, and the ex-stasis of Being, the movement of Becoming: which “is” also the Dao, but now as the mother of all things (Laozi, verse 1). But this duality is not a reiterated dualism (as long as it is not stabilized and, instead, remains in the oscillating movement of the Dao), but releases itself the paradox of the identity of both meanings as non-different. Since these two meanings don’t indicate identity or “the same entity” either, they are caught in an endless oscillation of enfolding and unfolding, inhalation and exhalation—in our minds and in (cosmic) reality—as they are also non-dually one (Wilber, Spectrum, ch. 3). This (epistemological and ontological, cognitive and cosmic) movement is the basis for the mystical paradox pervasive in many religious and spiritual traditions (Teasdale, Heart, ch. 3; Ellwood, Mysticism, chs. 2–3). Being at the center of all deep religious insight and experience in some or the other way, this mystical paradox of oscillation marks the move of naming, while, at the same time, unnaming Reality (Roy, Consciousness, chs. 9–10; Brainard, Reality, ch. 8). It appears in the naming-unnaming of Reality as “non-dual duality” of nirguna and saguna brahman, the Spirit or Breath beyond and

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with attributes (that can be named instead of “it/self”) in Hinduism; the One unmanifest and manifest, hahut and lahut in Sufsm; the One (ikk oankar) formless (nirankar) and creative of all forms (karta purakh) in Sikhism; the Buddha-body (dharmakaya), empty (sunya) and full of all things in Mahayana Buddhism. Fast-forward. In What is Metaphysics? Martin Heidegger quotes Hegel’s Science of Logic with the famous rendering of this “non-dual dual” indifference of the ultimate: “Pure Being and pure Nothing are therefore the same” (Heidegger, Writings, 108). For both Hegel and Heidegger being and nothingness are “the same.” This “identity” is even stronger in the original German, where Hegel actually says, both “is” (not “are”) the same (ist dasselbe). But this non-dual duality is still engaged in a dialectical movement of the becoming of this absolute abstraction of Being/Nothingness for Hegel and as the history of Being itself for Heidegger (Geschichte des Seins). The only thing that is as deep as this moving non-duality that encompasses nothing and all is the irresistible “Why?” that haunts the being that can ask this question and makes it the being of Being, in which the Being is “cleared” (as in a clearing/Lichtung in the woods), that is, a being that is awakened by and to Being: humanity as Dasein (Caputo, Element, 18–31). In so being, Dasein realizes itself as ex-stasis of nothingness, standing out from it, but only as long as it does ask this question and, thereby, “holds itself out into the nothing” (Heidegger, Writings, 109). Not only can this question “Why?”—which Heidegger adopts from Leibniz’s question of ultimate reality: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (TDM, ch. 6)—not be answered by referring to a creator God (Heidegger, Introduction, ch. 1); it must not be answered at all, except by the ecstatic existence of humanity “holding itself into,” insisting in nothingness. For Heidegger, God cannot be the answer to this question, because “if God is God he cannot know the nothing, assuming that the ‘Absolute’ excludes all nothingness” (Writings, 108). Hence, as in all mystical traditions, and as a transreligious fact of translucency, Reality is beyond an indication of anything that can be named, reiterated as reality, rendered an object of (our) knowledge, even “God” (Brainard, Reality, 31–40; Ellwood, Mysticism, ch. 2). The nameless name names/unnames the paradoxical “God beyond God” (McGinn, God, 1–19) of Meister Eckhart, itself being only one expression of the nameless in a vast tradition reaching from Plotinus to Paul Tillich, from Sankara to F. H. Bradley, from Dionysius the Areopagite to Raymond Panikkar, and (in its emphasis on emptiness and formlessness) from Gautama Buddha to Guru Nanak. Nevertheless, in naming the unnamable, we follow the Dao of Laozi if such naming symbolizes the inability to name the unnamable. The unnamable must always actively be unnamed to be revealed in its silence. Otherwise, with a fxating name for the unnamable, “it” would be forgotten and we

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would be trapped in the diverse horizons of consistency without realizing them to be horizons in horizons (Epilogue). This corresponds to Heidegger’s “forgottenness” of Being/Nothingness (Seinsvergessenheit): we would have forgotten to ask the question “Why” (Faber, Indra’s Ear, 167–71). While for some, like Karl Rahner, the question, as long as it is asked, reveals God as a transcendental horizon, the absolute horizon beyond any horizon, but only in the movement of always transcending all given horizons (Rahner, Foundations, ch. 2), for others, such as Plotinus, such identifcations would already fxate the horizon, forgetting its relativity to infnitely other horizons (or worlds): The One cannot be identifed, not even as One (Roy, Consciousness, 63–5). It remains nameless. But it must be named as such! There are two approaches in current philosophical anti-metaphysical (and anti-Heideggerian) discourse to “naming” relevant to our discussion. Alain Badiou, claims even in an anti-poststructuralist sense to be the radical iconoclast against any metaphysical One, which he always understands as at least cryptic divinity, and of multiplicity (Badiou, Deleuze, ch. 2). Beyond the structural analysis of Being into mathematical patterns, which occupies him otherwise (Badiou, Thought, 10–12), he develops a concept of (metaphysical) activity as “the event” arising in a situation (a complex of relations), but neither being discernable in the situation in which it arises nor causally deducible from it (Badiou, Being, part 4). The event appears with unexpected surprise, but with impact on the situation (from which it departs), changing everything (such as the French Revolution). In a sense, the event arises out of nothing, but in order to have an impact—given its indiscernibility in the situation in which (not out of which) it arises—it must be named. The naming of the event is the fdelity to the event by which the event becomes available as event in its own aftermath (Badiou, Being, part 5). The Christ-event, for instance, needed to be named as such to become what it has become; in Badiou’s view, St. Paul was naming it (Badiou, Saint Paul, ch. 5). John Caputo, however, coming from a Heideggerian, anti-metaphysical, phenomenological, and poststructuralist impulse, wants to be able to release the event (of God) anew from the name in which it is always trapped, reiterated, betrayed, and lost (Caputo, Weakness, ch. 1). Like the release of Being from a mere human (animal) being by becoming Dasein (in Heidegger), the event only arises in the name if it is freed from all conceptual entrapments and performs (or allowed again to be self-performing) its feat. The Christevent in the name of Christ is, for instance, the performance and experience of forgiveness, of the an-archic kingdom without king, the weakness of God, agape, divinity in the least one (Caputo, The Weakness, ch. 4). In contrasting both Badiou’s and Caputo’s positions, here is the paradox: While for Badiou the event comes to life only (retrospectively) if it is claimed and in fdelity named, for Caputo the name of the event is the trap

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that disguises it under conceptual stabilizations. However, as contrast (in Whitehead’s sense) they reveal an important insight: if the nameless is not named in fdelity, it is not silent, but indiscernible from its nonexistence; it is not even felt to be absent. In this state, the state of not asking “Why?” we have, as Karl Rahner so pointedly remarks, devolved back into merely intelligent higher animals (Foundations, 44–51). The fdelity to the “Why?” names/ unnames the nameless as being in the process of being present and absent at the same time, being present and absent, as Derrida remarks of Heidegger’s awakening of Sein in Dasein in the mode of time (Derrida, Margins, 64–5). Yet, in so naming the now presenting/absenting nameless, its name becomes its agent only as long as we do not decline its activity as the name, in the name, of the name, and silence the event in the name by making the name a concept, object, category, to be manipulated, or a being, even a ground of Being (TDM, ch. 6). Hence, as a contrast, the nameless name is not something, but the event in the name that is released in the acting of the name that acts in fdelity to “it” (the event in the name) without grasping “it.” We must follow “it” (the event in the name), not use it (the name instead of the event). We must not empty “it,” but ourselves, to let “it/self” (“its” Self) reveal. Revelation is that happening: the event in “its” naming (letting “itself” be named) self-unnaming “itself” as name of the nameless, but self-naming “itself” as the event of unnaming. Besides the Dao (ch. 3) and the AUM of the Mandukya Upanishad (UP, 199–201), to which I will turn later (ch. 7), one of the most famous selfnaming names of the nameless name is probably the Hebrew Tetragrammaton YHWH, revealed to Moses as the answer to his question regarding a name of the God (event) he encountered on Sinai in Exodus 3 (Lambden, Mysteries, 71–4). Moses seeks of this overwhelming theophany a name for reasons of identifcation of the divine power that reveals itself to him in the burning bush, so as to be able to allow the people to gain access to “its” Reality by categorizing or relating “it” to the people’s spiritual universe. Yet, God’s answer in Exodus 3:14 is rather the release of the event of Reality/God in the name, as it is unnaming any name that could be used for a reiteration or classifcation. Ehyeh asher ehyeh, “I am that I am” or “I will be who I will be (for you)” (Hamilton, Exodus, 61–8), subtracts itself from any reiteration (as name) and releases (the event of) “the Living God” (Thiselton, Theology, 39–42). In other words, the Tetragrammaton (contracted from this revelation) is not a name at all, but the unnaming of all names. Yet, at the same time, it is the naming of the unprecedented and never to be controlled event of God, happening on its own terms. And then again, this nameless name must be named in order to unfold its impact as event. But the name can only do so in fdelity to the event: “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD [YHWH] your God [Elohim]” (Ex. 20:7 NOAB). Then the name

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(haShem) acts for Israel (Ex. 5:1), the Face of God will be with the people (Ex. 33:14), and the glory of God (kabod YHWH) will fll the tent of the covenant (Ex. 40:34). Even the later rendering of YHWH through the lens of Greek and Hellenistic thought patterns as eternally present “I am”—God as Supreme Being (Pannenberg, Theology, 281) and, hence, meaning that God is Being itself (Caputo, Heidegger, ch. 4)—has not totally obscured the namelessness in the naming of Being. Especially if we do not understand this metaphysical rendering of the self-named name of the event of God/Reality— that Heidegger has complained about and that the Middle Ages have taught in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics, indiscriminately whether they were used by Jewish, Christian, or Islamic sources (Burrell, God, ch. 2)—as the Absolute that excludes nothingness, but rather—with Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Ibn ‘Arabi, and John Scotus Eriugena (Sells, Languages, chs. 1–5)—as the “non-dual dual” name for the non-static non-difference: as the activity operating in the oscillation between being and nothingness, sat and asat, unnaming/unnamed Reality beyond any qualifcations (Rg Veda, 10:129), as anirvacanya, explicable by neither of them (Sharma, Philosophy, 178). Although Bahá’u’lláh knows and uses the Tetragrammaton of Exodus 3:14, he translates it often into some form of the frst part of the shahada, the witness (the fdelity) to the nameless name of the one God, the transcendent and unique One, indicated by the Unity (tawhid) and exclusive Oneness (ahadiyyah) of God (Diessner, Psyche, 6–7): “There is no God but God” (la ilaha illa allah) or similar renderings (Lambden, Mysteries, 126, 155–8). Bahá’u’lláh understands the revelation “from the fame of the Burning Bush” as conveying the message of “Verily, verily, I am God!” (GL, #20). And he identifes himself as the very event of this name, as did already the Báb (SWB, 58), and with his name as the nameless name in the event of its manifestation (Lambden, Mysteries, 155–8). As the name of the nameless name is also always indicating the event in all divine names of all divine dispensations, it releases the process of new creation (the newly becoming event in the name) itself and the revelation that is the event of creation of the world: “Call thou to mind when thou wert in My company, within the Tabernacle of Glory” (Lambden, Mysteries, 126, 155–8; TB, 241)—before creation, when all was only a thought in God’s Mind (the primordial event in all names). He is now, “by Whose name the Hidden Secret was divulged, and the Well-Guarded Name was revealed” (PM, #150), the new Tetragrammaton as expected by the Báb to be “Thy Most Great Name through which the hidden secrets of God, the Most Exalted, were divulged” (SWB, 199). This name of the nameless is now BHA’, “the name of Him Who is the Eternal Truth, the Knower of things unseen,” the name of him “Who is the Hidden Name” and “the Unseen Treasure,” enfolding and unfolding “the secret of all things, be they of the past or of the future” (GL, #63). In Bahá’u’lláh’s acclamation,

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bahá’ is the Most Great Name (ism al a‘zam), which was sought by Muslim believers and mystics in, and beyond, all the “most beautiful names” of God hinted at in the Qur’ran (Surah, 17:110), but was hidden until now and only partly revealed in other dispensations (Lambden, The Word Bahá, 19–42). Like the use of YHWH as a powerful symbol enshrining deep meanings in its letters and their combination—especially explored by kabbalistic speculations and applications (Hallamish, Kabbalah, ch. 9)—so explicate the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, the symbolisms of certain letters to divulge their hidden meanings in the name. They reveal the acting in the name. The Tetragrammaton BAH’, consisting of ba, ha, alif, and hamsa, combine two hidden letters, the silent hamsa (the glottal stop) and the alif, which is the hidden letter in which the act of creation is enshrined (Lambden, Tafsīr al-ḥurūfāt, passim), with two letters that represent the hidden (ha) and the manifest (ba) Reality (Cole, in Bahá’u’lláh, Commentary on the Surah of the Sun, 24–7n2), hahut and lahut (as nucleus of all other cascading planes of reality). “From the letter ‘B’ He hath made the Most Great Ocean to appear, and from the letter ‘H’ He hath caused His inmost Essence to be made manifest” (TU, #3). When Bahá’u’lláh signs the Book of Certitude (Lawh-i Iqan) with the line “Revealed by the ‘Bá’ and the ‘Há’” (KI, 257), he not only claims a new revelation, a new creation released in this name, but the manifestation of the nameless in this name, which is now not revealed in a burning bush, but becomes an event in his person (TB, 53). Unfolding its impact in the fdelity to this event-person, if one follows the event in the name, one “fndeth on this journey a trace of the traceless Friend, and inhaleth the fragrance of the long-lost Joseph from the heavenly messenger” (SV, 11–2). Bahá’u’lláh’s name bahá’ Allah also resumes the long history of the meaning of the kabod Yahweh throughout the Exodus narrative, the presence of God in the tent of the covenant, the tabernacle, the temple, and as the face of God in the visions of Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1, namely, as the revelation of the “form of the formless” (Fossum, Christology, 260–87) Reality. That this Bahá’í understanding of the greatest name of Reality/God originated on Mount Sinai (Ex. 33), in which God reveals and hides God’s inaccessible essence to Moses and (in consequence) to all the prophets and messengers in all Abrahamic traditions, be only mentioned here (Bauckham, Gospel, ch. 3) and will be revisited in the next chapter on divine Manifestations. Concluding this journey through the diverse dimensions of the nameless name, we can say that it indicates the event in the name and the naming of the event, the affrmation of its naming and the self-subtraction in the naming, the symbolization of the hidden and the manifest in everlasting oscillation. Given these connotations, it is important to recognize that the nameless name is not meant to gain its dominion in the pure act of an ecstasis of selfsubtraction of our Selves into the mere nameless indifference of silence. This

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silence before creation, as it were, assumed by many mystics to approach the “essence” of God before God (McGinn, Thought, 86), would reach nothing, but not nothingness. Such might have been the emphasis of Nagarjuna’s method of negating all conceptuality (Winters, Thinking, ch. 4), all differentiation of subjectivity and objectivity, any existence of either subject and object, settling in silence or disappearance (Williams and Tribe, Thought, 140–52): This apophatic movement into the nameless seeks the ha beyond and over against the ba. But such an emphasis, if it becomes exclusive and isolated, would lose the name of the event without which no fdelity could release the event to become event at all. Conversely, naming the nameless is also not about the mere affrmation of the many names in which the event might be justifably relativized, or the one name of the creator or the highest being or the ground of Being that can be named without unnaming itself or (must be named) by the Mind of God, as recently reintroduced by Keith Ward and John Leslie (ch. 5), because this emphasis on the one and many names might lose the awareness of the unnaming process—seeking the ba over against the ha. Yet, to engage in unnaming is the only way to not forget the namelessness of the name that alone releases its own event. Instead, the emphasis lies in the mutual immanence of both movements as movement of the oscillation “with infnite speed” (in Deleuze’s meaning) between the ha, the nameless name of the event of Reality, and the ba, the event of unnaming the name of Reality. That such an apophatic, ecstatic move makes sense and is intelligible has been variously demonstrated through the history of religion and philosophy. It is a Platonic rather than an Aristotelian move. While Aristotle’s transformation of the transcendent eternal world of Platonic Ideas into this world with its immanent forms of becoming signaled an important step toward the mutuality of form and matter, soul and body (Kraut, Companion, ch. 1), it also implied a tendency toward a thoroughgoing rationalism (Harris, Restitution, ch. 14) that ended with Hegel and (in protest with) Heidegger (Caputo, Heidegger, 195). In Hegel it took the form of a totalization of the Intellect, as the working of the Concept through the movement of dialectic negation, absolutely closed in itself, so that life was absolutely fooded through and through by the light of Reason, in fact, captured by it: Being and Nothingness is/are the same, but rationalized as dialectic negation of themselves in the other. Heidegger resisted this totalization of Reason over Life and instead favored with Friedrich Nietzsche Life over Reason, Nothingness now signaling the surrational movement of Life beyond Reason (Spaemann, Experiences, 152–66). Unfortunately, in the case of Heidegger’s phenomenological mysticism, this move beyond reason was leading to his identifcation of the movement of Being (Geschichte des Seins) with the providence (Vorsehung) supposedly manifesting itself in Nazism (Derrida, Of Spirit, ch. 10).

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Raymond Panikkar, however, has demonstrated that the religious insight of an apophaticism transcending rationalization in as diverse religious traditions as Christianity, Buddhism (Silence, 14), and Hinduism (Trinity, ch. 1)—and others may be added with ease—can appear in quite a different constellation: It is the insight that if Reason equates with Being—as does the Mind of God of John Leslie equate, in Aristotelian manner, thought and being (ch. 5)—then the truly bold move is that, frst, this equation is true; second, it does not capture Reality; and, third, Reality will still manifest “itself” (“its” Self) in this equation (Epilogue). Hence, the Logos in Christianity (as is true for Wisdom in Judaism) is not Reality, but “its” Manifestation (the Son, not the Father), as is nirguna brahman beyond all attributes, but in-sisting in them as saguna brahman (Trinity, ch. 2). The same is true for the Dao as “being” beyond creativity (the named dao); but it “is” only in its creative order as the mother of becoming. It is also true for the dharmakaya, which “is” beyond all differentiations, but manifests itself only in its eternal ethical dharma-order of the dharmadhatu (Macy, Dharma, ch. 2). And it is true for Plato, for whom the realm of Ideas is ordered by the Good, which originates Being. “It” does not itself exist, but “is” rather nothing (Kraut, Defense, 320–3). It is especially true for Plotinus, for whom the One is not equated with the nous (Mind, Reason, Intellect), the equation of being and knowing, but escapes all of these characterizations (Sells, Apophasis, 47–65). Finally, this is true for John Leslie, for whom the Mind of God (in which we live as God’s thoughts) is not self-existing, but rather necessitated by the Good, which is not, but ought to be and, hence, lets be, and becomes Mind (Leslie and Kuhn, Mystery, 126–7). The nameless name is the “reason” for all that is and can be known, but it “is” nothing itself. “It” is nothing for “itself,” nothing except ecstatic in-sistence, in-sisting as “it/self,” with “its” Self, in and as (being equated with) Mind (Panikkar, Pluralism, 7–16). This is the notion of “in-sistence” (GPW, §40). For now (I will recur to it in the last section of this chapter), we may understand in-sistence at the movement (of Reality) that enfolds the ha and the ba in mutual immanence: which “is” the nameless name (ch. 7). It is here that the threefold differentiation of worlds, which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá credits to the teachings of the Prophets versus the dualistic differentiation between God and the world of the philosophers (with notable exceptions such as Plotinus), attains the same function (ch. 5): that the Primal Mind, the frst emanation of Reality (SAQ, #53), even “its” frst Manifestation (SAQ, #54), harbors in its own Self (Reality) “itself” as “its” Self at the heart of which abides the absolute inaccessibility of Reality (SAQ, #82). But “it” is always beyond “its” Self in/different to it and in-sistent in it. The profound implications of this understanding of the revealing silence of the nameless Name, even in the Most Great Name, will be reappearing throughout the coming chapters. But what is urgent at this point to remember is the insight

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that neither Logos or Being, nor Mind or Word, can exhaust the meaning of the nameless Name, that they cannot be equated with Reality, and that Reality is the subtractive affrmation of “its” Self in relation to everything, as the ba harbors the ha.

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2. THE ABSOLUTE, THE ALL-RELATIONAL, THE SURRELATIVE The mystical paradox of the nameless name is not an end in itself. Rather, it seems to leave us with another, even deeper, paradox, namely, that the “non-dual duality” excludes dualism and, thereby, only reinforces it: that God and the Absolute are in opposition as in F. H. Bradley (McHenry, Whitehead, ch. 7); that there must either be a God or Nothingness as in Ken Wilber (Adams, Perspective, 170); or that the alternative is about an Absolute or nothing absolute at all as in Richard Rorty (Contingency, ch. 1). Heidegger’s opposition between God as absolute and Nothingness (as stated in the previous section) drives the paradox even further: if God must be identifed with absolute Being that excludes nothingness, the Reality of Nothingness, if it is presumed to be ultimate (and only then being “identical”—in Hegel’s sense—with Being), must not be confounded with the Absolute, that is, it now appears (in ultimate consequence) as the groundlessness of pure relativity (Nishitani, Religion, 68, 96, 149–50). Here, unexpectedly, we fnd the root of Jacques Derrida’s claim that différance, the (always only differentiated and always oneness-deferring) ultimate that is never One, never something, is, in fact, nothingness as movement of differentiation and, hence, is “older” than Heidegger’s ontological difference (Différance, 1–28), the difference between beings and Being, which is only collapsed in Dasein (TDM, ch. 6). Like the Dao of Laozi, this “older” nothingness/différance is not a way where there is no way, but the Way of no way at all: any way that can be gone is not the Way; the Way is an infnite regress of not walking any way and, at the same time, of walking all ways, without ever possessing in walking the ways, or not walking them, the Way (ch. 3). The Truth of the Absolute is that it is nothing at all (sunyata), empty even of itself—as Zen and many Mahayana forms of Buddhism claim (Caputo, Element, 208–12)—and, hence, can only be absolutely relative, the non-difference of sunyata and pratitya-samutpada (Nishitani, Religion, 49–50). The ultimately Relative is the Absolute of the Absolute (whether or not identifed with God) itself. This Absolute is the Sur-relative since it “excludes nothing” by not excluding Nothing. Only the Relative itself, which is nothing (for itself), is absolute, ultimate, and omnirelative (chs. 7, 9).

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This surrelative approach to Reality correlates Derrida with Whitehead (GPW, §16). Like Derrida, Whitehead’s insight in the workings of Creativity is addressed by the movement of unifcation and multiplication (Bracken, One, 81–95), that is: as the many become one, so the one transforms always into one among a new many enriched by itself (PR, 21). Creativity is the movement of relationality through several phases: many past experiences become objects in the actual world of a new event by being internally united in this receptive, but also (potentially) self-creative event, which when it exhausts it potentials becomes decided (satisfed) and transitions into an object in the world of new events (GPW, §§12–13). Whitehead calls this external-internal relationship that constituted the web of being the “prehension” of feelings (PR, 25–6). The universe as a web of related feelings of one another’s becoming and being. The mutually prehensive fow of these processes of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in all of its potential modes, or their exclusion (PR, 50), is also an aesthetic process of valuation of these feelings into a new unity and the transmission of these feelings to other events in becoming regarding its/their own ideal of harmony (PR, 102). Valuation creates facts; facts transmit realized values (Rose, Whitehead, 27–48). Since nothing is beyond these prehensive processes of becoming (Hartshorne, Concept, 103–13), or conversely, all organisms are nexuses and societies of such processes and their formal patterns (or their absence), nothing is beyond all-relationality (Hartshorne, Relativity, 76–7). As already explored with the concept of connectivity (ch. 1), here relationality and rationality are coextensive (PR, 4), that is, there is not fxed notion of rationality that defnes relationality, but it indicates the movement of the relational web itself in which forms of mentality are creatively embedded and sustained or abandoned and lost (Faber, Immanence, 91–110). The measure of both is the divine Wisdom (PR, 345) in its manifestation of intensity and harmony (ch. 5). Like the Dao as Mother of all things (ch. 3), this universal all-relationality, which does not refer to any Absolute beyond itself, is captured by Whitehead’s concept of mutual immanence (Faber, Prozeßtheologie, §21), which Whitehead again uniquely symbolizes with Platonic khora (GPW, 210), the formless interconnectivity of prehensive processes (AI, 134), including the immanence of divine suggestions of Wisdom and assumed under the cycle of love (GPW, §30; TBG, Expl. 9). As with Derrida’s différance—even as Derrida himself adopts khora as surname of différance (Khora, 116)—Whitehead’s khora functions as ontological and epistemological description of infnite differentiation (Faber, Khora, 105–26). Derrida emphasizes the fact that no unifcation—Being, Spirit, Soul, Reason, God, Reality—does ever lead to (reiterated) unity, but just to a new addition to series of failed unifcations (failed insofar as they were intended to bring the movement of differentiation to a halt), or always

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only musters successfully further differentiation as the deference of unifcation (Welsch, Vernunft, 260–75). Whitehead, however, emphasizes that this process of differentiation through local unifcations exhibits a prehensive all-relationality of equal importance to the process of differentiation itself (GPW, 114), but sundered by the disconnectivity of apophatic origination and immanence (Faber, Touch, 47–67). This “medium of intercommunication” which derives from the “mutual immanence of actualities” (AI, 134), is, like the Nothingness of Being explored before, nothing for itself, but rather exhibits the self-empty character of sunyata (Abe, God, 33–45) that names the “essence” of the Buddhist pratitya-samutpada as the all-relationality of existence (GPW, §16). Not even God is—in the cycle of love—excluded from, but immanent to (in-sisting in) the Absoluteness of this khoric allrelationality (GPW, §32). The apophatic ecstasis of the Absolute in all-relational khora becomes even more obvious when we compare it to Whitehead’s three conceptual deviations from it (RM, 68–9). If we try to “substantialize” apophatic ecstasis, depriving it of its self-emptiness, we end up either reiterating it as the immanent Law of the cosmos (which Whitehead typologically relates to Eastern religious traditions), or as a trans-cosmic, transcendent person (which Whitehead typologically relates to the Abrahamic traditions), or as acosmic integration of the cosmos into a divine life (which Whitehead typologically relates to the pantheistic traditions—which should after Hartshorne better be called panentheistic) appearing within and without diverse religions traditions as their mystical side (Hartshorne and Rees, Philosophers, chs. 7, 8). In exploring the interesting transreligious conundrum these models of substantialization present, to which we must also return regarding the issue of transreligious confictual material later (ch. 8), Whitehead describes the relationships between them as inversion (between the immanence and the pantheistic models), direct opposition (between the immanence and the transcendence model), and passage (between the transcendence and pantheistic/ panentheistic model), before abandoning all of them insofar “the character of the actual world cannot rise above the actuality of this world” and, hence, we “can only discover all the factors disclosed in the world as experienced” (RM, 71). As all three of these solutions demonstrate a “logocentric” tendency to somehow reiterate the divine Reality (Faber, Intermezzo, 234), Whitehead abandons them for an all-relational view (GPW, 128). Nevertheless, if we abstain from their dangers of substantialization, these models can still present us with certain emphases demonstrative of the multidimensionality of valuations within and between religions helping us to understand the movements of the nameless name through this triad, namely, the Absolute (resonating with the transcendence model), the All-Relational (resonating with the immanence model), and the Surrelative (resonating with the pantheistic/panentheistic model).

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This can be demonstrated with the infnite worlds approach. We have already seen that each (of the infnite) world itself presents us with a certain plane of consistency (in Deleuze’s sense) and that each of them offers in itself (and in relation to each other) a cascading and cyclical movement upward toward apophatic subtraction and downward into diffusing affrmation of the world within its horizon (ch. 5). In other words, each plane of immanence has/is its own absolute horizon, transcendent to the plane and its events; but the apophatic horizon only affrms the all-relational mutual immanence of all events within “it” that constitutes this world; and as cycle of immanence, the horizon surrelatively includes all events of its world (Epilogue). The horizon (the Absolute) is not the plane (the All-Relational) and it is not the events released and comprised by the horizon (the Surrelative). As I have explored in more detail elsewhere (TDM, ch. 8), the Deleuzean absolute horizon is not reiterated as transcendent person or being or ground of Being, and it is neither reiterated as immanent Law in the events of the plane or as plane nor fxated as a pantheistic immanence of this world within the horizon. Rather since the horizon is “immanent (to) itself” not “immanence to something, events, planes,” it is non-dually indifferent from plane and events without being identical with them. Paradoxically, this immanence “to itself” is the absolute apophatic transcendence of the horizon to its plane (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy, ch. 2). Like the Unconditioned that is “named” in the in/difference between nirvana and samsara for Nagarjuna (McCagney, Nagarjuna, 58) or the self-emptying emptiness (or “absolute nothingness”) for Zen (Abe, God, 33–45), this was the grand insight of Plotinus, although based on Plato’s insight (Parmenides, 160b2–3), but seldom recaptured later in its clarity as he did in his Enneads: that the apophatic One is nothing for itself and, hence, “is/ is not” the All-One of all existence, indifferently so—neither in pantheistic identity, nor in mere transcendence, nor as mere immanence (GPW, 260). I will further explore this insight with Bahá’u’lláh’s commentary on Plotinus (and the Buddhist connection) in the next chapter. This apophatic ecstasis is obviously also the driving force of the cycling movements of the cascading threefold and fvefold symbolizations of infnite worlds (ch. 5) in relation to the apophatic Reality in the Bahá’í writings (and correspondingly to other religious resonant cascades). Stephen Lambden, in an important, detailed historical and exegetical contribution, has demonstrated the profound commitment of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh to the centrality of apophaticism for their revelatory proclamation and any refective understanding of Reality as both of them were affrming and recapturing the apophatic and mystical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and their related philosophical theological (or theosophical) schools, which all (at a certain point) extract an apophatic nature from their symbolizations of the Reality of God from their scriptures and their own religious experiences and intuitions (Lambden, Background, 37–78). The essential hiddenness of

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God even in the revelation of God’s kabod in biblical times and throughout its diverse religious movements (Quispel, Gnostica, ch. 26); the formless darkness of Ein Sof even in the emanation of the sephirot and the cascading worlds in Jewish kabbalistic thought and intuition (Scholem, Trends, ch. 6); the inaccessibility and unknowability of God’s essence in the early Church Fathers even when revealed by the Trinity (Macquarrie, Worlds, chs. 4–5); the absolute and exclusive transcendence of the oneness (tawhid) of God especially in Suf philosophy and spirituality (Izutsu, Sufsm, 23–35)—all of them fow into Bábi-Bahá’í proclamations of God as absolutely unknowable essence (Lambden, Background, 54–64). I will only highlight two aspects of this Bábi-Bahá’í apophaticism before I return to the ecstatic indifference they engender. First, ontologically and epistemologically the Báb always takes recourse to the hidden meaning of any ontic or semiotic symbolization of the signs of God in any world and creature such that any such sign always is affrmatively engendered by, and subtractively hides, a deeper (batin) reality “beyond-in” itself, creating a cascade of hidden and manifest meanings and (divine) signs and planes of existence (Saiedi, Gate, 58–60). Like Derrida’s différance, this is an infnite process, never coming to an end and not having any beginning, whether horizontally or vertically: it is the basis for the Bábi-Bahá’í assumption of the infnite worlds of God (ibid., 96). We could symbolically rephrase: every ba hides (and is engendered by) a ha, which is, on its own level, another ba hiding another more hidden ha, and so on, indefnitely. Although the higher ha is the horizon of the ba it engenders, it never yields to the ha of the inaccessible Reality “itself” (hahut), which “is/is not” always beyond any ha and ba. Yet, any ba harbors at its heart (qalb) the ha that engendered it as a hidden sign (sirr) of God (ibid., 220–6). In fact, in a horizontal derivation from this movement, one can say with the Báb that the hidden meanings of any religion (batin), as it is part of the divine movements of dispensations in the history of God with the world, will become the manifest meaning (zahir) of the religion or dispensation it engenders, but hiding another depth as of yet unexplored (ibid., 264). Second, similar to the Báb’s Commentary on the Letter Ha (Tafsir-i Ha) and the Commentary on the Mystery of Ha (Tafsir-i-Sirr-i Ha) (ibid., 221), Bahá’u’lláh wrote a commentary on the nameless name—the Commentary on the “He is” (Tafsir-i Hu [Huwa]) (Lambden, Background, 60). As with the concept of hahut, these commentaries are based on the symbolism of the letter ha, implying the inaccessible and unknowable essence (dhat) of Reality/God/Truth (haqq). Similar to the letter combination, ba and ha in BHA’, they refect on the nameless name of Reality in the form of the word huwa (He/It is . . .). As both the Báb (Saiedi, Gate, 221) and Bahá’u’lláh (Lambden, Background, 61) explain, huwa indicates the Reality that cannot be

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completed or complemented with any further characterization. Yet, its two letters ha and waw symbolize also the oscillation between hiddenness (ha) and manifestation (waw), both letters connecting to the transpersonal (and of course transgendered) huwa. “(She/)He/It is . . .” nothing at all we could express. But because of this absoluteness of immanence only “to itself,” “it” (Hu) is also an expression of the indifference of Reality from all that exists. This “reality” of huwa (of hahut) shines in its splendor (kabod/baha’) in all that exists, but without “identity with,” or “difference from,” this All. This Reality/God/Truth “ex-sists” out of “it/self” (its Self) in ecstatic insistence (emanation), but always “exalted beyond and above proximity and remoteness.” Reality (Huwa) “transcendeth such limitations” such that “its” relationship with all existents “knoweth no degrees” and any assumption that “some are near and others are far is to be ascribed to the manifestations themselves” (GL, 43). Moojan Momen has drawn the utmost logical consequence of this Bahá’í apophaticism. Since Bahá’u’lláh states that “no tie of direct intercourse can possibly bind Him to His creatures,” that “He standeth exalted beyond and above all separation and union, all proximity and remoteness” (GL, #148), Momen reasons that Reality is completely removed from any infnitely cascading or cycling or horizontally expanding planes of reality.

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Indeed if we are going to take a “strong” position on relativity, then we must say that a signifer no longer points to a fxed thing signifed (i.e., some underlying transcendental or absolute essence) but only to another signifer which in turn points to another signifer and so forth ad infnitum. Signifcance, therefore, is built up from this pattern or network of relationships rather than being an attempt to uncover some underlying absolute “essence.” (Momen, Relativity, 12)

Similar to the postmodern (deconstructionist, poststructuralist) understanding of the signifcation process as arbitrarily steeped in binary oppositions from which their deconstruction is liberating (Gutting, Philosophy, 293–5), to the (thereby) regained khoric all-relationality, as it were (Caputo, Deconstruction, ch. 3), there is no outside to this horizon; no god “beyond” the world (transcendent emphasis); no inside of an (isolated divine entity or) immanently “grounding” divine in it, a god as Law of this world (immanent emphasis); and no acosmic life of the world in God (pantheistic emphasis), but only absolute surrelativity, subtractive affrmation, ecstatic insistence, the nameless name. In the semiotic rendering of Momen’s quote, we fnd a resonance with the Derridian semiotic of the deconstruction of the “Grand Signifed”— the reiterated conceptual “god” instead of the transcendent God beyond all categories (Gutting, Philosophy, 316)—into the mutuality of signifcations, as

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well as Whitehead’s khora as medium of intercommunication (TDM, 456–7). One might like to pause here—and let this radical relativistic departure from any non-apophatic approach to Reality sink in!

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3. IMPERSONATIONS In light of the apophatic ecstasis and in-sistence of the nameless name of Reality and the radical relativity issuing from such a proclamation, we can now revisit the question of religious pluralism with a new agenda in mind: the absoluteness, all-relationality, and surrelativity of Reality, all in one, as dimensions of the truth of transreligious relativity, insofar as the apophatic gate releases and comprises the two gates of connectivity and infnite worlds. Given this perspective, we need not follow the criticism that was mounted against perennialism that it has disbanded and even oppressively blinded itself to the differences of religious intuitions and experiences and the confictual discourses issuing from them (Ferrer, Theory, ch. 4). It is true that the works of perennialists such as that of Huston Smith, Frithjof Schuon, Aldous Huxley, as well as of more confessionally bound universalists such as Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and Mahatma Gandhi, and maybe even of confessional pluralists and comparativists such as Raymond Panikkar, Keith Ward, and Paul Knitter, may lay (although to a differing degree) the weight in their considerations on the mystical side of religions and pursue a kind of oneness in the movement toward mystical union (unio mystica) that presupposes some kind of essence of all religions (Ellwood, Mysticism, 27–31, 50–3)—and Bahá’í writings and Whitehead would not contradict such efforts (Faber, Religion, 167–82). However, we may not also overlook that even under these irenic conditions profound differences would remain and even become more obvious regarding what this unifcation is like, what it would achieve (if it was to be achieved), and what kind of Reality is achieved by it (Panikkar, Dialogue, 82–5). Two confictual approaches stand out immediately: First, whether the approach to Reality leads to the dissolving of Self into a transpersonal Reality or whether this Reality is in its core personal and, hence, forces mystical unifcation to abandon dreams of oneness and, instead, to seek the most intimate personal relation in mutual love (Ellwood, Mysticism, 97–105; Ramadan, Quest, 205). Is this “essence” closer to monism or theism, Reality or God (Momen, Religion, ch. 8)? And, second, whether Reality is the fullness of Being we are approaching or even dissolve in (or not dissolve, but just realize it was our essence all along) or whether Reality is emptiness, but radiant with the wisdom of compassion—is this “essence” atman or anatta, brahman or sunyata (Abe, Zen, ch. 7)? In any case, we can give the grand perennial view its due by recognizing that what

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it wants to overcome is the reiterated notions and preconceptions that hold us apart and, in the end, always tend to further strive and warfare, exclusion and condemnation, othering and alienation, of great parts of the human world (and maybe even beyond). In light of the apophatic ecstatic Reality, we might give the impressive collections of cross-religious insights the beneft of a doubt that they are not done in the spirit of constructed syncretism, but that they create the healing awareness of prehensive sympathy of transreligious experiences of mutual enlightenment, resonance, and translucency (Panikkar, Dialogue, chs. 5–7); that their perennial aim is a unifcation of all of humanity (and the world beyond) in the mutual recognition of the divine/ultimate source of all of their religious intuitions and experiences (Reat and Perry, Theology, ch. 1) for a world of spiritual and ecological peace (Knitter, Earth, ch. 7); and that they pursue to uncover the apophatic core of all religions as an expression of a profound relativity of all of them in light of the absolute, all-relational, and surrelative indifference of Reality from/of/in everything (Schuon, Unity, ch. 3). Maybe the most impactful attempt made in this direction is John Hick’s “pluralistic thesis” (Hick, Rainbow, ch. 1). I will neither rehearse its ramifcations nor summarize the libraries of comments, responses, and books written in the wake of his thesis, its criticisms and spinoffs, and that Hick addressed in response (Interpretation, xvii–xlii)—criticisms that basically touch on every aspect of the thesis and come from every corner of philosophical (Hewitt, Problems, passim; Quinn and Meeker, Challenge, passim), theological (D’Costa, Theology, passim; Heim, Salvations, ch. 1; Hick, Rainbow, 1–11), and religious studies (Sharma, God, passim; Mavrodes, Polytheism, 147; Smart, Contemplation, 181), and dispute evangelical exclusivism (Plantinga, Hick, 295–8, Eddy, Pluralism, 473–8), postmodern diversity (D’Costa, Objectivity, 94; Newbigin, Gospel, 10), postcolonial (Surin, Critique, 667) and feminist (O’Conner, Sin, 52–4) deconstructions of unifcations, the realism-antirealism debate (Badham, Reader, 51), and logical and epistemological arguments against the soundness of the thesis (McGrath, Challenge, 40; Hick, Challenge, 277–86). I will rather, at this juncture and the rest of this chapter, direct my thoughts to the status of religious pluralism and the pluralistic thesis (Knitter, Myth, passim) within the present considerations on the apophatic dimension of transreligious relativity and certain alternatives presented by Whitehead and process thinkers before evaluating them in light of my own understanding of polyphilic pluralism (Faber, God in the Making, 179–200; TDM, Intermezzo, 2; TBG, Expl., 14). While Hick’s pluralistic thesis itself is generally seen as an alternative to less peaceful and irenic forms of conceptualizing and coping with religious difference that either claim the exclusive truth of one’s one religion (either

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demanding conversion or wielding the hammer of hell against the unrepentant) or at least admit the universal activity of their God/Reality in all (human) beings to their inclusive salvation beyond and despite the full revelation of this redemptive activity in their own (erroneous) religion, not condemning the others, but waiting for God/Reality to reveal or realize “itself” in all beings according to the truth of “my” religion (Knitter, Earth, 25–7). Against both solutions to religious diversity, Hick proposes the truth of all religions in themselves, being genuine ways to salvation on their own terms (Hick and Knitter, Myth, viii). As they are bound together in a unity of Reality (the Real) that in its absolute apophatic nature is inaccessible to all religions, they are, therefore, all equally true and false, caught up regarding their one imagination (Hick, Interpretation, 233–6). I will revisit this aspect of Hick’s thesis later again (ch. 8) setting it in the context of other similar approaches such as Ibn ‘Arabi’s and Bahá’u’lláh’s, which avoid the criticism of being “eliminative” (Griffn, Beardslee, and Holland, Varieties, viii) or a “debilitating relativism” (Keller and Daniell, Process, 16), that was thrown at Hick uncountable times (Griffn, Pluralism, ch. 1), that in his relativism, if there is no reiterated truth (revelation/realization) somewhere, it is really nowhere (Netland, Pluralism, chs. 5–7); hence, that his pluralism is no pluralism at all (Heim, Salvations, ch. 1). Instead, what interests me, here, are the two confictual felds mentioned just above: frst, what this thesis says regarding Reality (the Real) and the approach to “it” as either being personal or non-personal; and, second, whether Reality is to be understood as fullness or emptiness. In Hick’s thesis are enshrined two levels of answers to these questions: On the empirical level of any given religion, we indeed fnd the confictual images either embraced to the exclusion of the respective other, or we fnd some form of mutual inclusion, but in a hierarchical order, setting one over the other (Hick, Interpretation, 246–51). In the frst (exclusivist) case, adherents of a certain religion will experience, intuit, or dogmatically be asked to embrace, Reality either as persona or as impersona (the respective other being either some form of heretical deviation or remnant of ignorance about the truth of the matter); in the second (inclusivist) case, adherents will experience, intuit, or will be asked to follow the path to either ultimately fnd Reality to be a persona or an impersona, while in the meantime (as long as the realization or revelation has not been spiritually gasped in its ultimate nature) passing through the respective other approach (ibid., chs. 15–16). The same would be true for the second confictual feld, of course; one has only to exchange persona and impersona, for instance, with brahman and sunyata (Mizuno, Essentials, 114–6). These are real experiential and intuitive conficts and not merely philosophical constructions, and they are profound (Momen, Religion, 31–41). Examples abound. Just to hint at a few: The confict between monism and

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theism runs deep between doctrinal expressions of Eastern and Western religions and even within them in their diverse disagreements between offcial doctrinal and more intimate experiential discourses, pressing everyone to make a choice for one and against the other, for “us” or “them” (Thatamanil, Immanent Divine, ch. 1). If a personal approach to a divine person is favored, as is often (but not always) the case with offcial Abrahamic doctrinal discourses, then to try to dissolve (or realize the hidden reality of the illusion of) one’s separate self into a transpersonal reality is perceived as reducing the reality of God to a less than personal God and to lose one’s personality to either a less than personal reality or to actually become divinity (identity with the divine) on one’s own—both is here perceived as unenlightened or sinful or extremely heretical (Brainard, Reality, ch. 7). If, on the other hand, an adherent of Advaita Vedanta or diverse Buddhist schools claims ultimate personality for the ultimate Reality of the sanatana dharma or the dharmakaya, they would not be enlightened, but actually ignorant of the illusory nature of any personal separation from the ultimate, which aberration would hinder them permanently to realize their true nature, either in the form of “That art Thou” (tat twam asi), or the “Thy Soul is Universal Spirit” (atman is brahman), or “Thou art of the essence of the Buddha” (tathagatagarbha) (ibid., chs. 5–6). This confict reverberates even beyond classical religious adherence into current forms of holistic, transpersonal, and integral thinking on the monistic end of the spectrum (Visser, Wilber, ch. 2), operating with universal modes of “consciousness” (Teasdale, Heart, ch. 4), and, conversely, not even sparing some holistic or integral Bahá’í writers situating themselves toward the dualistic limit (Medina, Faith, ch. 4), but then operating (and unconsciously co-operating) with (trinitarian) modes of “personhood” instead (McIntosh, Theology, ch. 4). Confrontational discourses between representatives of these religions and schools among themselves or in the chance and unfortunate encounter through migration or through the change of the ruling class are abundant throughout religious history: While Yahweh is intensely personal in relation to God’s people, the kabbalistic ultimate Ein Sof is transpersonal and formless (Matt, Kabbalah, 23–72); while the Trinity enshrines the notion of divine personhood at least on two levels (of the trinitarian persons and the personhood of the one God) and allows only for personal intimacy of love as ultimate aim of unifcation (Thiselton, Theology, ch. 2), Meister Eckhart and many Christian mystics speak of God in terms of transpersonal Godhead (of God beyond God) and of the soul as being non-different from this Godhead (McGinn, Thought, ch. 2); while the oneness of Islamic orthodoxy defned and defended for instance by al-Ghazzali insisted on the absolute transcendence of the (personal, but really transpersonal) oneness (tawhid) of God, Ibn ‘Arabi and many Suf schools adopted a more pantheistic understanding of

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“unity of being” (wahdat al-wujud) as essentially being identical with God (Izutsu, Sufsm, part 1)—although ‘Abdu’l-Bahá with more attentive scholars does not accuse them indiscriminately thereof (SAQ, #82); while Sankara defended the absolute non-dual identity of brahman and the world, which is otherwise just an illusion of separation, many rival schools, such as the Vishishtadvaita Vedanta of Ramanuja, claim a non-dual non-identity between Reality and the world, some reality of Self and Personality (or at least of its characteristics) as different from the mere impersonality of brahman (King, Philosophy, chs. 8–9), and the diverse Krishna bhakti infuenced schools and scriptures (based on the Bhagavat Gita), such as the Bhagavata Purana and the worship of Krishna by Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, claiming Krishna as the Lord himself (svayam bhagavan), as the supreme Personality of the Godhead (BG, 7.7), as such being the ultimate personal Truth (Islam, Sufsm, ch. 3); while Krishna is personally identical to ultimate Reality, the Buddha is ultimately a manifestation of the transpersonal dharma (Parrinder, Avatar, chs. 10–12); while the dharmakaya is ultimately all-relational compassion and self-empty transcendental wisdom (Akira, History, ch. 17), D. T. Suzuki (and, later, other Buddhist sages and scholars) can speak of the dharmakaya as God and personal reality of love (Suzuki, Outlines, ch. 9, Makransky, Buddha, 195); while the Buddha is ultimately not a person (in any restricted sense), in Dzogchen Samantabhadra speaks in the voice of a personal God (Daoud, Rose, ch. 3 and 7). If, however, instead of confictual, a contrastive relativity of approaches is favored, normally a subduction of one side over the other takes place: Either ultimate Reality is in its apophatic nature transpersonal (nirguna brahman), but in its manifestations personal (Ishvara), as in the three personalities (trimurti) of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, who can be independent appearances of Reality, subsuming in the respective communities the characteristics of the others, or be the three major aspects of saguna brahman, namely, creation, providence, and destruction (Sharma, Philosophy, 8–12). Or, conversely, ultimate Reality is personal (bhagavan) and the impersonal aspect is only the power of this divine personality, like the lila of Krishna or the shakti of Shiva (Smart, Religions, 95). In this context, one might also think of shifting contours from impersonal to personal Reality: for instance, the biblical divine Spirit, the ruah Yahweh, as impersonal power (dynamis) of God, became the person of the Holy Spirit (Dunn, Christology, §§18–9); or the wisdom of the Jewish wisdom literature, such as it appears in Proverbs 8 and the Wisdom of Solomon 7, became the personal Logos of the Gospel of John 1 and the person of the Son in the Trinity of later Christian dogma (Hurtado, God, ch. 2). Now, while Hick on the level of empirical religious diversity fnds that no unifcation between these confictual oppositions or contrastive subordinations happens either between or within diverse religions and, hence, that personae

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and impersona are incompatible renderings of the ultimate, on a transcendent level he claims their unity in the ultimately Real (Rainbow, ch. 3) because of its absolutely apophatic nature (Interpretation, 246–51). Both personal and transpersonal “reality” is transformed into expressions of the apophatic Real (Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, 7), which although being neither personal nor transpersonal in the empirical sense is their coincidentia oppositorum in a transcendental sense. This is a fairly classical mystical move (Beierwaltes, Deus, 175–85), not unprecedented and rather accepted as transcategorical unifcation. It was, for instance, performed by Nicolas of Cusa (Flasch, Metaphysik, ch. 2) and many apophatic thinkers—as acknowledged by Western and Eastern tradition (Waldenfels, Nothingness, ch. 4)—insofar as they differentiate God from the Godhead, which is beyond the simple differentiation of God and the world, but also identical with neither of them (Roy, Consciousness, chs. 4–5). Even the already mentioned criticism that this apophatic move might imply a radical relativism was not unprecedented. It was affrmed, for instance, in the kabbalistic understandings of the Godhead (Ein Sof), somehow uniting light and darkness, good and evil (Scholem, Trends, ch. 7); and it was (without ultimate justifcation) denied by Plotinus and Nicolas of Cusa when they transferred the goodness of God to the ultimate Goodness of the apophatic One, but despite the coincidence of opposites excluding darkness and evil (Schroeder, Plotinus, 83–96; Bond, Cusa, ch. 3–84). Yet, two other criticism (among many others in the ensuing discussion) still linger: frst, that the apophatic Real has no connection to its empirical expressions in personae and impersonae and, hence, could be understood as irrelevant—meaning that in such a “transcendental agnosticism” one could just do without it (D’Costa, Hick, 7–8); and, second, that even if there were a connection, the impersonal nature of the Real an sich would be reinforced over the personal since their related articulation is similar if not identical (Griffn, Pluralism, 61), as attested, for instance, by this statement: “The infnite divine reality must pass out into sheer mystery beyond the reach of our knowledge and comprehension and is in this limitless transcendent nirguna, the ultimate Godhead, the God above the God of theism, the Real an sich” (Hick, Interpretation, 237). Hick seems to end in a paradox: the transfer of empirically experienced transpersonal divine reality into the transcendent (trans-empirical) Real, both of which are assumed to be of the same transpersonal “character,” but are actually unknowable per se, and, conversely, the implied inability to know about that transcendent Real anything that would allow us to assume its presence or absence in the empirical personal or transpersonal experiences signifed as divine reality (Hick, Rainbow, ch. 3). At this juncture, this apophatic conundrum seems to be similar to Momen’s characterization of the Bahá’í understanding of hahut (there is no sign of presence or absence of Reality in the world) and Whitehead’s

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point that we cannot know the unknowable, that “the unknown is unknowable” (PR, 4)—and that is that! Yet, at a closer look we will fnd specifc differences between these three positions, important for our further considerations. Related to the three gates of relativity employed in this book (ch. 1) and the three models of addressing divinity in Whitehead’s view (presented above), Hick seems to emphasize the gate of apophaticism and the transcendent model of Whitehead to the extent that the gates of connectivity (ch. 4) and polyphilic multiplicity of worlds (ch. 5) as well as Whitehead’s immanent and pantheistic/panentheistic models become secondary. Whitehead, on the other hand, is suspicious of any naming of the unknowable as it cannot exhibit any connectivity to the web of existence and, hence, emphasizes the connectivity of khora as locus of ultimate Reality, including infnite worlds comprised by khoric relationality (which I will take up in section 5 of this chapter). Bahá’í thought, again, equally emphasizing the gates of apophaticism and connectivity in the nameless name that embraces the ba and the ha in the Tetragrammaton BHA’ and in the ha and the waw in huwa, the unspeakable, yet manifest name of Reality (the unmanifest and the manifest God, hahut and lahut), could be seen to lean toward the pantheistic/panentheistic model of Whitehead, in the sense that the apophatic and relational God is the One “Whose mercy hath encompassed all the worlds, and Whose grace hath embraced all that dwell on earth and in heaven” (PM, #161). In short, in different, but related “impersonations” of Reality (whether personal or impersonal)—that is, transpersonal “impersonations” of personal aspects into Reality or “impersonations” of Reality into immanent personal aspects of its appearance—Hick seems to emphasize the ultimate as the Absolute, Whitehead as the All-Relational, and the Bahá’í revelation as the Surrelative.

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4. THE ULTIMATE MANIFOLD As the three emphases of divine relativity—the Absolute, the All-Relational, and the Surrelative—are aspects of the ecstatic articulation of the nameless name of Reality, we gain from their discussion above already a frst hint regarding the impact of apophaticism on the transreligious relativity of truth: namely, that we cannot articulate Reality in any way such that all three aspects can be united without something escaping. At best, we can hint at Reality only with multiple accesses and changing emphases, and must learn to talk of Reality in terms of an ultimate manifold (TDM, ch. 15). Nevertheless, we can say more about these three aspects of/as/in the manifold in relation to Hick, Whitehead, and Bahá’u’lláh by observing their interaction more closely.

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In an often-repeated mantra, the philosophical crux of Hick’s pluralistic thesis is seen in his adaptation of a Kantian epistemological model to explain the absolute apophaticism of the Real an sich (Interpretation, 241–6). Kant, in trying to unite the rationalistic and empiristic streams of Enlightenment philosophy—after the breakdown of the medieval synthesis of cosmology and Christian theology (Dupré, Essay, chs. 3–5)—and instead of pursuing ontological statements of Cartesian nature, such as the dualistic division of the world into res extensa and res cogitans, physicality and mind, attempted to understand the world-construction of the human mind, which is not a phenomenal (physical), but a noumenal (mental) reality, as an endeavor to grasp phenomenal reality external to mind with categories of the mind (Frost, Teachings, 238–42, 254–8). Yet, caught up in our mental grit, we are unable to reach the reality of the phenomena as such (an sich), which, therefore, must remain unknown, the unknown x (ignotum x) (Harris, Fundamentals, 449–65). Now, Hick uses this differentiation of phenomenal and noumenal reality to explain the difference between the empirical experiences and categorizations of Reality as personal and impersonal to be phenomenal appearances of the ultimately Real, which in its noumenal being an sich must remain an ignotum x. Much criticism has been launched against the logic of this transference of Kant’s scheme (Eddy, Look, 473–8), but what must interest us here is the fact that it seems to imply that we are not only prevented from making any ontological statements about the noumenal Real since we are bound to be stuck in the phenomenal expressions of it. What is more, we cannot know if the phenomenal images of the Real are of the Real at all (Griffn, Reenchantment, 260–77). Again, even if Hick insists on the experience of the Real in the divine phenomena as its expressions (as he has created his model from these experiences, in the frst place), the Absolute is absolutely unknown and, hence, as Whitehead says, unknowable. In this sense, “it” is, eventually, irrelevant at best, a mere imagination at worst. And so are even the divine phenomena: If the noumenal “in them” is absolutely removed from them, they are not divine phenomena (or phenomena of the Real) at all. And even if we could assure ourselves to be confronted with the Real in the divine phenomena, we would not know if it is one Real or a plurality of ultimate realities (Sharma, Path, 198–202). John Cobb and David Griffn have unhinged Hick’s approach from a process perspective on both of these counts (Griffn, Pluralism, chs. 1–2). First, they contrast Hick’s apophaticism with a Whiteheadian panexperientialism for which no unknown is absolutely unknown and, hence, the radically different experiences of Reality must have relevance and value for the signifcation of ultimate Reality. If these experiences show incompatibilities, such as the worship of a divine person and the dissolving into the ultimate transpersonal Real, they are only then valued if they are not dissolved into another neutral

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category that would precisely abstract from what makes these experiences real and important (Griffn, Reenchantment, 282–3). With many other commentators, Griffn views Hick’s Real only as an abstract philosophical construction that imperialistically devalues real religious experiences in their diversity by presenting us (on its one presuppositions) with an illegitimate God’s-eye view devoid of any (cognitive and ontological) content (Griffn, Pluralism, 21–31). Second, in order to take these diverse and contradictory experiences for real as experiences of Reality, and because they are, therefore, (to be taken as) ultimately contradictory, they cannot be deconstructed into one Real an sich, but must refect different ultimate realities. To substantiate this claim, Cobb and Griffn (and many other process thinkers) take refuge in Whitehead’s indeed complex ontology of multiple ultimate realities (ibid., 45–51). The fundamental division between religious ultimate (God) and metaphysical ultimate (Creativity) in Whitehead (Griffn, Reenchantment, ch. 7) becomes the basis for this new proposition of a differential pluralism over against Hick’s identist pluralism, which now appears not as a pluralism at all or only as a pseudo-pluralism (Griffn, Pluralism, 24–9). While God in the differential model represents the ethical force of a divine person one can worship (yet under different names in different religions), as, for instance, Christianity favors, so can Creativity stand, for instance, for the Buddhist experience of ultimate emptiness of the dharmakaya and the all-relationality of pratityasamutpada (ibid., 47–8). They are not the same reality, but related ultimates. Others have added to these propositions of differentiation. Joseph Bracken uses this Whiteheadian differentiation of ultimates to mutually bring to resonate Western mystical and Eastern Hindu and Buddhist traditions of God and Godhead, saguna and nirguna brahman, and the two-truth/reality distinction of Madhyamika Buddhism, relating them to the impersonal activity of Creativity and the personal actuality represented by God, respectively (Matrix, chs. 3–6). Gene Reeves and Marjorie Suchocki have suggested (Griffn, Pluralism, 51n44), and Jay Daniel has asserted, that by (at least) adding the Cosmos as a third ultimate, which for Whitehead is eternal, one could also represent indigenous experiences, for instance of Native American tribal religions, of the sacred Earth (McDaniel, Hope, 87–92). Indeed, both moves by process thinkers (in answering Hick’s model) can be based on Whitehead’s cosmology. But Whitehead’s text also points beyond these usages (TDM, 353–60). First, the Kantian model that Hick utilizes, maybe the most critical departure in Whitehead philosophy: from a dualism of mind and matter to a prehensive view of events in their dipolarity of mental and physical pole by which every world event is always a subject of its experiences of other events, which, in turn, are experiences objectifed and transmitted to new events (Shaviro, Criteria, ch. 3). Hence, in Whitehead

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there is no division in phenomenal and noumenal reality (TDM, 166–70)! Rather, reality is all-relational, but in a process of always restating these relations in rhythms of becoming-subject and becoming-object (Hosinski, Fact, part 1). Even God, in Whitehead’s view, exhibits both poles: God’s primordial nature of Wisdom and God’s consequent nature of Compassion (ch. 5). The metaphysical reality that God and the world “share”—Creativity—is the activity of this rhythmic transformation (GPW, §32). Personal difference (Whitehead’s God) and impersonal indifference (Whitehead’s Creativity) together form what I call the “theopoetic difference” (GPW, 144). They are (in some sense) ultimate; but what points beyond their understanding as different ultimate realities is that, in my analysis (ch. 9), the ultimate All-Relational (khora) names mutual immanence (AI 201) of anything and everything, whether ultimate or not, as the Ultimate in Whitehead’s thought (TDM, chs. 2, 13). Besides this Ultimate appearing as the threefold of God, Creativity, and the World (PR 348) in the process of intricate mutuality (GPW, §§33–4), Whitehead actually develops this manifold from an earlier version (RM, 88–93) in which he had additionally featured the realm of possibilities (eternal objects) as ultimate, but which he later integrates in the primordial nature of God (PR, 31). Yet, so will he also mutually deconstruct Creativity and God later, as neither can exist without the other: God being the primordial instance of Creativity (PR, 7) and Creativity being God’s shared activity beyond Godself (PR, 87), “intercreativity” or a “divine matrix” (GPW, §32). In this earlier fourfold of ultimates, Whitehead calls God (the nontemporal actuality), creativity (the infnite freedom of non-actual temporality), and eternal objects (the nontemporal and non-actual possibilities of becoming) the “formative elements” (RM, 90) of the world of events (the temporal actualities). But, again, they cannot be understood independently as they are intimately related in a fourfold matrix of actuality/non-actuality and temporality/non-temporality. They can hardly count as ultimate in their own right besides their perichoretic coinherence or their mutual immanence, the perikhora of interdependence (Faber, Khora, 105–26). In this sense, as proposed before, Whitehead’s ultimate Reality appears in the ultimate mutuality of the All-Relational (TDM, ch. 8). Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead’s assistant at Harvard and professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, made further important integrations of the Absolute, the All-Relational, and the Surrelative. I will only mention the most pronounced features here: Hartshorne transforms Whitehead’s two natures of God into a series of God-events (consequent nature) connected by a common eternal character (primordial nature) (Hartshorne, Idea, 513–60). Thereby, he is able to understand God (the Ultimate) as a supreme person— with a divine character and concrete history of the reception of the world in an infnite series of connected events expressing this character of goodness

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(Hartshorne, Relativity, 142–7). Hereby, Hartshorne follows Whitehead’s earlier defnition of a person (PR, 34), which is not restricted to human beings, but comprises all societies of events that can form a temporal series of events, insofar as it is connected by an infused character, but is differentiated by the complexity of their respective degrees of experiencing freedom, mentality, and consciousness (GPW, §22). As surprising effect, Hartshorne thereby reverses classical theism (Griffn, Reenchantment, 156–63). While classical theism believed in the impassibility of God (and an only accidental divine relationship to the world), Hartshorne now understands the absoluteness of God’s character as a merely abstract nature of God that is concretized in the God-events that, in turn, comprise the abstract character (Hartshorne, Omnipotence, ch. 1). The Absolute is not ultimate Reality, but an abstraction from the All-Relational (Hartshorne, Idea, 525–35). Hartshorne puts it this way: “The supreme in its total concrete reality will be the supereminent case of relativity, the Surrelative, just as, in its abstract character it will be the supereminent case of nonrelativity—not only absolute, but the absolute” (Relativity, 76). Furthermore, since the God-events prehensively include all that happens in the world, Hartshorne agrees with “orthodox Hinduism that the supreme being must be all-inclusive” (ibid.). For this divine inclusiveness, he reintroduces the term “panentheism” for this Whiteheadian position (ibid., 88–92). In our context, Hartshorne’s Whiteheadian transformation carries two insights regarding ultimate relativity: First, relativity is not excluded from absoluteness nor is it a matter of the absence, the reduction, or deviation from the absolute. Rather relativity is the divine horizon that includes the absolute as does life include character and the concrete includes abstraction (ibid., 79–83). Second, divine relativity is relative between God-events so that God is always surpassing God (one event the other). God is always greater than God. God’s Becoming is always more inclusive than God’s Being. That is, God is surrelative (ibid., 76–7), not in the sense that the hidden (apophatic) divine dimension is greater than the manifest (polyphilic) dimension, but that God with experiences of the world in one event is greater than God without or before these experiences. Whitehead himself was ambivalent on the question whether and to what extent to use personal and/or transpersonal renderings of the ultimate, valuing their respective experiences and conceptualizations without integrating them into one systematic account (RM, 62). Yet, he did also not take refuge in the recourse to the apophatic Absolute, which he considered beyond any ability to be addressed (SMW, 18). His position is paradoxical insofar as he avoids Hartshorne’s move to understand God as a society of events or a person in his own earlier technical sense (Johnson, Conversations, 4–10), but he still ascribes divine and personal attribute to God as events such as wisdom, compassion, love, justice, suffering, joy, engagement, and persuasion (PR,

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341–51; AI, 295–6). In his last revisiting of the question in his fnal public lecture “Immortality,” delivered in 1941, he leaves us with an account of a profoundly relativistic nature, valuing contrary religious experiences, such as that of Buddhism and Christianity—as he had deemed these religions the paradigmatic universal religions of today (RM, 139)—and with a mood of resignation (of our ability to rationally close the system upon them) and trust in the Good and its world of value (in the relative truth of his account).

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The world of Value exhibits the essential unifcation of the Universe. Thus while it exhibits the immortal side of the many persons, it also involves the unifcation of personality. (This is the concept of God. But not the God of the learned tradition of Christian Theology, nor is it the diffused God of Hindu Buddhist tradition. The concept lies somewhere between the two.) [God] is the intangible fact at the base of fnite existence. (Imm, 694)

Bahá’í scholars in general do not know of Whitehead (with the exception of a few philosophical and educational writers), but are fundamentally sympathetic to Hick’s transcendent apophatic unity of the empirical personae and impersonae (as well as that of the fullness and emptiness) of Reality as expression of their own understanding of the Bahá’í writings and their enshrined apophatic-polyphilic mystery (Fazel, Dialogue, 137–52). Given the present considerations, this is only partly justifed, namely, with regard to the apophatic absoluteness of Reality beyond any ascription of characteristics (Momen, Relativism/Metaphysics, 13). However, the embrace of Hick’s model is not justifed with regard to the all-relational immanence of absolute Reality, which cannot be derived within the Kantian restrictions of Hick’s thesis (Griffn, Reenchantment, 282–4). When such divine relationality is emphatically confrmed by Bahá’í commentators, not only leading to a “perspective pluralism” but even, in difference from Hick, to the affrmation of the reciprocity of the apophatic and receptive nature of Reality in its manifestations in relation to the world of becoming (May, Principle, 23), this twist is, in fact, closer to the cycle of love gleaned from Whitehead (ch. 5). It is only to one’s own peril to cling to, or even adopt, the Kantian model (with its dichotomous binaries, mutually isolating subject and object, world and mind, God and the world) that Hick employs and that some Bahá’í scholars in turn use to explain the paradoxical congruence of both the apophatic and polyphilic movements of Reality found in the Bahá’í writings (ibid., 20–5)—instead of experimenting with Whitehead’s prehensive model of experience (with its mutually connecting harmonization of subject and object, world and mind, God and the world) (Griffn, Pluralism, 43). The appropriation of Hick is even more misguided, if it misunderstands Hick’s ultimately Real not as utterly apophatic (Rainbow, ch. 3), but as reiterative—the claim

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that Hick insists or generates one functionally usable ultimate Reality (Griffn, Reenchantment, 273–7). Such a move would embrace a somewhat simplifed approach to the oneness of God (for instance, in the image of the one sun) to which one merely needs to attach an aspective diversity or perspective plurality of religious experiences (the many sunbeams) as if they were on the same level of being and cognition as the apophatic One. It would have failed to recognize the frewall of the apophatic coincidentia oppositorum that hinders any simple appropriation of divine oneness and would not give due attention to the actual value of the diversity of religious experiences (TDM, chs. 2–3). What is more, such a simplifcation clearly contradicts Bahá’u’lláh’s statement (mentioned above) that Reality must, in a movement of unknowing, only be hinted at to ecstatically “ex-sist” beyond both multiplicity and oneness, proximity and distance. In this chapter, I venture to sketch an alternative to the limitation that the Kantian implications that Hick’s model imposes on the pluralistic Bahá’í universe. Because despite its appreciation of religious pluralism, such an appropriation may fall short of the radicalism of the apophatic-polyphilic nature of Reality/God expressed by the Bahá’í writings and Whitehead, namely, as that of the ex-statically in-sisting of Reality in subtractive affrmation of/in/as multiplicity (TDM, chs. 3, 6, 8). Moojan Momen has collected, commented on, and systematized an impressive variety of Bahá’í scriptural utterances that fall down on all of the sides explored above, whether the personal or impersonal ultimate, theistic or monistic accounts (Momen, God, passim)—and I will revisit the “non-dual duality” of some of these accounts in the next chapters. In any case, his research shows that the Bahá’í writings—in difference from many religions, religious traditions, or theological and philosophical schools—do neither exclude one side for the other (as if the experience and concept of God must be only truly molded in personal or impersonal terms) or favor one side over the other (as if the impersonal God is more ultimate than the personal or vice versa). However, what I want to emphasize in the current context is this: that the apophatic Absolute of which no sign can be detected or made to indicate “its” presence or absence (as documented earlier) is not, as in Hick, the outcome of a philosophical speculation with a God’s-eye view that in typical Western hubris illegitimately occupies the place of concrete religious experiences and empties their differentiated, regionalized, and concrete value as experiences, as was countered by many critics to Hick’s proposal (Netland, Pluralism, ch. 7). Rather, Bahá’í apophaticism arose from a religious experience and the reception of the revelation of a non-Western fgure, Bahá’u’lláh, who made this non-dualistic, non-binary view central to his proclamation of the nature of God/Reality/Truth (al-haqq). None of the related criticisms of the apophatic Real (as manifest in personae and impersonae) launched against Hick apply! What is more, contrary to Hick, Bahá’í scripture

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pronounces the apophatic Absolute (hahut) to be the active condition of (and within) every true revelation or divine manifestation (lahut), which symbolizes the All-Relational (from lahut cascading into infnite worlds of differentiation) and that by bridging the ha and the ba manifests the indifference of unmanifest and manifest divinity such that one must consider “Him Who is the Manifestation of God and Him Who is the invisible, the inaccessible, the unknowable Essence as one and the same” (GL, #84). Yet, since the manifest Reality immanently realizes “in itself” the apophatic Absolute, in “its” immanence “to itself” being “its” Self, the Manifest ex-sists always already in apophatic ecstasis beyond “it/self” (its Self). As such, “its” Self is “it/self” present in all worlds in “its” Self’s own apophatic absoluteness (ch. 7), again being the presence of the apophatic absolute Reality in everything (Diessner, Psyche, ch. 1). Bahá’u’lláh proclaims the Absolute, the All-Relational, and the Surrelative, for instance, in this formulation: “let the tidings of the revelation of Thine incorruptible Essence bring me joy, O Thou Who art the most manifest of the manifest and the most hidden of the hidden” (GL, #155)! Being both exclusive and inclusive divine unity (tawhid), Reality is apophatic and polyphilic at the same time, that is, this Reality indicates the all-comprising, but always (reminding of Hartshorne) greater Surrelative—in at least three ways: First, in “its” apophatic subtraction, all is comprised by “it,” but “it” remains, at the same time, always beyond any ascription of anything to “it.” Second, when the Báb says that Reality is (at once) “the Exalted, the Allloving” (SWB, 178), the Absolute is the All-Relational. Since “its” very Being manifests (in experiences thereof), “its” Manifestation demonstrates this Absolute to be moved by love and beauty (Brown, Beginning, 24)— the only movements that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in his Commentary on the Islamic Tradition “I was a Hidden Treasure,” conceded of the Absolute in itself (Momen, God, 23). Not only is the Absolute all-relationally immanent in all (deeper than their own existence). Paradoxically, by “its” apophatic nature “it” binds everything that exists in all worlds together without closure in themselves, that is, not hermetically excluding (or being excluded by) the apophatic Absolute, but being in everything the Apophatic that drives the ecstatic movement of everything beyond oneself and anything existing at all (into divine nothingness). Ultimate Reality, here, is surrelative: not only by comprising all relationships in subtractive affrmation but also by being the innermost apophatic Reality—as in Nicolas of Cusa’s manifestation of God as maximum and minimum (Bond, Cusa, 22–7), “contracted” in everything as its openness beyond itself, its world, in fact, all existence. Third, because the Absolute manifests itself never absolutely, but all-relatively (which is the Bahá’í claim), that is, within and for all-relationality and as the Surrelative, the presence of the Apophatic in the world appears precisely in a manifold of

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revelations and manifestations. This is the basis for the proclamation of, and becoming event (with this new transcendental horizon) in, Bahá’u’lláh that all religious are true religions (GL, ##34, 111).

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5. EMANATIONS, INSISTENCE A little detour into Bahá’í symbolism is needed at this juncture in order to gain a greater understanding of the deeply enshrined commitment to the pervasive apophatic-polyphilic transitions in the Bahá’í understanding of divine relativity. By the invention of the Báb and the confrmation of Bahá’u’lláh, Bahá’í’s follow their own religious calendar, the “new, the wondrous” (badi‘) calendar (Keil, Time, ch. 4). In it is theologically engraved the apophatic-polyphilic character of Bahá’í revelation of the ultimate as absolute, all-relational, and surrelative Reality. It is based on the number nineteen, in the Abjad system (of the transformation of numeral values of Arabic letters of certain words into words of equal numeral value) and the Islamic “science of numbers” (Smith, Religions, 37) symbolizing “unity” (vahid). A Badi‘ calendar year comprises nineteen months consisting of nineteen days each (19 × 19 = 361) equaling the Abjad number of “all things” (kullu shay’) (Saiedi, Gate, 261). The additional intercalary days completing a full solar year are the “Days of Ha” (ayam-i ha), with ha (as already mentioned) symbolizing the Absolute (hahut). In symbolic transference, the Báb also used these numeral values and their associated meanings to structure the cascading impact of his revelation onto the world when he understood it (revelation/year) to grow from the frst unity (vahid) to universal relevance for everything (kullu shay’) (ibid., ch. 5). Hence, this frst manifestation of Bábi revelation consisted of nineteen companions, the frst disciples of the Báb. Without their acceptance, the Báb said, revelation will not manifest (DB, ch. 3). Yet, one will note that he included himself in this unit with eighteen companions—eighteen being the Abjad number of al-hayy, the name of God, the Living. This indicates that the Báb, who declared himself to be the eschatological Promised One of Islam—the Ariser (the Qa’im) who will bring justice and (in some renditions) even a new revelation (Amanat, Resurrection, ch. 4)—included himself in the manifold unity of revelation (vahid), which in polyphilic radiance emanates and embraces all things (kullu shay’) (Amanat, Resurrection, 192). In apophaticpolyphilic unity, the Báb is the one source of the eighteen Letters of the Living (hurufu’l-hayy) (Saiedi, Gate, 268). Besides these and many other, deeper layers of meaning given to the number nineteen and confrming this symbolism (Keil, Time, 96–104), I will only mention one relevant motif: As attested by the Báb’s Tafsir-i Bismillah (Commentary on the Bismillah), nineteen represents the number of the letters of the

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frst verse of the Qur’an (“In the Name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate”)—which the Báb equates with the nineteen holy fgures of Shi‘i Islam (Amanat, Resurrection, 191) as cosmological principles (Saiedi, Gate, 3)—of which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (following several old Islamic Hadiths) says that it includes the whole of the Qur’an (the Word of God) as the frst word (bism) includes the whole verse; that the frst letter (ba) includes the frst word as the point under the letter ba (Arabic: ba is written like a boat with a point positioned right under it) includes the ba (Savi, Summit, 22–3, 257)—and so it is from this Primal Point (nuqti-yi ula), the Manifestation of Godself (in the person of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh), that all things (kullu shay’) fow and mirror it (Saiedi, Gate, 81, 100). In addition, it is reported that the prophet Muhammad (according to the Hadith of Tirmidhi), whenever he was in great diffculty, invoked God with the names “Oh Everliving, Oh Self-Subsisting” (ya hayyu, ya qayyum). And in the traditional Islamic list of the most beautiful names of God (asma Allah al-husna), these two names (Hayy and Qayyum) follow one another (as number 63 and number 64) (Savi, Summit, 19–20). Bahá’u’lláh accepted the prediction of the Shaykhi leader Sayyid Kazim Rashti—the messianic school of Shi‘ism from which the frst companions of the Báb came forth (Smith, Religions, 8–13)—that “after the Qa’im the Qayyum will be made manifest” (DB, 41), referring to the two messianic advents of the Báb, the Qa’im, and Bahá’u’lláh, the Qayyum, that is, the eschatological advent of the SelfSubsisting Reality itself (Lambden, Qa’im, passim). It is clear from these connections that the Manifestation of apophatic Reality (Qayyum) completes the polyphilic unity (vahid=19) of the Everliving (hayy=18) and transcends it, at the same time, like the Qayyum transcends the Qa’im (Saiedi, Logos, 188). In other words: All things are emanations of unity and unity is a polyphilic emanation of apophatic Reality. By including the apophatic ha (Abjad number=5), also the Abjad number of the name of the Báb (Saiedi, Gate, 221–4), itself into the calendar, as the Days of Ha (ayyam-i ha), but being outside of all things (kullu shay’=361), apophatic Reality is remembered as transcendent origin and contrastive completion of the Badi‘ year (365/6) (Keil, Time, 105–11); and every New Year begins with the New Day (naw ruz) (ibid., 87), which symbolizes the new revelation (Saiedi, Gate, 327–9). As arranged by the Báb, the nineteen months of the Badi‘ calendar carry divine names (Keil, Time, 103). The last month, after the Days of Ha (ayyam-i ha), has the name of God, the Most Exalted, the Lofty (al-‘ala), which in Bahá’u’lláh’s many exhortations to the Báb signifes, because of his Name ‘Ali Muhammad Shirazi (the frst name relating to the son-in-law of Muhammad and the Shi‘i Imam), the dispensation of the Báb. The frst month of the New Year of the Badi‘ Calendar, however, carries the name Glory, Splendor (al-bahá’), the name of Bahá’u’lláh

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(Lambden, Word, 19–42). Already in the Báb’s new calendar, the frst month of Glory was designated to the Promised One (of his own dispensation), the One Whom God Will Make Manifest, which Bahá’u’lláh saw fulflled in his name (the Báb, Persian Bayan, Vahid 5, ch. 3). On the deeper level of this symbolization, the transition from ‘ala to bahá’ also indicates the manifestation of the Day from the hiddenness of the Holy Night as the birth of a new Manifestation/Revelation/Creation—so that a Bahá’í day always begins with the night (Keil, Time, 115–24)—from which apophatic revelation arises in polyphilic manifestation, ultimately emanating from the transcendent ha (the Days of Ha) into the ba (BHA’) of new creation.

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Happy the one who entereth upon the frst day of the month of Bahá, the day which God hath consecrated to this Great Name. And blessed be he who evidenceth on this day the bounties that God hath bestowed upon him; he, verily, is of those who show forth thanks to God through actions betokening the Lord’s munifcence which hath encompassed all the worlds. Say: This day, verily, is the crown of all the months and the source thereof, the day on which the breath of life is wafted over all created things. (KA, ¶111)

Gathering again to the central thought, here: our theme is polyphilic emanation. Emanation, the release of the manifold from the apophatic One, is often controversially discussed (especially in Christian theological contexts) as opposed to creation (Bonting, Creation, 64, 84–5). This is not intended here (SAQ, ##53–4). What is meant is (however it may be conceptualized in different religious traditions and schools of thought) the overfowing of apophatic Goodness, the movement of the bonum diffusivum sui (already discussed) into existence as the traditional expression of polyphilic emanation: of the Good that loves the manifold it fows into (GPW, §§21, 27, 40). Since the Good “is/is not” beyond existence and nonexistence, that is, cannot be grasped in oppositional categories of being or non-being, it is, with Bahá’u’lláh, neither one nor many, neither close nor far, neither identical with nor different from anything of which it is the apophatic origin. This apophatic Reality is precisely apophatic by being indifferent from all existence (GPW, §40). This is what I mean when I say that the Absolute does not exist, but in-sists in everything (Faber, De-Ontologizing God, 222–4), but also in love to its manifold emanations insists on the manifold from which it is indifferent (TDM, 140). This was already the profound insight of Plotinus: that the transcendent One “is/is not” the All or, differently: the apophatic One “is not different from and, hence, insists in” the All-One (GPW, 260). Plotinus’s famous judgment will occupy philosophical discussions over the centuries: “The One is all things and no one of them; the source of all things is not all things; all things are its possession” (Enneads 5.2.1)—and we will

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return to Bahá’u’lláh’s rendering of this apophatic-polyphilic paradox in the next chapter. The same “equation” was followed by mystical thinkers throughout diverse religious traditions, but was often (by despisers) misunderstood as pantheism (not in Whitehead’s, but in Spinoza’s sense). In its apophatic-polyphilic meaning, however, it was always accompanied by its own fourfold logic we fnd, for instance, in Nagarjuna, Nicolas of Cusa, and Bahá’u’lláh: namely, that the One is, is not, is and is not, and neither is nor is not the All. Even if with different intentions—Nagarjuna might have demonstrated the futility of all concepts, even the “equation” of Reality with the All (Waldenfels, Nothingness, ch. 2); Cusa might have liked to substantialize the meaningfulness of this “equation” (Bond, Cusa, 19–55)—in any case, Bahá’u’lláh, in his mystical writings, intended the experimental ecstasis from all knowledge that in the search of the wayfarer (the lover of God) would hold us back from fnding this apophatic Reality. Such is the state of the wayfarers in this Valley [of Knowledge]; but the people of the Valleys above this see the end and the beginning as one; nay, they see neither beginning nor end, and witness neither “frst” nor “last.” Nay rather, the denizens of the undying city, who dwell in the green garden land, see not even “neither frst nor last”; they fy from all that is frst, and repulse all that is last. For these have passed over the worlds of names, and fed beyond the worlds of attributes as swift as lightning. Thus is it said: “Absolute Unity excludeth all attributes.” And they have made their dwelling place in the shadow of the Essence. (SV, 24)

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Only in having fed all distinctions and even the clinging to any divine name and attribute, we encounter the nameless name: “Thy Name that hath caused to surge within every drop the oceans of Thy loving-kindness and mercy, and to shine within every atom the luminaries of Thy bountiful blessings and favors” (PM, #97). We also realize that “it” in-sists in us and in everything. Nay, whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth is a direct evidence of the revelation within it of the attributes and names of God, inasmuch as within every atom are enshrined the signs that bear eloquent testimony to the revelation of that most great Light. Methinks, but for the potency of that revelation, no being could ever exist. How resplendent the luminaries of knowledge that shine in an atom, and how vast the oceans of wisdom that surge within a drop! (KI, 100)

The mystical “equation” of apophatic and polyphilic movement as oscillation, as a cycle of love, is what I have called the in/difference of ultimate Reality and the manifold reality of all things: it indicates that Reality is indifferent

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from any reality (neither identical with nor different from it) and, since it is “nothing” (that could be said or substantialized as names and attributes of it), in-sists on and (only) in difference (Faber, De-Ontologizing God, 218–22; TDM, ch. 12). Or with Plotinus: The One “seeks nothing, has nothing, and needs nothing, overfows, as it were, and its superabundance produces and makes something other than itself” (Enneads 5.5.7). In other words: In/different Reality “is/is not” the Absolute insofar as “it” in-sists on and in the All as the All-Relational, insofar as “it” in/differentiates (differentiates and indifferentiates) “itself” (“its” Self) in the absolutely relative Surrelative (GPW 259; TDM, 425; TBG, Expl. 15–16). Maybe the most radical apophatic insertion of the in/difference of apophatic Reality from the polyphilic (and as such constituted) connectivity (as well as multiplicity of the worlds) and of the in-sistence of Reality as polyphilic immanence in all the worlds in Whitehead’s thought leads us back to the very passage that introduced the gate of connectivity at the beginning of the book (ch. 1) and appeared earlier in this chapter (section 3) as negation of any Beyond beyond relationality in this passage of Process and Reality, and, it seems, against his intention (at this point), namely, that

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what does not . . . communicate is unknowable, and the unknowable is unknown; and so this universality defned by ‘communication’ can suffce. This doctrine of necessity in universality means that there is an essence to the universe which forbids relationships beyond itself, as a violation of its rationality. (PR, 4)

Whitehead’s direct intention is, as already mentioned earlier, the emphasis on relationality and the universality of connectivity that cannot be pierced by “anything,” at least anything that can be known or named at all, because such an “intervention” would be either already relational and, hence, would have become part of the communication that any claim of “a Beyond” would have negated as its very condition for such a claim to make sense at all; or we would be left with a bad metaphysical rendering of “transcendentalizing” something of this world or in a mode of conception referring to the world into a fantastic realm “beyond” the world (including the multiplicity of worlds): we would be left with an arbitrary disconnection (PR, 6) and a patriarchal notion of an imperator who is independent from the world, but reigns into it. This conception of the God Beyond, so Whitehead, “was a sublimation from its barbaric origin. He stood in the same relation to the whole World as early Egyptian or Mesopotamian kings stood to their subject populations.” What follows is also a bad mysticism: the imagination of the “unifcation” with this “God Beyond,” which just leaves the “worst of a gulf” (AI, 169) of an arbitrarily disconnected communication between something and something else. In Kant’s sense of differentiating between a bad metaphysics of

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“transcendence,” in which something categorical is just elevated beyond the world, and of a “transcendental” categorization of conditions of knowing, which is immanent to the mind, Whitehead disavows any such simplifcation of theistic and mystical fantasies. Instead, Whitehead draws the consequence that the khoric space of communication (AI, 134) is formless and open to all events taking place in it, but being in its own infnity conditioned by the “non-boundary boundary” (Epilogue) of nothing “being” beyond connectivity, only the absolutely unknowable and unknown. And yet, read in light of the Bahá’í Faith’s and virtually all of the world’s religious traditions in their confession of ultimate apophaticism regarding Reality/God, we may interpret Whitehead’s “boundary” of unknowability in a different way. In this rendering, inspired by the radical assertion of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that there is no connection between Reality and the world of connectivity (GL, #1; Brown, Discussion, 22–7), “except” the Manifestations (the Primal Will, Mind, Word, Spirit), which I will—with far-reaching implications for Whitehead’s concept of God in relation to the threefold and fvefold worlds (ch. 5)—talk up in the next chapter (SAQ, ##53–4), there is really no “reality” beyond interconnectivity (khora), “except” mutual immanence itself (ch. 4). But since mutual immanence is neither transcendent as “another” reality, nor immanent to anything, as all is immanent in one another, we gain two insights from this rendering. On the one hand, mutual immanence regarding the realm of connectivity is ultimate as connectivity. This understanding can, in transreligious connectivity, be befttingly related to the Buddhist understanding of pratitya-samutpada, the non-substantiality of anything and the mutual interrelationality of everything (PR, 3), as well as the world of existence as the body of the Buddha, as dharmadhatu, and the true inclusive beyond of the reality of the Buddha, the dharmakaya (ch. 7). On the other hand, the same insight also highlights ultimate Reality to be nothing at all (not something “transcendentalized”) or absolute nothingness (Waldenfels, Nothingness, 40–6), its ultimate wisdom being not only absolute emptiness of self-existence (substantiality in the image of beings), as in Plotinus, nothing “claiming” for “itself” (Enneads 5.5.7), but being different from anything, that is, connectivity itself, by being indifferent from it. Hence, it is, as already mentioned, precisely this in/difference in which we can fnd the absolutely apophatic Reality to be polyphilic: that the difference of in/difference of the unknowable, unknown, nameless Reality is to in-ist (only) on and “in difference” (Faber, De-Ontologizing God, 228–33). What follows from this apophatic-polyphilic move is, therefore, not pantheism, for which God is identical to the connectivity of the world—in other words, that God and khora are the same—but a “transpantheism,” a complex in/differentiation between God and the world (SMW 178; PR 348; GPW, §§25–32, 40; TDM, ch. 14). Whitehead, in the last phase of his life,

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had come to this conclusion, but from the venture point of the (ontological, cosmological, and epistemological) ultimacy of mutual immanence. In his last lecture “Immortality,” he refgures his understanding of ultimate multiplicity of Reality in the form of one concrete universe (which is always the concrete relational Process itself) that can only abstractly be differentiated into two worlds: the world of creativity and the world of value. Both worlds, the multiplicities of actualities (events, nexuses, societies, persons, organisms, worlds) and values (possibilities in the process of valuation) are expressive of the two related ultimates of Creativity (the movement of becoming) and God (the movement of valuation), both comprising these multiplicities (Faber, De-Ontologizing God, 219–21). But in Whitehead’s last rendition, all of them (the dual twofold or the fourfold) are mutually immanent to one another, even so much that not only none of them can “exist” without the other (GPW, 142) but also that they in-sist in one another so that they cannot even be articulated for themselves without recourse to the other ultimate/world (Imm., 684–7). For instance, when Whitehead says that God is the “intangible fact at the base of fnite existence” (quoted above), he uses the “characteristics” (Imm., 685) of the world of creativity/actuality/facts to articulate the reality of the world of value/possibility/ virtuality. Conversely, when Whitehead describes creative events/facts as “realized values” (Imm., 688), he uses the “characteristics” of the world of value to articulate the reality of the world of creativity. Nothing has meaning apart from the other and all is an abstraction from the Universe, which is nothing except this mutuality naming Reality in-sisting in and as this manifold in mutuality (Faber, Multiplicity, 196–9). However, in the mutual concretization (processual relationality or relational processuality) of this ultimate multiplicity—not forgetting that “multiplicity” means unity and many-ness, both being related in folds (pli) (TDM, 125)—something like the mystical in/difference (hinted at by Nagarjuna, Meister Eckhart, Nicolas of Cusa, John Scotus Eriugena, and Ibn ‘Arabi, and being the implication of Plotinus’ work), expressing the ecstatic apophatic unity of difference and non-difference, lingers (Sells, Languages, ch. 1; TDM, ch. 13): that mutual immanence in-sists in itself—to alliterate Deleuze’s and Guattari’s formulation of the “immanence to itself” of the plane of immanence again (Philosophy, ch. 2)—and can, therefore, not be expressed other than as the manifold “it” in-sists on and in. Yet, because “it” is not immanent to anything but “it/self,” it is nothing but “it/self” as mutual immanence, which means (paradoxically): it cannot be “its” Self if “it” is nothing but “it/self” (TDM, ch. 8). Reality (as mutual immanence) must, therefore, (ecstatically) ex-sist beyond itself to in-sist in itself and can only in-sist as itself if it exsists not only as “itself” but also always (in love and goodness) overfows

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into “it/self” (Sells, Languages, 27). Being (not) other than “itself,” it is “its” Self beyond “itself.” In the words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: The sun is the sun because of its rays, because of its heat. Were we to conceive of a time when there was a sun without heat and light, it would imply that there had been no sun at all and that it became the sun afterward. So, likewise, if we say there was a time when God had no creation or created beings, a time when there were no recipients of His bounties and that His names and attributes had not been manifested, this would be equivalent to a complete denial of Divinity, for it would mean that Divinity is accidental. (PUP, #139)

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6. POLYPHILIC PLURALISM Finally, we are led back to the question of how in light of the present considerations to approach religious pluralism (Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, chs. 8–9). With and beyond John Hick, and with Whitehead and Bahá’u’lláh, religious pluralism can, in my view, be no less than some form of transreligious pluralism (ch. 5) or, in my own terminology, of polyphilic pluralism (TDM, Intermezzo II). I have, at this point, no intention of rehearsing the quarrels between models of religious exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism (Race, Christians, 71–98) once again (literature abounds), or of presenting even more alternative models generated over the last decades—such as the “holistic pluralism” of Kaplan (Paths, ch. 4); or the “orientational pluralism” of Rescher (Pluralism, ch. 6); or the “democratic pluralism” of Connolly (Pluralism, ch. 3); or the “dialogical pluralism” of Panikkar (Dialogue, ch. 2); or the “liberative pluralism” of Knitter (Earth, chs. 4–5); or the pluralism of an “interreligious theology” (Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, part 2)—of which I consider Griffn’s and Cobb’s Whiteheadian process model of “differential pluralism” as one of the most sophisticated (Griffn, Pluralism, chs. 1–2). I will also avoid suggesting a defnitive answer to the “right” form of pluralism, although in general I consider pluralism, as I have tried to demonstrate, always to be “deeper” than exclusivism and inclusivism (Knitter, Theologies, parts 1–2; Myth, part 1). Such an answer would, nevertheless, always be impossible without further refection on the vast confictual felds hindering transreligious peace—something with which the next three chapters will be concerned. Instead, I will now, at the end of this chapter (and of the last three chapters), collect the negative and positive criteria for discernment of approaches to religious pluralism already implicitly developed in my current considerations and put forward polyphilic pluralism as my best proposition for the discussion based on Whitehead’s thought, the Bahá’í revelation, and my

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own rendering of the insistence end in/difference of apophatic Reality. I will differentiate negative from positive criteria for the truth of transreligious relativity and the implied proposition that religious truth itself must be relative, as religious pluralism claims, and not absolute, as religious exclusivism and inclusivism are inclined to believe and which is still variously part of the concrete religious convictions of diverse religious traditions. The negative criteria name something that must become absent, if transreligious relativistic truth was allowed to come forth. First, religious violence must disappear, something made possible by a profound reorientation of religions toward a peace or peace-making proposition that abstains from any motivation that could incite pressure on other religions, or perceptions and conceptions of the truth of any religion within or without any specifc tradition or school. This criterion is based on the fundamental assumption that the dream of religious and universal peace, which many religions are urging anyone to consider a profound motivation for their very existence and the eschatological aim of all of humanity and of the whole world, is the nonnegotiable expression of ultimate Reality itself. God does not want war or strife! Full stop. Both Whitehead and Bahá’u’lláh agree on this condition for salvation—and I will return again to it later (ch. 9). Second, if a comprehensive peace demands a profound unity between religions—as Hans Küng has urged us to see (Ethics, 91–153) and the World Parliament of Religions 1993 has inscribed in its Charta Toward a Global Ethic (Teasdale, Heart, 9), which has received multireligious affrmative responses (Swidler, Life, passim)—it cannot just exhaust itself in the absence of violence, but must be based on the affrmation of, and deeper insight into, the Goodness of Reality that no religion is able to avoid in some ultimate sense (even if it believes in some complicated implications generated by mystical explications of the coincidentia oppositorum). If, as John Leslie proposes, the Good is that which ought to be, and hence is the ultimate reason for existence (Immortality, 2), and, as Whitehead insists, is even the limitation of Godself (RM, 152–3), then there can be no goodness without concrete limitation of good processes of valuations and events (facts) of realized values. But concreteness needs multiplicity of diversifcation and infnite renewal of values and valuations (Imm., 687). If we accept the bonum diffusivum sui, we also affrm that Reality wants to overfow into an infnite manifold of particular realizations of values of Goodness. Polyphilia: God loves the manifold! Hence, the truths of processes of valuation must be relative to Goodness and relational to one another, while this Goodness of Reality itself must be apophatic (and not a reiterated “good” to be manipulated as a commodity), only then allowing for the polyphilic relativity of its infnite realizations (which will inevitably also imply alternatives, contrasts, and conficts mitigated by the connectivity of and multiplicity of worlds).

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Third, religions must want, within and without, to avoid a process of simplifcation and de-sophistication, as it were, that would deprive the sensitivity of their basic religious intuitions and experiences (RM, 144), around which they form their identity through space (as community) and time (as history), such that they would lose their very sensitivity (prehensibility) that allowed them to arise in the frst place (Momen, Religion, ch. 12). Instead of falling into apathy and anesthesia, religions must seek such harmonizations of their experiences in confictual situations of their life (individually and collectively, within and without) that will not hinder, but heighten the intensity of their perceptivity of the ultimate Reality they mean to express (Faber, Democracy, 204). With Whitehead, we can say that if the harmony of the united manifold and intensity of sensibility to all the (spiritual and physical, mental and social, imaginative and inquisitive) worlds increases together, we leave a greater impression of divine Reality as a legacy for ourselves, our religious communities, and for the world to explore (RM, 159). God wants the world to mirror divine harmony and intensity (GPW, 74). Hence, no religious truth can be considered divine if it is not ever more imitating unconditionally the divine processes of harmonization and intensifcation with/in the world, which then again (and necessarily so) is always (also) mirrored in the harmony and intensity of the manifold of religious intuitions, experiences, and truths. Be transreligious! Fourth, the imperative of considering truth as transreligious relativity must avoid appearing as mere construction of the mind of some privileged philosophers or theologians, expressing more their social location in late-modern Western, postcolonial hegemony. It should rather be found to be a religious principle that has arisen from deep religious convictions and is practiced as a religious imperative in the sensitivity to the revelation of ultimate Reality itself (Medina, Faith, ch. 4). With the lens of the Bahá’í Faith (but by no means excluding other examples of similar sympathetic voices in other religious traditions), we will fnd, here, that a genuine religion exhibits this imperative of the truth of transreligious relativity. Not from an abstractly constructed rational truth and not from the modernist or postmodernist pressures of the West, but rather from a belief that is inspired and trusted as a revealed truth, here, a religion refects the intuitions and experiences of a community that gathered around the fgures of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh. Neither did their transreligious proclamations come to be an occidental context as Western constructions, but in an oriental context of frm and often-ferocious enmity with both modernization and postmodern divergences. Nor did they arise in a sphere of privileged perspective, but in a history of blood and martyrdom, oppression and diaspora. It is in this situation that a religion has held fast to such a revelation of relativity as foundation of its very existence, and that it promises the acceptance of this insight to be the only remedy that will yield a

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world of religious and universal peace, the inexhaustible diversity of realizations of the Good, and a spiritual ecstasis of harmony and intensity (Esslemont, Bahá’u’lláh, chs. 1–10). God wants truth, but no truth exhausts God. Yet, to believe and practice this insight might even mean to become a martyr for the truth of the other. Maybe, beyond any simple-mindedness (Hick, Interpretation, 309–15), the golden rule is not only about love and compassion (KI, ¶¶148–9), and the preference of Thy Neighbor (TB, 71); maybe it is also about the love of truth from a place of prehension of the other, about valuing the truth of thy neighbor higher than thine own. The positive criteria will name that which should be present in any account of the truth of religious pluralism in order to be a lens for the transreligious discourse, or a transreligious lens discovering the relativity of truth in different religions (without falling back into exclusivist or inclusivist regressions). First, the aforementioned intensity of sensibility to the religious intuitions, experiences, and modes of refection will not only have to be open to their very irreducible multiplicity (Panikkar, Dialogue, 82–3) but it will be (ever) greater (rather than less or diminishing) the more it allows for the harmony between the three gates of relativity to be admitted. If, for instance, as seems the case with Hick (Rainbow, ch. 3), apophaticism becomes prevalent (over the other two gates or even to their exclusion), either the Real is not encouraging connectivity, as is assumed in the Bahá’í writings, or it loses the ability to express the multiple (religious) worlds as valuable expressions of Reality without falling into a devaluation of the differences (since ultimately none of them is true or false). Griffn’s differential pluralism, contrarily, so seems to emphasize the plurality of ultimates that the apophatic character of their mutual immanence could get lost in the positive identifcations of certain “circumscribed” ultimates (such as God, creativity, and the world) so that we may be tempted to distribute these ultimates between religions. Yet, then, the Realities from which religions construct themselves would seem more to resemble the reiterated One, just multiplied. This would again simplify, even essentialize, the identity of a religion by its association with one of the ultimates over the others—instead of their perikhoric mutual immanence (TDM, 356–9). Second, since (as discussed above) the three gates of relativity resonate strongly with (the adapted understanding of) Whitehead’s three models of immanence, transcendence, and pan(en)theism, their harmony will also heighten the intensity of sensibility (prehensibility) to diverse religious intuitions, experiences, and refections. Such a harmonization (connectivity) of the fairly contrary or contrasting models (multiplicity of “worlds”) will also only be discovered when the essentializations of the three models in themselves is overcome: We must avoid, as Whitehead feared, essentializing the immanence of Reality as merely inherent Law of existence (be it natural

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law of cause and effect for naturalists, be it karma for the Eastern mind) that would allow for no escape. The escape from such a closure from immanence always came from apophatic renderings of such lawfulness: for instance, the apophatic ecstasis of the logos in Christian theology or of the dharma in diverse Eastern religions beyond themselves into the mystery of love (Panikkar, Silence, 130). We must also avoid, as Whitehead feared, essentializing the transcendence of Reality as merely projecting the image of a person on it, just being beyond the world. Instead, avoiding this projective closure, we must mediate transcendence through the apophatic provision in the direction of a transpersonal dimension of Reality that would not project mundane limitation of personality onto Reality, but would also not lose the personal characteristics we understand Reality to exhibit, such as wisdom, love, goodness, and compassion. We must fnally avoid, as Whitehead feared, essentializing an acosmic pantheism that, in Whitehead’s sense, is less an identity of God and the world, but reduces the world to a mere phase in the life of God/ Reality—such as seems to have been the implication or consequence of the thought patterns of Sankara and Nagarjuna, maybe also of John Leslie (as we are only an immanent part of the Mind of God). Instead, we might resort to some kind of mutuality that does not take away reality from the world (GPW, 299), that is, allows for multiple worlds, none of which is identical with Reality (TDM, ch. 14). Because of “its” apophatic character, Reality is always beyond any identifcation with any plane of immanence of worlds, but “it” may still be understood, in divine surrelativity, to encompass all worlds. Third, the apophatic nature of love, goodness, compassion, and peace, will be more accessible (and not less) the more we are allowed to explicate the resources of multiple worlds, in horizontal and vertical manner, of diverse religions since in general religious cosmology is virtually not known to exclude such a view completely. At least there is a difference between this world and a world above or to come that is enshrined in any religion (Momen, Religions, 199–203). Conversely, it might have become a sign of the disintegration of religious intuitions, experiences, and refections if this differentiation has collapsed into, for instance, a mere material world (Medina, Faith, ch. 1). It will contribute to the “truth of the truth” of many religions at once (or all, as the Bahá’í Faith consistently believes) when we understand their contradictions in relation to empirical and social phenomena as, at the same time, integrated in an apophatic cascade: from contrastive harmonizations into a coincidentia oppositorum and even more apophatic forms of oneness beyond (Lambden, Background, 60–2). In such a differentiation of worlds, their connectivity exhibits the cyclical movement of unfolding and enfolding, always driven by apophatic subtractive affrmation of the planes of differentiation (Saiedi, Logos, ch. 2). It is, then, this cycle of love, as in Whitehead, or of emanation and return, as in Bahá’u’lláh as well as in Plotinus and Sufsm,

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that will grant us new spiritual and mental frames to appreciate their divine character to be best expressed with attributes such as goodness, wisdom, compassion, love, and peace. After naming some of the criteria for transreligious pluralism: How can we now differentiate it as polyphilic pluralism from other forms of identist, differential, and mystical pluralism already discussed (and many other models that would seem to ft some of their characteristics)? While identist and differential pluralism would oppose one another by the number of ultimate realities (and might fnd the position of their opponent mutually absurd), I call mystical pluralism in general every position that emphasizes the apophatic nature of Reality in such a way that it is ultimately absurd to oppose one to the other on whether Reality is one or many. As stated before with Bahá’u’lláh and many mystical thinkers, Reality is apophatic precisely because it is beyond such differentiations. Rather “it” must be understood as indifferent to these differentiations. Otherwise both oneness and multiplicity will be predicated from Reality as if it could be essentialized or reiterated in either way (and by exclusion of the respective other predicate). This is the tradition of Plotinus for whom the so-called One is not “one” or “many,” but really nameless and without attributes—but, as in certain Suf and Bahá’í readings, not even being beyond attributes either (ch. 7). What differentiates polyphilic mysticism from this general description is that it insists on this indifference of Reality to be in/different, that is, only in-sisting in difference, and “being nothing” beyond (Faber, De-Ontologizing God, 221–2), except in all ecstatic emanations in-sisting in and on its self-subtraction in “its” affrmation of the multiplicity of existence (TDM, ch. 12). I still say with some kind of surprise that I have found both Whitehead and Bahá’u’lláh to express their respective affrmation of religious pluralism such that its polyphilic character seems to be inevitable. Although the implied radical relativity of truth and the affrmation of transreligious relativity are breathtaking, their insight is also easily missed in its complexity if it were to be simplifed to a mere apophatic relativism (Faber, God in the Making, 193–5). To begin with Whitehead: He ends his six antitheses on the mutual in/difference of God and the world—that is, their mutual in-sisting in difference while not differing regarding any distinguishing characteristic that could be named (ch. 5)—with the most comprehensive and outrageous one that conveys the apophatic-polyphilic oscillation and, at the same time, exposes the virtually unavoidable problems of a transreligious relativity always lingering if Whitehead’s proposition is mistaken in a reduced or simplifed manner (Gregerson, Varieties, 22). Here is the sixth antithesis with part of its adjunct exploration: It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God. God and the World are the contrasted opposites in terms of which Creativity

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achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast. In each actuality there are two concrescent poles of realization—‘enjoyment’ and ‘appetition,’ that is, the ‘physical’ and the ‘conceptual.’ For God the conceptual is prior to the physical, for the World the physical poles are prior to the conceptual poles. A physical pole is in its own nature exclusive, bounded by contradiction: a conceptual pole is in its own nature all-embracing, unbounded by contradiction. (PR, 348)

First of all, the antithesis of mutual creativity demonstrates the in/difference of ultimate Reality by un-saying any difference between God and the world. As both God and the world are creative of one another, no difference differentiates them from another. The in/difference is one of mutual immanence beyond which only the nameless remains unnamed (Faber, Intermezzo, 227–8). Yet, this in/difference appears neither as identity of God and the world (pantheistic simplifcation) nor as difference (dualistic simplifcation), but as process. The mutuality of God and the world creating one another is the utmost that we can go to allow mutual immanence to work not alone as dialectic of opposites, but as driving motor for an infnite movement of oscillation between God and the world to be ongoing, never to come to a standstill, never to become satisfed, always driving life beyond any measure of intensity and harmony reached—but not forgetting that God is the infnite measure of both intensity and harmony (GPW, §31). This is explained with the dipolarity of any event, even (although infnitely different) of God (GPW, §25), because it expresses the cycle of Wisdom (primordial nature) and Compassion (consequent nature)—and, in the case of the world: the divine appetition luring the world events toward greater wisdom and compassion in the experience of their realization of the greater intensity and harmony in the process of becoming (Griffn, God, ch. 18). Nevertheless, it is because of the physical fnalities (realized values) that multiplicity is unavoidable, which on the empirical level always also exhibits opposition. And it is because of the mental infnities, that is, the contrastive nature of possibilities, even as they are alternatives of one another or physically incompossible, that realizations/ actualizations (of value) can avoid to be bound to the wars of opposition, competition, mutual destruction or subjugation and, instead, can always reach for alternatives that allow contrastive transformations (Kraus, Metaphysics, 124–34). Further, this transformation process is Creativity’s work (the ultimate metaphysical principle): the aesthetic of transformation of opposition into contrast, less intensity and harmony into more and more satisfying forms of sensitivity and compassion, creativity and wisdom, love and peace (GPW, §46). Since God is already and always the infnite measure of this process,

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the mutuality of the “creation” of God and the world (as stated in the sixth antithesis) insinuates not a mere debilitating relativism by which the world (at least humans, but in many religions also animals, and even all sensible beings, or even the Earth) “creates” God-images indefnitely and without direction (Lyon, Postmodernity, 36–7) since with the divine measure it is always oriented toward Wisdom and Compassion, love and peace, aesthetic intensity and harmony (AI, ch. 20). Forgetting this delicate complexity would be precisely the simplifcation of this mutuality that could end up in the projection thesis of relativism of the likes of Ludwig Feuerbach (Pannenberg, Theology, 92–5)—but even this assumption would already be a grave simplifcation of Feuerbach’s thought since there are, on the one hand, the interests on the side of power-seekers to end up with particular projections, and there is the image of love that does not seek power, on the other (TDM, ch. 11). The most important aspect, however, in this Whiteheadian setup of the mutuality of creativity between God and the world (in our context) may be that this process is not happening because of a lack of human understanding of God; hence, it is also not an expression of a lack of truth (GPW, §32). Rather, the relativity that is aroused by divine compassion (perceptivity, sensibility) is creatively intended (appetition) and contributes to the divine aim (satisfaction) (PR, 105). In other words, God does not create creatures that are meant to perceive the truth of God passively, but are unable to grasp it in purity as the one truth; but rather: the creatures are meant to create the truth of God in these perceptions (of God and one another) “creatively” (with the directions of wisdom and compassion, love and peace, intensity and harmony). Thereby, they actively create the truth of God (and of themselves) as intended by the perfection of God as the infnite measure of this truth. “The truth itself is nothing else than how the composite natures of the organic actualities of the world obtain adequate representation in the divine nature” (PR, 12). Since the consequent nature is the movement of prehension of the realized values of the world and their transformation (in light of Wisdom and Compassion), which in the cycle of love is gifted back to the world in becoming (PR, 351), this truth is not merely one and the same, but always a manifold in becoming by being transformed in the mutual creative process of God and the world (Faber, God in the Making, 195–200; Bloom, Shin Buddhism, 17–31). God not only perceives of the multiplicity of divine perceptions and weaves it together to a new creation (May, Principle, 22–3)—basically in every creative event—but even more: Gods wants “truth” to be that inexhaustible, but always concretized, process of mutual creative processes (realized as values, but transformed as new potentials) that will always come to realize/actualize ever-new perspectives on the infnite inexhaustibility of God’s Wisdom and Compassion, love and peace, intensity and harmony (PT,

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##15, 41). The mutual ecstatic in-sistence of God and the world is the khoric place of truth. It is—like the Dao in all daos (ch. 3)—not without direction, but without (divine) coercion, emanating and harboring its creative truth (of mutual immanence) as its highest achievement of its movement—the realization of this achievement in the ongoing process (GL, #30). In relation to the other models of religious pluralism, but especially to the mystical solution, polyphilia is a divine insistence on and in multiplicity that is the manifold of the ecstatic emanation of the transformation of the world through divine Wisdom and Compassion in an ongoing process of a world of becoming, which must be creative of its manifold religious truths (TDM, 359). These “truths,” then, are as such transreligious. Transreligious relativity is not a lack of the ability to perceive God “correctly,” but an ecstatic gift of a creator that/who is infnitely inviting of the creativity of all creatures. While mystical pluralism will always end in an apophatic silence of which all articulation is equally right or wrong (Faber, God in the Making, 192–3)—something that underlies Hick’s position despite contrary intentions (Rainbow, ch. 3)—polyphilic pluralism will understand the in/difference of God as ecstatic insistence on and in the multiplicity of the expressions of the diverse modes of perception and transformation of religious experiences, intuitions, and refections the identity of which would not lie in claims of their exclusiveness or mutually usurped inclusive superiority, but in the transreligious fows of ever-new creative expressions or revelations of this transformative process as being that of Reality itself (Faber, Religion, 168–72). This is the theme of the next chapter: that Reality always manifests “it/self” (its Self) anew—as the apophatic Good overfows—in different religions and other spiritual identities; but that all of these, even as they are different “worlds,” are connected by the apophatic insistence of their becoming a manifold of divine compassion and transformation, not without direction, but by exhibiting some kind of salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) directed by and toward the perception of wisdom and compassion, the spiritual and ethical realization of love and peace, and the aesthetic satisfaction of intensity and harmony. Of the many passages of the Bahá’í writings that would corroborate this proposition of transreligious relativity because of divine creative instigations of ever-new experiences, intuitions, and understandings of the apophatic Reality/God/Truth (al-haqq), but manifested in an inexhaustible manifold in many “worlds” such as that of religions (Momen, God, 10–7), I will end with the maybe most stunning one of Bahá’u’lláh—a passage that also very easily can be misunderstood if reduced and simplifed to mere projectionism (Epilogue). All that the sages and mystics have said or written have never exceeded, nor can they ever hope to exceed, the limitations to which man’s fnite mind hath been

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strictly subjected. To whatever heights the mind of the most exalted of men may soar, however great the depths which the detached and understanding heart can penetrate, such mind and heart can never transcend that which is the creature of their own conceptions and the product of their own thoughts. The meditations of the profoundest thinker, the devotions of the holiest of saints, the highest expressions of praise from either human pen or tongue, are but a refection of that which hath been created within themselves, through the revelation of the Lord, their God. (GL, #148; italics added)

While the relativity of experience, intuition, and understanding of Reality, here, evokes a long tradition, which goes back to Ibn ‘Arabi (Chittick, Worlds, 163; Ibn ‘Arabi, 915–30), it is in Bahá’u’lláh’s rendering not only based on its presupposed mystical pluralism (Momen, Religion, 195–9) but also on a divine ecstatic insistence on and in creatures as divine self-disclosure, manifestation, or revelation. Of course, the apophatic side of Bahá’u’lláh’s verses quoted above exhibits a strong relativism of projection so that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá can warn us that “all the peoples of the world are bowing the knee to a fancy” since “they have created a creator within their own minds, and they call it the Fashioner of all that is—whereas in truth it is but an illusion” (SAB, #24). Here, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá not only confrms Hick’s apophatic relativism of Truth that views all religions merely as a matter of equally true and false projections (ch. 8), but ‘Abdu’l-Bahá also affrms this assertion as a problem, which only the acknowledgment of divine polyphilia, the infnite insistence of God/ Reality in the realization of all divine attributes (Corbin, Alone, 112–35), can heal. That an emphasis on the apophatic element of the cycle of emanation and return in Bahá’u’lláh’s quote can reproduce the problem and criticism of Hick’s apophaticism, will inevitably happen, if we only read: “a refection of that which hath been created within themselves, through the revelation of the Lord, their God,” (Momen, Relativism/Ideas, 384) instead of: “a refection of that which hath been created within themselves, through the revelation of the Lord, their God.” While we will need criteria for the differentiations of the rare divine Selfmanifestations—the “Manifestation of the Self of God” (GL, #88)—from these appearances of “idle fancy and vain imaginings” (PM, #49), the underlying assumption of Bahá’u’lláh in the above verse under discussion is that Reality/God/Truth, indeed, reveals “it/self” (“its” Self) in the multiplicity of creative realizations and, hence, actively in-sists in them not only because of divine Compassion (mercifully forgiving the projecting imaginations), but also because of the inexhaustible creativity of polyphilic Wisdom that instigates creativity in creatures and values “its” imaginative returns. Imaginations not only become the legitimate medium of divine knowledge (as in Ibn ‘Arabi) but also of the acknowledgment of the Divine Manifold that

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values the creative (not the reiterative) imaginations of “its” creatures—as they refect the spiritual realities of malakut in their manifold virtuous realization in nasut—as means for the transformation of the world into the mirror of malakut. Since these spiritual imaginations are not arbitrary, but (at least in divine imagination) intend to emphasize compassion and wisdom, peace and love, harmony and intensity, their perception and spiritual realization (by human creatures) will be essential for the realization of an enlightened civilization. Civilization’s truth is living from its insights into the spiritual peace of transreligious relativity in a world of becoming and in ecological unison with such a world.

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The Buddha, Luminous

As this investigation into the relativity of religious truth and the truth of transreligious relativity is entering the last three chapters, we are also approaching another confguration of the three gates of relativity. While the frst three chapters had set the stage with their exploration of themes arising from their mutual permutation, and the middle three chapters had concentrated on their respective unique contributions to the question of transreligious relativity, the last three chapters will (again) enter the more contentious matters stirred up by the oppositions between unity and multiplicity, compassion and selfassertion, love and superiority, peace and religious conficts. If polyphilic pluralism should be effective, it must not only demonstrate its value among other positions but also address the confictual matters arising at the gap between the conviction of the unity of religions in the sense of the transreligious incarnation of the three gates of relativity and the sheer unimaginable diversity of concrete religious experiences, intuitions, and understandings that not only have led to fairly contrary views on all matters one can think of being constitutive of diverse religions but also to the recognition of the very fact of the contradictory, seemingly unbridgeable nature of the perceived differences between religious articulations of ultimate Reality (which is sometimes even desired to be the fnal truth about religions). The following three chapters will address some of these confictual felds with the help of the accumulated instruments of articulating relativity and mediated through the binocular view, that is, the two lenses of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism and process and the relativistic resources of the Bahá’í universe. The three gates of relativity will be viewed as mutually immanent, but I will emphasize on one of them for each of the remaining chapters. This chapter, emphasizing the apophatic gate of relativity, will ponder on the reality of divine Manifestation, the central issue of unmanifest and manifest Reality, and the 267

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implications for a transreligious understanding of the diverse concretizations of this matter in diverse religious environments. The next chapter, emphasizing the relativistic gate of multiple worlds, will directly address conficts arising from the clash of the mind-sets of religious relativity and of its denial. The last chapter, emphasizing the gate of relativistic connectivity, will then ask questions related to the contributions and hindrances the proposal of this book might offer for the aim of furthering to a future civilization of peace that activates the insight into the mutual immanence of religions among themselves and with a culture of spiritual peace without which humanity will be (or remain) hopelessly bound for self-destruction or debilitation. It is, of course, the vision of this proposition that it is not the religious relativity of truth that debilitates, but its denial, avoidance, or negligence. In a prayer, Bahá’u’lláh formulates the essence of the present chapter: a search for the illumination that Reality provides, is, and infuses, as it also enfolds all its revelations as one multiplicity, undivided and unmixed, at once a plurisingularity: “O my God! I beseech Thee by Thy most glorious light, and all Thy lights are verily glorious” (ESW, §203). In this sense transreligious truth is doxology before it is refection, and its direction is not the misery of plurality, but its joy. But its secret only decodes in “its” experience, as our experience becomes “its” revelation.

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1. PLURISINGULARITY I will begin, here, where I ended the last chapter, with the problem of religious pluralism, especially when it does not recoil into an apophatic unsaying in silence, but ventures (back) into a polyphilic unfolding: How can we, under this condition (recapturing the two questions I directed at Hick’s pluralistic proposal in the preceding chapter), understand the difference between personal and transpersonal ascriptions to the ultimate—as it seems to mutually exclude the respective other position as penultimate—and how can we avoid an ultimate juxtaposition of this ultimate (whether personal or impersonal) to be either the expression of fullness of being or of emptiness and nothingness of being? What is more: How does this ambivalence of ultimacy refect itself in the approach to the human fgures that religions (literally or mystically, historically or mythologically) have variously endowed with expressing, revealing, representing, refecting, or being this Ultimate (in whatever rendering and form) “in person” such as Abraham, Jesus, and Muhammad (Abe, Unity, 183); and Zarathustra, Moses, Krishna, the Buddha, the Báb, and Bahá’u’lláh; and maybe Adam and Noah; Hermes Trismegistos, Apollonius of Tyana, and Asclepius; Fu Xi, Laozi, and Confucius (Kohn, God, 24–8, 39–40); Salih and Thamud; the Guru and the Tulku; the Tirthankara and the

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Jina (Parrinder, Avatar, ch. 13); Sri Ramakrishna and Jiddu Krishnamurti; Sri Aurobindo and the Mother; the White Buffalo Calf Woman of the Lakota and the Peacemaker Deganawida of the Iroquois (Buck, Universalism, 173–201); or Socrates, Francis of Assisi, and any spiritual fgure of utter selfessness becoming the presence of the Dharma-body (Suzuki, Outlines, 63)? Let’s begin with an interesting observation. Whitehead had had no preconception on either of these two issues (whether to assume a personal or transpersonal, empty or overfowing ultimate), but in a polyphilic manner he understood religions to form around unique religious experiences, intuitions, and refections that universalize themselves to include a cosmological interpretation of the world. Thereby, he adds, they exhibit the moments of the fnest metaphysical insights of humanity (ch. 1). Here, Whitehead concurs with, and differs from, the particular-archetype dialectic explaining the development of religion in the work of the infuential Mircea Eliade (Images, 120–1). This dialectic assumes that any local appearance of a (new) religion will tend to generalize itself to become an archetype, thereby embracing evernew spiritual territories detached from the local origin while, conversely, the timeless archetype will tend to become manifest in ever-new local appearances. However, while this dialectic in Eliade seems—perhaps on the basis of C. G. Jung’s understanding of collective unconsciousness (Archetypes, passim)—to suggest that these archetypes are a (virtually eternal) reservoir that is variously recombined and realized by different religions (Eliade, Patterns, 462), Whitehead assumes that the new local appearance of a religion, often mediated by a new spiritual guide of great originality, will, in the best case, restructure or revolutionize the archetypical world itself with unprecedented novelty, even shift the metaphysical (eternal) construction of the world toward undiscovered lands (Faber, Whitehead at Infnite Speed, 39–72). Here, we can see that Whitehead’s shift from eternity to novelty as guiding paradigm (GPW, §17)—as so clearly seen by Deleuze (Fold, 79–81)—has, indeed, consequences: What in the paradigm of eternity becomes a closed horizon (as if the horizon of horizons of all planes of immanence was fxed, while it, in fact, is only reiterated), becomes in the paradigm of novelty an open and infnite horizon without the possibility of closure (Epilogue). Whitehead, indeed, emphatically cleared the way to the primacy of the apophatic gate of relativity, cleansed from the oppressive One (TDM, ch. 2). In this, Bahá’u’lláh concurs, emphasizing not (only) the return of “true” religion (by looking to the recovery of the unadulterated past), but its novelty (badi‘) and unprecedented nature as occurring in a new manifestation of the apophatic ultimate (KI, 243–5) and the corresponding recreation of creation (GL, #14). For Whitehead, these deep, new insights of universal magnitude are not suggestions of a brilliant mind (or abstract refection), but spring from the divine experiences and mystical insights crystalizing around historical,

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legendary, or mythological fgures (sometimes these fgures ft all categories at once at different times and phases of the development of the religions in which they are remembered and venerated), who function as conduits and amplifers, releazing new spiritual forces and insights (of existential and metaphysical magnitude)—such as the Buddha, Prometheus, Jesus, or Muhammad (RM, 19–20)—being defned by, but not limited through either of them. For Whitehead, such fgures are an expression of God as a “principle of limitation” (SMW, 178)—limited by the Good (ch. 6), but for the infusion of patterns of order and novelty as eros (primordial nature) in all events to raise intensity and harmony above mere chaos of indirection (GPW, §27). Hence, they are not the only ones, not the fnal ones (as there is always novelty), but rather always new and unique manifestations, mirrors, prisms, lenses of rare intensity of this universal process. They heighten or focus experiences of this universal infusion with such an intensity that they (the fgures and their experiences alike) become understood as revealed—that is, beyond the reach of general experience without the appearance of their novelty (RM, 31)—and as (novel) universal (conveyers of) insights into the ultimate in the eyes of their followers. Yet, their respective amplifcations of this universal process do not harmonize around the criteria of personal or transpersonal renderings of the ultimate, fullness or emptiness; rather they seem to confront us with a complex multiplicity of alternatives (RM, 47–57). In such an ambivalent exposure to Reality (later Whitehead would say: without the consequent nature), Whitehead concedes, “God is not concrete,” but rather “the ground for concrete actuality” (SMW, 178). And in accordance with the three models of divine activity—immanent, transcendent, panentheistic (ch. 6)—Whitehead withholds judgment with regard to the personal or transpersonal character of this divine limiting activity, being an activity (not a concept) nevertheless (RM, 61). Its manifold must be understood as manifestations (as he later says) of Wisdom, a surrational, apophatic reason for rationality and harmonization (PR, 346), since no “reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality” (SMW, 178). What is more, since, as an implication for Whitehead, this “principle of limitation” must appear as “principle of empiricism,” which “depends upon the doctrine that there is a principle of concretion which is not discoverable by abstract reason” (ibid.), how and as what God appears in history is a polyphilic concretization, that is, revelation or appearance (theophany), of Reality in imaginative and diversifed religious experiences (ch. 6), the harmonization of which cannot be reduced to rationality or logic, unilateral imposition without reciprocity (or mutual perceptibility), or any singular expression. What further can be known about God must be sought in the region of particular experiences, and therefore rests on an empirical basis. In respect to the

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interpretation of these experiences [sic], mankind have differed profoundly. He has been named respectively, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Father in Heaven, Order of Heaven, First Cause, Supreme Being, Chance. Each name corresponds to a system of thought derived from the experiences of those who have used it. (SMW, 178–9)

Note that the diverse manifestations of Reality, here, carry both the names of personal and transpersonal, and both full and empty, historical representations. The presentation of Reality, here, is manifold and diverse; it does not allow for any logical reduction to one expression that in this polyphilic diversity is not always already an abstraction from which Reality is apophatically subtracted. On another occasion, Whitehead heightens this ambivalence in a somewhat pointed manner by emphasizing especially two religions to present us with this polyvalence in the image of a profound contradiction and a mutually exclusive alternative that is not easily harmonized: the “two Catholic religions of civilization [namely] Christianity and Buddhism” (RM, 64). But not only are they in a state of decay today and rivaled by another (cosmological thought system in the function of a) “religion,” namely, the naturalistic explanations of science (Rue, Religion, 1–20), but ultimately all of them confront us with a “divergence” that “reaches down to the most fundamental religious concepts, namely the nature of God, and the aim of life” (RM, 139). Is it a personal God with whom we aspire to live in eternal presence or is it a transpersonal Reality in which we desire to dissolve or with which we must realize our identity? Or is there no Reality at all, just matter and energy, time and space, bodies and changing contacts of bodies? No compromise seems to exist here. Yet, if these images are still expressions of the “principle of concretion” (SMW, 178), which is beyond rationality or “surrational” (Faber, Surrationality, 157–77), how do we harmonize these divergences? Are all “empirical” concretizations true at once? Whitehead answers, as we have seen, with mutual immanence of the multiplicity of this diversity of empirical symbolizations of transcendental Reality (ch. 4). But he grounds this understanding neither on the exclusive truth of either a merely transcendent, immanent, or pan(en)theistic model, nor on a plurality of divinities, nor again on a plurality of ultimates (ch. 6). Instead, he holds fast to the one dipolar God as apophatic and polyphilic plurisingularity of the cycle of love in which we cannot simplify the mystical in/difference of such categories of oneness and multiplicity (Keller, Face, ch. 10). And, in fact, Whitehead’s God harbors the multiplicity of potentials (primordial nature) and actualities of the world (consequent nature) in one Wisdom and Compassion (ch. 6). Hence, Whitehead grounds this mutuality within the plurisingular Reality by avoiding the Platonic conviction that the images of God

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in the world are only secondary shadows of the transcendent Ideas of Reality that never enter the world (TDM, 278). Instead, he favors the mutuality of God and the world by which the world transcends itself into God (consequent nature) while God in-sists in the world process (GPW, §§26, 33). This does not just mean that mere transcendence is unknowable, and hence unknown (PR, 4), but that God insists only then on this manifold world if what is knowable of God is not only referring to “a derivative second-rate God of the World, who is a mere Icon” (AI, 168). For Whitehead this is precisely why certain early Christianity theological schools have metaphysically improved on Plato in this one decisive point, namely, when they “decided for the direct immanence of God in the one person of Christ” (AI, 168) and “a direct immanence of God in the world generally” (AI, 168–9). Thereby, they were able (at least in principle) to avoid “a sublimation” of an understanding of God from images (in analogous projection) taken from a “barbaric origin” for which God “stood in the same relation to the whole World as early Egyptian or Mesopotamian kings stood to their subject populations” and their analogous “moral characters” (AI, 169). The point to be made at this juncture is this: We know anything and everything of Reality only by “its” in-sisting in and on the world process. This divine appearance in the world is not a secondary image of a transcendent Reality, but “its” real manifestation—or, alternatively, if we miss this point, Reality is not relevant at all. Since Whitehead is silent on the apophatic Reality beyond this relativity (relationality) to the world (PR, 4), and given what the investigation in the intricate in/different mutuality of God and the world has yielded (ch. 6), my conclusion is that Whitehead’s dipolar God “is” (nothing else but) the manifest Reality/God/Truth (al-haqq) “it/self” (its Self) that we have explored in our considerations so far (TBG, Expl. 16). In Bahá’í terms, I will restate this conclusion thusly: Since Whitehead is absolutely silent on the apophatic nature of Reality (hahut) as the absolutely unknowable unknown (PR, 4), as which it can be detected in his work if we listen closely (ch. 6), my conclusion is that Whitehead’s God “is” precisely that which Bahá’í revelation understands to be the Manifestation of the Self of God (the nafs of Reality on the level of lahut). Both, Whitehead and Bahá’í writings confront us with the plurisingularity of manifest Reality in light of “its” apophatic subtraction. Also, I will point at another conclusion that arises from the intricate oscillation in the plurisingular of this manifest Reality, namely, of both the singularity of its apophatic upward movement toward its non-manifest beyond (hahut) and the multiplicity of its polyphilic manifestations: Regarding the multiplicity of divine manifestations, in the Bahá’í understanding (ch. 5), the all-embracing, panentheistic plurisingularity of the divine Manifestation (lahut) releases (insists on) infnite worlds by manifesting “its” Self (to in-sist)

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in all worlds (be they symbolized as threefold or fvefold or sheer infnity), cascading into the multiplicity of its physical appearances in the world of becoming (‘alam al-khalq). Hence, this Self of Reality only appears in the diversity of the reception of these appearances in the worlds of religions (nasut). Whitehead confrms this conclusion, despite the contradictory difference between Buddhism and Christianity, in the following way: As Christianity is the “appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of his agency in the world”—in the empirical appearance of a “lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy,” visible in his “suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the fnal despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory” (AI, 167)—so does Buddhism appeal to “the Buddha,” who “gave his doctrine to enlighten the world” (RM, 51)—a doctrine (dharma) that “discourages the sense of active personality” (RM, 140)—as the very manifestation of the transpersonal dharma itself. But both divergent traditions became thereby the “most emphatic repudiations of this archaic notion” that Reality/God must “express . . . the characteristics of the touchy, vain, imperious tyrants who ruled the empires of the world” (MT, 49). Instead, they aim “at that union of harmony, intensity, and vividness which involves the perfection of importance for” (MT, 14) any event, world, or plane of existence. Yet, regarding the singularity of this primordial “Manifestation of the Self of God” (GDM, §26) in all of the manifest divine multiplicity in the worlds of becoming (nasut), we will have to conclude that the Manifestation (lahut) of the Self of Reality (hahut) manifests in “its” absolute, all-relative, and surrelative nature, that is, always as the same Wisdom and Compassion, love and peace, and absolute measure of intensity and harmony (ch. 6).

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Wert thou to give ear to My voice, thou wouldst cast away all thy possessions, and wouldst set thy face towards the Spot wherein the ocean of wisdom and of utterance hath surged, and the sweet savors of the loving-kindness of thy Lord, the Compassionate, have wafted. (ESW, 19)

It is not without deep resonance that we may recognize this duality of Wisdom and Compassion to be the characteristics of Whitehead’s dipolar God: the Wisdom of the primordial nature in its absolute, all-relational, and surrelative valuation of all potentials of the realization of the images of divine love and peace, intensity and harmony (PR, 346); and the Compassion of the consequent nature by which God is the fellow suffer who not only understands (PR, 351), but in unison with all becoming saves what can be saved (PR, 346) through its redemptive suffering (PR, 350) of all words and events, their nexuses and characters (ch. 4). And if this sounds still like an approach that would emphasize the personal qualities of a God represented, for instance,

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by the religious insights of Christianity, we may also fnd the deep resonance with Mahayana Buddhism as an exhilarating example of deep transreligious truth, because the dharmakaya “contains the two characteristics of wisdom (prajna) and compassion (karuna)” (Abe, Kenotic God, 32); only that it is not the personal God of which these primordial characteristics are expressed, but sunyata, the emptiness that (at least in Zen) is empty (of) itself (ibid., 27–8; Nishitani, Religion, 60). It is in this sense, as has been noted before (ch. 6), that Whitehead does not know of any Godhead beyond and before Wisdom and Compassion (that could be articulated) (PR, 4), but only of the in/difference of these characteristics with the ultimate metaphysical reality of Creativity (GPW, §34), the apophatic immanence of that (transpersonal) polyphilic activity of Reality that is not a (personal) actuality (Bracken, Matrix, 4). The plurisingularity of ultimate manifest Reality has received different names and was considered in different religions as well as religious and philosophical schools as one and, at the same time, different realities: the Reason (logos) of Philo of Alexandria and of Justin the Martyr; the Word of the Hebrew Bible (dabar); the Wisdom of Proverbs (hokmar) and of Wisdom of Solomon (sophia) as well as the Gospel of John (logos); the divine Mind (nous) of Aristotle and Plotinus; Plato’s archetypical realm of Ideas (paradeigmata); the Spirit (pneuma) and Order (logos) of the Stoics and the Daoists (chi and li); the eternal ethical order (sanatana dharma) of Brahman and the Dharma-body (dharmakaya) of the Buddha. As “the essence of Divinity is infnite” (PUP, #46), so are the worlds of God infnite (ch. 5), and the Manifestations of God that emanate and comprise these worlds are infnite (John Hatcher, Connection, 150–1)—but all remain expressions of one plurisingular (manifest) Reality (lahut). So visualizes the Lotus Sutra infnite Buddhas with their respective Buddha-felds emanating and comprising infnite worlds (Parrinder, Avatar, ch. 12), but all listen to the Shakyamuni Buddha’s teaching of the one Vehicle (LS, 60n14). And Whitehead’s dipolar plurisingular God emanates and comprises infnite potential worlds and their actualizations—always being their Wisdom and Compassion and still the one cycle of love (GPW, §30). Yet, this “oneness” remains allusive and illusive as it indicates the apophatic opening of the manifest Divine to the silence of unspeakable and unknowable Reality (Panikkar, Silence, 134–44), leaving the multiplicity of emanations to embrace in surrelative immanence with one another (TDM, ch. 15). A last twist: John Leslie has developed a unique approach to the plurisingularity of the Mind of God (ch. 5). Not only are, in his view, all worlds thoughts of the Mind of God that are because God thinks them, but they are all emanations of the Good, which ought to be, and, hence, are. But, more importantly, all worlds are expressions of an apophatic Good that insists in infnitely many divine Minds, all contemplating “all that was worth

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contemplating” (Leslie, Immortality, 10). Why, Leslie asks, “Is it better that there were only one divine Mind than there to be infnitely many divine Minds all emanating and comprising infnitely many good worlds?” To deny this, Leslie reasons, would be to claim that “it [would] be quite all right to annihilate all but one of them, just for the fun” (ibid., 11). Yet, even this divine plenitude of infnitely many contemplating divine Minds misses not its “pantheistic” oneness in which “each [would] be infnitesimally different from all the others (ibid., 38) as they would be engaged in the exactly same activity of contemplating everything that is worth contemplating. In fact, the best interpretation, in my view, of this hilarious and mind-stretching thought of Leslie’s is that the infnity of the Mind of God is in/different from infnitely many Minds as they relate to their respective infnitely many worlds they emanate and comprise—as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá claims from the Bahá’í standpoint for the infnite Manifestations of the Self of God (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Tablet of the Universe: John Hatcher, Connection, 150–1) and the Lotus Sutra affrms from the standpoint of the one Vehicle of the dharma that is in/different from all of these infnite Buddhas and their infnite Buddha-felds (LS, ch. 1), even comprising the in/difference of samsara and nirvana in the Buddha-seed (tathagatagarbha) (LS, 60n14). As such, the plurisingularity of the infnite manifold of the manifest Reality (lahut) is in/different from—and “one and the same” (GL, #84) as—the Absolute Beyond (beyond one and many) of the apophatic Reality (hahut). Purge thy sight, therefore, from all earthly limitations, that thou mayest behold them all as the bearers of one Name, the exponents of one Cause, the manifestations of one Self, and the revealers of one Truth, and that thou mayest apprehend the mystic “return” of the Words of God as unfolded by these utterances. (KI, 159)

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2. THE LUMINOUS MIND The in/difference of subtractive and affrmative movements of Reality, its apophatic and polyphilic cycle of exhaling and inhaling, enfolding and unfolding, as it is expressed with the “non-dual duality” of this plurisingularity to be both, neither, in, and beyond personal and transpersonal experience, marks the decisive difference from John Hick’s apophatic and David Griffn’s differential pluralism (ch. 6). Since there is no difference between, or mystical “identity” of, apophatic and polyphilic Reality, “its” manifestation is—as Nicolas of Cusa so aptly formulates—not other than (non aliud) “its” unmanifest essence (Faber, Gottesmeer, 64–95), but instead “its” manifestation as such is an apophatic-polyphilic Reality: “the Manifestations of the

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divine Essence” (KI, 151). Neither is the manifest divinity not ultimate Reality, nor is it different from “it” and, hence, is “itself” the Self of Reality—“it/ self” (its Self) insisting as apophatic-polyphilic plurisingularity. But what is (the mode of manifestation of) this plurisingular Self: personal, impersonal, neither, both? It appears that the polyphilic answer must be that this Self in-sists in both the personal relationality and the transpersonal indifference of “its” perception by the world, and of “its” (own Self’s) perception of the imaginations that the world entertains of it (KI, 104). Whitehead’s alternative between Christianity and Buddhism, exemplifying the respective emphases, might be contrasted with his own entertainment of a dipolar divinity that is both and neither unity and multiplicity of both personal dialogical and transpersonal non-differential “character,” or “it” in-sists as such in/as the “character” of rightness in all things (RM, 66). While this character can be experienced “as we apprehend the characters of our friends” (RM, 61), it can also, akin to the dharma, be perceived as the aesthetic order (RM, 104–5) and moral judgment (RM, 119) of the universe—both as ultimate Reality of the universe and in the extraordinary personalities that mediate Reality such as the Christ and the Buddha (Knitter and Haight, Jesus, ch. 4). Momen has proposed that Bahá’u’lláh does not fall into the trap of differentiating unmanifest and manifest Reality—like, for instance, certain inner-Hinduistic discourses on saguna and nirguna brahman suggest (King, Philosophy, 213–29)—by subordination of an (ultimately illusory) penultimate to the (real) ultimate (Momen, Relativism/Metaphysics, 13), or—as an alternative solution, often found in theological discourses between religions—as mere incompatible alternatives (Momen, God, 17–26). The reason is that Bahá’u’lláh follows several strategies of redirecting accesses to a deeper understanding of the apophatic-polyphilic character of Reality, and its articulation as Manifestation of the Self of Reality/God/Truth, at once: he affrms the validity of monistic and dualistic, transpersonal and personal, non-dual difference and indifference; yet, he still subtracts the mystery of Reality from one-sided affrmations in the form of apophatic negation; and he differentiates all approaches as being related to the spiritual capacities, stations, and perceptibility of the respective individual mind or communal spirit (Momen, God, 6–20). The most important argument, however, may well be that for Bahá’u’lláh all three modes of expressing Reality, namely, as the Absolute, the All-Relational, and the Surrelative, always mutually coinhere and “in/differentiate” in his understanding of the Manifestation of the Self of Reality, because there is nothing that could be experienced, intuited, thought, or articulated about Reality/God/Truth besides, beyond, or without (prehensive) reference to, that which “is”/“insists as” whatever can be experienced, intuited, thought, or articulated of Reality as such, in itself, or at all. Hence, the concept of the Manifestation unites and differentiates the difference and

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indifference between Reality and primordial Manifestation; the difference and indifference between the primordial Manifestation and the infnite worlds emanating from its Reality, which “is”/“insist as” the Self of Reality “itself”; the difference and indifference between the perception of this primordial Manifestation as personal Will or impersonal Force or transpersonal Embrace of the All; the difference and indifference between dialogical and monistic modes of how the world’s selves relate to the Self of Reality; the difference and indifference between oneness and multiplicity of Manifestations; and, fnally, the difference and indifference between the apophatic and the polyphilic nature of the Manifestation itself. For all of them we fnd strong statements in the Bahá’í writings, and any systematization will have to take all of these sides into account. Since Bahá’u’lláh’s understanding of the manifest, in/differently insisting Reality exhibits all of these modes of perception and is, at the same time, always surrelative, beyond any ascription, it may also function (and was intended by Bahá’u’lláh to function) as a means for the promotion of transreligious peace (ch. 8). Bahá’u’lláh’s in/differential method and his apophatic-polyphilic perspective on the content of any metaphysical and cosmological views (GL, #26) may provide an invitation to overcome the antagonisms between religions and streams of experience and thought within and without diverse religions—as exemplifed above with Whitehead’s juxtaposition of Buddhism and Christianity, and again with their juxtaposition with science (RM, 139–49)—to express their respective articulations and emphases of various aspects of ultimate Truth as profoundly relative—that is, as apophatic Absolute, connective All-relationality, and surrelative Multiplicity—and as radically transreligious (ch. 5). This assertion would also conform to Whitehead’s mutual immanence of any methodological, epistemological, ontological, cosmological, and soteriological positions regarding, and characterizations of, ultimate Reality/God/Truth, or better, as ultimate Reality. It seems to me that the best way to demonstrate the healing character of this relativistic unison as a peacemaking proposition is to seek out the resonances of Bahá’u’lláh’s radical and all-encompassing series of in/differences of the plurisingular manifest Reality just described, by following Whitehead in using Buddhism as an example. This is all the more apt—still following the two initial interrogations of religious pluralism along the lines of personal/impersonal and full/empty dichotomies—since in general Buddhist experience and insight leans toward the opposite of the Abrahamic emphasis on the intercourse of divine and human personality, as Buddhism tends to emphasize not only the transpersonal nature (nirvana) of Reality (dharma) but also its emptiness (sunyata). Utilizing Neoplatonism as a transreligious bridge between East and West, and addressing the effects it

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created within Suf philosophy, we can, then, relate this discussion textually back to Bahá’u’lláh’s refection on the reception of this transreligious stream through Persian mystical metaphysics, culminating in his claim of the force of in/differentiation of the Manifestation of the Self of Reality to represent this whole thrust of thought. Bahá’u’lláh achieves this mutual translucency between these diverse traditions as they gather themselves from the furthest recesses of Eastern and Western religious experience with a unique concept that transcends the religious boundaries of Abrahamic religions in the West and, with Neoplatonism and Sufsm, mediates between West and East: This is the concept of Uncompounded Reality (UR, 213–20). Its closest transreligious counterpart in the East, so my thesis here, is the concept of the Luminous Mind, which appears—in some way or another having left traces from early Buddhist Theravada to Mahayana and Vajrayana schools (Harvey, Mind, ch. 10)—in its fnal form in the Dzogchen tradition, especially (but not exclusively) of the Tibetan Nyingma lineage (Kalu Rinpoche, Mind, 3–11). Both concepts, besides their many appropriations and ramifcations in different schools, are—whether by historical transference or archetypical convergence—in strongly resonant transreligious unison with one another, as both of them point to the convergent one plurisingular Reality, namely, the Self of Reality “itself.” The concept of the Luminous Mind is a central Buddhist signifcation of ultimate Reality, but also of the essence of human existence, the human Self; and of the essence of cosmic reality, we might say, the infnite worlds of existence, too (ibid., 229–44). Its introduction can already be detected in early Sutras of the Pali canon (Harvey, Mind, 167). In the Anguttara Nikaya (1.8– 10 & 10–11) we read about the “brightly shining mind” (pabhassara chitta): Monks, this citta is brightly shining (pabhassaram), but it is defled (upakkilitthan) by deflements which arrive (agantukehi upakkilesehi). Monks, this citta is brightly shining, but it is freed (viamuttan) from deflements which arrive. (Harvey, Mind, 167)

These sutras also imply loving-kindness to be the profound attribute of this chitta (ibid.). Several things arise from this account: Mind is in and of itself of pure nature; this is indicated by its luminosity. Yet, mind is still defled, that is, in the state of suffering. The Theravada commentary on the Sutra understands deflement as attachment, implying the fundamental hindrances to enlightenment and liberation in Buddhist analysis: such as ignorance, hate, delusion, and greed (ibid.). However, the Luminous Mind can be freed from deflements (ibid., 169–70). Here, an interesting puzzle emerges: In its purity, the Luminous Mind is untouched by deflements and, hence, always in a

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natural state of luminosity and loving-kindness, even while it is defled. Yet, it is therefore that it can be freed of deflement, which is what the Buddhist path of liberation is about. The question is—how? In its development throughout the “three turnings of the wheel” from the early schools to Mahayana and Vajrayana, the Luminous Mind fulflled different, yet related, functions, connected by a Hermetic understanding of reality, as it were, in which macrocosm and microcosm mirror each other (Gombrich, Message, 122)—herein also connecting it with Plotinus, the Hermetical Writings, and the Jewish mysticism of the Sefer Yezirah (Conger, Theories, chs. 4–6), as well as with Bahá’u’lláh (Brown, Hermes, 153–88). Throughout the development of Buddhist understanding and refection, the Luminous Mind began to express the non-dual identity of the Self, which is No-Self (anatta), the Self without substantial identity, but with cosmic non-substantial continuity beyond individual lives, also called the mind-stream (bhavanga) (Harvey, Mind, 157–66); it named the storehouse-consciousness (alaya-vijnana), the root awareness of emptiness and all karmic seeds in the Yogacara (ibid., 176); it further indicated the Buddha-nature of all existence (buddhadhatu), even in the form of the hidden Buddha-seed (tathagatagarbha) (ibid., 166–76); and it indicated the absoluteness of ultimate Reality, which is inexpressible (avyakrta) and is called the Dharma-body (dharmakaya) of the Buddha (Sodargye, Home, 80–1). In its fnal appreciation of this complexity, the Luminous Mind held the key to the essence of the Buddhist doctrine, experience, and reality within Tibetan Buddhism as treasured by Dzogchen (or the Great Perfection) (Kalu Rinpoche, Mind, 22–3; Norbu, Source, 17–74). Dzogchen (or Atiyoga) is taught and practiced in all four classical lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, but especially in the Old School (Nyingma) (ibid., 1–11). Dzogchen understands itself as the highest and unsurpassable teaching of the Buddha, being beyond all other Buddhist paths and indicating the ultimate secret of the Buddhist dharma (Dowman, Spaciousness, xiii–xxix). Here, the Luminous Mind signifes Reality itself, its awareness, and the path attaining both, at once. Yet, most importantly, it is, and can only be fathomed if we understand it as, radical non-duality—the Reality of in/difference and in-sistence. Dzogchen, the path of “Great Perfection” (Kalu, Mind, 221), concurs with earlier renderings of radical non-duality, for instance, of the Heart Sutra, in which Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva of infnite compassion, gains insight into ultimate Reality as utterly empty such that form and emptiness are without difference (Strong, Experience, 140–1). It also builds on the radical view of Madhyamika, famous for Nagarjuna’s equation that there is no difference between samsara and nirvana (McCagney, Nagarjuna, ch. 3). This radical non-duality is the essence of what Buddhists call the Perfection of Wisdom (prajnaparamita); it is in/different from the Buddha (Strong, Experience,

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138) and becomes elaborated in the notion of sunyata (ibid., 42–5). Dzogchen understands itself to be the Great Perfection of this Wisdom, which arises in the pristine, luminous, empty, all-relational, spontaneous consciousness (chitta) beyond any duality even of the consciousness of duality and nonduality of subject and object, perceiver and perceived, phenomenal and ultimate, relative and absolute, samsara and nirvana, temporality and eternity (Norbu, Source, 85–8). This chitta “beyond” chitta is the Luminous Mind (Harvey, Mind, 169–70, 175). It indicates both the essence and natural state of the mind and the essence of existence. This Reality insists as the Buddha (Dowman, Spaciousness, 5). It is experienced in the unperturbed presence of the now (rigpa) (ibid., xx; Rigtsal, Secret, 126–32). And in this experience, it releases the awareness of the All being one, and of the One, the Buddha, being all, as all exhibits (is indifferent from) Buddha-nature (Kalu Rinpoche, Mind, 15–26). In his transreligious exercise on Sufsm and Buddhism, Yousef Daoud (Joe Martin) describes the Dzogchen view by equating it with Ibn ‘Arabi’s understanding of Reality/God/Truth (al-haqq) in these terms:

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Everything that is, is interconnected. What lies behind it, hidden by a veil of our cognition and deluded consciousness, is Buddha-nature (dharmata) or the absolute reality of pure, enlightened Mind: dharmakaya, the experience of which is called bodhichitta. It is eternally abiding, unchanging, uncreated, and beyond our world of becoming. (Daoud, Rose, 55)

Note the interference of all three modes of manifestation of Reality: as absolute (beyond becoming), all-relational (everything is interconnected), and surrelative (eternally abiding). And note the transcendence of objective and subjective categories, such as absolute Reality and enlightened Mind, dharmakaya and bodhichitta (Norbu, Source, 59), enlightenment consisting of the pure consciousness or naked awareness of their indifference (Fenner, Mind, 1–22). Against all dualistic oppositions, therefore, and similar to the relativistic character of any expression of Reality, as it manifests Reality (and “its” expression by us through “our” Luminous Mind), Reality as Luminous Mind cannot be impersonal, transpersonal, or personal either or alone (Daud, Rose, 54). Furthermore, the Luminous Mind must (as in Ibn ‘Arabi) also exhibit the indifference (Sells, Languages, 113) of reality and consciousness (Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabi, 916–7), the personal and the impersonal, as the in/difference that in-sists in these differences as well as the different modes of absoluteness, all-relationality, and surrelativity. Hence, as the Luminous Mind must even allow for the seemingly impossible to arise—not as mere pedagogical trick, or as illusion, but as real appearance of ultimate Reality itself to address “it/self” (since “it” and “it’s Self” are indifferent!)—“it” can even embrace an astonishingly theistic mode of Self (Daoud, Rose, 58–9). In

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the Supreme Source Tantra (Kunjed Gyalpo), one of the central scriptures of Dzogchen (Norbu, Source, 75–130), dharmakaya appears as transpersonal, but personalized, Ultimate and speaks in the voice of frst person as Buddha Samantabhadra:

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I am self-arising wisdom that has existed from the beginning . . . . I am the supreme source of everything, pure and total consciousness. . . . The ineffable is the ultimate nature of existence: the ineffable essence is one. One is the supreme source, pure and total consciousness. The phenomena of creation are duality. . . . As the essence of mind, the fundamental substance, I am the source of all phenomena. “Supreme,” refers to self-arising wisdom, the supreme maker that gives rise to all phenomena of existence. “Source” refers to the “creator.” . . . “Total” means that self-arising wisdom, the true essence, permeates and pervades the whole animate and inanimate universe. (Daud, Rose, 55–6)

The Luminous Mind, our pure being and consciousness, and the Buddha in the voice of Samantabhadra are univocally expressing ultimate Reality as self-arising Wisdom—like Whitehead’s primordial envisagement of the primordial nature is (mysterious, unanalyzable) causa sui, issuing in the allembracing and all-pervading Wisdom of the primordial nature (Faber, Mystical Whitehead, 227–8). The Self of Reality (as the Luminous Mind) is one, but in no imaginable reiterated or reiterating way. Instead, only in apophatic excess this Wisdom-Reality ex-sists beyond anything and only out of itself, being unborn and unbecoming (Harvey, Mind, 190–1); it cannot be defned, not even as “one”; and it in-sists in itself as well as in everything that is its (mindful) “creation”—building on the infnite Buddha-felds of Mahayana as skillful creations (Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, 215)—again reminding us of the Bahá’í use of divine universal Mind as Wisdom (TU, #2:23) and of John Leslie’s Mind of God, even as it also goes back to Plotinus’s all-encompassing (transpersonal) Mind (nous) gazing at the One as pure consciousness (Enneads 6.2.6) and its relation to the purity of nirvana (Kloetzli, Nous, 140–77). Like the primordial Manifestation of Reality in the Bahá’í Faith, it is the Self of Reality (GDM, §46) that must be named, here, as Samantabhadra (a transpersonal-personal voice of ultimate Reality), even as, in the Bahá’í Faith, Reality is named “Bahá’u’lláh”: not only as the signifcation of the human being with the title “Bahá’u’lláh,” but addressing the primordial Reality manifest (in-sisting) in it (ch. 6)—that which biblically (Ez. 1:26) was signifed by the transpersonal “Glory of God” (kabod YHWH). Reality manifests “it/self” (“its” Self) as personal and transpersonal, at the same time (Momen, God, 23–5). What is more, both modes mirror the Self of Reality in the “pure and total consciousness” that is our essential existence, and it connects all existence with the primordial Manifestation of the Self of God

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(Samantabhadra) non-dually like one “substance” (but most interpreters with a dualistic mind-set would misunderstand this pantheistically). Therefore, it is in utmost harmony with the concept of the Luminous Mind when Bahá’í scriptures affrm both of these points. Bahá’u’lláh plainly states that God made “the reality of man” nothing less than “a mirror of His own Self” (GL, #27). And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá daringly embraces the second point, that our mind/consciousness is of the same “substance” as the Luminous Mind (which is generally perceived as monistic and excluded by Abrahamic, but emphatically expressed in Dharmic religions), when he compares the symbol of the relationship of the sea with the waves of the sea with “the station of the Primal Will [the primordial Mind] which is the Universal Reality and which becomes resolved into the innumerable forms” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in Momen, God, 20) of all existence. We should not forget that this image also implies—in coherence with the Dzogchen “voice” of the Luminous Mind/Samantabhadra—that it is “the attributes of Godhead, Divinity, Supreme Singleness, and Inmost Essence” (KI, 177) themselves that this Mind of God expresses.

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Self-arising wisdom, the essence of all the Buddhas, exists prior to the division of samsara and nirvana and is beyond the limits of transmigration and liberation. As it . . . is intrinsically pure, this original condition is the uncreated nature of existence . . . , the ultimate nature of all phenomena. It cannot be identifed with a stable and eternal substance . . . and is utterly free of all the defects of dualistic thought . . . . It is given the name ineffable [because it is] . . . beyond the conceptual limits of being and non-being. . . . Self-arising wisdom, primordially empty, is in the condition similar to space, and it pervades all beings without condition, from glorious Samantabhadra down to the tiniest insect on a blade of grass. For this reason that total state of dharmakaya, the inseparability of the two truths, absolute and relative, is called the “primordial Buddha.” (Norbu, Source, 20)

This commentary of Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, one of the primary living masters of Dzogchen, on the Supreme Source Tantra, confrms these deep resonances with the Bahá’í understanding of the indifference of Reality (dharmakaya) and pure Wisdom/Will/Mind/Heart (pabhassara chitta) and the in-sisting in/difference of primordial Manifestation (the primordial Buddha, Samantabhadra) with all Manifestations (all Buddhas) without reserve. It also confrms the inseparability (in/difference) of absolute and relative dimensions as expressions of the one Reality, the “primordial Buddha”—the Bahá’í primordial Manifestation, the Primordial Mind of God (‘aql-i awwal), the primordial kabod of God, “Bahá’u’lláh” (in the primordial sense). Longchenpa, one of the greatest masters of radical Dzogchen of all times, in his profound and widely revered 14th century C.E. Treasury of the

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Dharmadhatu, begins his considerations poetically, praising and “circumscribing” in utmost paradoxical language the essence of the Luminous Mind thusly: Everything arises in the vast matrix of spontaneity And Spontaneity is the ground of everything, But empty in essence, never crystallizing. The ground is nothing although it appears as everything. Samsara and Nirvana arise as spontaneity in the trikaya matrix . . . It is the creativity of the luminous mind, . . . Being nothing at all, yet appearing as everything whatsoever . . . In its sameness it is the dharmakaya of luminous mind; . . . , empty of self, unchanging, unsublimating, . . . self-sprung awareness in the now, reality itself . . . .

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(Dowman, Spaciousness, 5–6)

The Luminous Mind is emptiness of self-assurance and fullness of all phenomena, creativity itself, but selfess in its creations. This addresses one of the most basic problems with which the considerations of this chapter began: whether Reality is emptiness or fullness is a false dichotomy, built on the illusion of a self that is self-asserting itself and, hence, reiterating its separateness and substantiality (Izutsu, Structure, 170–1). The Luminous Mind is beyond both the difference of fullness and emptiness, as it “is/is not” both at once, in-sisting in both—which recaptures my notion of in/difference (ch. 6). It is precisely by “being nothing at all,” which means the abiding in utter selfessness, that the Self of Reality, the luminous Buddha, inheres in all. Reality (dharmakaya) is indifferent from the Luminous Mind (pabhassara chitta); which is indifferent from the Buddha (Samantabhadra); which is indifferent from the creativity of all created things (samsara); which is self-sprung from spontaneity—like Whitehead’s creativity and the Báb’s and Bahá’u’lláh’s Will of God (mashiyyat); which arises as the fast matrix (khora) of the threefold Buddha-body, the trikaya, that refects the threefold worlds of the primordial Manifestation (Kalu Rinpoche, Mind, 167–72); which is empty of Self (Faber, Nicht-Ich, 42–8); which is unchanging and uncompounded, but encompassing and creatively instigating any creative becoming. In his Instructions on the Nonduality of Dzogchen, Tulku Pema Rigtsal elaborates on Longchenpa’s treaty: When we understand that . . . affrmation and negation of nirvana and samsara . . . are merely elaborate mental concepts, we realize that all discursive concepts are empty in themselves and are the sameness of reality itself. There is no view and meditation more profound than this. (48) . . . Primal awareness, free of dualistic perception, is called “luminous mind.” . . . The essence of the nature

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of mind is uncompounded and immutable. The primal awareness that is the true nature of mind is profound clarity . . . eternal life . . . . (57–8) This gives us deep confdence on the difference between Buddha and sentient being. Repeating . . . Longchenpa’s The Treasury of the Dharmadhatu . . . . Recognition of the nature of mind is Buddha; in the absence of that recognition, we remain deluded and sentient beings. (Rigtsal, Secret, 217)

Not only does the Buddha encompass all worlds, but coinheres in all, by being the non-dual Reality of which our pure consciousness, if we could fnd to our own roots in our self, is just a mirror: a mirror of the selfess Self of Reality, the primordial Manifestation of the Consciousness, Mind and Creativity (Will) of Reality. It is our aim toward enlightenment to gain bodhichitta (Norbu, Source, 59), wherein, as Bahá’u’lláh says, nothing may “hinder us from beholding the beauty of His shining Countenance, and that we may recognize Him only by His own Self” (GL, #13). While in the same voice as Samantabhadra selfessly directing himself toward the “invisible Self” (PM, #77) of the in/different apophatic Reality, Bahá’u’lláh pronounces that “extolling to the utmost Thy majesty and glory is but a token of Thy grace unto them, that they may be enabled to ascend unto the station conferred upon their own inmost being, the station of the knowledge of their own selves” (GL, #1). In summary, the Luminous Mind has at least three paradoxical aspects: First, how can the Luminous Mind be pure, undefled, while being defled? In the Dzogchen view, the answer is that the way toward, and the aim of, liberation are the same, that is, that there is no way to bridge samsara to reach nirvana, because we are already there and of its nature (Rigtsal, Mind, xxvii– xxviii)—we might say, we are mutually in-isting through one another, as is the primordial Self-Manifestation of Reality with our true self. Second, how can the Luminous Mind be both relativity and absoluteness or samsara and nirvana? In the Dzogchen view, there are two modes of the Luminous Mind: one realizing its Self as emptiness (being nothing) and the other realizing its Self as creativity (being everything), called trekcho and togal (Dowman, Spaciousness, xvi). This correlates (to use Deleuze’s term again) with the “infnite speed” of the movement of the (only seemingly resting) unity of the all-relational, but also surrelative (all-encompassing), plane of immanence of the Self of Reality (ch. 5). Third, how can samsara and nirvana, the relative and the absolute, emptiness and creativeness, be non-dually one, that is, as the Buddha, dharmadhatu, pure radiant spaciousness, pure emptiness, Samantabhadra, the primal Buddha, “be” before dualism and monism? Dzogchen answers with the fundamental in/difference of all in the pure luminosity of the primordial Mind. This correlates with Bahá’u’lláh’s confrmation of the Suf teaching that really nothing exists except, that is, anything in-sists only in, Reality: “Our purpose in revealing these convincing and weighty utterances

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is to impress upon the seeker that he should regard all else besides God as transient, and count all things save Him, Who is the Object of all adoration, as utter nothingness” (GL, #125). Bahá’u’lláh corresponds to these paradoxes of the Luminous Mind as apophatic-polyphilic Reality with his elaboration on Reality being apophatically “uncompounded.”

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3. UNCOMPOUNDED REALITY Before going into any detail regarding the resonance between the Luminous Mind and the Uncompounded Reality in Bahá’u’lláh’s discussion (Faber, Bahá’u’lláh, 53–106), and the impact it bears on the problem of this chapter regarding the conversion of oppositions into contrasts, I want to at least mention the plethora of other resonances we can easily recognize. There is the linguistic serendipity that the Sanskrit word “bha,” luminosity, in pabhassara chitta, is also implied in the Arabic root of bahá’ (BHA’), virtually having the same meaning and releasing the mutually contrasting light-metaphoric of Buddhist and Bahá’í scriptures. In the wider context of this light-metaphoric, one is immediately reminded of the corresponding splendor of the kabod YHWH (Fossum, Christology, 260–7), and the utilization of this divine luminosity in Suf and Illuminationist traditions within Islam (Scholl, Remembrance, 73), as well as their counterparts in Indian, Chinese, and East Asian Buddhist schools (Lambden, Word, passim). Note the closeness to the Muhammedan light or reality (nur or haqiqah muhammadiyyah) of Ibn ‘Arabi and the Persian metaphysics of light such as that of Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra (Hazini, Neoplatonism, passim). Nurtured by a long tradition through Jewish, Hellenistic, Christian, and Islamic philosophy at the interchange of Greek, Persian, and Indian thought patterns, both intellect and life fow together in these light images (Walbridge, Wisdom, 46–82). Hence, we can easily see the correspondence with the light of the intellect in Plato’s Good, Plotinus’s Mind (nous), the stoic Logos, and the Suf kalima (Parrinder, Avatar, 198–205), emphasizing the consciousness aspect of the Luminous Mind, but also the light that is life and life-force, as addressed with the stoic Pneuma, Heraclitus, and the Johannine Logos (John 1), and the fusion of these strains, for instance, in the life/ light/clarity/immortality connotation given to Amitabha, the Buddha of infnite light (Lambden, Word, passim), and, fnally, in Dzogchen, the light that is Samantabhadra, the primordial Buddha personifying the Luminous Mind, also called “Immutable Light” (Norbu, Source, 21). All of these connotations relate, of course, directly (by mutual exchange) or indirectly (by coincidence and convergence), the concept of pabhassara chitta (and not only the name) to the transreligious Bahá’í inheritance, heritage, and understanding of the Primal Mind, or Will, or primordial Manifestation (SAQ, #53).

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Yet, perhaps the most profound aspect of correlation in the transreligious fow between the Buddha and Bahá’u’lláh that interests me, here (still following the main questions of this chapter), is the ability to constructively contrast the opposed and mutually excusing connotations of Reality—as either a state of mind or an objective reality, either a personal or an impersonal (transpersonal) reality, either an empty or full reality, either an apophatic or polyphilic reality—through the radical non-duality, in/difference, and in-sistence of Reality beyond, but never through exclusion of, these differentiations, while they lose their mutually exclusive edge. I will document this transreligious mutual conversion with fve considerations on the inherent realization in both Luminous Mind and the primordial Manifestation of Reality/Truth/God of their nature to be what can be called uncompounded. First, the primary indicator of non-dualism in Buddhist thought, and, I would claim, also in the Bahá’í writings, is that which, as already stated, can be captured with the concept and procedure of in/differentiation, but which is often simply named (but also often misconstrued as reiterated) “Oneness.” Its meaning wants to convey that Reality is not composed and, hence, cannot be found in any analysis or construction invented to analyze its unity into its components or to explain its unity from their synthesis. However, “construction” itself is, in the understanding of the Buddha (the reception of his teachings), an illusion of samsara and of the defled mind (Harvey, Mind, ch. 11). In short, Buddhist metaphysical and spiritual analysis aims at demonstrating that any substantial unity, which seems to be aloof from analysis, such as the uniqueness perceived of the Self, can, in fact, be analyzed into components, which are devoid of, and never lead to, any selfsubsisting base or uncomposed oneness and, hence, exhibits only impermanence (Trungpa, Myth, 12–15). Nevertheless, as the Buddha affrms in a famous statement in the Udana of the Khuddaka Nikaya (of the Theravada Sutta Pitaka), there is a way out of the samsaric reality of impermanence; there is salvation from its inherent suffering, created by attachment; there is a way beyond this ignorance—because there is (as in the Bahá’í writings) uncompounded Reality without construction and change: “unborn—unbecome—unmade—unfabricated” (Udana 8:3, in DeGraff, Udana, 113). This is what the nirvana aspect (Harvey, Mind, 189) of the dharmakaya means (Xing, Concept, ch. 4); and this is—as stated in the Lion’s Roar of Queen Srimala Sutra—the intrinsic purity of the Luminous Mind (Wayman and Wayman, Roar, 104–7). Since this Reality abides beyond all composition and, hence, also any conceptual grasping (mano), that is, any duality (as inherent in any conceptualization), it is inconceivable, imperceptible, and inaccessible (Harvey, Mind, 171). It is at once Reality itself, experienced in the realization of the emptiness of all composed appearances, and the experience of the bliss of cessation in perfect calmness (Harvey, Mind,

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188–92). Its consciousness would be, and be beyond, bodhichitta—it is the realization of the Luminous Mind. Second, as Uncompounded Reality excludes dualism and monism alike. Its in/difference can neither be expressed by substantial oneness nor by reiterated duality. Nevertheless, in order not to fall back into monistic or dualistic patterns, it must, paradoxically, be expressed as both at once: as inaccessible oneness and an infnite manifold. As Yousef Daoud indicates with regard to Suf-Buddhist dialogue: seek the Reality of God in no name or in the irreducibly many names—but never in one name (Rose, 63). In our language of the relativity of truth, this translates into the apophatic-polyphilic multiplicity (which, as we remember, is also beyond one and many) of the Absolute, All-Relational, and Surrelative (ch. 6). Nagarjuna expresses this same insight as the in/difference of samsara and nirvana, as it is the consequence of the uncompounded nature of ultimate Reality, namely, that it cannot appear in mere difference from composed reality, but neither as the identity of it (King, Philosophy, 137–46). Since Uncompounded Reality is beyond all conceptuality, it cannot be named; but any name cannot be different from it either (McCagney, Nagarjuna, ch. 3). This is also the secret of Plotinus’s scheme of emanation of which Michel Sells has made the most interesting analysis (Sells, Apophasis, 55–7): While the apophatic One (hen) emanates the Intellect (nous), it is not different from it, as long as the Intellect looks upward into the undifferentiated One. Only if the Intellect looks at itself, it creates difference; and from this, for Plotinus, creation springs. We fnd ample evidence for this logic in the Bahá’í writings: from Bahá’u’lláh’s adaptation of the Islamic Hadith “He who knows himself hath known his Lord” (Bahá’u’lláh, Commentary/Tradition, passim)—which, following Henry Corbin, has its own history with Ibn ‘Arabi (Corbin, Alone, 120)—to statements of Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on the in/difference of Self and Divinity already mentioned earlier in this chapter. Third, regarding the Universal Reality or the Primal Will or Mind (SAQ, #53), the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh identify “it” with the primordial Manifestation (Momen, God, 24). We have only to recall this non-dual logic to be profoundly affrmed in Bahá’u’lláh’s assertion of the unity of unmanifest Divinity (hahut) with its primordial manifestness (lahut). In his Commentary on a Verse of Rumi, Bahá’u’lláh claims this indistinction to be of “the essence of belief in Divine unity” insofar as we must regard “Him Who is the Manifestation of God and Him Who is the invisible, the inaccessible, the unknowable Essence as one and the same” (GL, #84). This does not, of course, imply any monistic identity, which is not only clear from countless apophatic passages in Bahá’u’lláh’s writings, even from the same tablet, but from the non-dualistic logic itself by which Uncompounded Reality is in/different in itself and, hence, also in/different from its Manifestations,

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corroborating Plotinus and Nagarjuna as well as the Dzogchen understanding of the Luminous Mind. Fourth, the same apophatic logic also underpins Ibn ‘Arabi’s speculation on the nameless oneness of God, expressing itself in infnite multiplicity of divine names and attributes (Izutsu, Sufsm, ch. 7). While these attributes appear to be different from one another, a divine name or attribute has no identity in itself, but fnds its identity only in the essence of God, the apophatic Reality from which is in/different (Corbin, Alone, 114–5). ‘Abdu’l-Bahá indicates the same thought, which, thereby, reveals its non-dualistic intention, when he confrms that in God’s essence there are no attributes distinct from it. “This is assuredly beyond our comprehension, for the essential names and attributes of God are identical with His Essence, and His Essence is sanctifed above all understanding” (SAQ, #37). And Bahá’u’lláh obliges all Bahá’ís to pray in the Long Obligatory Prayer: “I testify that Thou hast been sanctifed above all attributes and holy above all names” (BP, 12). Yet, as this “essence” (dhat) of Reality is inaccessible even to the divine attributes, their unity—what they are—always transcends them into the unmanifest Real (Sells, Languages, 93). In Buddhist terms, this self-transcendence affrms their essential emptiness. As these attributes, in Ibn ‘Arabi and Bahá’u’lláh alike, are most perfectly mirrored in the primordial Manifestation, the Mind of God is their unity, although “its” Self is “itself” empty of substantiality, except being the Self of the essence in which the attributes are indistinct (Savi, Summit, 255–60). As in Longchenpa, all is empty of self-existence, but this is the Self of the Buddha (Dowman, Spaciousness, 43). And as for Longchenpa all phenomenal existence is only a creative dream of the Luminous Mind, so is for Ibn ‘Arabi all existence only ex-sisting as it manifests the attributes of God, which are in-sisting in their actualization (Sells, Languages, 75–7), which again is the self-disclosure (tajalli) of Reality (Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabi, 917–8). Fifth, the logic of non-difference has another consequence: We must not confound language utilizing the Greco-Islamic heritage in Bahá’í conceptuality with meaning, as if Greek thought defnes it for us. Not only are we warned by Bahá’u’lláh that revelation is not exhausted by its linguistic mold, being relative for its diverse audiences (Hatcher, Validity, 32–5), but the infux of Shaykhi and Suf terminology relieves us also of the assumption that we are bound by Greek categories (Bausani, Religion, 379), or even that we must defend them over and against Buddhist terminology of non-duality (Momen, Relativism/Metaphysics, 186). A case in point is the linguistic illusion that Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá use the categories of “essence” and “attribute” in an Aristotelian substantialist manner (Kluge, Ontology I, 122–60). Yet, in light of Ibn ‘Arabi’s conviction that “Real Wujud [Divine Existence/Being] has no quiddity or ‘whatness’ (mahiyyah)” (Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabi, 916), indicating “a no-thing” (ibid., 917), and

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Longchenpa’s essence-less dharmakaya/Luminous Mind that “is nothing although it appears as everything” (Dowman, Spaciousness, 5), this proves to be too premature a conclusion—as is also recognized in the BuddhistIslamic transreligious discourse (Shah-Kazemi, Ground, 44–7). The Islamic philosophical background of the Bahá’í scriptures is itself a process philosophy instead of an unfettered affrmation of Aristotelian substantialism, akin only to Whitehead in European philosophical tradition (ch. 8). In its use of “substance,” “essence,” “attribute,” and “event” (Hamid, Metaphysics, 264–9) and corroborated by Whitehead’s use of this terminology (Odin, Process Metaphysics, parts 1–2), the Suf, Shaykhi and Bahá’í framework is recognizably not Aristotelian, but rather Buddhist in nature. As soon as we can begin to see these patterns of resonance and convergence, here, we are almost forced to also seek the deeper conceptual oscillations between Bahá’í, process and Buddhist terminology. Hence, if we care to be open to a Buddhist reading of these categories, given their resonance of the dynamic of in/difference they display, a very interesting insight will emerge overriding such suggestions, namely, that for both Bahá’í and Buddhist thought “essence” is inaccessible: “The Invisible and Inaccessible can never be known; the absolute Essence can never be described” (SAQ, #37). While in Aristotelian lore the concept of substantial “essence” seems to imply that we can know the unknowable essence of God and really anything to some extent through “its”/their attributes, the Buddhist non-dualism asserts that there is no essence that could be differentiated from its attributes, and, thereby, be identifed. More cautiously, we could say not that there is no essence, but that it is intrinsically inaccessible (Corless, Buddhism, 336–7). Uncompounded Reality is inaccessible—period (Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabi, 926). In Buddhist terms, this allows for the mutual emptiness of all dharmas, and of these with the inaccessible, but indistinct “essence,” which then connotes emptiness itself, the transcendent Wisdom and the Self of emptiness, the Buddha (Kalu Rinpoche, Mind, 146–7). I will come back to this assessment in the next chapter. For now, this approach confrms Uncompounded Reality as in/difference beyond composition, as the apophatic Absolute beyond composition, as the attributes’ and relative existents’ “empty” in-sisting All-Relationality (Compassion), and as their all-encompassing Surrelativity. So, if we follow Bahá’u’lláh’s guidance of “regarding Him Who is the Manifestation of God and Him Who is the invisible, the inaccessible, the unknowable Essence as one and the same” (GL, #84), this also includes the in/difference of the Absolute, the All-Relational, and the Surrelative in the primordial Manifestation of the Self of Reality—as it does for the Luminous Mind. We can now relate this non-dualism to a tablet of Bahá’u’lláh that explicitly highlights these most interesting aspects for our transreligious contrasting with Buddhism (Faber, Bahá’u’lláh, 53–106). The Tablet on the

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Uncompounded Reality (Lawh Basít al-Haqíqa) (UR, 213–22) can now function as a commentary on the Luminous Mind, because it refects its nature, namely, that all is one and the One is all. Bahá’u’lláh’s tablet intends a non-dualistic understanding of the nature of Reality. It is neither fxated on a monistic expression: a feld of spacious emptiness; nor a theistic one: the Thou of a personal God. As with the ultimate Buddha Samantabhadra, who is the Luminous Mind itself and its Self, Bahá’u’lláh’s Reality/Truth/God (al-Haqq) can be expressed as either, both, or neither. Bahá’u’lláh’s tablet introduces the discussion of ultimate Reality by way of a commentary on the maxim that was introduced by Plotinus: “the One is all things” (Enneads 5.2.1; Sells, Apophasis, 60). This seemingly monistic maxim, affrmed by Islamic schools formed in the wake of Ibn ‘Arabi and, in the concrete case, related by Bahá’u’lláh through its discussion by the great Persian philosopher in the Illuminationist tradition, Mulla Sadra, was commonly debated under the heading “unity of being” (wahdat al-wujud), and was opposed by Indian Suf sage Ahmad Sirhindi with the decidedly dualistic counter-motto “unity of appearance” (wahdat al-shuhud) (UR, 203–4). Bahá’u’lláh’s position in this debate is quite unique and, by way of these connections, also evokes the Luminous Mind of which, as we have seen, the same non-dualistic AllOneness can be predicated. In the opinion of some scholars, there might even be a direct connection between Plotinus and Indian parallels and infuences (Gregorios, Neoplatonism; Wallace, Buddhism, 10–11), and Sirhindi’s opposition, in his Indian Suf context, may even be read on the background of Vedantist non-dualism and in Abrahamic reaction to Sankara’s monism. Now, Bahá’u’lláh answers with an interpretation of this Suf maxim that affrms the truth of this Plotinic statement with basically four arguments while, at the same time, releasing the implications of its non-dualistic understanding in an excitingly transreligious direction. Here are the four arguments: With a frst argument, Bahá’u’lláh differentiates the meaning of “all things” not to refer to “all (physical) phenomena” of the universe of becoming, but to name the pleroma of all divine attributes. Hence, being their essence and naming their Reality, “the One” in the formula, then, signifes the apophatic Uncompounded Reality in which these attributes indistinctly inhere while being “its” infnite polyphilic emanations (UR, 213). Like the Luminous Mind, the “inner essential reality” of all things is not their phenomenal existence, but their realization of the divine attributes. The “inner essential reality” of these attributes again is empty (sunya) since “it” (the essence of the attributes) has no self-existence either. As their “reality” signifes the apophatic essence of Reality/Truth/God itself, it is only “its” ex-sistence (beyond itself) they manifest as Reality in-sists in them. With a second argument, Bahá’u’lláh carves out the non-dualistic meaning of this maxim by quoting Plotinus in his tablet in the full (ch. 6): “The One is

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all things and no one of them” (Enneads 5.2.1; UR, 213). Although the One is all things, it is none of them—equally affrming identity and difference, or better, in/difference. The Luminous Mind is also both: the emptiness of all things, and, as such, their essence; yet, it is not any of the phenomena either, while they are the spontaneous arising and cessation of “its” own creativity. With Longchenpa and Ibn ‘Arabi, Bahá’u’lláh’s Uncompounded Reality (alhaqq) names the non-dual “Primal Divine Unity in all things” that is, it names indifferently “Absolute Reality” (UR, 214) as the “Supreme . . . Consciousness” that manifests “itself in the three realms of cosmos, self, and scripture” (Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabi, 920). With a third argument, Bahá’u’lláh in his tablet differentiates between two modes of the non-dual, indistinct Uncompounded Reality, in the way that resonates with the Luminous Mind: in the mode of “oneness of being” (tawhid i-wujudi) only the Uncompounded Reality really and solely exists; and in the mode of the “oneness of appearance” (tawhid i-shuhudi) the Uncompounded Reality is indistinctly present in all beings (UR, 214–5). Overcoming the traditional opposition between monism and dualism, theism and non-theism, wahdat al-wujud and wahdat al-shuhud, Bahá’u’lláh indicates that both modes of indistinct unity are equally valid (!) in naming the unnamable nature of the trans- and non-conceptual Uncompounded Reality. What is peculiar to Bahá’u’lláh’s interpretation of these two modes, however, is that Bahá’u’lláh radicalizes their non-dual characterization even further by transforming the “non-dual duality” of both modes into something else, entirely: He in/differentiates them through their mutual crossing over toward another or mutual transcending into another or mutually coinhering in one another, reminding of Whitehead’s mutual immanence (ch. 4). While wahdat al-wujud was classically meant to express a monistic unity (UR, 203–4), which Bahá’u’lláh already has reinterpreted as non-duality, Bahá’u’lláh answers with the slightly nuanced concept tawhid i-wujudi, which, now conversely, indicates the absolute transcendence of ultimate reality beyond its unity. And while wahdat al-shuhud was classically meant to uphold the orthodox dualism between transcendent God and creatures and, hence, favors the theistic difference over the monistic collapse of Reality and realities (UR, 204), Bahá’u’lláh answers with the slightly nuanced tawhid i-shuhudi, which indicates the absolute immanence of the indistinct uncompounded reality in all creatures. With a fourth argument, Bahá’u’lláh unites, that is, in/differentiates, both modes of indistinction, as they are only relatively true in themselves, but indistinctly true in the Self-Manifestation of Uncompounded Reality (UR, 215). As with the Luminous Mind, which comprises absolute and relative, unity and multiplicity, emptiness and creativity, in the luminosity of the dharmakaya, for Bahá’u’lláh the indistinction between apophatic Reality and

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its Manifestation is expressed in the Uncompoundedness of the (primordial) Manifestation. While the “locus of the Divine Unity, even though outwardly He is given a name and appears to be bound by limitations,” Bahá’u’lláh states, He/She/It “is in His inner reality uncompounded (basít), sanctifed from limitations.” However, this “uncompounded state is relative and attributive (idaf wa nisbi),” Bahá’u’lláh adds, “and not uncompounded in an absolute sense (min kull al-jihat)” (UR, 215). He/She/It (the Manifestation) is “it” (Uncompounded Reality) and her/him/itself (the Manifestation)—as in Plotinus and Longchenpa. This “Self” is the manifestation of ultimate non-dual indistinction. Self-Manifestation (in the double sense of spontaneous causa sui without “reason” and constituting its own Self) in-sists as Samantabhadra, the Self of immortal light, and the bahá’ Allah, not Mirza Husayn ‘Ali Nuri, but the apophatic luminosity of God’s Self “it/self.” “It” ecstatically in-sists as the chitta that ecstatically ex-sists beyond it/self in/from/as “it.” The Self of Reality is always only beyond itself “it” and “it” is only beyond it/self “its” Self. In this movement, we encounter the illumination of the pabhassara chitta. This ultimate oscillation of indistinction is an important instrument in Buddhism to avoid any new reiteration of fxed labels by which we would fall into the ignorance of deflement again, clouding the luminosity of detachment. This movement can never stop at any (conceptual, mental, physical, or spiritual) place or even non-dual categories and experiences such as nirvana, enlightenment, or emptiness, without becoming illusion and attachment again (Winters, Thinking, ch. 8). As the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh have made clear in many of their writings, although the primordial Manifestation (as the Mind of God) can declare “it/self” (its Self) God, it is never identical with God; and although it (as the Will of God) is self-creative and creates, it is also not the creator (Saiedi, Gate, 192). With Plotinus we can reformulate: Only the Intellect that understands it/self indistinct from, but not identical with the inaccessible essence of Uncompounded Reality, “is/is not” the Manifestation of “it” (Sells, Languages, ch. 1). With this delicate movement in/beyond fxated conceptualizations of religious experiences and intuitions, we may have gained a deeper understanding of the transreligious power with which different religious, philosophical, and spiritual thought patterns are able to avoid the opposition between phenomenal religions in the usually divergent interpretation of their experiences and intuitions as well as the bifurcating conceptualities they use (sometimes even in direct self-affrmation of their uniqueness over and against “the other”) and, instead, can follow the apophatic-polyphilic paradigm. Know thou that, verily, the Manifestation of God is not composed of . . . elements. Nay, rather, He is the Mystery of Divine Oneness, of . . . the Eternal

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Essence and the Unknowable Reality, . . . which has never been nor shall ever be separate from all else. (Bahá’u’lláh, Tablet of Manifestation, §2)

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4. BHAGAVAT It might not be true for all religions (all the time), but at a certain point, at their founding events, with their founding fgures, or in their later unfolding, by developing a deep perception for the divine presence in certain of their representatives, the question of the Manifestation of Reality becomes a question of great importance, even to the extent that without a thoughtful answer to it the essence of this religion is feared by its adherents to have been missed or even lost. An abstract manifest Reality, a primordial Manifestation, which is often deeply engrained in the fabric of the spiritual universes of diverse religions, seems often not enough. There is a thrust that demands “it” to become presence in this world—not through any kind of instrument of magic or the power of words (as force-felds) or as idols or ideas or events or objects, but in human form. Reality seems to address “it/self” in “its” core, heart, essence, nature, in the movement that John Hick iconically captured as transformation from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness (Interpretation, 164)—in our context, however, by moving “it/self” in compassion (karuna) and love (agape) in this movement (Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, 23). Yet, this movement is not simply anthropomorphism (Shah, Depictions, ch. 1), claiming some divinity for human beings, adhering to some kind of cult of the divine or divinized hero, known from Greco-Roman times, whether as myth or literal apotheosis (Riley, Jesus, chs. 2–3). Instead, generally the meaning of such a transcendental movement (as the central religious intention) is, for these exceptional fgures, such as the Buddha, Jesus, or Krishna, who are identifed with such a motif, not to indicate or demand their divination, to claim divine power, or satisfy themselves by being worshiped. Rather, it is about the appearance (self-disclosure, manifestation, revelation, theophany, zuhur, tajalli, kabod) of the translucent form of the formlessness (Fossum, Christology, 263) of the Reality “it/self,” to be, and to be understood as, the manifest witness of the (transcendent) unknowable Absolute as all-relational (universally immanent) and surrelative (encompassing) presence; to be the insistence of the in/different Reality “itself” or to ex-sist in (to point way from themselves to) the Self of Reality/Truth/God. It is in this context that transreligious translucency of mutual immanence and coinherence becomes important, if the truth of transreligious relativity should be accepted. Such resonances would also further circumscribe the ways by which the opposites that haunt the religious diversities between and within religions can be tested, whether or not they are able to form, or be

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transformed into, contrasts (in Whitehead’s sense). The preceding section has tested this mutuality with the modes of non-dual duality (not dualism) or in/difference by which ultimate Reality is addressed in different religions, whether “it” is emphasized in their different schools as more personal or transpersonal, unmanifest or manifest, empty or pleromatic. Bahá’u’lláh has given us a model to pursue by suggesting that the Uncompounded Reality is the “inner reality” of the human fgure (of the Manifestations) that appears as the “locus of the Divine Unity, even though outwardly He is given a name and appears to be bound by limitations”; a locus in which this fgure is “sanctifed from limitations” (UR, 215). The locus of Oneness appears in polyphilic diversity in which, although differences are its limitations, “it” does not disappear (in these limitations), but instead manifests it/self (its Self) therein (KI, 176–7). For Bahá’u’lláh, the human fgures in which religions found (and fnd) Reality are the sites of “its” presence in which Reality in in/difference in-sists. These fgures are, therefore, the “signs” (ESW, §246) of the lucidity of “its” presence without any disappearance of “its” sites (PM, #178). The inner logic of the motive force of manifestation needs Manifestations. In a well-known passage, Bahá’u’lláh condenses this divine logic thusly:

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And since there can be no tie of direct intercourse to bind the one true God with His creation, and no resemblance whatever can exist between the transient and the Eternal, the contingent and the Absolute, He hath ordained that in every age and dispensation a pure and stainless Soul be made manifest in the kingdoms of earth and heaven. Unto this subtle, this mysterious and ethereal Being He hath assigned a twofold nature; the physical, pertaining to the world of matter, and the spiritual, which is born of the substance of God Himself. (GL, #27)

I will come back to the multireligious problems implied of such a claim, which has played out in ferce oppositions between diverse religious as they defne their identity over against one another in the history of religions, in the next chapter. Here, I am interested in the transreligious resonances of this claim in light and in extension of, and the basis of such a claim in, the Uncompounded Reality and/or the Luminous Mind. Its non-dual duality of emphases of aspects, in themselves diverse and seemingly opposed to one another, yet abides in the surrelative unity of the (non-dual) twofold nature of its Manifestations, which comprises and releases its “outer” limiting divergence without losing its encompassing “inner” unlimited indistinctness. We may, at this point, remember that Whitehead, despite the perceived opposition of Christianity and Buddhism regarding the kind of religion its founders effected (RM, 50, 140), describes Christ and the Buddha in somewhat similar terms as personal presences of transpersonal Reality—which, because of apophatic indistinctness of these concepts, could also be called the transpersonal presence of the personal Reality (ch. 6). In short, as Jesus

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(according to Christianity) is the revelation of the nature of God, so is the Buddha (according to Buddhism) the presence of the dharma or the dharmakaya itself (Fozdar, God, 30–4; Knitter and Haight, Jesus, chs. 3–5; Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, 174–7). In their life, these fgures are either the nature of God in person or the dharma in person (Buddhadasa, Me, 129–30; Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddha, 36). My reading of Whitehead’s “God” as that which or whom Bahá’ís call “manifest Reality” or “primordial Manifestation” thus means: both the Christ and the Buddha—despite all differences in terminology, culture, conceptuality, way of life, ethnicity, and so on—are corporally the in-sistent presence of the Wisdom (primordial nature) and Compassion (consequent nature) of Reality/God (Odin, Peace, 371–84; Knitter, Buddha, ch. 5) beyond which there “is” nothing that can be known or said. In indistinctness from “it,” they actualize “its” Self in their lives, words, actions, teachings, characters, personalities, events, spirits, and ways they gather communities around themselves—and still do. Whether one calls them incarnations or appearances, theophanies or avatars, and whatever the mechanisms of differentiations are according to the different metaphysical worldviews articulating them (Parrinder, Avatar, chs. 15–18; Panikkar, Christ, passim; Kohn, God, 39–40), these fgures are, in the function of translucency that is mediating the Ultimate in person, neither “identical” with the Ultimate—Bahá’u’lláh calls for the provision that their Uncompoundedness, although infnite, is secondary (UR, 215)—nor “different” from the Ultimate, as we all are, knowing (in mystical experience and refection) the indistinct Reality closer to us than ourselves. They are exceedingly rare, in whatever context they are revered. There is, according to Christianity, only one Incarnation. Although an Islamic Hadith estimates as many as 124,000 prophetic fgures accepted within and without the JewishChristian-Islamic line of prophets and messengers (Ater, Comparison, passim), there are only a few of the traditional 313 High Prophet-Messengers (rasul or nabi-rasul) named and, according to Ibn ‘Arabi, they all exhibit the essence of Prophet Muhammad, the Muhammedan light (Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabi, 927). According to Vaishnavism, only about two hand full (up to twenty something) avatars of Vishnu/Krishna are named in various scriptures and traditions, but with Krishna being the only full Avatar (Parrinder, Avatar, 20–2, 72n1). Although there are myriads of Buddhas in Mahayana Buddhism, according to Theravada Buddhism, there can only ever be one fully enlightened in a cosmic age (Morgan, Buddhism, 19). And in the Lotus Sutra, despite the infnite skillful means, it is all the myriads of Buddhas who bow before the one, the Buddha Shakyamuni (Reeves, Lotus Sutra, 13–6). According to Jainism, only twenty-four Tirthankaras ever make an age full (Lundberg, Adam, 71). According to religious Daoism (dao jiao) the divinized Laozi, Lord Lao, appears as the incarnation of the Dao, not only in the

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historical Laozi, but also, for instance, as the Buddha and as the Prophet Mani (Kohn, God, 24–7, 39–40). According to Sikhism, there were only ten Gurus (and the last one is the holy book itself, the Guru Granth Sahib). And so on. Yet, instead of simply subsuming all these under some kind of divinehuman mixture (as in Arianism), divinized humans (as with Greek heroes), or materializations of some gods (as with Hindu devas), Bahá’u’lláh warns us not to lose sight of the impossibility of such a reductionist claim: Reality is not an object that can be handled and combined with anything; the human mind, heart, spirit, soul, is not a thing that can just be combined with anything either, although it unfolds in worlds (PT, #29). Instead, per Bahá’u’lláh, it is the in/different Reality that/who in-sists in them trans/personally (HW. A, #1). In a sense, it is not their personality that expresses Reality, but Reality becomes present in them to this rare extent as they have delivered their selves up to the Self of Reality (KA, n160 on ¶143), have become nothing in “its” mediation and, hence, are, as Bahá’u’lláh says, pure mirrors of the Sun of Reality, “the Manifestations of that Sun of Reality, which casteth Its light upon the Mirrors” (SV, 38). Let me explore the particular points involved in this transreligious pattern with some examples. However Buddhism might have developed out of and in opposition to Brahmanism (Lindtner, Buddhism, 217–46), in concurrence with and in opposition to the Upanishads and later writings such as the Bhagavat Gita, it seems clear that even early Buddhism (some say maybe even the pre-sectarian Buddhism) did not understand the Buddha as a mere human being. Rather, even in schools that emphasized the human nature of the Buddha, that fgure was not devoid of superhuman features, such as powers, marks, and abilities. The divine Buddha of the Mahayana, conversely, did not lose human birth, development, enlightenment-experience, and death either, however much all of these divine characteristics might have become an expression of the Uncompounded Reality of the dharma (Xing, Concept, ch. 1). “The early Buddhist texts . . . give support to [the] claim that, in Buddhist beliefs, the Buddha and the Buddhas are a sui generis type of beings” (Pyysiäinen, Buddhism, 150). Yet, as already mentioned, even if the infnite Reality of the infnite Buddhas, in the Lotus Sutra connected in one vast dharma-feld, elevates the discourse to mythological heights, the historical Shakyamuni Buddha remains the teacher of the assembly. The same is true for Krishna (Sheridan, Theism, 17–20, 52–3). Even when all avatara become partial revelations/corporatizations of his nature as the Supreme Divine Personality (ch. 6), which is the trans/personal appearance of the atman that is brahman (whatever different strains of historical background have grown together into the full appearance of the divine fgure of the Bhagavat Gita), Krishna’s appearance is human and has historical relevance and appearance

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(Parrinder, Avatar, 120–6). And if this is true for the Ultimate shining in the historical fgures of Nanak and Mahavira through the guru and the tirthankara (Parrinder, Avatar, ch. 13), it is, of course, eminently true for the Christian claim of “Jesus Christ having come in the fesh” (1 John 4:2). Importantly, this Johannine claim is not just a matter of anti-Docetism, that the Logos (primordial Manifestation) did not really become human, but even more a matter of the divinity of Christ, that the human person of Jesus was the divine Christ, in the frst place (De Boer, Death, 328). The picture that transreligiously arises is this: The fgures in which the Uncompounded Reality becomes visible are what Pauline literature calls “the visible image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), of apophatic Reality, reminiscing on the Jewish fgure of Wisdom’s being the “spotless mirror of the workings of God, and an image of his goodness” (Wisdom of Solomon 7:26) (Witherington, Jesus, 266–7). And what Dharmic religions revere as bhagavan or Bhagavat, the Adorable One, is the supreme Trans/Person in the bodily/personal expression of Uncompounded Reality or the Luminous Mind (Sheridan, Theism, 17–20, 52–3). This concept “applies to the Buddha, to Mahavira, to Krsna (BG 9.11)” and its experience is answered with bhakti, because invariably “a Bhagavat by way of maya has let himself be incarnated in a mortal and physical frame in order to teach a path to the One to its devotees” (Lindtner, Buddhism, 240). But what is most interesting in this rendering of the Manifestation of Uncompounded Reality is, now, that it carries its own non-dual duality of ultimate and corporeal existence with it because of the nature of the ultimate Reality as the non-dual duality of “its” apophatic and polyphilic aspects (Sheridan, Theism, 20–31, 57–9)—as is the non-dual dual nature of the Luminous Mind also. As the Luminous Mind has two aspects: that of emptiness (being absolutely empty even of itself) and spontaneous creativity (surrelative all-relationality)—the apophatic and the polyphilic in my terminology—so has absolute brahman two “forms” (rupa), “an immortal and a bodiless, and a mortal and a bodily: the One was transcendent and immanent” (Lindtner, Buddhism, 240). Like brahman, the Bhagavat has also two forms. “It is not just later on, in Mahayana, that a distinction is made between the rupa- and dharmakaya of the Buddha. The distinction between the two forms is inherent from the very beginning in the concept of the Bhagavat.” And the Bhagavat again teaches a twofold dharma; in Krishna’s case (BG 3.3) that of jnana (reaching for pure consciousness) and karma (working through the multiplicity of related existence). This non-dual duality of brahman and Bhagavat is, again, mirrored in the Buddhist indistinction between samsara and nirvana. Here, the Hindu “That Art Thou” (tat twam asi) translates into the Buddhist thatness or suchness (tattvam). Here, the Bhagavat “identifes the micro- and macrocosm by saying that tat is one with tvam, that object and subject are

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somehow not really different” (Lindtner, Buddhism, 243)—an “identity” that in Buddhist terminology becomes the indifference of samsara and nirvana, the indistinction between emptiness and fullness. In the Yogakara Adornment of Mahayana Sutras (Mahayana Sutralamkara karika), ascribed to Asanga, for instance (MSA 9:56), the “essential nature of the Dharma Realm (here a synonym for the Buddhas) is defned . . . as both ‘the purifcation of the Suchness of all things’ (cosmic dimension) and ‘awareness of all things and . . . awareness which has that as its object’ (psychological dimension)” (Griffth, Buddha, 512). It is this “unconditioned awareness,” which is the “fundamentally unconstructed awareness” of Reality, “free from improper imaginative constructions” and “empty of any phenomenological content,” that highlights the non-dual duality of everything and nothing, being and state of mind, subject and object, the emptiness and fullness of the Luminous Mind that allows the Buddha to engage in universal communication for salvation, because this “unconditional unconstructed awareness is like empty space, while subsequently attained awareness is like that space flled with the colors and forms” (ibid., 514). The Bhagavat is the presence of Uncompounded Reality in person. “He Who is everlastingly hidden from the eyes of men can never be known except through His Manifestation, and His Manifestation can adduce no greater proof of the truth of His Mission than the proof of His own Person” (GL, #20). This insight harbors important implications spelling out truths of transreligious relativity. First, the Reality that the Bhagavat exhibits in her existence is the twofold essence of Uncompounded Reality as “unity of being” (tawhid i-wujudi) and “unity of appearance” (tawhid i-shuhudi), being none of them except in in-sisting in/difference to them. Hence, as in the non-difference (abheda) of the personal and transpersonal aspects of Reality (brahman) in the Bhagavat—as found, for instance, in the Bhagavata Purana (Sheridan, Theism, ch. 2), but also of the related indistinctness of creativity and emptiness of these two aspects of Samantabhadra in Longchenpa’s Precious Treasury of the Dharmadhatu (Dowman, Spaciousness, 2)—we are asked by Bahá’u’lláh to overcome the notion that we must decide between the personal or impersonal (and full and empty) essence of Reality (al-haqq), but instead we are to fnd both indistinctly being expressed in the Manifestation (mazhar-i ilahi). Second, the non-dual duality of apophatic emptiness and creative polyphilia of Reality is refected in the twofold nature of the Bhagavat as divine (lahut, dharmakaya) and human (nasut, rupakaya). This insight—whether in the form of the relation of unqualifed indistinctness (abhedavada) to the All of Sankara or that of qualifed indistinctness in the Bhagavata Purana, for which brahman becomes differentiated (Sheridan, Theism, 39–41), or the non-dualism of the early Buddhist two-body differentiation (Xing, Concept,

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23–44) and the later trikaya doctrine (ibid., chs. 4–6)—will relieve us from the opposition of either understanding the Manifestation as only human or only divine, or even as a being in between. Rather, the intention in all of these traditions seems to indicate that the Manifestation is either always both at once or not at all (as, for instance, in certain Advaita and Madhyamika interpretations of understanding Reality)—but never, or only by simplifcations, some kind of mixture. Third, the Bhagavat as expression of this twofold essence in her twofold nature also exhibits a twofold station: that of apophatic oneness and that of polyphilic manifold, as non-dualism and pluralism always mutually resonate (Sheridan, Theism, 39–41), whether in Advaita and Madhyamika, or abheda and Yogacara incarnations. Bahá’u’lláh’s words express this twofold station as different from the twofold nature, referred to and quoted above (GL, #27), thusly:

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These Manifestations of God have each a twofold station. One is the station of pure abstraction and essential unity. . . . The other station is the station of distinction, and pertaineth to the world of creation, and to the limitations thereof. In this respect, each Manifestation of God hath a distinct individuality, a defnitely prescribed mission, a predestined revelation, and specially designated limitations. (GL, #22)

While the twofold nature addresses the question of embodiment (incarnation, appearance, theophany), being born as a fully enlightened One or as avatara of the divine essence and personality (Momen, Hinduism, 5–9), the two stations stress the ability of Reality to embody in polyphilic love as a manifold in different worlds and religions. Both insights will be taken up as transreligious solutions to the multireligious oppositions in these matters in the next chapter again. Fourth, “in the person” of the Bhagavat, Reality expresses its twofold character as Wisdom and Compassion (Cobb, Dialogue, 125–9, 145–50) as it unites and releases the contrast of what Whitehead has called the dipolarity of God (and very event) of physical and mental prehension (ch. 6). This non-dual dipolar prehensive oscillation becomes the in/difference of subject and object, mind and body, consciousness or realm, samsara and nirvana, atman and brahman—neither being only a state of mind (as in the Yogacara) nor only an objective state (as in the Theravada). What is more, by this insight—as Whitehead’s God indicates the Primal Manifestation of the apophatic Reality—any of the polyphilic Manifestations of Reality as Reality “in person” can be understood as the all-presence of the all potentiality of all divine attributes and virtues (primordial creativity, Wisdom) and the all-receptivity of all happenings (consequent receptivity, Compassion). This is nothing less than a restatement

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of the classical divine characteristics of omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience in the language of love (Cobb and Griffn, Process Theology, ch. 3); as it is also a restatement of the two characteristics of the dharmakaya as jnana and karuna (Abe, Kenotic God, 3–67). The Bhagavat commands not only our mind to seeking unity with the indifferent, the brahman, but she also demands our heart to seek community with the in-sisting, the Bhagavan. Fifth, conversely, the “person” of the Bhagavat will, now, become the healing channel of these non-dual appearances—personal and transpersonal, empty and full, creative and receptive, wise and compassionate—by drawing us into a twofold reaction, that of jnana and bhakti, insight and love, mystical knowledge and worship, transpersonal unio mystica and personal perichoresis—thereby, combining the two major ways religions have addresses (whether in themselves or in differentiating themselves from others)—the path of knowledge (gnosis) and the path of faith (pistis). Or as the Short Obligatory Bahá’í Prayer says “Thou hast created me to know Thee and to worship Thee” (BP, 4). Collectively, these conciliations of all of these contrastive oscillations “in the person” of the Bhagavat or Manifestation, as it has (or can, if one lets it) overcome the deep oppositions of religious divergences, may open a way for the transformation of religious conficts into transreligious contrasts, with which this chapter is concerned. This transreligious elucidation will also lead to the fnal two questions of the current considerations—distributed between the last two sections of this chapter—on the non-dual natures, characters, and stations of the Bhagavat or Manifestation, as they relate to the twofold movement in the in-different oscillation between these non-dual dipolarities: How are we to understand the apophatic movement (upward) of the “person” of the Bhagavat or Manifestation into Reality? And how are we to think of the process involved in the polyphilic realization (downward) of Reality in the Bhagavat or Manifestation? Given all the non-dual dualities just described—and again refected within the movements of the cascading multiplicity of unfoldings and enfoldings of Reality of and into worlds (ch. 5) as well as the oscillation between apophatic and polyphilic dimensions of Reality (ch. 6)—these movements will exhibit the following characteristics: In the upward, apophatic direction, we will have to expect the disappearance of all oppositions and even the contrasts in the pure indifference of the Absolute, but without any loss of the enfolded in/difference of the All-Relational and the Surrelative in “it.” Conversely, in the downward, polyphilic direction, we will have to expect the appearance (tajalli) of all the contrasts and even oppositions in the divergences of the multiplicity of existence in which the Manifestations unfold Reality as corporeal symbols of ultimacy in “its” incomprehensible and infnite manifoldness.

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5. KHORA (THE SELFLESS SELF) For a non-simplifed understanding of the Bhagavat or Manifestation to “be (in-sist as)” the Uncompounded Reality or Luminous Mind “in person,” it is necessary to remember the non-dual nature of the in/difference between these contrasting categories and the in-sistence of Reality “in person” not to indicate any mixture of dualistic or antagonistic categories or paradoxical additions of spheres of being to one another. While many contentions between religions were gathering around the precise nature of such an in/ different in-sistence, we must always remain aware that the here-proposed direction of thought tries to avoid the conficts that such contradictions into one or another dualistic and dialectic, or contradictory and exclusionary, solution have instigated in the hearts of believers. This can be achieved not by obliteration of the perceived differences or the downplaying of their importance, but by deliberately allowing these differences to be admitted as necessary elements of the world of becoming, which is prone to such oppositions, while, at the same time, indicating the apophatic nature of the Bhagavat in her in/difference from the Uncompounded Reality. This move does, as was already demonstrated, allow us to formulate these contradictions as contrasts and translucent resonances between religious categorizations of seemingly diverse religious experiences and intuitions. Hence, it is, at this point, not necessary to oppose what has been opposed so often in religious discourses of different factions or schools or religions: whether the Uncompounded Reality is personal or transpersonal, substantial or non-substantial in nature, monistic or theistic in relation to the world, and so on. Instead, we can already begin with the insight that the Uncompounded Reality is always beyond these dualisms and, hence, can only be expressed in a multiplicity of accesses that will include such divergent emphases. We can also, at this point, neglect the question whether in a monistic context the notion of a Bhagavat does make sense at all since in such a context all existents (or at least living beings) are of its nature anyway and not in need of any further avatara for its mediation (Parrinder, Avatar, ch. 4). Yet, the notion of avatara formed even in this context of radical Vedantic monism with its attitude of “personal” worship (bhakti) instead of monistic knowledge (jnana), leading to dissolution of the “personal” duality between worshiper (bhagavata) and worshiped Reality (Bhagavan)—for instance, in the abheda schools of the Bhagavata Purana and Chaitanya (Parrinder, Avatar, ch. 5), but also in the similar non-dual co-inherence of both personal and transpersonal nature as essential to the understanding of God in the transreligious formulations of God/Reality (sat/asat or haqq) in Kabir and Guru Nanak at the root of Sikhism (Islam, Sufsm, 92–116).

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Although the Luminous Mind is already the nature of all existence (tathagatagarbha) and empty in itself (sunyata), in no need of any mediation, yet the necessity of the rare appearance of the fully enlightened Buddha in Theravada Buddhism (Momen, Buddhism, 33–9) and the healing and graceful presence of great Bodhisattvas (mahasattva bodhisattva) in Mahayana Buddhism was felt to compliment the monistic message (Kalu Rinpoche, Mind, 131–41). So was the differentiation of the three Buddha-bodies (trikaya) a means to facilitate the “non-dual duality” between the human and superhuman appearance of such a being and “their/its” ultimate nature as Luminous Mind, Wisdom, Compassion, and Emptiness (ibid., 167–72; Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, 175–8). In the Christian context, this mediation became, of course, the centerpiece of orthodoxy, but in general by excluding either the mediator to indicate a being in between God and humanity or the one-sided emphases on either divinity or humanity of the (Bhagavat) Christ (Baillie, God, chs. 1–2, 5). Yet, it was also felt that this mediation is not a mere exception from the relationship of God to creation, but the fulfllment of human existence in, and the evolution of, the Spirit (Lampe, God, ch. 2–3), or the emergence of the cosmic Logos-Christ in the hyper-personal Omega Point (Teilhard, Phenomenon, 254–73). Karl Rahner famously declared anthropology to be defcient Christology—which, conversely, implies that human nature is fulflled in the Christ (Siebenrock, Christology, 117)—and Donald Baillie (to which I will come back in more detail presently) understood the singular “paradox of Incarnation” as the fulfllment of the universal “paradox of grace” for all of humanity (Baillie, God, 114–8). The same is true of process theology (GPW, §38), for instance, in the work of John Cobb. Developed from Whitehead’s dipolar God, the presence of the Logos (the primordial nature) in a human being is not understood as an exception of the kind of connection God has with all creatures (with God’s suggestion of their initial aim in every of their events of becoming), although it is an exceptional and perfect presence of the primordial nature of God itself in all of the events comprising and generating the “person” (in Whitehead’s understanding) of Christ. In an intricate interconnection with the humanly free dimensions of these same events, this interwovenness forms the history and self-identity of this person (Cobb, Christ, chs. 2–4). And although Bahá’u’lláh insists on the uniqueness of the Manifestation in relation to humanity in general, this does not indicate a mixture of human and divine elements, a half-God, or “a God,” or a homo divinus, but “non-dual duality” manifesting the Self of the Uncompounded Reality “itself,” in/different from, and in-sistent in, it. Nevertheless, Bahá’u’lláh designates the apophatic Reality/God/Truth (al-haqq) as the same “innermost reality” of all Manifestations (GL, #27) that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (quoted above) understands to act in all of

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creation, and especially in humanity with its conscious ability to know God, being waves on/of the sea of the primordial Manifestation, the Logos, Wisdom and Compassion, the Spirit, Will, and Mind of Godself. What, in any case, is important at this juncture is the apophatic mode of in/ difference of the Bhagavat or Manifestation in human form: The in-sistence of Uncompounded Reality in the Manifestation’s humanity is in/different from the apophatic nature of the Uncompounded Reality in-sisting as the primordial Manifestation and consequently all things. In radical clarity, Bahá’u’lláh declares the apophatic ex-sistence of the Bhagavat in terms of the most radical difference from Reality, while, at the same time, intimating the in-sistence of apophatic Reality “itself” in all things: “All the Prophets of God and their chosen Ones, all the divines, the sages, and the wise of every generation, unanimously recognize their inability to attain unto the comprehension of that Quintessence of all truth, and confess their incapacity to grasp Him, Who is the inmost Reality of all things” (KI, 99, §105). Nevertheless, Bahá’u’lláh, insists on the absolute in/difference of the Manifestations from (that is, “with”) God/Reality: “Were any of the all-embracing Manifestations of God to declare: ‘I am God,’ He, verily, speaketh the truth, and no doubt attacheth thereto” (GL, #22). And he adds that “the Báb in the beginning of the Bayán saith: ‘He is the One Who shall proclaim under all conditions, “Verily, verily, I am God, no God is there but Me, the Lord of all created things. In truth all others except Me are My creatures. O, My creatures! Me alone do ye worship”’” (TB, 53). The Báb had explained this apophatic “non-dual in/difference” as mutual exsistence and in-sistence of Uncompounded Reality with the Manifestation(s) as absolute “Point” (nuqta) of two relative stations: one of manifesting, fowing, speaking, and creatively acting from Reality/God to all creatures; and the other manifesting all creatures (kullu shay’) as fowing back, returning, reacting to God/Reality (Saiedi, Gate, 181–8). In one station, the Manifestation speaks with the voice of God, revealing the Word of God to creation; in the other station, the Manifestation speaks to God in the form of prayer and supplication, representing all creatures (ibid., 41–2). But the innermost “reality” of the Manifestation, making both possible at once, is that as voice of God the Manifestation must be a pure mirror without any distinction from God by being “nothing” for itself (ibid., 46–7). In the mode of absolute kenosis, as it were, the Bhagavat is also not distinct from creatures either: being divine (lahut) and human (nasut) at once, without limitation, without demarcation, without parts, uncompounded, and in absolute self-effacement. The Báb invokes an Islamic tradition (Hadith), related to Imam Sadiq, to make this point that defnes divinity as the substance the essence of which is servitude (ibid., 164). And Bahá’u’lláh exclaims that it is as true to say that a Manifestation pronounces to be the pure mirror of divinity (as quoted above)

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as it is true for the same (or any) Manifestation “to say, ‘We are the Servants of God’ . . . . For they have been made manifest in the uttermost state of servitude, a servitude the like of which no man can possibly attain” (GL, #22). So, the “non-dual duality” in the Manifestation of Uncompounded Reality, manifesting “in the person” of the Bhagavat/Manifestation—be it the Buddha or Christ—is the absolute selfessness of this “person” by which it “is” the “stainless Mirror” of God and humanity (creation) into one another, in-sisting in one another in in/difference from one another, but as all-relational and surrelative “Universal Reality” (TAB, #19). This double, khoric “nothingness” of the Self of the Manifestation in the face of the apophatic Reality and of the human existence of the Manifestation originated from, as well as pervaded and embraced by, this Universal Reality and, hence, the mutual in/difference as condition of the monistic and dialogical in-sistence of the Unbound Reality in, and as, the Manifestation is maybe nowhere brought to a more congruent expression as in this passage of Bahá’u’lláh:

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Were the eye of discernment to be opened, it would recognize that in this very state, they have considered themselves utterly effaced and nonexistent in the face of Him Who is the All-Pervading, the Incorruptible. Methinks, they have regarded themselves as utter nothingness, and deemed their mention in that Court an act of blasphemy. For the slightest whispering of self within such a Court is an evidence of self-assertion and independent existence. In the eyes of them that have attained unto that Court, such a suggestion is itself a grievous transgression. How much more grievous would it be, were aught else to be mentioned in that Presence, were man’s heart, his tongue, his mind, or his soul, to be busied with anyone but the Well-Beloved, were his eyes to behold any countenance other than His beauty, were his ear to be inclined to any melody but His Voice, and were his feet to tread any way but His way. (GL, #22)

Again, what is not meant with this selfess Self of the Bhagavat or Manifestation is what has occupied many inter- and intra-religious discussions about the constitution of their “person” (in-sisting “in person” as Uncompounded Reality or Luminous Mind) in terms of what precisely makes up their humanity and/or divinity/ultimacy. In the Christian context (Rahner, Foundations, ch. 4), this was discussed over centuries thereby forming an orthodox belief in the full humanity and full divinity of Christ (Pannenberg, Grundzüge, §§8–9): choosing a path between Adoptianism, which would add a divine element to a human, the human personality of Jesus becoming divine in the wake of it, and Docetism, which understood the person of Christ as an Earth-walking God, unimpressed by human contingencies, sufferings, and processes of growth and decline; between Arianism, which made the Logos as quasi-divine being in between God’s reality and creation (sometimes wrongly identifed as Plotinus’s view), neither divine nor human, and Nestorianism (with high

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probability not the position of Patriarch Nestorius himself) for which two persons were only slightly united; and between Apolarianism, which needed to subtract parts of the humanity of Christ to make space for the Logos to take home in the sub-human existence of Jesus, and Monophysitism, which fused the divine with the human into one nature and person (Baillie, God, 59–98). In the Buddhist context, an important struggle ensued about how to defne in what sense the Buddha, who as not an ordinary human being was still human and, at the same time, not divine in the sense of any of the divinities (devas) of the Hindu universe. The three-body doctrine formed from the twobody doctrine (Xing, Concept, chs. 3–5), which was itself a countermeasure against such mixtures by, at the same time, highlighting that the Buddha is not an ordinary person before (as demonstrated by his self-chosen last birth) and especially after his enlightenment (bodhi) under the Fig tree. If the Buddha after his enlightenment, having become realized as the Buddha (that he always was), did not initiate new dharmas that would create karma, he must have been, while still functioning in everyday life as a personality, liberated from the illusion of a soul (atman) since there is no such thing as a soul, but only the realization of the non-substantial non-self (annata), which is at best only related through the stream of liberated dharmas, the bhavanga and clear consciousness of the Luminous Mind, omniscient in its perception (ibid., 88–96). The selfess Self of the Manifestation, in-sisting as the Self of the Uncompounded Reality “itself,” in the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, was not prone to any of these misunderstandings. In resonance with the Christian discussions, the Bahá’í writings do not state this selfess Self to mean the (human) “soul” of the Manifestation. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá clearly states against any form of Adoptianism that the divine dimension of the Manifestation is neither becoming divine, but always “is,” nor, against any reductionism of Docetism, was not really human, as the Manifestation has a human body and soul (SAQ, #39). Against Arianism, which would claim that the Manifestation is a being in between God and humanity (although superfcial readings of Bahá’í writings have sometimes erroneously confused their understanding with it), she is rather being both to the full in her “twofold nature” (GL, #27) and “two stations” (GL, #22). Against Nestorianism, indicating the Bhagavat being two persons or personalities, she is rather the in/difference of apophatic Reality and its human expression (GL, #22). Against Apollinarianism, that the Bhagavat was partly God and partly human, exchanging maybe the soul or the mind of the human person with the divine Mind of God (SAQ, #39), and against Monophysitism, for which she was a confused new being (ibid.), the Bahá’í writings instead always insist that she be fully, in two natures and two stations, in the apophatic upward movement of in/differentiation united in the Uncompounded Reality and in the downward movement differentiated in the

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complexity of divergences and limitation of history, culture, and personality (GL, #27). Nor can the selfess Self of the Manifestation be confounded with only partially successful conceptualities of ancient Christianity such as anhypostasia and enhypostasia, on the one hand, or exhaustions of divinity in humanity in the kenotic theologies of the 19th century C.E., on the other (Baillie, God, 85–98). The former solution tried to explain the presence of the divine element in Christ by elevating the human personality beyond itself into a universal personhood (of the Logos), claiming that the human nature (with body and soul) of Christ was not a human person (hypostasis), but was at best (taken up into) the paradigmatic “universal person”: that which humanity archetypically would be if it was the Logos who incarnated in this non-person Jesus (Baillie, God, 85–94). Against that view, the Bahá’í writings insist on the full humanity of Christ and any Manifestation, that is, their integer human personality, while not denying the more remote interpretation possible from this scenario, namely, that the Manifestation—like the Enlightened One—represents that khoric person that is all-perceptive and all-sensitive and, hence, is the expression of an “universal person” (the Wisdom and Compassion of the dharmakaya) any human should aspire to become by overcoming one’s self (PT, #29), but thereby enfolding the whole universe (SV, 54–5) and being the “reason” for creation (KI, 102–3; HW. A, #64). Yet, instead of an interpretation of the khoric Self that would not only imply a descending move of divine limitation in human becoming (GL, #22) and the suffering in the person of the Manifestation (ESW, §228) but would explain these circumstances with the emptying of the divine attributes of the Logos in the human person of Jesus or even the annihilation of divinity in (and for the time of) Christ’s human existence (Baillie, God, 94–8)—or forever, ontologically (Altizer, Gospel, ch. 4) or epistemologically (Vattimo, Interpretation, ch. 1)—the Bahá’í writings, in Suf lore (ch. 6), rather speak of the polyphilic realization of the divine attributes in the human person of the Manifestation, as she in her apophatic nature is understood as the Self, the uncompounded Reality, of all of these divine attributes and virtues (Sours, Station, ch. 6). In the Buddhist context, again, the Bahá’í writings would concur that the human soul is “evanescent” (BP, 12). It is only by the grace of God “that thou mayest become an eternal light and an immortal spirit” (HW. A, #51). Bahá’u’lláh, in a deeply kenotic mood, even proclaims himself as “evanescent soul”: “Would that at every instant all the affictions of the world could, in the path of God and for the sake of His love, be visited upon this evanescent Soul Who is immersed in the ocean of divine knowledge” (SLH, 272)! Much closer to the Buddhist anatta-understanding of the (human) selfess Self (Momen, Buddhism, 24–6), it is not the “eternal substantiality” of the soul, as a simplifed and Western (Aristotelian) account would be deceived to reason (see above

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on substance, essence, and attributes), but the illusion of its self-existence that Bahá’u’lláh wants us to realize. The soul’s/selfess Self’s “existence is a contingent and not an absolute existence” (GL, #81)! Later Mahayana Sutras (for instance, the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra) count as one of the ultimate attributes of the dharmakaya (Williams, Buddhism, 103–9), and identifed with the tathagatagarbha (Kluge, Buddhism, 160), the selfess Self (atman) of the Buddha. It means that in the “discernment” of the Luminous Mind nothing “is” but the empty Buddha-nature itself: the apophatic, luminous, pure consciousness beyond any limiting, reiterated identity and difference (Harvey, Mind, 43–5, 174–6). This emptiness of the Self of the Buddha is also refected in the khoric understanding of Whitehead’s “person” (AI, 186–8). And the apophatic nature of the human “soul” in the Bahá’í writings becomes clear when they state that “because every soul is fashioned after the nature of God” (SAB, #159), it is not an “entity,” but a relativistic mirror of the apophatic nature of the Manifestation (Diessner, Psyche, 10–1). In this Self (beyond the dualism of atman and anatta), the Buddha is “in person” the Uncompounded Reality of the Luminous Mind, whether in his universal (dharmakaya) or his corporeal (rupakaya) existence. It is in this sense that the selfess Self (bi-nafsihi) of Reality (dhat) “itself” is, in the Bahá’í writings (Lambden, Transcendence, 40), “in person” the Manifestation (mazhar-i haqiqat), whether in its state of primordial in/difference (or “station of pure abstraction”) or the state of difference (“station of distinction”). It is in the selfessness of the stainless Mirror of the Manifestation that not only the Self of Reality manifests (lahut)—and beyond that (hahut), there is nothing we can say, not even about a Self of God—but also that the humanity (nasut) of the Manifestation comes to its utmost realization: As the selfess Self is the Self by which all attributes of God are encompassed (the surrelative Self), it is in “its” humanity that these attributes are fully realized. It is this corporeal realization (haykal) that constitutes the perfect human being (the all-relational Self), which in “the station of distinction . . . hath a distinct individuality” (GL, #22) while it remains “the person” of (and indistinct from) Uncompounded Reality. In the biblical image of the “reed” (Rev. 11:1), ‘Abdu’l-Bahá describes the selfess Self of the “perfect” human being thus: Entirely freed and emptied of its pith, it becomes capable of producing wondrous melodies. Moreover, these songs and airs proceed not from the reed itself but from the player who blows into it. In the same way, the sanctifed heart of that blessed Being is free and empty of all save God, is averse to and exempt from attachment to every selfsh inclination, and is intimately acquainted with the breath of the Divine Spirit. (SAQ, #11)

Since these convergences are intended to demonstrate the transreligious relativity of seeming opposite conceptualizations, I want to further corroborate

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that the “reality” of the selfess Self—as nothingness in the Face of Reality, but also as the Self of Reality “itself” for all worlds—has been captured by different religious traditions, being fully resonant with the Báb’s, Bahá’u’lláh’s, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s explorations. I will relate three such attempts: that of Plotinus, Masao Abe in the Zen tradition, and Donald Bailey in the Christian tradition. We have already seen that Plotinus’s apophatic All-One was at the basis of Bahá’u’lláh’s exploration of the monistic or dualistic, personal or transpersonal understanding of Reality, and how Bahá’u’lláh relativistically united these views in his understanding of the in/difference and in-sistence of Uncompounded Reality, thereby deeply resonating with the Luminous Mind. Several Bahá’í authors have engaged with Plotinus in relation to the Bahá’í writings to fnd it congenial for further consideration (Kluge, Neoplatonism I and II, passim), all the more as Plotinus’s thought has impacted the Islamic philosophical background leading up, through Suf and Illuminationist thought, to the immediate context of the event of the Bahá’í revelation (Hazini, Neoplatonism, passim). What is important in our context is to counter a misunderstanding of the apophatic nature of the One in relation to the All-One from which all things emanate through the hypostasis of the Divine Mind (nous) implied in Bahá’u’lláh’s use of this conceptualization as an expression of the nature of Uncompounded Reality: namely, that it may present us with a reiterated One that with necessity, that is, without freedom, emanates the world through the Mind that is subordinated to the One. This (double) misunderstanding is tainted by the Arian debate of the fourth Christian century (Nicolson, Spirit, ch. 4) in which Plotinus and “Neoplatonism” (Williams, Arius, 181–223) seems to have become the enemy of orthodox renderings of the co-equal eternity and divinity of the Logos within God and with the Father of which the Logos was considered the Son (Gieschen, Christology, 187–8, 350) insofar as the Logos/Son was equated with Plotinus’s Mind (nous). Whatever the Arian subordinationism or the degrading of the Logos (as non-eternal being, as creature, and so on) might have been, it neither represents Plotinus’s nor the adopted Bahá’í view. The important correction comes from three essential elements of Plotinus’s thought already discussed: First, the One is not “one” or “many,” but apophatically beyond numbers and differentiations; “it” means the indifferent “x” that cannot be expressed in terms of dualistic categories—resonating strongly with Bahá’u’lláh’s use of Plotinus’s One as Uncompounded Reality and the Luminous Mind in the Buddhist framework, expressing this apophatic indifference of the dharmakaya. Second, as with both the Luminous Mind and Uncompounded Reality, Plotinus’s apophatic One “is/in-sists as” All-One; it is empty and full of all things, inaccessible and creative. It is in this sense that it is patient to Being, which, as in John Leslie (ch. 6), is the Divine Mind.

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There is no “being,” nor anything else beyond the Divine Mind that can be said to be one or many, full or empty, personal or transpersonal. Rather, the Divine Mind (of the equation of thought and being) is the Manifestation the apophatic One, the all-relational immanence of the One, by which everything is mutually immanent to one another in universal sympathy, and the surrelative encompassing of all things as “one giant living organism embracing all living beings within it” (Enneads 4.4.32). Third, the reason for emanation of anything, that is, of the Divine Mind releasing and comprising everything in existence, is pure Goodness that is beyond any bifurcating categorization of Reality’s creativity to either be necessary or free. Buddhist refections on the Luminous Mind speak, as we have also already seen, of the spontaneity of clear consciousness (which cannot be defned either way). And the Bahá’í writings invoke the Divine Will, equaling the Divine Mind in Plotinus, making it to be the self-creative, spontaneous creativity, releasing and comprising the All. So, again, the Divine Mind of Plotinus is neither subordinated to something beyond (since there is not anything beyond it), nor is it a creature of the One, as it “is/is not” Reality as creative, spontaneous Goodness. Eventually, Plotinus’s Divine Mind is not only “indifferent” from the apophatic One, but “in/different” from the One, that is, it is not “identical” with it either (since identity and difference are already dualistic differentiations, coming too late to grasp the indifference from which all dualisms arise). The Divine Mind is, as Michael Sells has demonstrated, “it” (the One) and “itself” (the Mind), or as Bahá’u’lláh says: the Mind is “its Self,” the Self of Reality. Thus, the Mind is and is not Reality, the Mind is and is not God, in the sense that there is no Reality/God beyond the Mind—as Whitehead’s God has no beyond except the unknowable and unknown and inexpressible (ch. 6). Nevertheless, the inner essence of the Mind is the apophatic non-closure of it/self, its Self, in itself, as the Self is not its (the Mind’s) Self, but that of apophatic Reality that has no Self except (that of) the Mind. It is this subtle dialectic that invokes that the Mind, in looking at itself, does become dual, self-refective, still being undivided, in/different as the “clear . . . and transparent light” (Plotinus, Enneads 5.8.4. 5–10) like the Luminous Mind. And in looking downward, the Mind becomes the creator of all things, surrelatively comprising everything as this “clear light” (Enneads 5.8.4. 5–10) in which the All appears in mutual all-relationality (Armstrong, History, ch. 15). But in looking upward, into the abyss of nothingness, emptiness, self-emptied Goodness (bonum diffusivum sui), it realizes its Self to be not its possession, no one’s possession, but the gift of the One that “seeks nothing, has nothing, and needs nothing, overfows” (Plotinus, Enneads 5.2.7–11). The Divine Mind is a mediator, but not an intermediary! It is in this non-dual luminous consciousness of self-emptiness of this apophatic (in/different) “identity,” that the Mind (ecstatically) “is” (“ex-sists” as

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the) One, and its Self “is” (in-sists as) the selfess Self of the Uncompounded Reality, that Bahá’u’lláh invokes for the (primordial) Manifestation(s) and that the Luminous Mind indicates for the (primordial) Buddha (nature). Hence, it is nothing less than the essence of Reality/God that is attributed to its Manifestation as it “is” in the highest possible sense “in/different from” or “in/differently” the essence of God—in this sense there “is not” anything beyond this “identity” of the Manifestation in the in/different essence of Reality/God. And yet, it is the Self that does not possess itself, its Self, the Reality of its Self, but expresses it only in its selfessness.

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Thus, viewed from the standpoint of their oneness and sublime detachment, the attributes of Godhead, Divinity, Supreme Singleness, and Inmost Essence, have been and are applicable to those Essences of being, inasmuch as they all abide on the throne of divine Revelation, and are established upon the seat of divine Concealment. Through their appearance the Revelation of God is made manifest, and by their countenance the Beauty of God is revealed. Thus it is that the accents of God Himself have been heard uttered by these Manifestations of the divine Being. (GL, #22)

Moving on to Masao Abe. Steeped in the Zen tradition and philosophy (Abe, Zen, passim), Abe is not only an important third generation representative of the Kyoto School of Buddhist Philosophy (Buri, Buddha-Christ, ch. 9), but at some point in time teaching at Claremont, California, the center for Whitehead and process studies (Lai and von Brück, Christianity, 227–34), Abe has, in discussion with the doyen of process theology, John Cobb, elaborated on a Buddhist Christology. He uses the in/difference between emptiness and fullness of Reality as a dialectic that directly comments on the Pauline suggestive statement regarding the kenosis of Christ (Phil. 2:6–11), thereby confrming the selfess Self of the (ultimate Reality of the) Buddha (nature) discussed here. While the Christian interpretations of the Pauline passage vary widely (McCready, He, 73–80), all agree that it does convey a sense of selfessness of the (possibly even preexistent) Christ-fgure that, in fact, was invoked by St. Paul to remind the Philippians of the “right” existence before God as intended for humanity (the archetypical Adam), namely, the overcoming of the self-interested self for a pure existence from the grace of God (Dunn, Christology, 114–21). Abe, aware of the contemporary Christian discussion on kenosis, for instance in the work of Karl Rahner and Jürgen Moltman, now makes the radical move to understand its content from the dialectic movement of the Buddhist self-emptying emptiness (sunyata): as nothing becoming nothing via becoming everything, everything, having nothingness as its essence, is itself emptying itself if it recognizes its nature—which would be its enlightenment, its luminous consciousness, as it were. Hence, in a double

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move, Abe, frst, transforms the “dispossession” of the divine Son (as cited from Rahner) into the formula: The Son is not the Son of God (for he is essentially and fundamentally selfemptying); precisely because he is not the Son of God he is the Son of God (for he originally and always works as Christ, the messiah, in his salvational function of self-emptying). (Abe, Kenotic God, 12)

In taking seriously the trinitarian message that the Father is “greater” than the Son (John 14:28), he also claims that without the self-emptying of God, Christ’s self-emptying cannot be understood, because this is a movement of complete love, leaving nothing back of self-possession, not even (in or as) God. Hence, Abe radicalizes his formula: God is not God (for God is love and completely self-emptying); precisely because God is not a self-affrmative God, God is truly a God of love (for through completely self-abnegating God is totally identical with everything including sinful humans). (ibid., 16)

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The underlying Buddhist assumption for both the nature of God and, hence, (being also that) of Christ is that it is always of such a process that is in its nature self-emptying its Self. Since not only is “it” besides that movement and nature nothing, but also because there is nothing besides that—that is, besides “it” is nothing—it is absolute and, at the same time, as such being everything, it is all-relational. Hence, Abe brings the Manifestation of this Self of Christ as Self-emptiness into this formula: “Self is not self (for the old self must be crucifed with Christ); precisely because it is not, self is truly self (for the new self resurrects with Christ) (ibid., 12).” In the Suf infused language of love, Bahá’u’lláh makes this self-emptying the true Self (is it atman, is it anatta?) of all who seek the selfess Self of God: For when the true lover and devoted friend reacheth to the presence of the Beloved, the sparkling beauty of the Loved One and the fre of the lover’s heart will kindle a blaze and burn away all veils and wrappings. Yea, all he hath, from heart to skin, will be set afame, so that nothing will remain save the Friend. (SV, Valley of True Poverty and Absolute Nothingness, 58)

Now, Donald Baillie could have taken up the kenotic passage of Philippians, but he chooses otherwise (God, 94–8). Of course, I could have explored the Christian understanding of the selfess Self of Christ with more recent examples, but it is remarkable that Baillie’s Christology, which tried nothing but to be an orthodox account of matters, was hailed by Rudolf Bultmann as the greatest book ever written on Christology, and is cited as witness in John

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Hick’s attempt on a metaphorical, non-incarnational Christology (Metaphor, 106–8). It is Baillie’s extraordinary feat not only to express the Christian understanding of “the paradox of Incarnation” in terms of the selfess Self, but in connective translucency to encompass the selfess Self of the essence of God, the person of Christ, and our own human nature—like the Luminous Mind encompassing ultimate Reality (Buddha-nature), the Buddha “in person,” and the human nature (the Buddha-seed), and Bahá’u’lláh’s vision comprising the apophatic selfessness of Uncompounded Reality, its Manifestation, and our true Self—with one image, namely, that of “the paradox of grace” (Baillie, God, 114–32). This interpretation follows the scriptural passages in which whatever good we do is ascribed to the grace of God, such as when St. Paul confesses: “I labored . . . yet not I, but the grace of God in me” (1 Cor. 15:10), and when Jesus renounces goodness for himself since “no one is good, except God alone” (Luke 18:19). Paradoxically, thereby, we are not relieved from responsibility, but become free to be persons with responsibility for our choices and actions. Baillie traces this paradox through the Christian ages as also related to the understanding of the Incarnation as highest fulfllment of this paradox. In his view, it grants us access to the Incarnation as the realization of the selfess Self of Christ that is the Son (and God) because he looks away from himself to God. He does not have a (divine) self-consciousness (as a mode of self-assertion), but his “selfconsciousness was swallowed up in his deep and continuous consciousness of God” (ibid., 125). He is the “God-Man” who “is the only man who claims nothing for Himself, but all for God” (ibid., 127). This is the reason that “in his person” the nature of God is expressed, as all is of God and the love of God and of Christ are one. And again, the selfess Self of the Bhagavat, Buddha, Christ, Manifestation, is the expression of the essential nature of God: love (TDM, ch. 11). In a fnal refection, I want to relate this notion of Reality as in-sistent “in the person” of the Manifestation with a thought of Whitehead briefy referred to above. In his engagement with Plato’s khora as medium of intercommunication of all existence (ch. 6), Whitehead also restates what he understands to be a “person” as exhibiting the same khoric nature. Instead of accepting a soulsubstance (PR, 104), and dismissing any substantialism as failed for a process and event understanding of the world of becoming (ch. 5), Whitehead also subscribes to the self-emptiness of every event as it, in its prehensive structure, becomes a unity of its complex past, but not a self-asserting self (subject of itself). It rather “satisfes” itself as a “superject,” projecting its “Self” (its satisfaction of having becomes) beyond itself into the world of the future and other events to be prehended again (GPW, §§10–1, 20–2). Subject becomes object, becomes subject (ch. 1). This external dipolarity of self-creativity (subject) and transition (superject) mirrors the inner dipolarity of physical pole

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(past events) and mental pole (possibilities). In any case, the resulting life history of events, forming one lifeline through the universe, is not a self-identical self, but—rather like the Buddhist bhavanga—a stream of events in the larger mutuality of all events, namely, khora (ch. 5). In fact, Whitehead thinks that this “spatiotemporal” unity, if it has become a person, that is, a creative continuation of one lifeline, and in human form, recovering originality, not just repeating reiterated structures of the past, is khora in person.

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These events are together by reason of their community of locus, and they obtain their actuality by reason of emplacement within this community. . . . This is at once the doctrine of the unity of nature, and of the unity of each human life. The conclusion follows that our consciousness of the self-identity pervading our life-thread of occasions, is nothing other than knowledge of a special strand of unity within the general unity of nature. It is a locus within the whole, marked out by its own peculiarities, but otherwise exhibiting the general principle which guides the constitution of the whole. This general principle is the object-to-subject structure of experience. It can be otherwise stated as the vector-structure of nature. Or otherwise, it can be conceived as the doctrine of the immanence of the past energizing in the present. (AI, 187–8)

A person is, in its most clear consciousness and compassion (prehensitivity), the realization not of an isolated self-identical self, but of the mutual immanence of its and all other events in some way constituting its Self ecologically and selfessly. If such a “person” actually follows its empty nature (sunyata) of all-relationality (pratitya-samutpada) without disappearing (Nicholson, Spirit, 182–7), but coming in its own surrelativity of wisdom and compassion, it exhibits the nature of peace (nirvana as samsara), not as an abstract concept (not dualistically), but as moment of the selfess Self of the Uncompounded Reality or the Luminous Mind (AI, 288–9). Whitehead hints at “it” (and its Manifestation as the dipolar God) by way of apophatically surpassing narrower notions of love, personality, impersonality, or beauty, settling on harmony of harmonies. As such, as Manifestation of this Reality/God/Truth, “it” is the motive force for the promotion of the intention of religion, of the manifestation of a civilization of peace. Habitually it is lurking on the edge of consciousness, a modifying agency. It clings to our notion of the Platonic ‘Harmony’, as a sort of atmosphere. It is somewhat at variance with the notion of the ‘Eros’. Also the Platonic ‘Ideas’ and ‘Mathematical Relations’ seem to kill it by their absence of ‘life and motion’. Apart from it, the pursuit of ‘Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art’ can be ruthless, hard, cruel . . . . The notions of ‘tenderness’ and of ‘love’ are too narrow, important though they be. We require the concept of some more general quality, from which ‘tenderness’ emerges as a specialization. We are in a way seeking for the notion of a Harmony of Harmonies, which shall bind together

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the other four qualities, so as to exclude from our notion of civilization the restless egotism with which they have often in fact been pursued. ‘Impersonality’ is too dead a notion, and ‘Tenderness’ too narrow. I choose the term ‘Peace’ for that Harmony of Harmonies which calms destructive turbullence [sic] and completes civilization. (AI, 284–5)

The three examples of the appearance of the selfess Self at the heart of vastly different religious horizons not only may demonstrate a transreligious pattern of translucency and convergence. We may also glean from its very possibility and existence how these horizons can be translated into one another. The Bahá’í writings establish such translatability despite the inherent religious and cultural divergences as the measure for the proclaimed mutuality of religious intuitions. To be more precise, this impulse is not a mere fgment of imagination, but a sign of the in-sistence of Reality “itself” and of the inherent transreligious motive force of peace. Through the acceptance of the (threefold) relativity of religious Truth (apophatic, all-relational, surrelative) and insofar as such an acceptance expresses and contributes to a future consciousness of a universal religious community into which humanity is supposed to develop, Reality becomes incarnated in humanity. Or with a conceptual turn we could say: it becomes “excarnated” as the primordial Manifestation of the apophatic Reality streams through the lifeblood of humanity (TDM, ch. 15). Resonant with the Bhagavat, “it” appears from the inside of the world of becoming “in person.” Whitehead’s philosophical correlation between Khora and Peace, universal reality and personhood, again, established the selfess Self of the Bhagavat as the very mode of existence in which humanity becomes humanity as it directs its existential (religious) intuitions and motivations toward the existential and corporeal realization of this correlation.

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6. THE TREE OF LIFE It is the proposition of this chapter (and the book as a whole) that the emphasis on the Absolute, the apophatic gate, allows the other two gates—the AllRelational (connectivity) and the Surrelative (Multiple Worlds)—to release transreligious Truth, and in the midst of this process, to reveal the meaning of differences and oppositions of concrete religious expressions of ultimate Reality as they arise from the creative force of all things. If the Absolute was to be reiterated, it would (to take up once more Deleuze’s thought image), lose its surrelative immanence “(to) itself” and would become immanent to any plane of immanence as one event among others, shining in its transcendence only within it, in spatiotemporal difference to all other events, and (to follow up with Whitehead’s thought image) only to the extent of its passage

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and eventual disappearance in the perpetual process of perishing (TDM, chs. 8, 13)—and some may be satisfed with such a solution. But as immanence (to) itself, the apophatic Absolute is in in/difference to/from all events the release and return of all worlds to “its”/their (selfess) Self, beginning to shine through the human form of, and as, the luminous Buddha, the Bhagavat, the (cosmic) Christ (of Teilhard de Chardin), the Manifestation. Yet, “its” immanence will appear (tajalli) as diversifed in different worlds and religions, even to the degree of opposition charactering the worlds of becoming and perishing (ch. 6). The relativistic implications regarding the difference between the two views (themselves seemingly locked in dualistic opposition), namely, whether there can be only one instantiation (Incarnation) or there must be many corporeal Manifestations of the Uncompounded Reality in different religions (and worlds), will occupy us in the next chapter. What remains to be said in this section pertains to another perspective on the same complex question: “How is (uncompounded) Reality/God/Truth (as Truth) present in the worlds (religions)?” insofar as it translates into: “What kind of polyphilic immanence is the Manifestation of Reality ‘in person’?” And “Can we fnd transreligious evidence for a mutual transformation of this kind of immanence?” The best icon for the scope of this question is maybe the threefold body of the Buddha (trikaya). It recapitulates (what we have gained in the previous section), frst, that it comprises ultimate in/different Reality (the Luminous Mind) as creative Absolute (dharmakaya), the in/different presence of the Buddha-nature (dharmadhatu) in all events of all worlds; but, second, also (over and against monistic reductions that would stop with the frst element) the corporeal presence of the historical Buddha within this world who is this Reality “in person” (rupakaya); and, third, the pervasive and comprising, “magical” and imaginative, presence of the Buddha constituting all worlds as Buddha-felds surrelatively and appearing as “skillful means” (upaya) to all things (sambhogakaya) (Xing, Concept, ch. 4–6). All three kinds of presences or “forms” of the formless (sunyata) appear together (Kalu Rinpoche, Mind, 168–70), not reduced to any one of them (as in monistic and dualistic reductions), as the creative polyphilia (because) of the inherently apophatic nature, the selfess Self, of the Manifestation of the Uncompounded Reality as the Luminous Mind. This icon is (as was demonstrated earlier) also represented by the Bahá’í ringstone symbol (Figure 1) with the threefold and fvefold multiplicity that it enshrines, and the “God” of Whitehead (which I have correlated to these foldings in the preceding chapter, and identifed with them earlier in this chapter). Without repeating earlier consideration, this transreligious resonance immediately leads to four important conclusions. First, it is the Bahá’í icon as a whole (threefold and fvefold), not any part (for instance, the

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middle horizontal line consisting of the letter ba, “representing” the world of Manifestation alone) that presents us with the complete notion of the Manifestation of the Uncompounded Reality. Second, the Bahá’í icon enshrines a process of unfolding and enfolding, a cycle of love, with various implications regarding its (vertical) twofold movement of emanation and return as well as regarding the mutually related (horizontal) planes of immanence in which this process differs in its movements and “forms” of unifcation, all of which can be looked at as (polyphilic) unfolding or (apophatic) enfolding. Third, the Bahá’í icon translates different ways and modes of religious search “in one,” mirroring mystical and prophetic religious expressions that seem otherwise to be held apart or opposed to one another (in the various claims of opposed “identities” of religions or schools, for instance, by substantializing Western and Eastern Religions as opposed to one another). Fourth, in surprising ways, the Bahá’í icon approximates the luminous consciousness of Uncompounded Reality that we are all invited to experience without losing the apophatic sting that elevates this consciousness beyond monism and dualism. The rest of this section will elaborate on these four conclusions. First, the whole of the (threefold and fvefold) Bahá’í icon presents us with the complete notion of the Manifestation of the Uncompounded Reality. Neither can it (both as icon and as Reality) be reduced to the monistic identifcation with ultimate Reality, represented by the top horizontal line (consisting of two entangled letters ha), thereby dispensing of the imaginative to corporeal unfolding of this highest level of in/difference (hahut, lahut). Nor can it be reduced to the dualistic opposition/contrast represented by the mere limits of divinity (lahut) and humanity (nasut), represented by the top and bottom horizontal line (both consisting of two interlocked letters ha) leaving out the imaginative, spiritual dimension (malakut, jabarut), represented by the middle horizontal line (consisting of the letter ba). Nor can it be reduced to either the apophatic aspect (hahut), as if nothing exists or (that which exists) is a mere illusion or without the creative impulse of the apophatic Goodness (rightly emphasized by Plotinus and Dzogchen). Nor can it only be represented by the cumulative image of the three or fve worlds, as this would leave out the fact that even the inclusion of the apophatic “world of God” (hahut, lahut) in the icon is a mere representation of what the whole icon cannot represent. Like the oscillation between the origin (shih) of the Dao, which cannot be represented even in the icon of the taiji except by the nothingness (wu) it leaves out, the wuji, and the Mother (wu) of all things (Chen, Tao, 179 on: Laozi, verse 52), it is as a whole that the Bahá’í icon, springing from the empty khoric space in which the icon appears (and is visible in contrast to it), that “is” the Manifestation of the apophatic Reality, which only fnds in “its” unpresentable Uncompoundedness “its” (apophatic) oneness, although it can only be expressed in (the icon of) the manifold of

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the worlds, within the secondary Uncompoundedness of the Manifestation. In this complete sense, the Bahá’í ringstone icon is called the Most Great Name (ism-i a‘zam): BHA’ (ch. 6). Second, the icon represents a process of unfolding and enfolding, a cycle of love, with various implications regarding the twofold movement of emanation and return as well as mutually related planes of immanence in which this process unfolds (enfolds) differently. In this regard, the correlation of the trikaya with the Bahá’í ism-i a‘zam gains its maybe fnest corroboration from the threefold realms of Ibn ‘Arabi. As already discussed (ch. 5), in Henry Corbin’s reading, Ibn ‘Arabi, over against the Aristotelian Islamic philosophical tradition (and in Neoplatonic lore), presents us with three instead of two realms: not only that of intellectual entities (I add: Whitehead’s primordial nature) and that of physical realities (I add: Whitehead’s world of becoming), but also an intermediary world of the imaginative (I add: Whitehead’s consequent nature). In full coherence with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s reading, the dualism of philosophical thought is overcome by the revelatory insistence of a third realm, the realm of similitudes (‘alam al-mithal), in which both intellectual abstractions and corporeal becomings meet, interfere with, and translate into one other, to constitute realms of the Spirit (one might add: St. Paul’s soma pneumatikon of 1 Cor. 15). This imaginal, spiritual intermezzo between lahut and nasut is at once the enfolding of the corporeal world into the divine kingdom (malakut) and the unfolding of universal realities into images of spiritual delicacy (imaginings). For Corbin, it represents the angelic realm of the realization of the divine command (jabarut), of spiritual powers (not dissimilar to St. Paul’s mentioning of powers and principalities in Eph. 6:12) that, at the same time, enfold our spiritual existence in the process of our becoming unifed with the divine. Corbin extracts two interesting implications from Ibn ‘Arabi’s account, immediately related to the current considerations. Creation itself is a theophanic process by which the apophatic Reality exudes from its absolute in/difference all of its divine attributes (Alone, ch. 1). In Bahá’u’lláh’s refection we have seen that this is his interpretation of the seemingly pantheistic Suf doctrine of the “unity of being” (but actually going back to Plotinus), namely, that the unity of creation with the apophatic Reality comprises all attributes of God as inherent in the Uncompounded Self of the primordial Manifestation since beyond its Self (indicating hahut) they are either in no way different from the essence of the Absolute or (understood as being) obliterated in “its” apophatic depth (Cole, Manifestation, passim). The primordial Manifestation is the Self of Reality/God by being the uncomposed (surrelative) unity of all divine names and attributes. The cascading worlds, whether symbolically captured with the threefold or the fvefold, are but explications, unfoldings, differentiations, realizations of the pleroma of these attributes,

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even to the point of oppositions in the word of becoming (Bahá’u’lláh, Commentary on a Verse of Rumi, §20). In the Buddhist context, we know of the contrasts of (the names of sunyata) Wisdom and Compassion; and in the Jewish context (even more pronounced in the kabbalistic tradition), we know the seeming opposition (or dialectic) between divine movements of justice and mercy represented by the two peripheral columns of sephirot in the Tree of Life. And, as Ibn ‘Arabi recognized more than most, such contrast might develop into relative oppositions of religions in their emphases of some divine names and attributes over others (an issue, I will return in the next chapter). But what is most astonishing in Ibn ‘Arabi’s account of this emanating, overfowing, creative “unity” of the Self of God is that the inherent movement of differentiation into the worlds of creation is one of passion, compassion, and suffering (Corbin, Alone, 107). While employing an alternative etymological derivation for “God” (Allah) from Al-Lah—“a fash of light on the path we are attempting to travel,” from ilah (root: wlh) “connoting to be sad” (ibid., 112)—Corbin highlights Ibn ‘Arabi’s understanding of creation as a departure from the indifference of the apophatic Absolute, accomplished by the primordial sigh of Reality/God in the creative act. As an implication, all divine names and attributes of this act of creation from divine mercy and compassion—this divine suffering of differentiation beyond “its” (and their) indifference (in hahut)—desire nothing more but the return to this indifferent unity within the essence of God from which they are bared. Yet, in the most original turn of thought in Ibn’ Arabi, in consequence—but in uncanny resonance with the salvifc manifestation of Bodhisattva virtues in Buddha lands and this material world in Mahayana (Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, 215)—their heliotropism (ibid., 106), their intense desire, the fre of their love for the Beloved, their heliopathy (ibid.) and theotropism (ibid., 108–9) for the highest imaginable unio mystica of the polyphilic with the apophatic Reality can only be fulflled by the process of their unfolding into the different worlds and spiritual planes until they have realized themselves in the world of becoming by which they fulfll their selfessness. Bahá’u’lláh confrms this approach in one of his prayers: And at whatever time my pen ascribeth glory to any one of Thy names, methinks I can hear the voice of its lamentation in its remoteness from Thee, and can recognize its cry because of its separation from Thy Self. I testify that everything other than Thee is but Thy creation and is held in the hollow of Thy hand. (BP, 140)

As already introduced with the refection of the Báb on the “primal Point” earlier in this chapter, it is the nature of the Manifestation that it involves a process in which the selfess Self of the Manifestation manifests all the

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attributes of the Self of Reality/God such that it is precisely in their actualization that “it” realized “its” selfess Self, a khoric ex-sistence (beyond “its” Self) in which “its” Self is the stainless Mirror of the Sun of Reality that gives all glory to God/Reality and nothing to itself. This, so ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, is the “Holy of Holies” of all religions, as it “pertains to spiritual virtues and divine qualities” (SAQ, #11). The spiritual and ethical implications are important: We are the waves on the sea of the Manifestation of Uncompounded Reality insofar as we mirror this process of the realization of the divine attributes in acts, character formation, and spiritualization of our individual and social lives; yet (reminiscing on the preceding section), as in them Reality/God is in/different, we do not possess these attributes as our accomplishments and— similar to the insights of D. M. Baillie on grace and responsibility as universal pattern of “Incarnation”—become responsible ethical persons precisely by attributing our good lives exclusively to them, the attributes of the Self of Reality that realizes itself, “its” Self, “it” in its Self, through us. This was the frst correction Bahá’u’lláh ventured against the simplifed pantheistic understanding of Uncompounded Reality: Reality is/realizes “itself’” as all things, but by being/realizing “itself” in all attributes, as they are actualized by all creatures (UR, 213). In this “paradox of grace,” as Baillie says, we can now envision the unio mystica not to be mere knowledge or even mere consciousness, but (maybe as in Daoist and Buddhist renderings) presenting itself as the Luminous Mind that in embodying the “natural” non-acting acting (ziran) or the spontaneous non-acting (wu wei) realizes the divine virtues selfessly when we become selfess Selves (which we always already are and have been). In the Christian context, we could maybe say: in becoming a divine image in Christ (imitatio Christi), obliterating our will in the Will (Self) of God (PT, #8; SAQ, #18). We may also be reminded that this realization involves a corporeal and social process of peace-making. This was the second correction of Bahá’u’lláh over against the seclusions of mystical existence: that the mystical impulse of unifcation with the divine or reality must be translated in a prophetic vision of the corporeal, social, and ecological unity of peace. Here, Bahá’u’lláh departs from Corbin’s reading of Ibn ‘Arabi’s (even docetic) “spiritualization”; spiritualization demands materialization. This is the background of Bahá’u’lláh’s ethical and social, cultural and political, religious and interhuman admonitions (TB, 21–2) and the major spiritual force behind the (so-called) “Bahá’í Principles” of unifcation on all levels of physical, mental, spiritual, social, political existence that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá later expounded (PT, ##40–53). Sri Aurobindo, maybe more than anyone after Bahá’u’lláh, began to grasp this deeply spiritual process not (only) to be intended as an individual mystical disappearance upward in the unmanifest brahman—as was suggested upon the background of classical philosophical

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Hindu schools, but especially of Advaita Vedanta (as representing the highest understanding of Truth/Reality)—but as the downward realization of brahman (Uncompounded Reality), embodying its Self (atman) in a spiritual evolution of humanity to the point that it realizes the Manifestation in the world of becoming, which he called the Divine Supermind (Aurobindo, Life, part 1: chs. 14–18, 28, part 2: chs. 26–28), namely, in a future human society of peace and as cosmic transformation—a notion akin to that found in the work of Teilhard de Chardin (Sethna, Spirituality, ch. 1). Third, the Bahá’í icon translates different ways and modes of religious search, mirroring mystical and prophetic religious expressions that seem otherwise to be held apart or opposed to one another (in the claims of some particular “self-identity” of religions or schools). For Corbin, Ibn ‘Arabi’s cascading threefold of realms represents downward modes of differentiation and incorporation, and upward modes of indifferentiation of, and into, the primordial Manifestation, which originate and issue again in the Muhammedan light/reality (nur/haqiqah muhammadiyyah), the Mind of God (Izutsu, Structure, 170–1). In this sense, the Prophet alone is the perfect image of Reality/ God in which all attributes enfold and from whom they unfold (differentiate), the “perfect” being, human and divine, who is also the highest realization of the mystic quest (Chittick, Worlds, 31–5). So, “if the experience of the Prophet has been mediated and relived as the prototype of mystical experience, it is because of the exemplary character of the conjunction of lahut and nāsūt in his person” (Corbin, Alone, 120). The Prophet and the Mystic are in/different in the Manifestation, and to follow one of these modes (as emphasized by different religions and schools) means actually to follow the other, too (even if only by implication). Mystical union is the union with the Prophet, the Mind of God in the Prophet, who is the Manifestation of God/ Reality (mazhar-i ilahi) in which the “authentic mystical wisdom (ma’rifa) is that the soul . . . knows itself as a theophany” (ibid., 133). Bahá’u’lláh calls the Prophet the “Mystic Herald” (GL, #125) and the “Hidden Mystery” and the “Treasured Symbol” (TB, 47). Yet, departing from the “union of being” (wahdat al-wujud) of the school of Ibn ‘Arabi, which leaned toward a pantheistic unio mystica in the style of Advaita Vedanta (even if this is doubtful for himself), and in opposition to the dualistic “union of appearance” (wahdat al-shuhud), Bahá’u’lláh does follow neither. Rather, he transcends all of these categories—as is ft for the Luminous Mind—into a state beyond the Suf aim at the annihilation of Self (fana) into a state of living in God (baqa) that cannot properly be expressed in either personal or impersonal terms, but is strictly beyond any of these categories (GDM, §§101–5). Here, “the wayfarer leaveth behind him the stages of the ‘oneness of Being and Manifestation’ and reacheth a oneness that is sanctifed above these two stations. Ecstasy alone can encompass this theme” (SV, 63). Conversely, this

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also means that all stations, be they of transpersonal mystical union or of intensely personal perichoresis of love, have their relative truth to be valued. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in his Commentary on the Islamic Tradition “I Was a Hidden Treasure” makes this same point when he admits that the truth of the respective positions is a question of the relative standpoint of the (individual or social) mind and the emphasis of the divine attributes manifested in a person or society (Momen, God, 15). Hence, different ways and modes (or emphases of their combination) are open to the wayfarer and religious manifestation of the mystical path. Although they might have different value and importance between themselves (Saiedi, Gate, 185–6), they remain caught up in relativistic mutuality in comparison to all of their insuffciency to gain access to the apophatic Beyond past the limitations of their limited (mental and physical, spiritual and social) perspectives, (individual or collective) minds, and (incorporated) worldviews (SV, 29–30; SAB, #24). This is refected in the different ways or modes of the religious path, for instance, proposed by the Bhagavat Gita: the ways of selfess acts without merit (karma yoga), of selfess love and worship (bhakti yoga) or insight (jnana yoga) (Parrinder, Avatar, 55). These ways resonate deeply with the Suf planes of physical reality (nasut), the way of heaven, of love and worship, of lover and beloved (malakut), and of insight, abstraction, and the power of deep understanding (jabarut). They also reverberate through Whitehead’s selfemptying of the events of the worlds of becoming, the compassionate love of the consequent nature, and the conceptual multiplicity of the primordial nature and its transcending, unifying, and contrasting valuations. Yet, it is an open question from their togetherness and coinherence whether love or insight are closer to the Reality/Truth, or which precisely is the “kingly” way (raja yoga), as Krishna can appear as Great Atman (Self), Great Brahman (indifference), and Great Personality of Reality (and was interpreted by different schools in these ways) (Raja, Depth, ch. 15; Sheridan, Theism, ch. 2). The same would be true for Buddhist differentiations of the solitary way of the Arhant or the way of solidarity of the Bodhisattva (Akira, History, ch. 16); or by the self-power (jiriki) to reach nirvana or by other power or grace (tariki) of the Amitabha Buddha in Japanese Buddhism (Suzuki, Shin Buddhism, 41–4). In the end, Bahá’u’lláh agrees with Dzogchen that by “gradualism,” which creates hierarchies of higher and lower stations and progressions, one can seem to be trapped in a step by step approach to Reality instead of being released (by enlightenment) from the secondary character of any “way” that really has no causal relation to our innermost Self (Dowman, Spaciousness, xvii–xix). It is always possible, says Bahá’u’lláh, that the “severed wayfarer—if invisible confrmation descend upon him and the Guardian of the Cause assist him— may cross these seven stages in seven steps, nay rather in seven breaths, nay rather in a single breath, if God will and desire it” (SV, 65–6).

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Fourth, in surprising ways, the Bahá’í icon remembered in the ringstone symbol also approximates the luminous consciousness of Uncompounded Reality we are all invited to experience without losing its apophatic sting that always hints beyond monism and dualism. It is important to mention, at this juncture, that such a position might, from a thoroughly dualistic view, seem radical, even to Bahá’í authors (Kluge, Buddhism, 155), although it relies not only on philosophical speculation, but is an experiential reality (Foreman, Knowledge, 705–38) recognized across mystical traditions as attainable. Especially in its non-Kantian formulation, this position not only avoids the dualism of the phenomenal and the noumenal (Adam, Perspective, 801– 17)—a conceptual weakness, already discussed regarding Hick’s pluralistic thesis (ch. 6)—but, therefore, has a strong basis in Whitehead’s prehensive, processive, and non-substantialist understanding of the khoric “person” in an interconnected universe (ch. 5) and its (both personal and transpersonal, human and divine) consciousness (AI, 284–8). The maybe most unexpected corroboration of such a position comes from a surprising resonance that remains to my knowledge hitherto unexplored: that the mystical approximation to this Luminous Mind as pure consciousness is present in the Bahá’í ringstone symbol. While we have until now explored this pure consciousness (pabhassara chitta) in the upward movement through the (threefold or fvefold) mystical indifferentiation into the Divine Mind, with a dramatic reversal of this Bahá’í symbolism we can fnd it in mysterious ways to be related to the indifferentiating downward movement of the Mandukya Upanishad, taking up an earlier reference (ch. 5). It is the shortest of the Upanishads and considered as the essence of Upanishadic teachings by which (the Upanishadic tradition itself says), if one reads it with seriousness and follows its illumination, one would reach liberation (moksha) instantly (Deussen, Upanishads II, 556–7). The pure state of consciousness it discusses—which can also be found in derivations of the Luminous Mind such as the “eighth consciousness” (alaya-vijnana) of the Yogacara (Harvey, Mind, 175–6)—is, however, already a probable late extraction of a much longer Hindu tradition, reaching back into the oldest strata of the Upanishadic literature, the Chandogya Upanishad (8. 7–8. 12) (Raju, Depth, 32–3). The Mandukya Upanishad presents to us (the experience of) pure consciousness (beyond any dualism) in the form of a threefold cascading downward from the waking state to the state of sleep, and from the state of deep sleep (without dream activity) to the transcendent “fourth” (turiya) state in which we are wakened and liberated to the indifferent clear consciousness that Dzogchen calls the Luminous Mind and that Bahá’u’lláh addresses as the Uncompounded Reality. The Mandukya Upanishad, in a few short paragraphs describes these four states of consciousness—from the dualistic “possessiveness” and individuation of waking consciousness (vaishvanara), which is turned outward, to the

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dreaming state (taijasa), in which the senses turn inward, to the state of deep sleep that the Upanishad identifed with Insight (prajna) where separateness is gone, but without conscious recognition, to the “fourth” state of wakening (turiya), a super-conscious state beyond the differentiation of inward or outward, upward or downward, sense or intellect, which can only be signifed as non-dual and indifferently one, jivamukti, the cessation of the Self in the attributeless brahman (Maharshi, Works, 34). Yet, “it” also (surprisingly or not, given our previous analysis) appears as Ishvara, the Lord, in a space of clear consciousness where only the Lord shines, where the Absolute and the Manifestation are in/different in us (Krishnananda, Mandukya Upanishad, 92–110). In this state, so the Upanishad, “there is none other than the Lord. He is the supreme goal of life. He is infnite peace and love” (Mandukya Upanishad, §7). Compare this with Bahá’u’lláh acclamation of the pure God/Reality-consciousness of the mystic of the Uncompounded Reality in the Manifestation, when the wayfarer reaches the fnal “plane whereon the vestiges of all things are destroyed in the traveler, and on the horizon of eternity the Divine Face riseth out of the darkness, and the meaning of ‘All on the earth shall pass away, but the face of thy Lord . . .’ is made manifest” (SV, 60). What is more, like the Bahá’í ringstone that exhibits a threefold symbol, capturing the meaning of the Bahá’í Tetragrammaton BHA’, so does the Mandukya Upanishad identify these four states with the “trigrammaton” AUM (Mandukya Upanishad, §8), itself being the sound that is one and all, “the Brahman [that] is all, and the Self of Brahman,” which “has [these] four states of consciousness” (ibid., §2). While the frst three states are related to the three letters A, U, M, separately, the whole threefold is presented in the world AUM, the primordial sound of the apophatic and polyphilic in/different Self of brahman. Like the Self of the Uncompounded Reality, the total “mantram AUM stands for the supreme state of turiya, [which is] without parts, beyond birth and death, the symbol of everlasting joy” (ibid., §12), and conveys the consciousness of the Uncompounded Reality as the luminous Reality, Consciousness, and Bliss (satchitananda). It is all the more fascinating that Bahá’u’lláh, in one of his tablets, also follows the same downward movement through dream and sleep to a state of pure consciousness. In a passage on the reality of the worlds beyond our waking consciousness, Bahá’u’lláh calls sleep “the most mysterious of the signs of God amongst men,” because that “world hath neither beginning nor end.” He also recognizes—as so often discussed in Hindu and Buddhist writings—that it is undecidable whether the “worlds” of dream and sleep (as they are about consciousness) are either states of mind or indicate a reality in which we are immersed. Hence, it “would be true if thou wert to contend that this same world is, as decreed by the All-Glorious and Almighty God,

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within thy proper self and is wrapped up within thee.” But whenever we have retreated into the fourth state, beyond waking, dream, and sleep, it “would equally be true to maintain that thy spirit, having transcended the limitations of sleep” has entered another universal reality. Like the pure consciousness of the turiya state, Bahá’u’lláh characterizes this transcendent state as one in which our spirit will have “stripped itself of all earthly attachment,” that is, is freed from all discrimination. Hence, it is in this state that we can be said to have, “by the act of God, been made to traverse a realm which lieth hidden in the innermost reality of this world” (GL, #79). In closing, besides all technical complexity, we can restate the All-relationality and Surrelativity issuing from apophatic Absolute Reality (the emphasis of the three gates of relativity that this chapter explored) with a fnal image: the polyphilic overfowing of “its” in/different Life into the Uncompounded Reality (and the Luminous Mind) fows through all phenomena of the world, as their innermost Reality. This “inmost reality of all things” (KI, §105) must be understood, and can only be experienced as, a state without identity and difference, but differentiating “it/self” in the cascading foldings of planes of immanence in contrasts and even oppositions of its phenomenal appearances in different words. The reality of this insight cannot exclude the relevance it must have on different religious universes and spiritual paths, intuitions and identities, either. The Bahá’í writings use the image of the tree of life to indicate the unity and difference (and in/difference) of this fow of life through the (mental, spiritual, social and physical) worlds (SAB, #28). It is not an image that must necessarily, as in Deleuze, be opposed to the rhizome, as both can appear together, and as the fow of life through the whole tree is, even if in a more vertical image than in the rhizome, one “substance” circulating throughout and maybe even despite all potential stratifcations, but always in the oscillation between all of its connected parts (Prologue). So is the Uncompounded Reality not only manifest in all phenomena, as the ocean of all of its waves and streams (SAB, #207), but as life-fuid even in the mutually seemingly most remote branches and leaves “inasmuch as within every atom are enshrined the signs that bear eloquent testimony to the revelation of that most great Light” (GL, #90). All beings are connected and differentiated “as birds in one garden of roses, as pearls of one ocean, as leaves of one tree, as rays of one sun” (SAB, #35). ‘Abdu’l-Bahá takes up the Johannine image for Christ of “the true vine” (John 15:1–9), expressing the mutuality of in-sistence of the Manifestation being the whole by fowing through all “the branches”—a fow expressive of the cycle of mutual love. Hence, ‘Abdu’lBahá, can equally designate the Uncompounded Reality of the Manifestations as the whole tree of existence and its in-sisting in its life fow: “The Tree of Life,” of which mention is made in the Bible, is Bahá’u’lláh” (SAB, #28); but so are also “all parts of the creational world . . . of one whole” with “Christ

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the Manifestor refecting the divine Sun [who] represented the whole” (BWF, 364) in it. And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá can add another level, namely, that at the deepest level of unconstructed, undeconstructable, uncompounded surrelativity all worlds are one ecological whole branching from the Manifestation: “The contingent beings are the branches of the tree of life while the Messenger of God is the root of that tree. The branches, leaves and fruit are dependent for their existence upon the root of the tree of life” (BWF, 364). The Buddha, luminous!

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Chapter 8

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Circumscriptions, Circulations

After the emphasis on the apophatic gate in the frst of the last three chapters, this chapter will accentuate the relativistic gate of multiple worlds. It is a fact that religions differ. Not only are they diverse, but they are with regard to many central questions opposed to one another, be it in their proposed way toward and articulation of the aim of salvation (if it is about salvation at all, and not rather about transformation of this world or education or civilization), or be it in the religious experiences around which different religions construct their worldviews and pursue their metaphysical, symbolic, ritual, and intellectual heritage, always diversifying, always drifting apart (Smart, Religions, 10–28). In this chapter, I want to address these oppositions not as contrasts, but as different worlds, striving for, or engaged in, their internal circumscriptions in order for a religion to fnd itself housed in a certain identity or externally defending itself as an entity that is unrivaled by any other community. Such circumscriptions, the (ever ongoing and ever-more refned) constructions of an inside and an outside, are an evolutionary advantage of complex organisms (Goodenough, Depths, ch. 2). The question is, however, whether this organic symbolism is not obsolete when confronted with a common world in which mutual acknowledgment lays its demands on the human and ecological community with painful obviousness today (Keller, Introduction, 13–4). Nevertheless, we fnd that the more we are destined to mutuality, the more religious, ethnic, cultural, social identities try to resist any diffusion in an unknown common organism, as differentiation is such a fundamental matter of the construction and perpetuation of (a religious) identity that it will not be taken lightly (Armstrong, Blood, part 1). But whether they are played down or affrmed, we neglect them only at the peril of strife, discontent, war, and mutual destruction (Juergensmeyer, Terror, ch. 11). Yet, such differentiations are often dialectically related. One’s self-defnition is not just a 327

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self-chosen internal clarifcation of one’s own tradition (since traditions are always in the movement of a fow into one another), but a matter of mutual exclusion, thereby once more and irresistibly manifesting transreligious fows even in mutual antagonisms. This chapter will not suggest solutions, but rather honestly try to value the differences as such; not as fxed identities, however, but as transreligious necessities—at least as long as we hold fast to bifurcating energy as fundamental to the future of religions.

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1. DIFFERENTIATIONS Religions only come in the plural. There is not one religion and there is not one defnition of religion either. Some say, there is no religion at all, since such a concept is, for most of the entities defned as religions, not inherent to their own understanding, but a colonizing move of Western expansionism, in this case, by means of intellectual weapons (Smith, Meaning, ch. 2). This has lead today, in a climate of postcolonial sensitivity (Keller, Neusner, and Rivera, Theologies, 1–21) and in a—also Western—postmodern mood, to the view that only internal self-defnitions are to be accepted (Kitagawa, Quest, 4). What is more, such self-defnitions are not only not allowed to be questioned (from the outside) but are sacrosanct in the sense that they come in the form of quasi-independent planes of immanence that cannot be understood from any other perspective than the one created from the inside. The outsider has to respectfully listen and learn; the insiders have authority over their own self-defnition (Netland, Pluralism, ch. 8). There are no universal values or conditions for such a dialogue (Knitter, Earth, chs. 4–70). It is one of a multiplicity of monologues, at least in the sense that any generalization is called out as neo-colonial attitude that has to be censured or curtailed or banned (Pui-lan, Imagination, ch. 8). This mutual fragmentation is, of course, nothing but the colonial expansion of one’s own view that is claimed to be universal in the sense that it has no outside. It is, in new attire, nothing but the old idea of the superiority of oneself and that of the inherent independence of one’s view or experience or tradition or group or practice. The only difference is that we now, if we do so at all, acknowledge that “others” have the same claim; and if we don’t want to obliterate them all (which might not be part of one’s religion’s precepts either) and after so many experiences of suffering in the history of humankind pertaining not only but especially to religious claims, we must at least accept a space in which we can claim our universality without an outside as if there were no other claims, disregarding them as quasi nonexistent. Some have proposed that this was the outcome of the experiment of “religious liberty” in

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American culture (Kitagawa, Quest, 198–209). It is not a friction-free system since these universal billiard balls may collide—as they do. Mere physics could tell us that no physical bodies can occupy the same space, and if the space is limited, they will interfere. Concurrent claims of exclusive universality, then, must—closer to quantum mechanical imagery—occupy the same felds, must be interfering planes of immanence, must meander in mutual transgression and transreligious oscillation (Keller, Cloud, ch. 4)—which they do, as only a rudimentary glimpse into the history of religions will demonstrate. Furthermore, the strictly nominalist claim that there are no universals, which is based on the mutually exclusive universality of my universe of (religious) experience, discourse, and reverence (as if they were independent substances or closed essences), is illusory; only their relativity is real (SMW, chs. 7–8). Hence, not only may we doubt voices that demand purity of one’s own tradition over and against all others, even their heavenly origin, received without any flth of human infuence (which would always seem to be sinful or wrong), but also resist the screams of hatred and isolation that shout that we cannot communicate these worlds, that they are closed in themselves, that there cannot be a wider designation of mutual immanence and universality, for instance, of human rights or values, not being totally dependent just on my horizon of things, my plane of immanence. The pre-modern paradigm of one universal religion over against the plethora of the many “other” religions, the modern paradigm of the limitation of religions to their private consummation, and the postmodern paradigm of mutually independent (localizations that claim) universalities are all pretransreligious. They have not yet found access to the relativity of religious truth claims, which are harbored and expressed across all religious experiences and intuitions, universes of discourse, and reverences of one’s beloved godheads—if we care to listen closely and gently—and will, so the prophecy, either be dissolved by the soft fowing waters of mutuality (as the Laozi promises) or crushed on the rock of the next universal conqueror. In recognizing that religions have not only their holy inside but an outside that from any other inside seems to be less great, less holy, even evil, blasphemous, or idiotic is of course not only limited to the futile game of measuring up to religious superiority, but appears also to be at the heart of any (even if hard won) secular view that despises or at least limits all religions so as not to be bothered by the cacophony of their cock games (Pinker, Angels, ch. 1). Secularity, if it is that at all, is itself an alternative that is neither an independent entity on its own nor only one-faceted, but defnitely some kind of competing quasi-religion on its own—a “secularized salvation” (Kitagawa, Quest, 190–4). It is not without keen sensitivity to this fact that Whitehead considered science, or at least the materialist philosophical permeation of the

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sciences, as one of the three universal religious traditions of today besides Christianity and Buddhism (RM, 139–49). Religions fercely differ in centrally held “truths” of their convictions. The history of their interaction is full of ironies, mutual occupation, mutual exploitation, and mutual diminution and denigration. Intellectual undertakings like comparative religion, comparative theology, and religious pluralism seem to most who love their own interior universality a matter of fear and trembling, not only to lose ones purity (with the perspective to also lose one’s salvation) but to see one’s hard wrought identity dissolve into whatever shallow and murky mixture of inconceivables (Plantinga, Pluralism, 172–92). Maybe it is also the overwhelming complexity of this manifold that lets one recoil back into the simplicity of one’s own home. Maybe it is the deep-seated fear of one’s own doubts regarding one’s own religious identity—that the “other” could be right, that I may have built my life on the wrong conditions, that there is a truth to learn that would catapult me out of my social and spiritual context into an unknown universe, and would even exclude me from my family, my friends, my life partners. And this manifold, if you have opened up to it, is, indeed, mighty, overwhelming, frightening, but in another sense—the sense that the world is much larger and more mysterious than one can ever assume, that we can never settle, that religious engagement is an infnitely moving endeavor—an “adventure” (AI, ch. 19), as Whitehead says, hitting us (to use Deleuze’s and Guattari’s term again) with “infnite speed” (Philosophy, 21). There are Buddhas and Avatars (even Buddha as Avatar), resurrection and reincarnation, or neither, heaven or nirvana, personal love or dissolving unity, universal order or small orders, revelations or enlightenments, history or karma, grace or effort, soul or non-self, one God or empty nothingness, wrath or mercy, chance or providence, linearity or cyclicity, time or eternity, creation or spontaneity, damnation or universal salvation, activity or non-activity, the prophetic or the mystical, experience or dogma, and the rest of it. No wonder that some do not want to see this ocean of relativity without condemning it. On a philosophical level, it was Jacques Derrida who demonstrated that all attempts to unify these differences, complexities, bifurcations, or oppositions, would not succeed—in principle (Derrida, Différance, 1–28). Any unifcation, every attempt to fnd an underlying unity into which to integrate oppositions and incommensurabilities, but also all attempts to fnd new forms of unity between them, will inevitably lead to just one more regional unity among the others that were considered to be unifed by any such attempt. Any unity is regional. Even if we claim to have found a novel encompassing unity—through creative measures or through reduction and deemphasizing of differences—or to have discovered a more fundamental unity of (then) seemingly only phenomenal differences, this unity will, in fact, only create

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another difference in an ever widening landscape of the unities that these differences were for themselves (Welsch, Vernunft, 260–75). Any unifcation is the creation of another differentiation among the elements unifed differently. Derrida called this process différance: It is “older” than any metaphysical or epistemological ideas of fundamental or most elevated unity, be it named the Good, God, Truth, Being, Oneness, Soul, Reason, Mind, State, Class, Ideology, Society, and so on. And every new synthesis of one of these concepts will but create a further differentiation: whether God is personal or non-personal or transpersonal; whether soul is substantial, identical with or different from ultimate Reality, or empty or emptiness itself; whether reason is logical or aesthetic; and so forth, indefnitely. Whitehead, half a century before the appearance of this (postmodern) philosophy of difference (Hardt, Deleuze, 2), has—in a less pessimistic manner—made the same observation, and he elevated it to the most profound axiom of his philosophy: that the groundless creativity of this world of becoming functions by always being instantiated in the self-creating process of new events of unifcation, the growing-together of a multiplicity of events that are unifed (in “concrescence”), to a real and concrete unity, the event (actual entity) that, as soon as it becomes realized as this event, transitions into its becoming a fact for other events in process of such a unifcation of which it is only one element among many (GPW, part 2). The many become one and are increased by one (PR, 21). Every religion is such a unity: a process based on events of singular unifcation of experience, intuition, and refection that draw on older syntheses, renew them creatively, but, by the same token, becomes another religion among its siblings, another unity that differentiates the spiritual, intellectual, and social landscape of religions. Gilles Deleuze—in drawing on Whitehead—has brought out the highly critical implication of this unstoppable process of differentiation by (and despite) unifcation: that the universe (of physics as well as of the human mind) is a vast process of divergences (Logic, chs. 23–4). It isn’t true, in his view, that—as Leibniz believed—God has selected a world in which only compatibilities exist or that such compatibility is the foundation of a universe to exist coherently; rather, instead of a pre-stabilized harmony, we live in a world of divergent dimensions, divergent incompatibilities. It is a world of divergent worlds. However—as for Whitehead (GPW, 114)—all divergences are still related; nevertheless, they are relative to one another not by unity, but by difference (Deleuze, Fold, ch. 6). The critical implication is that whenever we try to create or (in the Buddhist sense) to construct a coherent world of (only) compatibilities (of that which is possible together without contradiction), we not only reduce the divergent world-relativity to a segment of coherence but also elevate it (unjustifably) to the position of the Truth. But in reality, this aggrandizement is nothing but a coup d’état of one circumscribed

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local harmonization, elevating itself to the position of hegemony and control of the (then, under this imperial condition) seeming chaos of divergent realities of existence and becoming (TDM, ch. 2).

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They speak of abstractions such as the One, the Whole, the Subject, etc., and seek the processes through which these abstractions are embodied in a world made to conform to their requirements (this process can be Knowledge, Virtue, or History . . .)—even if it means experiencing a terrible crisis each time they realize that rational unity or totality turns into its contrary, or that the subject engenders monsters. Empiricism starts with an entirely different assessment: analyzing states of things so as to bring out previously nonexistent concepts of them. The states of things are not unities or totalities but multiplicities. (Deleuze, Regimes, 304–5)

The divergent world of worlds, relativistically related by difference, has been occupied by the dictatorship of one divergent trajectory (one religion, or school of thought, one savior, one history, one tradition, one dogma, one logic) by the exclusion of all incompatible elements. Here, multiplicity (of the many folds) has been transformed into mere many-ness, and one of the many ones now occupy the seat of sovereignty over all others, claiming the right to extinguish the differentiated, divergent, chaotic, processual landscape into one eternal, unchanging, unforgiving substance needing nothing to exist besides itself than its own rule of coherence (ch. 5). This is the truth of exclusivism, although someone being of this persuasion will think of it as the Truth. But the capital Truth of the oppressor is nothing but that, the little truth magnifed to a grandiose monster. In reality, it is the little local truth; knowing of its relativistic relation to other different, even incompatible truths, divergent from it (and all else), will release the mystery of Truth, its relativity, its becoming, its processuality, its incompleteness; it is the listener to truth, not its possessor. Deleuze credits Whitehead to have discovered that in a world of process, divergence is the rule and that even (Whitehead’s) God is not a fashioner of compatibilities, selections of only compatible possibilities by the exclusion of all other worlds, but (in my formulation) the divine multiplicity that instigates and comprises the relativistic creation of ever-new divergences of worlds and worlds of divergences (TDM, ch. 12). For Whitehead . . . bifurcations, divergences, incompossibilities, and discord belong to the same motley world that can no longer be included in expressive units, but only made or undone according to prehensive units. . . . In the same chaotic world divergent series are endlessly tracing bifurcating paths. It is a “Chaosmos.” . . . Even God desists from being a Being who compares worlds and chooses the richest compossible. [God] becomes Process, a process that at once affrms incompossibilities and passes through them. The play of the world

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has changed in a unique way, because now it has become the play that diverges. (Deleuze, Fold, 81)

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This multiverse is a Chaosmos. The multiplicity of religions, with its differences, incompatibilities, and divergences, is a chaosmos of spiritual experiences, intuitions, and refections, embedded in a landscape of a manifold of planes of immanence, moving not only apart but always across one another, folding every fold of one plane into many others of other planes. The more we are linked in this way, the more we can gain an insight into the mystery of this process of which Reality is not just a mere indeterminateness, but a polyphilic in/difference that insists on these divergences as the Truth of this multiplicity (ch. 6). The mystery remains in this transreligious process and does not call for a halt, for the exclusive elevation of particularity to the abstract height of all-encompassing Truth (Faber, Sense, 36–56). This is the reason that Whitehead’s God, who, as we have seen in chapter 7, is really the in-sistent Manifestation of in/different Reality, is not an abstraction, but an event, the dipolar event in the divine process of the cycle of love that insists on and in-sists in the divergences (GPW, §27). It is this (divine) process that creates ever-anew intensities and harmonies in relation to one another and also comprises, transforms, and heals them without a fxed, abstract aim (such as a law) since Goodness is overfowing and diversifying to ever-new realizations of intensity and harmony, beauty and peace (TDM, ch. 13). Hence, he must take the differences between religions (and within them) seriously; they are not meant to be harmonized for the price of their suppression (Smith, Drudgery, ch. 2). But, at the same time, we ought not to view the religious chaosmos as the enemy and death of religious commitment or religious truth or divine command, but can, as is the profound Bahá’í commitment, praise this chaosmos with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as divine manifold, insisted on by the polyphilic love of Reality/God/Truth. This would be the way to avoid divergences to remain a matter of strife and confict, and actually to become a means of peace. The chief cause is the misrepresentation of religion by the religious leaders and teachers. They teach their followers to believe that their own form of religion is the only one pleasing to God, and that followers of any other persuasion are condemned by the All-Loving Father and deprived of His Mercy and Grace. Hence arise among the peoples, disapproval, contempt, disputes and hatred. If these religious prejudices could be swept away, the nations would soon enjoy peace and concord. (PT, #13)

2. BIFURCATIONS If religious divergences are not only real (that is, not an illusion, but a divine insistence) but also incompatible, we are confronted with the question of

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how exactly to live with this religious chaosmos as a matter of Reality/Truth, because we are confronted with concrete oppositions that, if we use our common logic and intuition, seem not to be able to be claimed by anyone of sane mind to be true at the same time. Yet, this is not the (metaphysical) problem of the divergences themselves, which often present themselves to us in such opposed views, but our (epistemological) problem, namely, of how to access the divergences through perspectives with which we would have to provide ourselves in order to shift our orientation regarding these divergences in such a way that we can understand them as chaosmos and do not feel the need to reduce them to sameness, or to stratify them into fxed hierarchies of truth, or to erase them in favor of the one (regional) truth we happen to accept for whatever social, logical, or instinctive reasons. This is the inescapable dilemma of being religious: that our commitment to any religious truth (of a revelation, an experience, an intuition, a logic, a state of mind, a doctrine, a ritual, a social practice, and so on) will always be a limitation of a space of possibilities that leaves out a much wider landscape of potential and viable alternatives, or even creates them as real potentials in the course of their realization; but, conversely, that no truth will reveal itself to us without such a commitment, since abstractions are not truths, but only possibilities. We must remember, here, Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness (ch. 3): the elevation of abstractions to the status of “real” Reality (such as the Ideas of Plato); the principle of valuation: that only concrete limited events have value and release facts as realized values (ch. 6); and the principle of creativity (ch. 1): that concretizations of truth are always new members of a chaosmos of truths, valuations, and facts in the process of becoming. Yet, divergences are not bifurcations (ch. 5). When Whitehead began to investigate the bifurcation of nature (CN, ch. 2), the view that mind and nature are irrevocably disconnected (a view that was the outcome of the falling apart of the medieval synthesis of spirituality and physicality), which lead to dualism and monism of either mind or matter, respectively, but also to the philosophical underpinning of modern science with scientifc materialism (Kelly, View, 25–46), he found this hiatus to be one of an opposition of abstractions rather than one of the concrete process of becoming, which always integrates physicality and mentality in dipolar events in process and nexuses of processes, engaged in the mutual concrescence and transition of its opposites (GPW, §§2, 9). Whitehead diagnosed the reason for the bifurcation not in the divergence of reality (which he accepted), but in the unfortunate creation of an ideology of substantialism: that the divergent, but mutually relative factors of the whole movement of the world of becoming were abstracted from one another by the conceptualizations of the mind (which are its abstractions and

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simplifcations). As the resulting mental concepts are taken to be the reality of the processual fux of the chaosmos, they not only bring the process to a halt in fxed images but also project these fxed images onto the world as if it consists of entities of the same character as the mental imaginations. The representation of reality by the mind was born: the correspondence theory of truth that claims that mental entities correspond to real entities in the eternal world (CN, 16). A factor of the becoming whole of the world, which is characterized by relativity and relationality, has been transformed into independent entities of a billiard ball universe; process has become substance (GPW, §9). Substances appear as independent essences, only externally connected by collision or force or control. Chaos is the uncontrolled (or controllable) enemy, the evil, the error. Truth, now, is the hierarchization of such substantial entities into subjugation under the highest entity, the divine substance of highest independence and controlling power. The god in the image of the absolute emperor is born (AI, 168–9). And in this paradigm truth is a submission under the absolute will of this omnipotent lord—as in Ockham’s divine potentia absoluta, not just being infnite, infnitely exterior and alien, but (at least in its effect) utterly unbound by the Good (ch. 5). It is not divergent reality, but this substantialism that creates the bifurcation into scientifc materialism and theological absolutism and exclusivism (Griffn, Reenchantment, ch. 1). Hence, whenever we sense a bifurcation, something is wrong, but not with the divergent religious experiences, intuitions, and conceptualizations, but with our substantialist perspective on them. The religious chaosmos is full of divergences, but they do not have to be understood as bifurcations, locked in a deadly fght for hegemony (ch. 3). The world of religious universes of discourse is full of such divergences, but what if we don’t have to lock them into the game of bifurcation (ch. 4)? One way to meet this challenge would be to insist on the indeterminateness of Reality (ch. 1), its apophatic nature—as is preferred by many religious pluralists today such as John Hick (ch. 6), and is manifest in Nagarjuna’s discarding of conceptualization as such as an illusion, always hindering us from experiencing Reality as freedom from theories (Winters, Thinking, 132–42). We have already seen that this solution does not take into account the polyphilic in-sistence of the in/different Reality (ch. 5). Bahá’u’lláh, however, has taken a decisive step in this polyphilic direction when he recognized the opposing monistic and dualistic views of Reality as divergent by making them relative to one another and demonstrated their mutual immanence and the transcendence of Reality beyond both, at the same time (ch. 6). In a tablet to an arrogant Shi‘i divine who became a Bahá’í (but later became estranged from the Faith), Bahá’u’lláh proposed an alternative: that if we are locked in bifurcation, all are wrong.

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If however, the supporters of . . . two positions should contend and quarrel with one another in their exposition of . . . two perspectives, both groups are, and have ever been, rejected . . . and both groups shall return to the hellfre despite the fact that they, in their own estimation, soar in the highest horizon of spiritual understanding. (Tablet to Jamal-i-Burujirdi, §3)

So, what if we review seeming bifurcations in the diverse religious universes of discourse under the commitment of such a premise? Could they instead be divergences? There is, for instance, the fundamental divergence between a monistic view and a dualistic view of the relation of ultimate Reality to the multiplicity of the world of becoming (Momen, Religion, 31–4): Advaita adherents would not accept any Avatars (Manifestations) since, if we are already the Self that is identical with ultimate Reality (atman is brahman), there would be no need of any appearance of Reality “in the person” of an Avatar, especially since it also seems to suggest that Reality is of an ultimately personal nature, which the adherents of Krishna would, of course, confrm (Parrinder, Avatar, ch. 4). Bahá’u’lláh, instead, affrms both positions as acceptable on their own terms, but divergent because of the differences in the constitution of the minds of the religionist (ch. 7). “The conceptions of the devoutest of mystics, the attainments of the most accomplished amongst men, the highest praise which human tongue or pen can render are all the product of man’s fnite mind and are conditioned by its limitations” (GL, #26). There is the related question of why we would need a mediator at all. If we remember Whitehead’s differentiation into three modes of metaphysical worldviews embedded in religions—immanentism, transcendentalism, pan(en)theism (ch. 6)—we could dispense of appearances of human fgures claiming to present these respective realities to us “in person.” And yet, neither monistic nor dualistic religious settings have excluded such mediators, be it Krishna, the Buddha, or Christ. Why, we could ask in the Buddhist context, do we need a human Buddha fgure if everyone can in principle reach Buddhahood (and is promised by effort or grace of the Bodhisattva) to reach nirvana, to realize the dharmakaya? Why a nirmanakaya? Why the “necessity” that in every age a fully Enlightened One was to be born (Digha Nikaya, Tevigga Sutta, 1, 44)? Why, we could also ask in the Christian context, does God, the Logos, who is in the world, in everything, have to become fesh (John 1:1–14)? Why should the nature of Reality/God be appearing “in person” in human attire? Neither of these positions seems to demand it: Judaism lives well without such a concept of Incarnation. Sikhism relativizes the Guru—neither Islam nor Hinduism, neither Prophet nor Avatar, neither Krishna nor Muhammad, neither the Vedas nor the Qur’an (Parrinder, Avatar, 92–7)—and seeks the dissolution into the formless Godhead identifed with Reality (al-haqq) of the Sufs (Islam, Sufsm, 103–4). Jainism does not

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need any God or mediator for the universal immanent law to work itself out in every living being (jiva) (Long, Jainism, ch. 4). The Hindu Great Dharma (sanatana dharma) works on its own and embraces all whether they believe in the threefold Godhead (trimurti) or in the indifferent nirguna brahman (Acharya, Dharma, ch. 1). Bahá’u’lláh’s solution is, as discussed, that of the surrelativity of Reality that in-sists in its infnite worlds by differentiation and concretization as the polyphilic movement of the in/different Reality “itself,” as “its” Self (ch. 5). Hence, this Self appears in all worlds that this Self comprises in their own form to realize all the divine attributes of the Divine Self in these worlds and, thereby (whether understood as salvation or education), to lure all creatures of these respective worlds into a process of approximation toward the realization of this very Self in their selves (and their realization of the divine attributes), without ever having left the abode of apophatic Reality (ch. 7). In other words, to seek apophatic Reality directly is to fold oneself (ones Self) into the Manifestation of “its” Self.

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In every world (`ālam), He [the Manifestation of God] is manifested according to the capacity (bi-isti`dād) of that world. [2] In the world of spirits (`ālam al-arwāḥ), for example, He reveals Himself and becomes manifest unto them [the spirits] through the vestiges [traces, signs] of the Spirit (āthār al-rūḥ). [3] So, likewise, in [the world of] bodies (ajsād), in the world of names and attributes (`awālim al-asmā wa’l-ṣifāt) and in other worlds (al-awālim) which none comprehends save God. [4] All [of these worlds] derive their good-fortune from this Theophany (Manifestation, ẓuhūr). [5] Wherefore, He appears unto them according to the requisite form (sūrat) in order that He might guide them unto God, His Lord, and draw them nigh unto the Abode of His Cause. (Tablet of Manifestation, §6, transl. Lambden)

There is the question of the origin of the universe, whether or not it has (or needs to have) a creator. Abrahamic religions insist on the creator, as they do on the transcendentalism Whitehead associated with them; religions under the Dharma and the Dao, however, refuse any suggestion of a creator God as compromising the very liberation they seek, as illusion of substantialism, claiming self-existence in, and excluding a divine being from, the sea of emptiness (Dharmasiri, Critique, ch. 2). History reveals several forms of mutual concessions, for instance, in Christian mysticism the idea that God does not create ex nihilo (by will and freedom or cause)—or at least not as effcient cause, but as attractor, as in Aquinas (Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, 218–9)—but by nature and goodness (Moltmann, God, 79–85), or ex Deo, from the essence of God (Sells, Languages, ch. 2), or even as a creature of the spontaneous irruption of undetermined Reality into the duality of God and world (Faber, Gottesmeer, 64–95). The Lotus Sutra, conversely, names the Buddha the Father (originator, Person) of the universe (LS, ch. 3) and

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Dzogchen can speak of Samantabhadra as creative force (Doud, Rose, ch. 3). Bahá’u’lláh’s solution, again, seeks divergence without bifurcation as he affrms—similar to the Buddha—that this is an indeterminable question (avyakata) that cannot be expressed in dualistically opposed concepts without losing its polyphilic complexity (Momen, Buddhism, 31–3). In one sense, as already the Báb had confrmed, God is not the creator of the world since the apophatic Reality does not act, as divine essence is beyond activity (Saiedi, Gate, 197–8), yet, as in Daoism, non-acting (wu wei) is the highest form of acting, without effort, spontaneous (Chan, Source Book, 791), and, as in Buddhism, is empty of itself, that is, spontaneously active (Grigg, Tao, 277–303). This self-creative activity for (the Báb and) Bahá’u’lláh, as for Whitehead, is causa sui (PR, 88; Brown, Beginning, 27), but out of the Self of the selfemptying activity of the non-acting essence of Reality/God, which is the primordial Manifestation of God (TU, #2:48). Since this is not a matter of time, but eternity, we can also not bifurcate a duality in which one position would claim the temporal creation of the world and another one the eternal existence of the world without beginning and end (Brown, Beginning, 21–40).

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As regards thine assertions about the beginning of creation, this is a matter on which conceptions vary by reason of the divergences in men’s thoughts and opinions. Wert thou to assert that it hath ever existed and shall continue to exist, it would be true; or wert thou to affrm the same concept as is mentioned in the sacred Scriptures, no doubt would there be about it. (TB, 140)

There is the question whether the world is a reality or an illusion. In some sense the strong emphasis on the sole Reality of God especially in Suf philosophy has led to the impression that only God really exists, the Reality/God (al-haqq) (Savi, Summons, 14). But, in general, it was the Dharmic religions that favored the illusory “nature” of the external world based on the assumption that it is really only in the ignorant state of the mind—from which we must be liberated—that there are objects opposed to subjects while there is really only the Luminous Mind, and the world is its dream (Norbu, Source, 233–5). Only if this dream becomes substantiated, reiterated, and is taken as reality, we are bound by this illusion as reality in a painful karmic process (Wallace, Buddhism, 4–6). Advaita Vedanta strongly suggests the illusory character of “reality” of subjective separateness from brahman while we are only itself (Sharma, Philosophy, ch. 1). But not all Hindu schools agree; rather shades of more or less reality are articulated by opponents of Sankara such as Madva’s Dvaita dualism (close to Christian views), and more subtle forms of non-dualism as in Ramanuja’s Vishishtvaita (qualifed non-dualism) or several forms of Achintya Bheda Abheda, for instance of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and Gaudiya Vaishnavism (Parrinder, Avatar, chs. 4–6). Again,

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we fnd both positions in the Bahá’í writings. On the one hand, they emphasize that God is the only Reality and all besides God is (as) nothing (SAQ, #80), and, on the other hand, they insist that Reality insists on creation not to be an expression of ignorance and, hence, a mere illusion (ibid.), but of the creativity of Reality “itself,” a manifestation of the Manifestation, of “its” Self as the Creative Word and as the sea of which all else is as waves (ch. 7).

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Bear thou witness in thine inmost heart unto this testimony which God hath Himself and for Himself pronounced, that there is none other God but Him, that all else besides Him have been created by His behest, . . . [and at the same time] are as nothing when brought face to face with the mighty revelations of His unity. (GL, #94)

Consider the following question: If Reality/God is a cause of the world (as in some sense was assumed as a possibility in the just-mentioned bifurcation), in what sense might this be the case? Is God an effective cause (as Christian orthodoxy teaches) so as to be independent and external to the world, or is God a formal or quasi-formal cause as Meister Eckhart (Flasch, Productio, 125–34) and Karl Rahner (Duffy, Experience, 4–6) taught, so that God were internally related to creation much like (in Aristotelian terms) form to matter? Or might God even be the material cause of the world, distributing itself among the creatures, which thereby are of its God-stuff, as one Hindu view suggests brahman to be the feld of existence of the world (King, Philosophy, 212–3)? Is the world the body of God, as many contemporary theologians in pursue of panentheism in one or another sense and with diverse restrictions claim (Clayton and Peacocke, In Whom We Live, passim)? Bahá’í writings, indeed, polyphilically affrm all of these solutions as long as they correct one another in their divergence. Yet, at the same time, they also apophatically negate all of these views, as we must always strive to transcend our categories and learn to uncover them as limited abstractions from Reality, which cannot be grasped in any abstraction (Momen, God, 9–13). Instead, the Bahá’í writings confrm that we are unable to craft a picture of the creative process and the involvement of Reality in it beyond a clear affrmation of the Reality’s insistence on it and insistence in it. Bahá’u’lláh can speak of the Manifestations of the essence of God (GL, #139), but will also deny their “identity” with “it” (ch. 7). Nevertheless, the primordial Manifestation “is born of the substance of God Himself” (GL, #27), and we are “molded” out “of the clay of love” (HW. A, #13) that is Godself (PUP, #96). Hence, in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s words, we can understand the Word and Spirit of God not only as procession through emanation, that is, as either a division of God or a “mere” theophany (SAQ, #53)—as some Bahá’í authors have concluded (Momen, God, 24; Kluge, Neoplatonism I, 169–70)—but as a procession through manifestation, the in-sistence of the Word and Spirit in

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all beings—as if they were fowing out of divine substance (SAQ, #54)—but, at the same time, negating this to be divine “stuff” shared and distributed among the creatures (SAQ, #82). Bahá’u’lláh will praise the inaccessibility of the apophatic essence of Reality/God, but, at the same time, also praise it as “the Quintessence of truth, the inmost Reality of all things” (KI, 92). The picture that arises from the Bahá’í writings is not one of incoherence, but of highly sophisticated relativity arising from the transformation of bifurcations into divergences of the mind of the contemplator (SAB, #31): this transformation needs always at once affrmation and negation, or (what I have called) a subtractive affrmation (GPW, 327; TDM, ch. 3) in an apophatic transcending of all categories while affrming divergent viewpoints as valuable and valid on their own terms and within their own limitations (Momen, Relativism, 9–14). There are many other such bifurcations that are treated in this same way in the Bahá’í writings—not as bifurcations, but as justifed divergences—or appear under scrutiny as pointing toward (Buddhist) inexpressibility (avyakata) or (Upanishadic) unmanifestness (avyakta). But they never ft into the dualistic bifurcations by which the deep conficts between worldviews, cosmologies, religious doctrines, interpretations of experiences, philosophical schools, and their associated religious, cultural, social, and political institutions are propelled forward through human history, sometimes over centuries, without any meaningful way to stop the dialectic energy they create or perpetuate and that can always, if the conditions are right, erupt into mutual denigration or obliteration of the “other.” We may think of the centuries of Christological problems still unsolved: how to “combine” human and divine nature in a person who is also one person among others of a trinitarian God who is also one (Hick, Metaphor, chs. 5–7)? We may think of the unsolvable bifurcation between Christian and Hindu views on the connection, similarity, or even identity of the concept of Incarnation and the Avatar, always locked in a discussion of their difference to highlight the mutual superiority of the respective embraced religion while denigrating the other (Parrinder, Avatar, chs. 15–16): “You are not historical enough—no, you are caught in the illusion of history; you are engulfed by the limitation of just one Avatar (Incarnation), which is to say, you revere a very ‘small’ Godhead—no, you are caught in the eternal cycles of ignorance from which the grace of the Incarnation has saved us” (Ward, Religion, 147–52)! Should Christ be understood as Logos, a person of God, or as Spirit, a human being inspired by God (Haight, Jesus, ch. 15)? Should the Buddha be understood as human being (and nothing else) or as divine pre-existent Being (Strong, Experience, 131)? Is there ultimately God or just the universe or nothing? Is the nature of the ultimate brahman (spirit) or sunyata? And so on. One really must not have contracted any religious agoraphobia. I am not belittling the problems, far from it! They are fascinating and worthy to be followed through with a wide and deep minded search. But I am wary of

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the widely held resignation to the impossibility of striking through the Gordian knot of bifurcation instead of accepting the chaosmos, full of indefnable in/ differentiations always oscillating with (and into) divergences that will (with Whitehead) always only be “solved” in the moment of an event, a decision, a momentary unifcation, which will again become part of a new process of new syntheses (TDM, ch. 7). Maybe, then, the event that we should desire is the one that relieves us from the struggle of death that these bifurcations can produce, and offers us a liberating relativity of divergence instead (TDM, ch. 5). As such an event will itself appear in, and recreate, the landscapes of a transreligious chaosmos, maybe we should give up on the underlying fallacy of misplaced concreteness and follow Whitehead’s mutual pollution of mind and matter (ch. 5), in fact, of all abstractions that we have constructed as (self-contained) entities, and transform them back into the relativistic felds (or felds of immanence) from which we have taken them. “Philosophy,” says Whitehead, and I take this here also to mean meaningful transreligious discourse, “is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity” by which its “selective character . . . obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies.” Hence, it is the “task of philosophy” and of transreligious discourse “to recover the totality obscured by the selection” (PR, 18). Events, for Whitehead, are decisions (PR, 42–3). Such an event may be the decision to accept as truth the truth of transreligious relativity. No argument will get us there, as all arguments, being abstractions from events, will always remain gleefully and awfully “before” the decision, prematurely naming this event as if it had already happened (or not happened at all). The potential foreclosure, the foreclosure of and through abstractions, received as binaries and perpetuated as weapons in the battle over supremacy, can only be healed by the cutting-through of a new event and its unexpected, unprecedented synthesis (ch. 4). Revelations, theophanies, religious renewals, are such events—in the best case, opening up new, and harboring a plenitude of new and wholesome integrations of intensity and harmony directed toward “Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace” (AI, 284). They are the events and processes exploring the trajectory of their novelty: the (new) Manifestations of Reality and the magnitude of a civilization cherishing them. Herein, on the basis of such events, in their “opening synthesis,” may lie the promises of religious peace. These events may “be/manifest” the Truth we are looking for. 3. MULTIPLICATIONS The vast chaosmic landscape of transreligious history and thought may best be envisioned as always being engaged in movements of multiplication of perspectives, perpetually reshaping their landscape with measures of more

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or less. Since only abstractions are halts to this process, mostly collected at points of extreme opposites in the creation of concepts and identities, the landscape of Reality may better be understood as a multiplicity of felds of relationality, planes of immanence, or scales of interaction in the syntheses of events that always already integrate what we conceptually analyze as simplifed and divided (abstract) entities (CN, ch. 2). The more or less of the integration of, the emphasis on, and the multiplication through, abstractions (like mind and matter, for instance) will lead us to three corrections against the misplacing of such proliferating and mutually battle-locked abstractions as if they were “concretizations” (GPW, §13). First, instead of exhibiting just collections of opposites, of opposing or mutually excluding abstractions, events always happen (using Whitehead’s term) as “concrescences” (PR, 26), as the growing-together of not only abstract possibilities of emphasis but primarily (other) concrete events (or facts) in new processes of valuation of the inherent and inherited values of these concrete (realized) events and their spaces of unrealized possibilities (GPW, §§2, 16, 20, 27). They must be analyzed not only into their components but intuited in their surrelative oneness of unifcation that cannot be deduced from their components (PR, 19–20). What is more, they must defnitely not be reduced to seemingly inherent (but maybe only projected) or extracted conceptual abstractions used to contradict other syntheses (for instance, of other religions or schools of thought) or to incite antagonistic strives (ch. 6). This unity of events, born from their concrete synthesis, is their spirit (AI, 285); and this spirit is beyond the spatiotemporal continuum (PR, 287)—much like there is in the estimation of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá a unity to the processes of a human being (nafs, ruh) that cannot be reconstructed from elements, being indivisible and beyond temporality (PT, #29). In Bahá’u’lláh’s words, the event of “the Manifestation of God is not composed of . . . elements” (Tablet of Manifestation, §2). Nevertheless, the event is surrelationally related to everything, as it is “a system of all things” (PR, 36); and the Manifestation “has never been nor shall ever be separate from all else” (Tablet of Manifestation, §2), integrating religious intuitions in unison with their differentiations (GL, #22). As for Whitehead’s God, “there is no loss, no obstruction,” because in God the “world is felt in a unison of immediacy” (PR, 346). Second, as does nature, so also does the transreligious landscape abhor any vacuum! If we add the belief of current biological evolutionary research that divergences do not just create an infnitely diversifed biological space of equal possibilities of the realization of all of them, but gathers around specifc clusters of their combination, which appear like islands in this biological landscape of evolutional realizations (Conway Morris, Solution, 8–10), we fnd that this landscape has valleys and mountains of intensity of realizations,

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and islands of convergences of intensities. For instance, there were multiple convergent developments of the eye even if the phyla and evolutionary pathways are far apart (Conway Morris, Runes, ch. 9). So, there will always be positions divergent from others flling the space between existing solutions to a problem with new mixtures of conceptual abstractions as well; but there will also always be events convergent to certain solutions that highlight the concurrence of the greatest intensity of internal satisfaction with the highest harmony of external relationships to the landscape as a whole (ibid., chs. 2–3, 24). Whether distributed in time (history) or space (geography), in a sense they will be always both new and similar, unprecedented (maybe in their scope or clarity) and in some profound unison with other such events of synthesis. Especially, when we recognize the inevitability of small, stable or metastable, islands of culmination in the process of convergence to be based on the inevitability of formal emphases and reverberations (ibid., ch. 4), we will not be surprised that certain (biological and) religious “solutions” in the virtual landscape (of the Mind) arise from vastly different backgrounds, but exhibit a unison of patterns of mutual heightening instead of dissipating intensities and harmonies. Much as for Whitehead’s God, in the infnity of potentials and potential worlds of the primordial nature, a process of Wisdom prevails, of the valuation of their formal relationality for any event in any world (PR, 345–7) to achieve the heightening of intensity and harmony, rightness and love, adventure and peace (PR, 244). Third, while there will always be new events and states of different, divergent, and unprecedented realizations of religious intensity and harmony (represented by new religious experiences and refections, traditions and schools, revelations and inspirations, prophetic calls and mystical insights), their relative importance may be measured by their ability to let us “see” (feel, intuit, understand) the whole landscape of all planes of immanence (ever more) in unison, that is, without destroying the many events on their respective plane and the many planes in their moving intersections, but by their ability to (more or less) convey them (to say it with Deleuze again) “with infnite speed” (ch. 6); or conversely, to be (more or less) able to roam freely like a “nomad” (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 381) through the so constituted and conveying new plane of immanence. In fact, the surrelative monad (one) of such an event, in its surprising, but also commemorating, synthesizing becomes all-relational insofar as it is, at the same time, folded together as the unique apophatic nomad of this plane, shifting its meaning in different contexts on the plane without losing its integrity as event, in-sisting uniquely in unison with the plane’s other events and crossing planes. I want to explore these three characteristics of a virtual transreligious landscape with three related issues of antagonism in transreligious discourse a little further: Hindu Avatars and Christian Incarnation; Logos- and Spirit

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Christologies; and one and multiple Manifestations. It is, of course, impossible either to elaborate on the intricate questions that have arisen from these discourses sometimes over millennia, and which are complex in themselves, or to do justice to their inherent importance for one or another religion or school of thought in a fair manner. Instead, I will concentrate on certain patterns of “convergence” that have appeared, and have been recurring, in these three complex transreligious areas of contention (ordinarily ending in some kind of antagonistic stalemate) so as to highlight how process thought and the Bahá’í writings have reacted to, escaped, or even foreseen the stalemates always reappearing as tensions within the transreligious landscape. In this sense, we may have gained a measure in the valuation of positions, namely, whether, and to what extent, they were are able to liberate to those three movements of multiplication in achieving transreligious peace. Surrelative syntheses: Hindu’s have no problem thinking of Christ as an Avatar of God, Vishnu or Krishna (Long, Vision, 114), but Christians rather fnd themselves in a “hostile takeover.” It happened to the Buddha, who was integrated into Hindu sacred history as an Avatar. While Buddhism may refute this inclusion as a form of its reabsorption into Hinduism, Hinduism can rebrand the Buddha Avatar, in acknowledging that the Buddha was not accepting the Vedas as scripture, as divine confusion of the weak believers (Sharma, Buddhism, 234–40). Christian theologians’ hold against Krishna that he is only a mythological fgure, represents a docetic “appearance” of a god in the world for some time (without being mortally wounded by it and to overcome it as Christ did in cross and resurrection), and binds us in the cyclical worldview that was overcome by the linearity of the unique divine history (Heilsgeschichte) with the world (Ward, Religion, 197–200) from creation, to the fall, to salvation, and to the Eschaton (Parrinder, Avatar, ch. 16). Comparative studies, however, would doubt these assessments as prejudicial, as they are misunderstanding the real historical nature of Krishna’s appearance (even if repeated in multiple appearances), not as a divinized human sage (although more current Hindu thinkers might be fne with this description), but as the Personality of Godself (Sheridan, Theisms, 17–20). Hence, divine Krishna appears in all Avatars, but embodies himself completely only in the fully human Krishna who was born from a woman like Christ and died as a human like Christ (Parrinder, Avatar, ch. 9). They would further question the assumption that Christology begins “from below,” the merely human story of Jesus, while the Avatar begins “from above” (ibid., 119–20), as from biblical studies and Christian theology alike we know today that Christianity had very early on already developed a high Christology (Hurtado, God, ch. 5). Conversely, we know very little of the historicity of Jesus and can assume several mythological patterns overlaying his presentation in the Gospels (for instance, born from a virgin, the miraculous insights of early youth, the dying God, the

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vindication and ascension to heaven) (Hengel, Son, ch. 5; Riley, Jesus, ch. 3). And it is especially the assumption of the necessary uniqueness of the Incarnation as a non-repeatable act of God (Hebblethwaite, Incarnation, 49–512) that has become eroded from different sides from within Christian thinking today, not only by those who would like to understand Incarnation itself as mythological rather than a historical category (Hick, Metaphor, ch. 9; Haight, Future, 164; Panikkar, Christ, 14–53; Knitter, Theses, 7; Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, 151–4). Yet, whether we “identify” Incarnation and Avatar (as perennialists like Aldous Huxley have done) or differentiate them like truth and tainted docetic imitation (as several Christian orthodox thinkers have done) or subsume them both under symbolic thinking (as John Hick would prefer), a common pattern arises from their confrontation, comparison, systematization, or mutual resonance: that they both emphasize a personal God or Manifestation of God “in person” (Parrinder, Avatar, 125–6) over an impersonal Reality (or subsume the latter as an aspect under the former), although “personal” can, as often in more sophisticated current theological thinking be understood as “transpersonal,” but never less than personal (Peacocke, All That Is, 24). In fact, without this emphasis, we will fnd even internally to Hinduism resistance against the development of the concept and reality of the Avatars and also bhakti forms of worship in adherents of the strictly monistic Advaita Vedanta, as it assumes this world and our personality to be a mere illusion (King, Philosophy, 213–6) and any dualism between divine and mundane reality as the illusion that is the most grave hindrance for salvation; salvation that precisely happens in the event of the overcoming of this illusion (Parrinder, Avatar, 61). Then again, the Buddha can appear like Avatars, again and again, from age to age, without just being “a personality” (Nicholson, Spirit, 148–55), but sunyata “in person” (dharmakaya) (Williams, Buddhism, 176–9). This is possible because all appearances of the Buddha, while being human and historical (and so we may assume this would hold for all Buddhas as long as they become Buddhas in human attire) is not that of a mere human being (nirmanakaya), but of an enlightened one who has all the powers of “skillful means” (upaya) to appear in whatever form (sambhogakaya) necessary to bring salvation from the illusion of “personality” (Xing, Concept, ch. 5). A Bodhisattva may appear human, to which Western theologians like to attach the predicate “docetic,” but not be human (The Sutra of Meditation on the Bodhisattva Universal Virtue, in LS, 349). Reverberating convergences: The opposition between monistic and theistic tendencies in Hinduism as well as the suggestive inclination in contemporary Hindu thought (since it has itself in its innermost intellectual and experiential depth often understood as monistic) to understand an Avatar more historical “from below” as an exceptional human being, a sage (Parrinder, Avatar,

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ch. 8), rather than the appearance of the Primordial Personality of Godself (Krishna) at one or rare occasion(s), is as an interesting transreligious pattern repeated in Christian theology with the divergence of Logos- from SpiritChristologies (Borg and Wright, Meaning, part 5). While the Spirit (pneuma) of God can be understood as impersonal power (dynamis), it always, in Jewish and Christian biblical contexts, remains or emphasizes the personal presence of God in the world. Additionally, the Spirit is often only ambiguously differentiated from the innermost human self, as it/she is the self’s inner relational activation by God (Lampe, God, ch. 1). The same is true for the Spirit of Christ, which/who is said to be present in all humans (or at least believers) and is in some sense the same as the Spirit of Godself (ibid., ch. 2). Most importantly, the Spirit is in any case the inherent presence and activity of God in the world and the person of Christ, and not an external activity, falling into the world from an alien outside (ibid., chs. 3–4). Logos- or Wisdom Christology, again, would hold that this presence is not enough to understand the personal presence of God in Christ; that it rather needs the special and unique Incarnation of the universal Reality of the Logos/Wisdom/Word of God only in Christ, absolutely different from the presence of the Spirit performing the work of salvation in a way that cannot be restated in any more general terms (Hebblethwaite, Incarnation, ch. 4). Spirit Christology, again, would make the case that this uniqueness is a misunderstanding, that even the biblical literature, especially the Wisdom literature, has never unambiguously differentiated between Spirit and Wisdom, but even identifed them (Witherington, Quest, 186) and hence presented us with Christ more as the most pure example of the work of the Spirit throughout the whole of creation rather than an exception (Haight, Case, 257–87). Geoffrey Lampe summarizes the differences between these Christologies with these three characteristics: All can agree that Spirit and Wisdom and Word are biblical symbols poetically referencing the personal activity of Godself, and not any divine being mediating between God and the world, but also never closing the gap between them (God, ch. 1). Second, while at the time of Jesus the Logos was already differentiated as if it was a hypostasis of God, a divine being or a moment of a hierarchically ordered divinity, acting on God’s behalf, the Spirit retained its immediacy of the acting presence of God (ibid., ch. 2). Third, only a theology that feels the need to follow the myth of the fall and redemption from the outside assumes also a Logos-fgure that comes down into the world to save it in one-time event, while another theology that understands divine creation and salvation as a continuous active engagement of God from the inside, in the world, in an evolutionally and— with Irenaeus of Lions—as an educational process to lead the world to an ever-greater perfection of the divine-human relationship, will see in Christ the true “Adam” (not the mythological fgure, but the idea and essence of

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humanity) in which this evolution has found its frst and perfect realization (ibid., 18–25). While there are other evolutionary Christologies, not building their universe on the Spirit, but the Logos, such as that of the universal cosmic Christ the Evolutor of Teilhard de Chardin (Science, ch. 4), in an evolutionary Christology the process of salvation is coextensive with creation and, hence, incarnation is also coextensive with creation (Lampe, God, 14–8). Such an evolutionary Christology is not necessarily a “low” Christology that does not recognize the divinity of Christ, as this assumption could also already be built on a mythological presumption, such as that only the Logos can bring divinity to Christ, but not the Spirit, who too is universally always already inside of all of Creation (Dunn, Christology, chs. 5–7). One may, however, note that this assumption would also be an argument against the Logos of the Gospel of John (Witherington, Jesus, 282–9). Besides, Teilhard’s Christology is a high Christology, which begins with the Trinitarian plunge of the Son into the depth of the multiplicity of the world in order to unite it by complexifcation and increasing freedom of the so united universe in one organism of the universal Christ, happening as process from the inside (TDM, 445–9). What makes a Spirit Christology appear “low” is rather that the Spirit is immanent and evolutionary working through the world process, instead of external and momentary intervening. Its processual and progressing presence is not oriented toward fall and redemption, but education and perfection; it signifes the appearance of the Incarnation from the universal dynamic of the divine Spirit, historically breaking through, exemplifying the spiritual human being, and forming everyone in its/her image, which thereby has become the image of God (Lampe, God, 23). What, in the view of the developed Christian orthodoxy seems to be bothersome with such a Spirit Christology is that it may question the Trinitarian interpretations of the centuries following the biblical and apostolic age (Hebblethwaite, Incarnation, ch. 9), as it seems to collapse Spirit and Logos, much like the Wisdom Literature had done already; and it is in no need of systematizing the developing “ditheism” of the Logos as Son and God as Father with a “third person” of the Spirit (Lampe, God, ch. 8). At the same time, it is also not in need of interpreting the differences between Jesus and God the Father as differences in God (McCready, He, chs. 1, 8–10) since God is already in and beyond all differences in the Spirit in the world, in Jesus, and all creatures. The Spirit of Christ is not identical with the historical personality of Jesus either, but rather the immanence of the unique, but exemplary Image of God in us (Dunn, Jesus, §§7–10). In this view, Christ is not in need to be explained as particularly “divine” (or identical in essence to God the Father) by adding always in an unsatisfactory way a divine Person to it (enhypostasis) such that the human person appear as either less than human or as impersonal (anhypostasis) (Baillie, God, 85–94).

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Besides resembling one of the fault lines transforming the Theravada insistance on the uniqueness of the Buddha into the Mahayana universalism of the Buddha-nature in all sentient beings (Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, ch. 6), these shifts in perspective of the Spirit-Christology (which can also be a Wisdom Christology) are convergent with, but in peculiar ways also different from, the opposition of Advaita and Avatar thought. The reverberation of the same pattern consists in the importance or irrelevance of Avatars, held by either the monist or theist positions within Hinduism, respectively. Like in Avatar thought, in which it is God, the supreme “transpersonal” Person, who comes personally down in Krishna, although cyclically, so rarely, in Logos-Wisdom Christology (identifying Wisdom with Word and Logos as a different being from God) God uniquely becomes fesh in Jesus. Like Advaita thought, for which we are already in our self identical with brahman and in no need of a specifc divine incarnation, Spirit Christology understands Jesus Christ as an exemplifcation of the universally active presence of God the Spirit in all creatures and especially in the selves of human beings and humanity as a whole in order to evolve it to an expressive realization of this internal divine immanence. The difference lies in the fact that in general the Spirit is not “identical” with the creature’s self and its immanence is not (at least in its deepest sense) impersonal (although transpersonal in view of any limitation of human personality). Yet, it is hard to deny Spirit-Christology wanting to express exactly what Logos-Christology wanted to express: the real presence in the fesh of God in the word beyond the divide of Creator and creature (Haight, Jesus, ch. 15; Future, ch. 8). Nomadic translucencies: An interesting pattern arises from the nonidentity of Reality with the world of becoming, in which Avatar thought and Spirit-Christology coincide—that of the assumed reality (non-illusionary existence) of the world and the real immanence of divinity in the form of the Spirit (brahman) of the Personality of God (Krishna): this actual presence of Reality/God cannot be reduced or reigned in by only one Incarnation (Panikkar, Christ, 14–53, 164). While it is from the perspective of SpiritWisdom Christology that such a multiplicity of Incarnations is rather to be expected than to be excluded, any Logos-Wisdom Christology with the same immanent, universal, and evolutionary implication—such as that of Teilhard de Chardin, but also of the doyen of Christian process theology, John Cobb (Christ, ch. 4)—will, as that of the Spirit-Wisdom Christology, at least in principle be open to such a suggestion, or will not fnd any fnal argument to its exclusion (GPW, §38). It is also not true that only a non-incarnational Christology (like Hick’s and Haight’s), that is, one that does discard the literalism of the divine Logos talking on human existence in the fesh (Hick, Metaphor, ch. 10; Haight, Future, ch. 7), will embrace such a multiplication of divine Incarnations (Morris, Logic, 181–6; Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism,

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183), because a Spirit-Wisdom Christology that, like Lampe’s, lives from the incarnation of the Spirit in, and being coextensive with, creation, will object to such a reductionism—as will any orthodox incarnational Christology that wants to resituate contemporary Christianity within the awareness of religious pluralism and the acceptance of the salvifc character of other religions besides Christianity in their own terms. Unfortunately, such pluralistic attempts remain limited: frst, by their commitment to an, although universal, so nevertheless decisive, inclusivism of the divine presence in many religions as “incarnation” of the God of Christ or the cosmic or spiritual or divine Person of the Christ-Logos, such as John Macquarrie’s Christology of Mediation (Mediators, passim); and, second, by the fact that they remain unaware of, or reject, the Bahá’í Revelation, with its sacred history of Manifestations and the event of Manifestation in Bahá’u’lláh as unique event in the same universal process, declaring it, without any argument, a syncretism to be avoided (I have already deconstructed this faulty and prejudicial assumption in ch. 4 and I will come back to it in the next section of this chapter). Yet, it is true that both streams—assuming a universally incarnate Sprit evolving into Manifestations of divinity and an explicit affrmation of the multiplicity and even cyclical repetition of such Manifestations of Reality/ Divinity (whether as Logos or Spirit, Atman or Krishna, Buddha or Dharma) come together in the non-literal, metaphorical interpretation of Incarnation in the context of religious pluralism, such as proposed by John Hick. Again without being able to go into any details, I will mention at least three characteristic of his position. First, Hick, after demonstrating the failure of literal ways to intelligibly address the Incarnation in any historical dogmatic or current theological renderings (Metaphor, chs. 4–7), suggests a metaphorical interpretation to save the central insight of the Incarnation as the real presence of God in Christ in his fulfllment of the will of God and the demonstration of the divine self-emptiness of divine agape, which is always Reality-oriented. Christ, here, becomes the visible symbol for the fulflled love of God and the paradigmatic human answer to this love—a position that is also shared by orthodox theologians, and even often with the same words and phrases (Baillie, God, 66–7). Second, while literalism takes the mystery in terms of lexical meanings (knowing too much about it), in metaphysical theories the metaphor is not unreal, but more real as it leaves the mystery in the symbols used and presents through them the reality indicated. A metaphor achieves this by using one set of ideas in relation to another, borrowing and transferring the language instead of fxating it (Hick, Metaphor, ch. 5). Third, in this metaphorical interpretation, the humanity of Jesus is not substituted by docetic claims of a god walking the earth (Baillie, God, 11–20), insinuating the mind of Jesus just channeling the Mind of God, which would make Jesus inhuman; yet it does also not fxate the presence of this Mind of God within

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one historic occasion alone, but allows (by its inner logic) for a multiplicity of such Incarnations of the love of God in different religions such as the ones inaugurated by the Buddha or Muhammad in their different cultural contexts and languages. Christian orthodox views not withstanding, Hick sees no intelligible reason to confne Incarnation to one appearance only if such a confnement is crafted around the argument of the oneness of God, as even Thomas Aquinas has already refuted this argument. In addition, such a claim would misunderstand this oneness of God as a defned, instead of an apophatic, category (Hick, Metaphor, ch. 9). Much like the Bahá’í revelation, this view affrms “incarnational” multiplicity because of, not despite, the oneness (tawhid) of Reality/God (GL, #27). Meandering through those three related felds of tension regarding surrelative, convergent, and translucent multiplicities in addressing the meaning of the manifestation or appearance or concretization of Reality/ God, we may gain access to the intuition that is behind the claim that there is no overarching or particularly deep and unavoidable argument for the exclusion of convergent syntheses between religions regarding the nature (human and divine), processuality (from above or below), and number (one or many) of their divine (accepted or refused) Manifestations if we also accept the apophatic Absolute in all-relational and surrelative appearances (according to the three gates of relativity) in different contexts, even divergent ways—as is claimed by Dharmic religions in general and on occasion even in Abrahamic religions (Parrinder, Avatar, part 2; Haight, Future, chs. 7, 9; Knitter, Theses, 3–18). We need not fall into the trap of mere opposition of opinions or bifurcations of doctrinal mutual exclusion if we accept the complexity of the interference of these seeming oppositions in real religious developments and let our comparisons be led by the recognition of the abstract nature of our conceptual oppositions, relating them back to the events of religious experience, intuition, and refection that these conceptual abstractions cannot exhaust. We may then realize that these divergences are processes of multiplication from these events, always making space for (new) positions in between (inherited) positions. Then, we will also fnd convergences between them because we have become perceptive to the transreligious resonances and transferences of historical and spiritual nature “reoccurring” in some metastable “sweet spots” as they appear across religions of vastly different cultural, geographical, historical, linguistic, and conceptual diversity. We may realize that we lean toward exclusive (or exclusivist) positions only for the price of strive and war, and that we may fnd more valuable (more intense and harmonious) modes of conceptualization of the mystery of divine presence if we allow the three modes of multiplication to be our leading horizon: frst, that the surrelative unity of events of religious transformation cannot be reduced to its components,

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but represents some kind of novelty—like Badiou’s events, appearing in a situation, but not being discernable in, or deducible from, them (ch. 6); second, that events of new synthesis unfold their power of all-relationality in a process of convergences amid divergences—the more they can relate to the multiplication of positions, the more they both safeguard the mystery addressed and release the processual connectivity between them, even if they appear as from mutually alien worlds of perception and comprehension; third, that the always primary apophatic nature of the monad of such events of religious novelty allows them to function as the condition for positional bridges that will proliferate whenever nomadic freedom encourages us to roam the whole feld of divergences and convergences. The more these modes of multiplication appear in religious contexts of experience, intuition, and refection, the more a transreligious (and philosophical) refection on the events and processes evolving through these experiences, intuitions, and refections will contribute to the reverence for the mystery they enshrine and the peace that shines through all of them. This should be considered a more valuable, more intense, and more harmonious aim of such experiences, intuitions, refections than the otherwise ensuing unquenchable antagonisms, strives, and wars. I believe that both process thought and Bahá’í revelation pursue such aims and have taken steps to realize these modes of multiplication for the achievement of transreligious peace. I will wait with further explorations of this claim until the end of the chapter and after having added two other related modes of solution that pursue this peace in the midst of the profound divergent and convergent, monadic and nomadic relativity and transreligious multiplicity. For now, I will just hint at the Bahá’í belief that if we do not force unity or difference, that if we follow the admonition “Be multiplicity!” (ch. 5), that if we but let transreligious multiplicity itself fashion its “coordination” in a polyphilic way, then we might feel no necessity to fear divergences, complexities, and multiplications, but instead might be enabled to embrace multiplicity itself as a sign of the apophatic, all-relational, and surrelative Reality that always furthers peace. Then we might, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá envisions, enter the Garden of Reality: Consider the fowers of a garden: though differing in kind, color, form and shape, yet, inasmuch as they are refreshed by the waters of one spring, revived by the breath of one wind, invigorated by the rays of one sun, this diversity increaseth their charm, and addeth unto their beauty. Thus when that unifying force, the penetrating infuence of the Word of God, taketh effect, the difference of customs, manners, habits, ideas, opinions and dispositions embellisheth the world of humanity. . . . [T]hen difference reinforceth harmony, diversity strengtheneth love, and multiplicity is the greatest factor for coordination. (SAB, #225)

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4. MANIFESTATIONS The profound and irrevocable move of the Bahá’í Faith (in Deleuze’s image) toward the “conveying” of a multiplicity of religious identities with “infnite speed” within an always-moving plane of immanence has often, especially in the early years, led to the prejudicial impression that this was a “syncretistic” shortcut, intellectually shallow, and a sacrifcing of irreconcilable differences between religious identities for a cheap call for unity— although not always, as early appreciations from theologians and scholars of religious studies, such as Gerhard Rosenkranz, Helmut von Glasenapp, and Friedrich Heiler, demonstrate (Eschragi, Bahá’u’lláh, 146–7), but also the genuine appreciation of as important an Islamic fgure as Muhammad Iqbal (Development, ch. 6). This is, with good cause, as I have tried to demonstrate so far, not only a view that has forgone any engagement with the universe the Bahá’í Faith actually presents, including its deep religious and philosophical roots in Shi‘ism, Sufsm, and Shaykhism, but also a view that has deprived itself of the application of a rule of (the least) courtesy, if not, in the current time of serious attempts in comparative religion and theology, religious pluralism, and interreligious dialogue, of the necessity to not dismiss minorities just because they are minorities. Not withstanding the argument that one “has already enough to do” with the Big Five (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism), there are no valid criteria that would defne the importance of a religion by the number of adherents or any other external size to measure its spiritual depth (Weisse et al., Religions, passim). Usually, if other religions than the Big Five are mentioned than because of traditional presence (like maybe Jainism) or personal preference of a researcher or thinker, making the criteria of inclusion in, or exclusion from, consideration even more subjective (Chryssides and Geaves, Study, 101–3). Alternatively, the silencing of the religious other is often being based on the prejudice that wisdom must be old and novelty must be met with suspicion (as if ancient religions were not young at the time of their inception); or the ban of silence is lifted when a tradition of respectable age (and survival) fts in the view of the commentator of the current interreligious age (like maybe Sikhism) thereby exempting such a choice from the pejorative characterization of syncretism. Such a silent agreement is blinding, especially in light of Michel Foucault’s forceful demonstration of the manipulating power that pervades and structures (religious, secular, academic, or cultural) institutions (and the market mechanisms behind them) that lead, house, or propagate such discourses (Knowledge/Power, chs. 6–8). It is all the more unfortunate and arbitrary if it infects the proponent of religious pluralism or, at least, of a universal inclusivism that admits that one can learn from religions other than one’s

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own since they represent hidden aspects of the divine Reality that all of them in their own way and with their own limitations revere. It must be some kind of blinding prejudice when Christian theologians like John Macquarrie, who’s inclusivism admits the potential of multiple Incarnations and who does his best to fairly present the great mediators of God to humanity such as Zoroaster, Socrates, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, Laozi, and Confucius, and even proponents of a new, interreligious theology (Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, chs. 10–12), exclude Bahá’u’lláh and either discard or neglect the Bahá’í Faith, which has the same unity of “mediators” in divine Reality at heart, only one and a half centuries earlier, on the irrational, but nevertheless powerfully manipulating, account that it is syncretistic (Mediators, 2). Yet, his own commandment of purity, such that every religion should stay in its own house and work on its own identity, is deeply fawed if we take just a superfcial look at the history of religions, that is, their transreligious mutuality in infuence and inspiration, and the movement of concepts, ideas, and rites. This is especially true when the grand unifcations they all present, if one steps only deep enough down into their historical origins, begin to reveal their multiplicity of confuences. What is more, just as Whitehead’s philosophy of events, nexuses, and societies predicts, while becoming one from many, these new entities (religions) immediately begin to differentiate themselves into a new multiplicity of denominations, sects, historical branches, schools, and mutually war-fearing oppositions (ch. 4). It is all the more disheartening when diehard religious pluralists such as John Hick, who almost literally formulates the program of the Bahá’í Faith of the ultimacy of apophatic Reality that relates all Faiths to “its” Self through vastly different modes of transforming self-centeredness into Reality-centeredness (Hick, Interpretation, ch. 14), has barely recognized the Bahá’í Faith as the pioneer of all of these contemporary positions although the Bahá’í Faith does so not as an abstract philosophical position, but as a religion, as lived intuition, and from revelation (May, Principle, 1–36). Not only did the Bahá’í Faith appear historically earlier than all of these abstract philosophical positions (Hick, Can There Be, 1–6), but its embrace is also wider than the roughly contemporary inklings of such a religious multiplicityunity. Take, for instance, Sri Ramakrishna who, although he accepted Avatars to appear in different religions (Parrinder, Avatar, 107), remained convinced of the ultimate inclusivism of Hinduism (Devamata, Ramakrishna, 14–6, 49–56; Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, ch. 5), much like his student and greatest disciple Swami Vivekananda (Banhatti, Life, 151–3) who promoted this view at the very same Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 at which we hear and read of one of the earliest mentioning of the Bahá’í Faith in the West (at least America, if one does not count E. G. Browne and others in Europe) after the ascension of Bahá’u’lláh in 1892 (GPB, 404–5). Foucault’s inextricable

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mutuality of power and discourse has often won the day as can be witnessed from these examples. But they are, of course, even more widespread in institutions that have sustained like-minded thinkers and practitioners, theologians and philosophers, religious comparativists and heroes of interreligious dialogue (Ferrer, Future, 14–5; Smart, Experience, 417–8)—although again there are notable exceptions, too (Avalos, Words, ch. 6; Sharma, Religion, 211–42; Tucker and Grim, Worldviews, 96–112). One of the realities of the Bahá’í Faith that might always have been most puzzling even to religious pluralists and scholars-practitioners for whom interreligious dialogue is the foundational mode of being deeply spiritual today is its relentless relativistic acceptance of all religions as divinely inspired and revealed (Q.E.D.). To present this view in a coherent framework, as Bahá’u’lláh has done, not only with an abstract systematization but rather in the rare voice of divine revelation, has already been the object of most of the discussions of the preceding chapters. What is of interest at this juncture, however, is the deep tradition from which the Bahá’í writings explicate this view, that is, not as ad hoc scaffolding, but as harmonious explication of the long-standing tradition. Indeed, one of the long-standing streams of thought and religious life fowing into the Bahá’í synthesis is that of generations of Suf philosophy, especially the one visible with, and in originary manner proposed by, Ibn ‘Arabi and his school (Corbin, Alone, 3–103), as developed by the metaphysics of the Persian poets (Iqbal, Development, ch. 6) and as reformulated within the Shaykhi school in the context of which the Báb arose. These transreligious fows are documented not only by Bahá’u’lláh’s conversations with diverse contemporary Suf tariqahs and masters (Ma’sumian, Seclusion, 18–26) but also by his generous references to long-standing transreligious Jewish, Greek, Christian, Islamic, and Indian backgrounds in these streams that Bahá’u’lláh engages in his works (Savi, Summit, passim). Well, maybe some of these fgures and traditions were syncretistic—but if they are more than that, if they can be discovered in their own integrity, maybe we should also extend this recognition to the Bahá’í conceptuality, which, as we have already seen (ch. 5), draws for its explication of the revelation of the unity and relativity of religions that Bahá’u’lláh proclaims on their philosophical, ethical, and spiritual insights, conceptualities, and categories. In fact, Bahá’u’lláh develops his new and universal sympathic hermeneutics of relativity on the sophisticated spiritual multiverse of cascading and intersecting, resonating and oscillating, porous and breathing worlds that he equally credits to these traditions and critiques from the new event of his revelation (ch. 5). In the event of Bahá’u’lláh, the relativistic characteristics of the conceptual Suf schemes, such as these cascades and cycles of multiplicity and unity he appeals to and transforms, converge into a new horizon of horizons that explains religious diversity, the

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multiplicity of religions, the necessary divergence of religious experiences and intuitions, and the uncontrollable variety of religious and philosophical refections as proliferation of the creative Mind/mind in light of apophatic Reality. Yet, what follows from this multiplicity is not the fear of losing Truth, but (to the dismay of dogmatists) an embrace of the inexhaustible grace of Truth/Reality in “its” infnite refractions that enrich the transreligious landscape with sheer infnite variations without “its” unison (with all of them) losing the character of a new transcendental horizon arising from a new event of unforeseeable integrity (ch. 4). While the basic idea of a cascading threefold or fvefold was already introduced as well as (in Henry Corbin’s reading of) Ibn ‘Arabi’s and Bahá’u’lláh’s rendering of it (ch. 5), I am now, by way of an example, interested in the implications that the transformation process of this apophatic-polyphilic axis of cascading enfolding and unfolding, emanation and return, has for the profound relativity, one might even say, the religious pluralism that Bahá’u’lláh adapted and adopted in conversation with Ibn ‘Arabi as one of the intellectual and spiritual backgrounds of his revelation. This example will speak to the deep connectivity and penetrating intelligibility of Bahá’u’lláh’s pluralistic and relativistic claim regarding the unity of religions as a progressing multiplicity that drives an education process of humanity toward a future society of peace through the progressing awareness of the transreligious translucency of its sources, motivations, experiences, and intuitions—a process of transformation that both Ibn ‘Arabi and Bahá’u’lláh (although differently) understood as infused by the immanent presence of Reality/God “it/self” in a universal sense (not excluding, but also not reducible to, the rare Manifestations of the Sun of Reality). There are other deep resources of Bahá’u’lláh’s unique explication of this apophatic-polyphilic mystery of relativity of religions that I will not be concerned with here, but which are of equal importance for a full picture of Bahá’u’lláh’s convergent synthesis of deep traditions. One may immediately think of Jalal ad-Din Rumi’s epic Mathnavi (which was viewed as the “Persian Qur’an”) with its radical relativity of religions in the light of the apophatic Beloved in which humanity must overcome attachment to particularity (Bausani, Religion, 209–37), or Farid ud-Din Attar’s Conference of Birds, which discloses Reality in the relativity of one’s own Self and its infnitely different refraction of Reality (Banani, Valleys, 31–6). Bahá’u’lláh revealed works in honor of both poets and poems, embracing them with the aura of divine revelation (Momen, Bahá’u’lláh, 4–5). We ought to know that Ibn ‘Arabi thought of his explorations into Reality as a divine revelation (wahy), too, not just as the outcome of inspiration or philosophical refection (Austin, Introduction, 13). His thoughts and writings claimed an authority that remained effective in the following centuries of refection on, and criticism of, his work. We need also to take into account

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that the infuence of his work, especially after the expulsion of Muslims from Andalusia by the decree of the Spanish Catholic monarchs in 1492, but corroborated with other inner-Islamic developments (of a Suf-unfriendly orthodoxy), found a home in Persia as a living tradition embraced in some way or the other by the religious discourses ensuing in the centuries before the appearance of Bahá’u’lláh (Corbin, Alone, 3–101). There is nothing remote or exceptional to relate to the thought of Ibn ‘Arabi and the Persian poets—as metaphysical and spiritual discussions of their works especially among Suf philosophers and adherents were mandatory. There is also nothing shallow or ad hoc in the reverence and sublation of their work and insights—as it was expected in discussions and positions to refer to their ideas. It is only the way their deep religious relativism (always upheld in an atmosphere of orthodox suspicion of heresy and often persecution) was received and used as explanatory mediators by Bahá’u’lláh that qualifes and distinguishes his claim of relativity of religions. For an understanding of Ibn ‘Arabi’s relativity of religions, we need to know at least four of the elements of his thought pertaining to the matter in question. First, all creation is embraced by the Muhammedan Light, the Mind of God, emanating into the differentiations of all things created, but remaining their enfolding unity (Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabi, 917–20). What is unifed in this universal polyphilic theophany are the names and attributes of God, which are united in the primordial Manifestation of the Mind of God, but which in the cascading unfolding through the imaginal and physical realms are differentiated and recombined in their infnite realizations downward. Corbin correlates the differentiation of these names and attributes of God with the pathos of Reality/God, the sigh of divine release, and the heliotropism or theotropism of the differentiated names and attributes. In mutual sympathy of Reality and the names and attributes, their mutual desire to return (or be returned) to the unity of Reality/God (ch. 7) must for this reason be realized by their cascading into physical realizations. In order to be able to return to the imaginal and intellectual realms, they must spiritualize the physical realms with their appearances, that is, the activation of their potentials as offering of themselves in all in the worship to Reality/God (Corbin, Alone, 105–35). Second, all the names and attributes of God must be realized in their infnite variety of differentiation, inherent inexhaustibility, endless recombination, and limited coincidence in different creatures, demarcating in these infnite variations of combination the essential nature and the specifc characteristic of any and all creatures. It is only in the Prophets that the whole threefold of the Mind of God (in abstraction), the imaginal realm (of symbolization), and the world of becoming (in physical realization and activation) is (ontologically) united in mystical unity with Reality/God, which characterizes them as

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the complete revelation of Reality/God (Corbin, Alone, 120). In all “beings,” this unity appears only to the extent of the limited manifestation of names and attributes in the essential nature of these beings and in proportion to their effort to realize them. Hence, while the Prophets or Manifestations of Reality/God (mazahir-i ilahi) represent, comprise, and relate to all names and attributes of God such that their worship of God, that is, their return to God, is completely free of illusions, wrong conceptions, and erroneous limitations (Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabi, 926), all other creatures will return to God only through the limited lenses of the inherent and actualized names and attributes they are given or have acquired, are harboring, or to which they have submitted. Hence, all creatures follow God only in the specifc names and attributes of their own nature and actualization as their Lord (Corbin, Alone, 114). In this sense, all individual beings, but also all religions, realize some of these divine names and attributes as their divergent refection of God in the limitation of “their Lord.” This understanding of the cyclical process of apophatic and polyphilic oscillation is the basis for Ibn ‘Arabi’s famous concept of “the God created in all faiths” (Momen, Religions, 42). Third, because of the coinherence of all the attributes in all Prophets and, equally, the divergence and multiplication of the same names and attributes in an indefnite variety of beings, the Prophet is a perfect human being (alinsan al-kamal). The Prophet not only emanates all the names and attributes but also mirrors them to all beings in clear Muhammedan light (Sells, Languages, ch. 3), undisturbed and untainted. This holds true even if the Manifestation of their essential reality in the human realm in the variety of Prophets (Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabi, 926–7) actualizes only some and implicates others of the names and attributes according to the Command of God (amr) and the circumstances of their revelation and appearance (theophany) in relation to particular peoples. Nevertheless, they are essentially the same mirror, beyond any particular religion, and (at) the origin of the truths of all of them (Sells, Languages, ch. 4). At the same time, because of the infnite refraction of their emanating names and attributes, all peoples create their own Lords and mirror these Mirrors only in the light of these limited Lords in which they fnd themselves realizing the infnite array of names and attributes of the Manifestations (Corbin, Alone, 117). Ibn ‘Arabi concludes: Such a man positively recognizes God only when He manifests Himself to him in the form recognized by his traditional religion. But when He manifests Himself in other religions, he fatly refuses to accept Him and runs away from Him. . . . Thus a man who sticks to the belief of his particular religion believes in a god according to what he has subjectively posited in his mind. God in all particular religions . . . is dependent on the subjective act of positing . . . on the part of the believer. Thus a man of this kind sees (in the form of God) only his own self and what he has posited in his own mind. (Isuzu, Sufsm, 254)

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Hence, while all religions refect only a limited array of the infnite Mirrors in which they understand their particular religions to originate, these Manifestation, although they seem specifcally to be “owned” by particular religions, are actually not owned by any religions, as they transcend all of their idiosyncratic particularities, against any dogmatic confnement religionists and religious institutors, who often used to play the game of superiority over other religions (Chittick, ‘Ibn Arabi, 527–8). Moreover, Ibn ‘Arabi warns that all religions must be accepting of others since these religions are only expressions of the transcendent (surrelative) greatness of the respective Manifestations and the inconceivability of the Reality/God they mirror forth for a theopoetic process of mutual learning and eventual liberation from the illusion of the limited truths of one’s own mind, one’s own religious characteristics, and especially one’s own superiority (TDM, ch. 5). Ibn ‘Arabi admonishes:

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Beware of being bound by a particular religion and rejecting all others as unbelief! If you do that, you will fail to obtain a great beneft. Nay, you will fail to obtain the true knowledge of the reality, Try to make yourself a (kind of) Prime Matter of all forms of religious belief. God is wider and greater than to be confned to one particular religion to the exclusion of others. (Isuzu, Sufsm, 254)

While the Mirrors are one in the Mind and Light of God, they are justifably different in their theophanic appearances revered by different religions. But even more so are they free from the limitations of the minds and religious limitations that a particular realization of their names and attributes wants to press on them as their “true” nature (Hatcher, Validity, 27–52). Yet, in this radical relativity hides the secret of the Prophets: not to belong to any religion so that only the one who walks in the path of all the Prophets will be able to overcome the vain imaginings of antagonism and religious superiority, distancing us from the intended divine command of religious peace as it is manifested in the Prophets. Fourth, except for the so-called “extreme” (Shi‘ite) views (ghulat) that would understand the theophanies of the Manifestations (in Ibn ‘Arabi’s sense) as “incarnations” (hulul)—although thy might be quite old and at the basis of Shi‘ism (Momen, Introduction, 45)—the later development of, and on, Ibn ‘Arabi’s thought remained mostly aloof from any physicalist understanding of theophanic realization, all the more since in the Islamic context— differing from the Christian concept of Incarnation (Rahner, Foundations, 212–28)—hulul meaning the fowing down of the substance of God, itself becoming (substituting) a creature, which was strictly excluded (shirk) under the orthodox provision of the exclusive Oneness of God (ahadiyyah) not to make partners with God and avoid to imitate or equal polytheism. As this was

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the view of Muslim thinkers regarding the “true” nature of Christian Incarnation (although wrongly), the thrust of the theophanic realization of Manifestations was not directed toward the physical realm (to come in the fesh), but, as Corbin emphasizes, conversely, to elevate the physical realizations of the human world (nasut) as they realize the divine character of the Manifestations (lahut) to the imaginal, spiritual realm (malakut) (Corbin, Alone, 165). In this sense, Corbin even accepts the Christian accusation that the Islamic theophany of the prophetic Light is “docetic” in some meaningful sense. The Prophets are not God becoming fesh, but their manifest divinity (lahut) elevates humanity (nasut) to spiritual purity, integrating the intellectual and physical reality in the imaginal realm of the kingdom of God (malakut). This is the reason that the Shi‘i expectation—especially in Shaykhi movement, the immediate spiritual context of the frst disciples of the Báb (Lawson, Apocalypse, 1–20)—of an eschatological return of the hidden Imam (sometimes equated with a new coming of a Prophet) divided the scholars and religious leaders (the ulama) on the matter whether this coming of the Imam could actually be a return in the fesh, as a human being, or must needs remain in the imaginal realm—an expectation that the Báb demythologized and affrmed, that is, “in his person” to actually be a new Manifestation of the Primal Will (Saiedi, Gate, 19). As we have seen already in earlier chapters (now revealing their background), Bahá’u’lláh affrms Ibn ‘Arabi’s four aspects of religious relativity fully: First, all Manifestations exhibit the essential unity of/in the Mind of God in the station of the primordial Manifestation (mazhar-i ilahi) of Reality/ God/Truth (al-haqq). Second, the providential (divinely ordained) difference of their appearance in the human world with specifc revelations does not hinder them from being universal Mirrors of the Self of Reality, as they—in perfect kenosis (ch. 7)—enfold and emanate all the names and attributes of God, we can see in any and all of them only Reality/God, Reality being manifest “in their person.” Third, the Manifestations (even in their divergent human attire) are always beyond what any religion, even the one in which they appear or which originates from them or that aggregates around them, makes of them in their limited imaginations of their human minds and in their limited selves; and yet, these un-owned Mirrors manifest to them their specifc divine import in the divine history (Heilsgeschichte) of humanity. Fourth, in them all religions are one and multiple, at the same time; they should understand their divergences as a divine matter—not as a matter of strive and antagonism, but as a matter of the relativity of the realization of divine names and attributes in their respective minds and individual as well as social characters, all of them refecting in their own way apophatic Reality, even if in inconceivably and mysteriously different ways. There is no syncretism in this approach! To uphold such a prejudice regarding the Bahá’í

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Faith, then, can only be considered evidence of the ignorance of the depth of the relativistic tradition that reveals itself in Bahá’u’lláh’s affrmation of Ibn ‘Arabi’s (and many other’s spiritual) universe of discourse. Yet, while Bahá’u’lláh affrms this relativistic spiritual and philosophical universe of discourse, we have also already seen how he transforms the internal categorical binaries of monism and theism that haunted the school of ‘Ibn Arabi in the wake of diverse systematizations of its transreligious relativism in his Tablet of Uncompounded Reality (ch. 7). What is more important, here, is that with Bahá’u’lláh something completely new happened: He does not follow in the footsteps of a Suf interpretation of existence and life, but uses its categories as skillful means, as it were, to explicate a completely new epistemological, hermeneutical, and religious standpoint, namely, that of the event of a new revelation of such a Mirror of Reality in his own person. Given the categories of Ibn ‘Arabi and of many other religious discourses on the appearance of Reality “in person” among humanity, this is not necessarily an extraordinary claim (as throughout history such claims were repeatedly made). But that this appears to be in continuity with the history of religions is precisely the active content of Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation: Everything else being equal, if one denies the argument for one such event, one must deny all of them (Bahá’u’lláh, Tablet of Ahmad, in BP, 310). Hence, the “truth” of the claim as such, Bahá’u’lláh suggests, should rather be evaluated by the measure, introduced earlier, namely, to what extent it furthers rather than minimizes provisions for, and practices of, transreligious peace.

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That the divers communions of the earth, and the manifold systems of religious belief, should never be allowed to foster the feelings of animosity among men, is, in this Day, of the essence of the Faith of God and His Religion. These principles and laws, these frmly-established and mighty systems, have proceeded from one Source, and are rays of one Light. That they differ one from another is to be attributed to the varying requirements of the ages in which they were promulgated. (GL, #132)

This declaration changes everything, as the herewith affrmed unity of Manifestations in the multiplicity of religions is now neither an abstract philosophical position nor the insight of a spiritual school or an idiosyncratic sect, but a divine precept in the appearance of a “new” religion (rather, a new religious order) that understands itself only as the culmination of the thrusts and trends of religious history to lead to a reconciliation of all religions for the establishment of a peaceful unity of humanity (GL, #49). Since this event was expected in the dreams, prophesies, mystical desires, and scriptures in as diverse traditions as the Abrahamic and Dharmic religions in their eschatological visions of their particular religion, Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation situates

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itself in the connecting felds of immanence of these religions as their fulfllment (Buck, Interface, 157–80). The new plane of immanence does not deny the diversity of religions, but abrogates most forcefully their antagonisms (TB, 221) as built on vain imaginings and not on the spiritual and imaginal kingdom of God, which is realized only if we break through to the insight of the essential unity of the Mirrors and the divinely ordained multiplicity of religions. Bahá’u’lláh proclaims the very kairos facilitating this event and the process of the realization of the names and attributes that follow from it.

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5. RECONCILIATIONS I will return to exemplify the way process thought and the Bahá’í writings have answered the challenge of divergence and the fssures of bifurcations: how they have countered any reductionism inherent in shortcuts of syncretism, on the one hand, and uniformity negligent of religious differences, on the other, with strategies that ft the three criteria of multiplicity and multiplication introduced earlier in this chapter. In the meantime, I must mention at least some of the sojourners in the search for reconciliations of religious difference. In their current appearance, these movements come to light at least half a century after Bahá’u’lláh’s imperative of reconciliation in the face of the necessity to form a future universal human civilization of peace (Velasco, Reconciliation, 95–134). Even the call for such a peace to be based on, or at least not be exclusive of, the peace between religions, formulated by Hans Küng (Christianity, 440–3), was only adopted in 1993 at the Second World Parliament of Religions. Unfortunately again, this multireligious process of reconciliatory awareness has missed recognizing the much earlier pioneering proclamation by Bahá’u’lláh in which they all believe and for which they struggle (Teasdale, Heart, 7–10). These sojourners, even if unacknowledged, appear to operate in three paradigmatic modes: a vertical (hierarchical), a horizontal (unitary), and a rhizomatic (chaosmic) mode. I will exemplify all three of these modes of transreligious reconciliation with Jain many-sidedness (anekantavada), perennialism and its insight of/into hidden unity, and the “participatory turn” of Jorge Ferrer. And by relating these movements to Bahá’í views, I want to indicate the criteria of multiplication to function as a more general basis for the specifc examples of the last section of this chapter, which will center more around the process perspective. The Jain logic and method of many-sidedness (anekantavada) is one of the most long-standing ways of acknowledging and unmasking the onesidedness of any position regarding matters of Truth and Reality (Charitrapragya, Mahavira, 75). It is, therefore, with good reason that it has become a timely advocate of religious tolerance in an atmosphere of ongoing religious

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warfare. In concurrence with the central Jain axiom of nonviolence (ahimsa), it is a powerful means to promote religious pluralism and interreligious peace today (Valley, Anekanta, 99–112). Besides the seven possible points of view (nayas), regulating all kinds of scopes and directions of forming a proposition, anekantavada presents seven alternative “views” (syadvada) one can and must take on all things in search for Reality and Truth: namely, that in some ways, something is (syad asti); in some ways, it is not (syad nasti); in some ways, it is and it is not (syad asti nasti); in some ways, it is, and it is indescribable (syad asti avaktavyah); in some ways, it is not, and it is indescribable (syad nasti avaktavyah); in some ways, it is, it is not, and it is indescribable (syad asti nasti avaktavyah); and in some ways, it is indescribable (syad avaktaviah) (Cort, Ahimsa, 325–7). If one takes all of them into account while making claims about the ultimate reality of anything, this method seems to promote a radical relativity of all views on Reality (and any particular reality), avoiding all kinds of reductionism arising from any specifc viewpoint to be the right viewpoint and, hence, for any religious doctrine or worldview to exhibit any grounds for feeling superior over all others. In this sense, Jain anekantavada is a sojourner in the profound relativity of religious truth, promoting only provisionary approximations to Reality, which always infnitely escapes any defnition, and—especially in connection with the imperative of ahimsa—establishing interreligious peace on that basis. One may wonder, however, why the ancient Jain device of many-sidedness is mentioned in our context as if it had appeared “after” the Bahá’í proclamation of reconciliation and its methods of coping with multiplicity in a thoroughly relativistic way. While Bahá’u’lláh’s transreligious relativity has a basis in the long-standing tradition of Suf interaction between Western and Eastern religious and philosophical thought, isn’t Jainism one of the oldest religions extant in uninterrupted practice (Smart, Religions, 68–71)? The reason for this time-warp becomes clearer, however, if one notices that the use of the doctrine of many-sidedness of (any truth claim on) Reality as expressing the original and central Jain metaphysical, ethical, and soteriological doctrine and method of nonviolence was only recovered in the age of interreligious dialogue (Wiley, Ahimsa, 15–24) when it became, maybe not earlier than the 1930s, coined “intellectual ahimsa” by A. B. Dhruva (Cort, Ahimsa, 324–47). While, of old, being used in the context of disengagement from the world of matter (Charitrapragya, Mahavira, 77), anekantavada was only more recently, in Global Jainism, rediscovered as means of creating reconciliation, peaceful community, mutual religious tolerance, and pluralism in this world (Juergensmeyer, Encyclopedia, 608–9). Of old, anekantavada displayed not an effort for the peaceful coexistence between religions promoting the claim of a relativity of religious truth via non-dualism (Chapple, Dissonance, 140)—for instance in the sense of

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Nagarjuna’s fourfold negation of any “position” (McCagney, Nagarjuna, 110–2)—but was introduced as a unique method to escape the seeming exhaustion of the multireligious “space” by the alternative between the Hindu claim of the indestructability of the self (atman) and the Buddhist counterclaim for the impermanence of the self (annata) (Johnson, Function, 42–4). By taking exception to the inescapable one-sidedness of any position regarding this matter (Charitrapragya, Mahavira, 76) as well as the fxation of oppositional alternatives of either permanence or impermanence in general, this logic was carving out a new Jain “identity” in the midst of their Hindu and Buddhist opponents (Dunas, Jains, 199) regarding the liberation from any conceptuality that does not acknowledge its own limiting conditions, making it possible in the frst place (Cort, Ahimsa, 325). In this sense, the epistemology of anekantavada is close to the Buddhist avyakata, the undecidable questions (Long, Jainism, 120–2), and the Bahá’í view of the conditioned-ness of all viewpoints (Momen, Relativism, 9–11). And metaphysically, this doctrine is one of the earliest formulations of the infnite complexity of (any) reality, which cannot be reduced to any one perspective or any abstracted multiplicity of limited experiences (Valley, Anekanta, 111–2). Thereby, it generates the ontological relativism that does also, as we have seen in the last section, defne ‘Ibn Arabi’s and Bahá’u’lláh’s understanding of the infnite multiplicity of divine attributes and their combination in actualizations at the heart of any world-realization. However, if one follows through these “views” without clinging to any of them, one will be led to the truth that is enshrined in the Jain “position,” that is, the right perception of Reality: that the soul (jiva), being indestructible, will, on its journey through a vast cosmic hierarchy of realms (mirroring the cosmological assumptions of the karmic Hindu and Buddhist universe of experience and discourse) in its effort to divorce itself completely of matterparticles defling the soul and hindering it to become liberated, reach moksha by attaining an unchanging and unmovable state of liberation, stilled and situated in the highest realm of the cosmic hierarchy, which is often pictured as a cosmic human body (Smart, Religions, 71). The liberated sage (jina), who conquers samsara through right perception (samyak darshna), right knowledge (samyak jnana), and right living (samyak charitrya), reaches infnite knowledge (kevalajnana), becomes omniscient, and “a god” (as it were) who perceives all of reality not in any limited, partial, veiled, collared manner, but unobstructed in its entirety (Jaini, Path, 91). This understanding of omniscience has much in common with the Buddhist understanding of the dharmakaya as all-knowing Wisdom and all-perceptive Compassion, with Ibn Arabi’s fgure of the Prophet who knows existence in its entirety, as the Prophets are in their highest Self the Mind of God, and Bahá’u’lláh’s view and factual claim to the same effect, namely, for any Manifestation to be, like

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Whitehead’s consequent natures of God (Donaldson, Cosmologies, 118–25), in Wisdom all-perceptive of the world of becoming (kulu shay’) (Hatcher, Validity, 27–52). Originally, then, the method and logic of many-sidedness was not a means to promote an epistemological or ontological relativism steeped in nonviolence and religious tolerance, but an instrument to win discussions with Hindu and Buddhist philosophers and convince them of the truth of the Jain position (Chapple, Dissonance, 137–57). The Jain position, in turn, is not in itself relativistic, but defnitive in a certain way, if only knowable to the liberated Jina (Cort, Ahimsa, 332). The Jina is not subjected to anekantavada since the liberated soul has the right view of all reality and knows everything through the all-perception of Reality (Jaini, Path, 266–7). Consequently, mere relativism of all positions is not considered the aim of anekantavada; rather, in order to reach moksha in the journey through the impure realms of perception, knowledge, and living, such relativism would just be the beginning stage of a seeker to loosen the grip of hardened positions one may carry as baggage (Jani, Path, 118). From a higher standpoint, however, (mere) relativism would merely demonstrate the confusion of the seeker and, in fact, leave no space for any justifcation of nonviolence either (Cort, Ahimsa, 328). Instead, the aim of the whole liberation process of the soul on its journey toward purifcation from the impurity of matter is the experimental insight in the correctness of the Jain doctrine (Koller, Why, 89) against which all other “views” are false (Dunas, Anekantavada, 125)—although this can only really be perceived by the omniscient Jina for whom there is no ambivalence anymore (Cort, Ahimsa, 333–4). This discrepancy between the relativity of all views and the right insight of the omniscient sage remains vital in the revival of the method of manysidedness and the non-fxity of any “view,” especially since anekantavada has now entered and actively redefnes global interreligious discourse from a Jain perspective. Although, this unique Jain approach can now indicate the relativity of all positions of all religions (Valley, Anekanta, 99–112), it would still need anyone entering this relativistic space to leave this pluralism behind again for the hierarchically higher truth of a defned Jain liberation process as it is laid out in a spiritual cosmology that is presupposed to present the spiritual traveler with the true image of Reality, but is truly perceived in its non-ambivalent reality only in the state of the omniscient Jina. This hierarchical order of truth (gunasthanas) (Cort, Ahimsa, 333) is no stranger to Dharmic traditions either. It is rather pervasive in the discussions on whether or not ultimate Truth is that non-dual, non-personal Reality (brahman) with which we (atman) are essentially identical, or whether we are rather of personal nature and ought to be united with the Lord (Ishvara) in bhakti. It can be found in Nagarjuna’s “two-truth” doctrine (McGagney, Nagarjuna,

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74–117)—one from the samsaric position (otherness), one from the nirvanic position (identity)—as well as the Dzogchen view for which (following the Indian siddhanta tradition) all Buddhist streams approaching ultimate Truth are hierarchically ordered such that the Madhyamika view of emptiness of Reality indicates their highest realization in the Great Perfection of the Luminous Mind (ch. 7). None of the other two strains of sojourners, neither perennialists (with exceptions) nor adherents of Ferrer’s “participatory turn,” follow such a hierarchical view of Reality/Truth. Rather, they equalize all views on the same level of mystical insight such that, as soon as they are considered from their apophatic heart, they cannot be hierarchically differentiated, but only coordinated. Or they deconstruct such hierarchies in light of Deleuze’s rhizomatic view of connectivity as permanently changing multiplicity of efforts to reach non-dualistic breakthroughs to Reality (Duckworth, Nonsectarian, 339–48). Yet, so does Dzogchen transcend any gradualism, even denying the necessity of meditation (Norbu, Source, 218–28); and some mystical religions, such as Zen, know of the suddenness of enlightenment or the identity of way and attainment (Abe, Dogen, ch. 1). And while the Bahá’í writings affrm a “hierarchical” structuring of divine revelation, differentiated according to the cascading threefold or fvefold worlds, such categorizations are more of a heuristic than an ontological nature—they don’t come to life from a correspondence model of truth (that our mind and concepts could literally picture and correlate with reality), but from the apophatic nature of Reality/God/ Truth and “its” infnite Manifestations in infnite worlds (ch. 5). The primordial Manifestation not only comprises all worlds, thereby embracing in “it/ self” the apophatic-polyphilic verticality and circularity of upward enfolding and downward unfolding of, and (of “it/self”) in, all of the worlds (ch. 7), but—because of this apophatic in/difference and polyphilic in-sistence (ch. 6)—the movements of the Manifestation cut through all worlds, being present to, and in, all of them non-hierarchically (ch. 5). In addition, Bahá’u’lláh urges against any view that is presented as opposed to, and “better” than, another, to be considered true at all since this game of mutual superiority would make both views wrong and irrelevant. The intention of the cascading threefold and fvefold cosmological structure comprised and pervaded by the Manifestation is, therefore, not meant to instill a hierarchy of “better” and “higher” as a measure of superiority, but, contrarily, to raise the luminous awareness of translucency throughout the grades of conceptual enfoldments of differences upward into the in/difference of the presence of the apophatic Uncompounded Reality and the polyphilic unfolding of this in/difference downward into multiple modes of differentiation and divergence: from hahut, of which nothing can be said except “Reality/God is . . .” (huwa); to lahut, in which there is nothing but Reality/God

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(“Reality/God is Reality/God”); to jabarut, for which unity and difference complexify differently as “I am Reality/God and Reality/God is I, except that I am I and Reality/God is Reality/God”; to malakut, in which unity and difference are in a meta-historical, meta-temporal, meta-physical, spiritual conciliatory (and always “reconciled”) state of difference without opposition and bifurcation such that it names the kingdom of Peace/God; to nasut, the human world of differences and oppositions and the cyclical becoming of unity and difference (Lepain, Tablet, 43–60)—and back. An important resonance between the vertical dimension of the Jain and Bahá’í relativity consists in this luminous awareness, which exhibits both a subtractive and an affrmative dimension (ch. 2): On the one hand, the dynamics of différance and fractalization (Schmidt-Leukel, Pluralism, ch. 14), refraction and multiplication, in the world of becoming is one of the reasons that we cannot gain access to Reality beyond the constructions of, and insights into, our minds, except we become enlightened, become omniscient (all-perceptive), or are a Buddha, a Jina, or a Manifestation. Infnite many-sidedness, in this sense, indicates to all beings the inaccessibility of omniscience, except by the revelation of (and to) the Jina, Buddha, Avatar, or Manifestation (Dunas, Jains, 77) in the world of becoming. On the other hand, we are also reminded of Ibn ‘Arabi’s reasoning—which Bahá’u’lláh endorses—that this multiplication is due to the infnite variation, combination, and realization of the infnite names and attributes of the inexhaustible apophatic Reality as “it” reveals “its” Self in them. In this sense, infnite many-sidedness is the affrmation of the infnity of realities in their realization. Nevertheless, an interesting divergence between the Jain and Bahá’í view on many-sidedness may lie in the inherent dynamics that motivates their respective epistemological subtraction and ontological affrmation. While both the Jain and the Bahá’í dynamics of many-sidedness considers the “hierarchical” approximations to Truth/Reality—a more or less closeness to “it”—neither a characteristic of Reality being more or less further away from any spiritual stations (maqam), nor a mere chimera in light of Truth/ Reality. Rather, from both the universal perception of the omniscient Beings and the Manifestations, ultimate Reality is always closer to all relative realities, even if we feel divorced from “it”/them or position ourselves as divided among ourselves because of our claims of superior closeness to “it”/them (PT, #41). As all-perceptive knowledge is always “whole,” the “hierarchy” is always already broken, while for the “broken” knowledge wholeness is always missing (Cort, Ahimsa, 333). The divergence may arise not so much from the fact that Jainism does not acknowledge ultimate Reality other than its Manifestation in the liberated souls of the omniscient Jinas—as this is all that in the Bahá’í understanding can be accessed of ultimacy either (ch. 7)— but by the Bahá’í motivation of the whole dynamics of polyphilic relativity

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and multiplicity from its apophatic source and nature. For the Bahá’í view, hierarchical spiritual stations are suspended not by gaining or exhibiting or revealing omniscience per se, as in Jainism, but by the omniscient insight of the all-perceiving Manifestation “it/self” that “it” cannot be approached other than in the apophatic unknowing in “its” (own) Self in which “its” Self is both the Self of Reality and “its” Primal Manifestation in all realities (GL, #26). Consequently, there is also no fxed gradualism of approximation to Reality, because we are always (in any station and grade of approximation) already only “one step away from the glorious heights above and from the celestial tree of love” (HW. P, #7). Since, today, the Jain approach to many-sidedness is inextricably linked with ahimsa (Cort, Ahimsa, 328–30), aiming at a nonviolent society of interreligious peace, we must emphasize that the paradox of infnite relativity and multiplicity, on the one hand, and the defniteness of the omniscient view, on the other, demonstrates an important insight in any attempt on transreligious reconciliation, namely, that in order to escape mere relativism, we need to claim Truth somehow to be absolute, even if “it” will only appear as relative and, beyond that, even furthers “its” multiplicity in the world of becoming. Even if this absolute Truth is absolutely apophatic, as the Bahá’í writings confrm, the revelation of its Primal Manifestation in events and processes, persons and communities, imaginative and corporeal realities always exhibits (with Whitehead) some kind of divine valuation in the chaosmos of possible orders and disorders of relativity such that not all views are ever equally true. Case in point is the Jain insistence on ahimsa as an expression of the nature/valuation of ultimate Reality and the direction of anekantavada toward reconciliation and peace. This is corroborated by Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation of peace being the primordial intention of Reality’s Manifestation, but also with Whitehead’s divine lure toward peace as intention of any divine valuation in all processes of the worlds. In this sense, Bahá’u’lláh knows of both the relativity of all views, such that we cannot pitch one view against the other without losing Truth/Reality in the course of this bifurcation, and the valuation of different spiritual stations (maqam) as being closer to the in/different Truth/Reality than others. As Bahá’u’lláh lays out in the Tablet to Jamal-i-Burujirdi, while all “positions (maqám) are . . . acceptable before the throne of God,” yet, “there are those who have attained to the highest levels of spiritual comprehension (a`la marátib-i `irfán) while others are different therefrom.” However, in any instance, “inasmuch as the purpose of the spiritual understanding (`irfán) and the exposition (dhikr) of the highest levels of the elucidation of the teachings (bayán) is to attract the hearts, [and] cause fellowship between souls” (§3), the highest position (maqam) is that of peace motivated by the profound apophatic insight that there “hath never been nor is there now anyone capable of

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proffering a beftting description (wasf) of the essential nature of this Most Great Manifestation (zuhúr-i a`zam)” (§8). There are many examples of this connex between indefnability of Reality and “its” Self, the Primal Manifestation, and the active indetermination of bifurcating positions in Bahá’u’lláh’s writings. So, if there is a difference in the approach to many-sidedness and nonviolence in the Jain and the Bahá’í view on the relativity of truths and the reconciliation of religions, it may be this: while Jainism would imply the omniscient revelation of the Jain tradition as the true access to Reality, for Bahá’u’lláh, there is no fxed truth that can be defned and articulated of Reality and “its” Manifestations (of “it/self,” “its” Self) that would break through the relativity of their indeterminateness (in Reality) in any meaningful way other than to follow the way of all the Manifestations. Since they are “in themselves” (in their abstraction from all else but lahut, and even more so as manifestation of hahut) beyond the “truths” of any fxed differences, although they appear in differences differently, neither can we follow any mere relativism of opinions (anything goes) nor any fxed one-sided “true” doctrine to the exclusion of all others; instead, we will encounter the apophatic Truth/Reality in the oneness and multiplicity of “its” Manifestations and the unity and multiplicity of their religions if and when and as long as they (and our view of them) exhibit reconciliation (PT, ##40–1). Although it is to be expected that diverse Bahá’í authors differ on the degree of relativity they admit to be involved in Bahá’u’lláh’s discouragement of insisting on the superiority of one “position” over another (implying that one’s own spiritual “station” is thereby higher than that of the unfortunate opponents), such discussions refect the deep impossibility to overcome this dialectic so clearly presented to us in the “vertical” Jain scale of possible spiritual “stations” related to anekantavada between mere relativism of opinions and true Jina omniscience. Some Bahá’í authors, like Moojan Momen, lean toward the pole of radical relativity, a Derridian relativism of différance, laying emphasis on the impossibility to escape the apophatic unknowability of Reality, but mitigated by the pole of the omniscience of the Manifestations asking us to realize a new mystical, ethical, and socially engaged practice that follows Bahá’u’lláh’s precepts as the Manifestation of today. Others, like Ian Kluge, lean toward the other pole, the pole of determined omniscience, the view that the pole of relativism of viewpoints is a low grade approximation to Truth, and that, instead, this (absolute) Truth can be articulated with philosophical categories—in his case especially that of Aristotle (Momen, Relativism/Ideas, 367–97). Others again, like Nader Saiedi (Gate, 60–5) and Keven Brown (Response/Unity, 25–7), tend to understand works like Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet to Jamal-i-Burujirdi and the Tablet on the Uncompounded Reality as well as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Commentary on the Islamic Tradition “I was a

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Hidden Treasure” as expounding a hierarchy of meanings mediating between these two poles. In the end, what, in my understanding, might differentiate the Bahá’í view on this contrast of relativistic and determined poles from the Jain view— but also Ibn ‘Arabi and diverse Buddhist views—may lie somewhere else, entirely—namely, that differences, divergences, and multiplications of such differences and divergences themselves are neither to be transcended, nor is the polarity to be relieved of its tension in one or the other direction, nor is the space in between these poles to be reiterated into a hierarchical gradualism. The reason is that all of these ways try to escape the tension, to decide the undecidable, or know the unknowable, whether there is a “real Truth” behind all views. Instead, Bahá’u’lláh’s view would be that this whole polar feld is itself (caused by) the Manifestation of divine presence and activity, that is “but a refection of that which hath been created within themselves, through the revelation of the Lord, their God” (GL, #148). This divine Relativity is similar to, but more than being of Ibn ‘Arabi’s relativity of the minds and the recombination of divine attributes; and it is similar to, but more than being of the Jinas’s compassionate omniscience of all suffering and illusion (Donaldson, Cosmologies, 64–95). Bahá’u’lláh’s divine Relativity is an active engagement of Relativity “it/self” (“its” Self) with the multiverse of becoming, willed and perceived by the polyphilic fow of the in-sisting Revelation of Reality “it/self” (of “its” Self) in Wisdom and Compassion in (the Whiteheadian sense of the) mutual creativity of God and the world (ch. 6). With regards to the second sojourner, perennialism (Lings and Minnaar, Religion), a few comments may suffce at this juncture since I have already discussed its propositions earlier (ch. 5). There exists a stream of holistic, integral perennialism, crystalizing around Ken Wilber’s work, which reiterates spiritual hierarchies and, hence, subscribes to a strongly vertical view of approximations to Truth/Reality with problematic social implications that tend to undermine the unity of humanity (Median, Faith, 119–72). Yet, in general, perennialist thinkers avoid an overly hierarchical view. While vertical dimensions remain part of the mystical gradualism in which perennialists engage, the perennialists’ peace-making proposition is “horizontal,” because in its unitary nature everyone (indifferent from preferred spiritual hierarchies) can equally fnd access to Reality/Truth in all religious traditions if one only looks deep enough. In the depth of all religious traditions, in their esoteric and mystical dimensions (instead of the external and social organization), one discovers a network of experiences, insights, and poetic symbolisms that hint toward the unity of religions (Ferrer, Theory, ch. 2). It is an open question, however, whether the Reality at the core of this mystical unity of religions thusly discovered is “itself” unitary because of “its” profoundly apophatic nature: whatever we say we only say in order to overcome

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our conceptualizations, or whether Reality is actively present in all of these traditions as their common depth. It is also unclear whether this depth constitutes a, even if fat, “hierarchy” close to Nagarjuna’s “two-truth” doctrine, or whether the exoteric reality is illusory in nature—which would incur the danger to adopt a spirit-matter or soul-body model while, at the same time, in docetic manner declaring matter and the body an illusion. The Bahá’í writings agree with perennialism on the mystical unity of all religions and the contingency of all social embodiments. Shoghi Effendi declares that “the core of religious faith is that mystic feeling which unites Man with God” (DFG, #223). And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá discusses on many occasions the difference between the external, social, contingent, and changing appearances of religions, embedded in, and expressive of, culture and time, and the “essential ordinances established by a Manifestation of God [that] are spiritual; they concern moralities, the ethical development of man and faith in God.” Insofar as the “purpose of the religion of God is the education of humanity and the unity and fellowship of mankind” and “is directed to the advancement of the world of humanity in general” as well as “reveals and inculcates the knowledge of God and makes possible the discovery of the verities of life,” we can say that this “ideal and spiritual teaching, the essential quality of divine religion” is “not subject to change or transformation,” but “is the one foundation of all the religions of God.” In this sense, “the religions are essentially one and the same” (PUP, #112). Again, Bahá’í positions on the precise understanding of this “spiritual unity” with “social diversity” have differed, but have mostly agreed on three elements: the divine origin of all religions (not their concrete gestalt, which is as different as one can think of); the coinherence of the ethical teachings (although they appear in different languages, systematizations, and metaphysical arrangements); and the common interest in the transformation of the character of humanity (KI, 240–1) toward amity and peace (not their concepts by which they explain, and the rites by which they perform, this transformation). All three aspects are based on explicit declarations and admonitions of Bahá’u’lláh to use these modes of unity to create a peaceful society. Yet, as Shoghi Effendi emphasizes, the Bahá’í Faith repudiates excessive centralization on one hand, and disclaims all attempts at uniformity on the other. Its watchword is unity in diversity such as ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá Himself has explained: “Consider the fowers of a garden. . . . How unpleasing to the eye if all the fowers and plants, the leaves and blossoms, the fruit, the branches and the trees of that garden were all of the same shape and color! Diversity of hues, form and shape enricheth and adorneth the garden, and heighteneth the effect thereof.” (WOB, 42)

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In a deep transreligious “nomadism,” the Bahá’í writings can connect to the perennialist’s intentions and even conceptual differentiations between unity of, and differences between, religions not as a simple phenomenon of “all being the same” (far from it!), but as a sophisticated interaction between mystical, ethical, and social realities crossing over and cutting through any fxed identities of any religion for itself or any group defning such an identity for it (Fazel, Dialogue, 9–14). As with the perennialists, the aim of such “unity in diversity” is raising awareness of divine education as the transformation toward a peaceful society that already fnds its nucleus of inspiration in the deep mystical and ethical desire of the heart for such a reconciled future embracing the whole of humanity and the Earth. If there were a difference to the perennialists’ viewpoint, it would be that the Bahá’í perspective of “unity in diversity” seems to me to be much closer to deeply spiritual pluralists like Raymond Panikkar (Pluralism, 1–16)—even against potential misunderstandings of Bahá’í authors of the nature of this pluralism (May, Principle, 17, 27; Schaeffer, Clash, 57–122). The Bahá’í insight into unity of religions would consist in the stronger emphasis on the differences as themselves spiritual gifts (of a multiplication) of the realization of divine names and attributes that are never in any simple sense “one”—as the “Oneness” of Truth/Reality lies in “its” in/difference from multiplicity and polyphilia (ch. 6). However, maybe also in difference from perennialists and postmodern pluralists alike, the reconciliatory “unity” of religions from the Bahá’í perspective does not just convey the insight that oneness must be of apophatic nature, but that the polyphilic engagement of Reality/God with the world takes the form of a process that embodies the connectivity of the different worlds of religions (ch. 4)—neither being just of inconceivable diversifcation or chaotic diversifcation, (or as Shoghi Effendi says) neither being “spasmodic or fnal,” but by being “continuous and progressive” (WOB, 115). The proposal for reconciliation of the third sojourner is steeped in a postmodern perspective and (in the conceptuality of Deleuze) of a more rhizomatic nature. It developed maybe in reaction to discussions on religious pluralism in an age of interreligious discourse as well as the perennialists’ move toward a unity of mystery, and maybe also as reaction to inclusivist reductions of the oneness of religions to the oneness of one religion as organizational body (something of which the Bahá’í Faith has wrongly being accused, not the least as even some Bahá’í authors cherish such a vision). In light of this situation, Jorge Ferrer develops a quite different picture of the “one” future of religions. In his proposal of a “participatory” nature of all religionists in all religions, it is a new perception of the human predicament that asks us to consider the future of humanity mandated in some sense as a united spiritual reconciliation (something the Bahá’í Faith consistently has made to

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its most central motive of its existence and direction of activity). Ferrer seems to refect a cultural situation, especially in the global pluralistic awareness of the present, that Ninian Smart has characterized, on the one hand, by a profound skepticism regarding any unitary future of religions (given the irreconcilable complexities and divergences when one has begun to investigate the real religious phenomena of this world), but, on the other hand, the necessity for “some kind of worldview, perhaps at some higher level,” at least “of how religions and ideologies are to treat one another” (Smart, Religions, 591). Whitehead’s philosophy (Faber, Religion, 167–82) and the ensuing process tradition have understood themselves as such an attempt (Griffn, Reenchantment, 1–19), of course, and Ferrer’s approach is of this kind, too (Ferrer and Sherman, Turn, 1–79). In the current global village, Ferrer detects four scenarios for such an overarching worldview (Ferrer, Future, 14–5). The frst one he denies, because it envisions either a victory of one religion over all others or a synthesis of most traditions; this proposal seems to indicate some kind of newly constructed religion, maybe most visible as danger in the interreligious movement to understand itself as the successor to all particular religions. Both forms seem to be carried by inclusivism and superiority. The other three scenarios, however, mutually enhance one another and promise a better alternative in Ferrer’s view: frst, mutual transformation of religions and cross-pollination would not destroy or undermine the specifc heritage and identity of different religions, but would hold them in a process of constant fux and mutual enrichment, even multiple, hyphenized, or hybrid religious identities (for instance, between Judaism and Buddhism); second, acceptance of interspiritual wisdom, gleaned from the teachings of spiritual masters of different religions or for a global ethics, as in the proposal of Hans Küng, would demonstrate a compelling reason for universal convergences in the mysticism and ethics of all traditions such that it becomes irrelevant whether one stays in one, or moves into another, tradition or ventures into some kind of hybridity that we evidently fnd in the trans-spiritual and inter-contemplative movements; and, third, spirituality without religion, for instance visible in proliferation of the New Age movements and postmodern spiritualities, which have left all need for organizational directives, or naturalistic spiritualities, which have lost the need of any specifc spiritual expression either, would express common longing without belonging. All four expressions, excluding the global hegemonic dream, as they are not mutually excluding one another, present the “participatory dream” of Ferrer in which he expects us to invert the old dream of a unifed religion “organized around a single vision” and, instead, to recognize the “already existent spiritual human family that branches out in numerous directions from the same creative source” (ibid., 14).

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Being highly critical of Wilber’s hierarchical and linear integralism and, instead, akin to Gilles Deleuze’s “rhizomatic landscape” of diverse paths and goals in the movements of planes of immanence (Ferrer, Participation, 52), Ferrer envisions a human unity that always co-creates our spiritual resources from the multiplicity of its spiritual paths, always anew connecting, reconnecting, branching out, and reconciling our spiritual heritage on the basis of the acceptance of one human family. The acceptance of this family is, of course, a prescription that entails that we understand the mystery addressed in our traditions not as “reality” to be matched by our mind’s correspondence, but as the “ought” that releases transformative power (Duckworth, Nonsectarian, 339–48) to communicate with one another on the basis of that which religious traditions variously describe as compassion, love, and dialogue; leaving behind dogmatism, oppression, disrespect; and contributing not only to an overcoming of religious conficts but also of the problems inherent in these conficts, which are clashes of class, gender, race, and of ecological insensitivity as well as economic and social injustice. As such a community of spiritually individualized persons, we would, so Ferrer’s vision, “become unique embodiments of the mystery,” ourselves “co-creating novel spiritual understandings and practices,” so that “our religious future may bear witness to a greater-than-ever plurality of visionary and existential developments grounded in a deeply felt sense of spiritual unity” (Ferrer, Future, 64). Do I really have to repeat that all of those participatory visions are (part and parcel of) the Bahá’í view? Do I have to mention that, if one looks for a philosophically sophisticated basis of this turn’s implications, this is what is latent in Whitehead’s philosophy of process and relationality, creativity and organic evolution (TDM, ch. 5, 8, 15)? May the preceding chapters of this book be a witness to my affrmation of both the religious vision and the philosophical pervasion of this participatory dream: the unity of humanity; the mutual creativity realized between God and the world; the spiritual unity in a mystery that calls for transformation toward wisdom and compassion, intensity and harmony, beauty and peace; the images of the garden, in its diversity nurtured by one rain, of the lights diverging and refracting from one sun, and of the branching of the tree; the mutual immanence and coinherence of all religions because of their source; the mutual immanence and diversity of the manifestations of the one apophatic Reality; the polyphilic in-sistence of the in/different Reality/God/Truth. Yet again, as is true for Hick’s pluralistic thesis (ch. 6), from the Bahá’í perspective the ability of the Bahá’í writings to connect to all “four” of Ferrer’s categories of a participatory turn and the interference and interdependence of the spiritual paths for the future reconciliation of religions, except hegemony and fnality, superiority and oppression of divergence, is not due to philosophical construction, but is nothing less than the event of religious

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novelty: of revelation, intuition, and experiential realization, presupposed by any such constructions. From this event, it is the Bahá’í central fgures’ declared transreligious intention to further the recognition of, and raising of the awareness for, frst, the indefnite succession and mutual immanence of all religions, in which the Bahá’í revelation is a successor in a unique kairos for all religions, but also a moment of an eternal process beyond itself (PUP, #114); second, the mutual enrichment of all religious traditions, as they are revelations of Reality and unique displays of divine names and attributes (PT, #41); third, the interspiritual coinherence of all religious traditions (whether we know it or not) (PUP, #130); and, fourth, the organic, but trans-organizational aim of religion in a future civilization of peace (the Most Great Peace) (PUP, #27), in which an indefnite spiritual and bodily unfolding of humanity, and maybe even its transformation into a spiritual organism, the character of which we have not even an idea today, may mirror the kingdom of all the Manifestations of Reality/God/Truth (PT, #11).

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O thou who art carried away by the love of God! The Sun of Truth hath risen above the horizon of this world and cast down its beams of guidance. Eternal grace is never interrupted, and a fruit of that everlasting grace is universal peace. Rest thou assured that in this era of the spirit, the Kingdom of Peace will raise up its tabernacle on the summits of the world, and the commandments of the Prince of Peace will so dominate the arteries and nerves of every people as to draw into His sheltering shade all the nations on earth. From springs of love and truth and unity will the true Shepherd give His sheep to drink. (SAB, #201)

If there were differences of the Bahá’í from this participatory approach, they would have to be sought in these three elements. First, while Ferrer admits that he has still implied a certain “hierarchical” preference for ultimate Reality to be closer to Advaita non-dualism and Buddhist sunyata instead of an personal deity suggested by other streams of the same Dharmic or Abrahamic religions in general (Ferrer, Theory, 179), Ferrer sought more neutrality by avoiding the term “indeterminate” and, instead, by using the open term “undetermined” (which means it could be either determined or undetermined) or “nondetermined” (Ferrer & Sherman, Turn, 1–79). This is closer to my own use of “indetermination” (Faber, Sense, 36–56), but harbors the same difference between Ferrer’s epistemological epoché (the suspension of judgment) and my understanding of the apophatic in/difference as active in/ differentiation of Reality (GPW, §40), as well as the polyphilic in-sistence of Reality “itself” (TDM, chs. 8, 11, 13) and the polyphilic pluralism that follows from it (TDM, Intermezzo I and II) that I see in the Bahá’í writings making all the difference in relation to religious pluralists of the mystical and apophatic kind (ch. 6).

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Second, Ferrer’s “participation” is itself a meta-theory of participation, not participation itself. In this sense, the criticism against Hick may to some extent be applicable here: Ferrer merely creates a philosophical position that elevates itself to present everyone else with an overview over all the particularity in which diverse religions are imprisoned and, hence, knows “better” than the diverse religious practitioners from their own local standpoints what Reality is or ought to be for the diverse traditions (ch. 6). While it is easy to criticize a religion for its particular standpoint, even if it is the Bahá’í Faith with a universalizing standpoint, as a penultimate phenomenon in light of the ultimacy of the philosophical considerations of one mind, it has at least the advantage to be a religious standpoint, a practice of faith, a precept of religious performance, that cannot be accused of being a mere (and sometimes colonizing) meta-theory. This is the reason that scholar-practitioners of a religion that embraces the ideal of mutual convergences, but not from the perspective of a theoretical independence of this insight from their particular religious experiences and core believes, will take exception against such a participatory move (Ward, Religion, 335–40). This is also the reason that I began the adventure of this book not with the philosophical refections of Whitehead alone, but in correlation with the primary religious grounding in the Bahá’í Faith (ch. 1). Instead of a superior overview of abstract refection, what the Bahá’í Faith offers, instead, is the in-sistence of Reality itself, of “its” Self, in a cycle of love, wisdom and compassion, that in its ongoing renewal through the immanence of “its” Manifestations in the diverse religions themselves, does not claim to be the last, fnal, or unsurpassable expression of a Reality, which is always inaccessible and inexhaustible, but the polyphilic present Reality/God/Truth in any world. Third, as with the current discussions among the other sojourners of transreligious reconciliation, it is an unfortunate fact that Ferrer does not (or has only begun) recognize the Bahá’í Faith as the forerunner and sojourner in those movements’ intentions to work for a future society of peace in which religions do actually present the spirit of the translucency of Reality (Ferrer, Participation, ch. 10). The deeper reason might be that the occasional short mentioning of the Bahá’í Faith is still veiled by the imperative that novelty, if it is not of philosophical nature, that is, a meta-theory, but a religious event of novelty, must be of syncretic nature (Ferrer, Future, 14) instead of a synthetic vision and the sympathic power inherent in the religious movements of Reality “itself” (ch. 4). Different from Suhrawardi’s continuity between philosophical thought and religious event (Introduction), the postmodern paradigm upholds the exclusion, or vanquishes the expectation, of Reality to be real. Instead, in trusting only the projections of experiences, it cannot (in general) admit the potential of the inherent experiential, that is, prehensive nature of their arising

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(Faber, God in the Making, 179–200): “of that which hath been created within themselves, through the revelation” (GL, #148) of Reality “itself.” 6. CIRCULATIONS

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The Bahá’í writings insist that all of our expressions of Reality/God/Truth are relative in light of “its” absolute apophatic nature so that nothing can be said of “it,” except that “it” overfows as love (HW. A, #4) and because love ought to “be.” This love breathes in a cycle of inhaling and exhaling and moves in the oscillation of unfolding and enfolding—as the Bahá’í ringstone symbol unveils (Figure 1). While apophatic uniqueness resides beyond any categories of oneness and multiplicity, the pleroma of multiplicities manifests “its” Self in the form of infnite names and attributes (PT, #58). To “know” these attributes is to realize them perfomatively in one’s own life, ever being vigilant about the sedimentation and reiteration of our conceptuality, but also our religious fxation on dogmatic ritualizations and prejudicial exclusions because of the feeling of superiority of “our” way. How can the limited grasp the unlimited and transcend it? Impossible. The unlimited always comprehends the limited. The limited can never comprehend, surround nor take in the unlimited. Therefore, every concept of Divinity which has come within the intellection of a human being is fnite, or limited, and is a pure product of imagination, whereas the reality of Divinity is holy and sacred above and beyond all such concepts. But the question may be asked: How shall we know God? We know Him by His attributes. We know Him by His signs. We know Him by His names. We know not what the reality of the sun is, but we know the sun by the ray, by the heat, by its effcacy and penetration. We recognize the sun by its bounty and effulgence, but as to what constitutes the reality of the solar energy, that is unknowable to us. The attributes characterizing the sun, however, are knowable. If we wish to come in touch with the reality of Divinity, we do so by recognizing its phenomena, its attributes and traces, which are widespread in the universe. All things in the world of phenomena are expressive of that one reality. (PUP, #125)

In light of some of the Christian disputation, as they appear in these last three chapters of the book, one could explicate this apophatic-polyphilic circulations of divine relativity with the Pauline term “analogy of faith” (analogia fdei, analogia tes pisteos) of Romans 12:6: briefy, that to prophesy needs the horizon of the whole of the event, scripture, story, principles, rules, and doctrines of the faith in Christ in mutual relationship to be “true” and relevant. I am not interested in the exegetical or internal theological discussion regarding the precise meaning of this term (Fitzmyer, Romans, 647–8),

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here, but rather in the horizon that it spans if it is not limited to the Christian context, that is, what the circulation through all religions and their events, scriptures, traditions, stories, principles, rules, and teachings could mean. As in the Bahá’í view this transreligious horizon is evoked by the prophetic event of the translucency of all religions, it is not limited to one religion and its scriptures, stories and doctrines, but encompasses the analogy of all of them as its feld of inquiry and understanding, and as site of intensity and harmony. While later Karl Barth had further contrasted the analogy of (Christian) faith to that of the world as a whole (analogia entis) including all of its religions (Johnson, Barth, ch. 6), the Bahá’í writings embrace both creation as a whole and the true self (KI, 101) as well as all Manifestations (GL, #24) and all scriptures (PM, #65), that is, all religions, as true signs of Reality for this analogy. What we might gain by this universally circulating “analogy of faiths” is that we are not seeking to construct a unity, a perennial core, or a syncretic harmonization (like the Diatessaron) as an aim of inquiry, but presuppose such an enfolding unity with the novel event of its revelation (KA, ¶136). It is already (or already always has been) latent in creation and self, Manifestations and scriptures. And this latency is that of the divine presence of divine unity and peace (TB, 161–2), which, although “defled” by the “insistent self” (Savi, Summit, 331–3), particular claims of exclusive truth, and limited sites of understanding (particular Manifestations and particular scriptures), is the “sun” that always has already enlightened the “mirrors” (creation, self, Manifestations, scriptures) of all religions—think, the Luminous Mind (ch. 7). This “analogy of faiths” asks for a profound transtextuality of their scriptures in light of the unity of Manifestations (GL, ##3, 10) and promises an inherent access of the true self to the Self of the Mind of God as if it was “its” own Self (GL, #153). Whitehead operates differently, as he uses philosophical conceptuality to stay in the adventure of avoiding fxation of limited horizons and the superiority that attaches itself to it, always seeking a novel way to express the mystery (Faber, Whitehead/Speed, 39–72). Hence, “the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated” (MT, 174). But the mode of coordination is that of (striving for) a peace in which we ever anew realize the mystery, as we become a civilization wider than self and personality. Thus Peace is self-control at its widest,—at the width where the “self” has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality. Here the real motive interests of the spirit are meant, and not the superfcial play of discursive ideas. Peace is helped by such superfcial width, and also promotes it. In fact it is largely for this reason that Peace is so essential for civilization. (AI, 285–6)

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In this sense, the Whiteheadian peace-making propositions are expressions of such a selfess coordination of events of worth in harmonies that do not exclude intensity, but bind their becoming (concrescence) together with the utmost relativity of creativity, novelty, adventure, and mutuality. This humbleness before the mystery is true for practical spirituality as well as the conceptual discipline of philosophical refection (MT, 173). It is, thence, imperative that peaceful concepts are expressive of a coordination that does not lose its surrelative “identity” while they seek convergences (islands of emphases in the chaosmic infnite combinability) and in a “nomadic” freedom of circulation always allows for a wider rather than a narrower range of potential emphases to be sheltered by them—modulated through the three criteria of multiplication. The following three examples of such a “coordination” will further attempt to transpose the general impulse of the Bahá’í revelation to such a peacemaking (as introduced in the last section) through a Whiteheadian lens onto areas in which the criteria of multiplication might make all the difference between peace-suggesting coordination and the instigation of further tribalism, sectarianism, mutual strive for superiority, supersession, and extinction. With those examples of coordination, I will revisit questions hitherto asked throughout the chapter (but in part deferred for discussion to this juncture): frst, the coordination of the range and kinds of the multiplicity of Manifestations; second, the coordination and mutual transformation of Eastern and Western categories in isolation used for divisive disintegration; third, the coordination and variation of views on Incarnation and theophany. It must be mentioned, however, that these questions are for themselves still awaiting further discussion among interested readers and experts in the respective felds. The short refections on their diffculties are not meant to substitute that endeavor; rather the intention of the coming paragraphs is only to show how Whitehead’s categorical and conceptual coordinations as well as resonating Bahá’í modes of articulation regarding these contentious felds intend to perform a conceptual peace-making through the coordination of divergences as they release patterns of convergences and are united in their “nomadic” circulation through one another, but also are destined to pursue their living process of inevitable multiplication. The frst example pertains to the infnity of Manifestations of the Self of Reality and the infnite variability of their difference as well as their infnite in/difference. There is no doubt that Whitehead’s world of becoming, of process and relationality, is a multiverse of incommensurable divergence (TDM, ch. 7); yet also, that Whitehead’s dipolar God, the infnite (provider and infuser of) Wisdom and Compassion (PR, 347), is itself one—an absolute One that is beyond all differentiations and unifcations capable of withstanding any divergence in “its” unison with all becoming (PR, 345); an

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all-relational One that in all differentiations of all worlds is in unique ways present as suggestor of values and concretizations, activations, and realizations (PR, 67); and an surrelative One that comprises all differentiations in living transformation (PR, 346). God, in God’s primordial aspect, enfolds the infnite multiplicity of all possibilities, potentials, and values yet to be realized and, in God’s consequent aspect, receives the unending multiplicity of actualizations of these possibilities, potentials, and values in the mode of reconciliation (ch. 6). This God is eternal and everlasting, but also world-relative and -sensitive (GPW, part 4). As each world in the multiplicity of worlds is different, always in a process of renewal, and without beginning and end realizing different values and combinations of values, God is present to, and in, all worlds in their specifc actualizations of values, divine attributes, and contours. God mirrors the (potential) greatness of all creatures and worlds in the creative process—differently (RM, 155). If we accept the proposition (of this book) that Whitehead’s God is but the primordial Manifestation of Reality, as presented in the Bahá’í revelation (ch. 7)—the Will, the Mirror, the Sun, the Tree of Life, the Spirit, the Mind, the Word, the Wisdom of Reality (Momen, God, 24)—we gain access to a concept of the manifest apophatic Reality in its polyphilic in-sistence that not only resonates deeply with the infnite Buddha-felds of the Lotus Sutra (one Buddha comprising the relational feld of one world) but also opens a path to embrace the cyclical appearance of “its” Self in these worlds, be it of the Buddha, or of Krishna (as reported, for instance, in the Bhagavat Gita and the Bhagavata Purana). Yet, we also can follow the reasons for preferring unique appearances, as insisted on in Christianity, indicated with the Incarnation of the Word (SAQ, #38), or in Islam, expressed with the doctrine of the unique Seal of the Prophets (KI, 179). Since in Whitehead’s universe no event can be identical, since all events create unique unifcations of this universe that they leave and are greeted as a novelty in the world they constitute (PR, 21), there is a historical nature for unrepeatability to the process of divine Manifestation (GL, #22). Not only is the one God of Wisdom and Compassion differently present in any given world or cosmic epoch, but also in any appearance in it, related to the history in which the appearance happens (as its novel unifcations which comes from its web of relations, but cannot be explained by it, transcending it into the unprecedented revelation of Reality in its situation). Not only, then, must this God appear differently in any culture and society in its world-historical space and time (Suchocki, Divinity, 47–9), but must also in unique ways be related to it (Faber, God in the Making, 179–200). Nevertheless, the import of this uniqueness is always universal, surrelative, and united in the great process of Wisdom and Compassion of the cycle of love surging through these worlds and societies. Uniqueness and universality are no opposites, as Deleuze has demonstrated (Deleuze, Difference, 3–5), but necessary companions, as they

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are not repetitions of the same, not examples of a colonializing generality, but unique appearances of inexchangable value bound to a processual, patterned fabric of past and future, refection and revelation, traditions and novel events (Faber, Origin, 273–89). So does the Báb lay out a vision of infnite worlds with their infnite Manifestations (Saiedi, Gate, 6)—as do Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Hatcher, Connections, 150–1). Yet, while those infnite Manifestations are “one” (only) in abstraction (from the worlds in which they infuse themselves), they are also unique in their trans-historical relevance (in the ‘alam al-amr, the World of Command) and historical appearance, personality, related to the time they appear (GL, #22) without losing their respective universal relevance as “universal realities” (SAQ, #37). It is in this sense that no Manifestation in any world just repeats another one, but renews all of them; their coming is always a new creation (GL, #14). Hence, in the Bahá’í view, as in Whitehead, Manifestations of Reality are unique, and because of this uniqueness (and not their abstract generality) they can connect the histories of worlds, societies, and religions. Other than Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu cycles of divine appearances, but closer to the Abrahamic historic progression of revelation (Saliba, Homo, 129–31), and similar to later claims of multireligious convergences by Ramakrishna (Rolland, Life, 49–62), but wider than Mani’s early cross-religious proclamation (Coyle, Manichaeism, xiii), does Bahá’u’lláh relate all religions and their “universal feld” of Manifestations to one another (Lundberg, Adam, 59–82), as unique expressions of the history of the Wisdom and Compassion of God with the diverse communities of the world, symbolized with the term “progressive revelation” (ch. 4). It is in this context that it may begin to make sense that incommensurabilities between religions are not necessarily a hindrance for the access to Reality, but—as captured in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s image of the fowers in a garden (TDP, #14)—an enrichment of the polyphilic pleroma of God (TDM, ch. 14). The divergences among religions are, then, always inclusive expressions of the surrelative process of raising humanity to the ability to realize the fullness of divine attributes—leading to spiritualities, communities, societies, and worlds of peace. In “this diversity [of religions] increaseth their charm, and addeth unto their [own] beauty,” “each one contributeth to the beauty, effciency and perfection of the whole,” and their “difference reinforceth harmony, diversity strengtheneth love, and multiplicity is the greatest factor for coordination” (SAB, #225). At this point, I don’t want to miss at least mentioning again the (at frst maybe) strange proposition of John Leslie that the Good might not only be the “reason” for there to be anything at all, because it “ought to be” (ch. 5) but that it were “better” that there would not only be one Mind of God in which infnite worlds (on the basis of Goodness) would diversify and still be

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comprised by this Mind, but that there “ought” to be an infnite number of Minds of God (Leslie, Immortality, 10–1). In fact, this approach would refect the infnite “number” of Manifestations (in paradoxical confuence with their rare appearance), as espoused by the Bahá’í writings (SAQ, #50), and the infnite variability of Whitehead’s God in relation to infnite worlds (RM, 159–60) for which God would be an infnite multiplicity (PR, 350). What is even more obvious in such a proposal of the infnite Minds of God is that their “oneness”—since they are all still called (and are essentially the same) Divine Mind—is best be understood as being itself apophatically in/different to, and in-sisting in, the infnite Minds—although Leslie does not draw this conclusion. Yet, it would be in line with the subtractive affrmation inherent in this infnity: leaving the oneness to the apophatic Reality unarticulated. We can sense this move already in the threefold dynamics of Plotinus’s Divine Mind: looking upward into the abyss of the unknowable Beyond, the Mind sees nothing; looking at “it/self” (“its” Self), “it” sees “perfect mirrors” (PUP, #10); and looking downward “each of the Mirrors [is] refecting the divine Essence” (KI, 66) into the multiplicity of worlds, the religions, the hearts. The second example pertains to the categories used to either stir confict or accommodate coordination. One of the most profound decisions of Whitehead’s conceptual universe was the deconstruction of the Aristotelian notion of “substance” and related terms like “essence” and “attributes” (GPW, part 2). In his considerations on philosophy and the new sciences of his time (relativity theory and quantum physics), as well as on the relation of language and reality (PR, 11, 138), Whitehead concluded that these categories have nothing but created troubles by suggesting that the world is built up of independent things, substances that persist through time, needing nothing to exist but their own essence and essential attributes, while all else changes (Kraus, Metaphysics, chs. 1–3). Instead, he reconstructs these simplifcations of the mind that extract “entities” from the relations out of which they exists, namely, the all-relational as processes of creative becoming, in such a way that the dull hurling of particles become transposed (back) into (the prehension of) processes of prehension, of feeling, of feeling of others in one’s own becoming. In this deconstruction, the world appears as a web of processes of compassion that rather resembles Buddhist ultimate all-relationality (pratitya-samutpada) while it recovers the ecological interwovenness of all existence (Faber, Ecotheology, 75–115). The fault of the substance model was to establish an absolute difference between mind and matter, spirit and body, individual and society, and the misuse of these divisions to create power-inficted justifcations of oppression. Based on a model of God as independent substance, unchangeable, unrelated, uncaring, apathic toward the very existence of the world (Faber, Democracy, 192–237), even if God annihilates the world, God would not be impacted in the slightest (Caputo, Weakness, ch. 9). Whitehead,

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instead, proposes a cycle of love in which God and the world are entangled in a process of mutual immanence of enfolding and unfolding, are empathically related, and pulsate in movements of in/different diverging and converging (GPW, part 3). This conceptual revolution cuts through many of the problems that have haunted religious divergence to the core: whether to speak of God in personal, impersonal, or transpersonal terms (RM, 68); whether to expect our existence to be one of a substantial soul or a bundle of impermanent dharmas (PR, 104); whether to believe in an immortal soul-substance or in a khoric personhood (AI, 186–7), and so on. If an event has no self-sustaining constant essence besides its activity of becoming itself, as it does not exist before it has become in this aesthetical process of evaluation of its potentials of realization (PR, 25–7), there is no substantial category that would defne anything against anything else. There is no soul-thing in us that wanders unimpaired through time, but we are nexuses of events that create our identity as we relate to our past, our world, and make our decisions of who we will have become when we have become (AI, 215). There is no substantial self that is self-contained, but we are a khoric interrelated strain of history through a world unique in the way that we change with our becoming as the world changes us while we become unique (AI, 187–8). There is no divine person as substance, but Reality/God acts as Love and Compassion (PR, 346). There is no independence, but all-relationality (PR, 4). Nevertheless, the process categories do not abolish the meaning of substantial terms, but cleanse them of desire of power over things (making all others than us things), making God a thing, making our internal being a thing. They can express even better the personal terms of love and compassion, while connecting to the emptiness (from independent selfassertion) of our nature, and the diverse “identities” from the nature of the world as khora, and Reality as (providing the) khoric space in which we live (AI, 134–5). Reality is not a thing, but (expresses “its” Self in/as) the very medium of intercommunication, immanent and transcendent, full end empty, personal and transpersonal as Wisdom and Compassion, Love and Harmony, Beauty and Peace (TDM, ch. 9). It is this “nomadic” connectivity that lets us see the convergences in different conceptual systems employed by different languages, cultures, and religious systems—furthering peace. While on the surface the categories used by the Bahá’í writings seem to approximate to the Aristotelian substance language, we are warned not to identify the use of philosophical terms in the mouth of a Manifestation with the Reality it indicates (TB, 140–1), because this language is always related to the conceptual universe of the people addressed with the proclamation of a Manifestation, limited by (or self-limiting to) their spiritual capacity (GL, #33), and relative to the questioner and hearer or reader. This is established Bahá’í hermeneutics (Eschragi, Kommentar, 329–30). But even more

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astonishing is, as already related in the preceding chapter, the fact that the immediate philosophical background in which the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh were articulating their claims of Manifestation, namely, the Shaykhi school of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i—and which were adopted as well as transcended in the writings of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Brown, Response/ Unity, 1–29)—made one of the most unexpected moves only mirrored (in the West) in the Whitehead’s philosophy of process (Hamid, Metaphysics, 264–70): While the Platonic philosophy that (still) underpinned the later substantialism of Aristotle and most of the Western philosophical schools up to the 20th century (with rare exceptions) identifed the world of Ideas and Forms with activity and Matter with passivity, Shaykh Ahmad like Whitehead after him reversed this identifcation (GPW, 171). The importance of this move consists in the revolutionary disappearance of the substance scheme implied by this Platonist identifcation, namely, that matter is mere passivity (and often close to being identifed with evil, flth, and that which should not be) while mind and forms and ideas are seen as pure paradigms of a world of light that are always only imperfectly present in the world of becoming. Now, the disentanglement of both form and activity and matter and passivity releases the world as one of creativity, uniqueness, and responsibility, being active in events of becoming, while the world of Ideas is not active, degrading us to puppets of predestination, but the world of possibilities, suggesting realizations to evaluating events (Imm., 684–8). Instead of making the world of Being the “real reality” and the world of becoming just a shadow, it is now the world of freedom; not anymore is it the world of becoming one of the infiction of unilateral power of coercion “from above,” but a world of compassion and divine persuasion, nonviolent in its mutuality, “from within” driving toward peace (TDM, ch. 11). The Báb accepts this reversal, using it to explain the creativity of God in relational, not coercive terms: that God’s Will is pure matter, pure, formless activity (Saiedi, Gate, 202), like Whitehead’s creativity (PR, 21), and that God’s Purpose is the forms, the possibilities of realizations (Saiedi, Gate, 202), like Whitehead’s primordial nature (PR, 44). Activated by the Primal Will, every event in the world is invited to realize these forms of divine Purpose (Brown, Response/Darwinism, section 3). In this sense, the primordial Manifestation is as formless and creative as the Buddha-nature (Dowman, Spaciousness, 5). And it entertains the forms/attributes inviting to their realization. But we must activate them freely; activate them in the “forms” (virtues) of “Reality-realization.” Implicit, here, we fnd also a good reason for the assumption that Manifestations come cyclically, as they seduce to the peace (AI, 295–6) for which they, in the process, suffer under the oppression of the powers that use coercion instead of persuasion (PT, #53).

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Other implications abound. Case in point is the conjecture, held by some Bahá’í scholars, that Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá use the categories of “essence” and “attribute” in an Aristotelian substantialist manner (Kluge, Substratum, 17–78). Yet, in light of Ibn ‘Arabi and Longchenpa, this proves to be premature. And we cannot even be sure that such substantialism is actually underlying even Aristotle’s’ metaphysics of “being qua being” (Post, Metaphysics, 5–10). As already explained in the preceding chapter, in the Whiteheadian-Buddhist reading of these categories (Odin, Metaphysics, parts 1–2) for both Bahá’í and Buddhist thought “essence” is absolutely inaccessible (SAQ, 120–1) so that we cannot know of “it” to any extent through “its”/ their attributes—something that Whitehead categorically affrms (PR, 79, 157–8, 209). Since the Buddhist non-dualism asserts that there is no essence that could be differentiated from its attributes (Corless, Buddhism, 336–7), the immediate khoric implication is the mutual emptiness of all dharmas in their in/difference from Reality, which then again connotes emptiness itself as the Self of emptiness, the Luminous Mind, and the selfess Self of the Manifestation (Stambaugh, Self, 81–92). The consequences for a non-substantialist understanding of our Self or Soul, so often misinterpreted as being bound by Aristotelian categories of a soul-substance (PR, 104), are remarkable. If we have freed ourselves from these conceptual limitations, we can suddenly envision the trans-categorical and transreligious “nomadic” convergence between Western and Eastern conceptual intimations. While they are in themselves limited and one-sided articulations of the mystery beyond all categories, they are actually creating a transreligious, transcultural, and trans-philosophical thread of understanding and mutual resonance. Consider that the Bahá’í concept of the soul (nafs), including related concepts such as the heart (qalb) or the secret (sirr) (Savi, Summit, ch. 12), mirror the Buddhist concept of the mind or chitta (PM, #114) precisely not in its Western, Aristotelian, dualistic sense, as Bahá’ís at least in the West (and limited by the Western philosophical and religious heritage) sometimes seem to think of the soul’s reality (Hatcher, Connections, chs. 10–13). Rather they open their non-dual, in/different sense of their “reality” being beyond both simplistic monism and dualism (ch. 6). Their “reality” is like the Luminous Mind a chitta non-chitta (ch. 7), that is, beyond all grasping of images and concepts, formless, beyond imaginings and self-projections (SAB, #47). The “reality” of the “soul” (nafs, qalb, ruh, sirr) is the pure awareness of itself as “it(self),” as in/different from Uncompounded Reality. To this testifes not only ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s direct claim that the soul is not composed and, hence, eternal (PT, #29). This view is, moreover, deeply engrained in Bahá’u’lláh’s understanding of the soul, for instance, when he in his Commentary on the Islamic Tradition “He who knows himself knows his Lord” (and really the

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Greek insight of self-awareness: gnoti sauton) proclaims the human logosself (the Self that has the Word, Reason, and Self-Knowledge) as that which analyses everything, but that itself is not analyzable, and, hence, is a secret to itself and a sign of God (GL, #82). In its purity, uncompoundedness, and eternity, “it” (its Self, nafs) is—as Bahá’u’lláh (GL, #80) and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (PT, #29) state alike—untouched by any kind of limitations and debilitations, like the Luminous Mind (Kalu Rinpoche, Mind, 146–7). As “it” cannot be known in its essence, it is also empty of Self, for its Self is beyond itself (participating in Plotinus’s Mind looking into the abyss). And to know “it/self” as such is to know Reality/God, as they are apophatically in/different. As the soul is all the divine attributes, that is, as they are its very “essence,” its reality again mirrors, or better, is in/different from the reality of the primordial Manifestation, like waves of one ocean (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in Momen, God, 20). As is true for the Luminous Mind, the universal dharmakaya is the essence of our very being such that we are already always (in/different from) the Buddha in nuce, the tathagatagarbha, of Buddha-nature. It is the secret of the Luminous Mind that we are already this purity, although in ignorance it appears defled. And it seems to be the secret of the Bahá’í understanding of soul/mind/heart that it is already always the brightly shining sun even if it seems to be hidden under the clouds of limitation and infiction (GL, #80). The third example pertains to peaceful coordination of variations related questions on Incarnation, Avatars, Bodhisattvas, divine appearances and theophanies that have created so much mistrust and strife between religions and schools across religions. A few thoughts must suffce, here, to indicate Whitehead’s and the Bahá’í writing’s peace-making, “nomadic” connectivity across the incommensurable universes of discourse in which these problems are pondered. Whitehead demonstrates openness to many “manifestations” of ultimate religious experiences in unique historical and mythological fgures at the root of diverse religions (RM, 18–20). Both his understanding of the Christ as revelation of the nature of God (as love) in person and the immanence of God in Christ according to Christianity (AI, 167–8) as well his sophisticated conceptuality of the mutual immanence of all in God and of God in all (PR, 348) are witnesses to that effect (as was presented throughout the preceding chapters). It has led process theologies to explicitly develop new modes of coping with the religious divergences in the matter presently discussed (GPW, §38). What is more, process theology has never found itself bound by Christian discussions only. Instead, it has—using the same connective process conceptuality—embraced, for instance, Buddhist (St. Odin), Hindu (J. Long), Jain (B. Donaldson), Daoist (Z. Wang), and Indigenous (M. A. Coleman) modes of “manifestations” of the Divine in the manner here proposed: in divergence, in convergence, and in nomadic connectivity (Griffn, Pluralism, passim; Faber and Slabodsky, Traditions, passim).

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The perhaps best know example is John Cobb’s reformulation of the Christological problem of the two natures of Christ, with the following consideration: As the primordial nature of the dipolar divinity can be understood as the Logos (Cobb, Christ, ch. 3) and the consequent nature as the WisdomSpirit of God (Cobb, Jesus, 25–36), without absolute division between both because of their mutuality and their engagement with the world in the cycle of love (ibid., ch. 4), the presence of God in the world in every event as the gift of its beginning (its subjective aim, the best possibilities of its becoming offered in the situation of its situatedness within the nexuses of all events that comprise its world from which it arises) can reach such an intensity that, in a particular “person” such as Christ, it becomes the presence of the Logos and the Wisdom-Spirit itself (of its Self), rendering Jesus the Christ (Cobb, Christ, ch. 7–10). This “person” is not only refective of the past of his own (private) history but exudes to the world the highest divine potentials and healing powers of (the dipolar) God. Since the events that constitute the “person” of Jesus would have as its nexus of initial aims the Logos itself (its Self), his Self would be constituted not only—as with every person’s events—by potentials of divine perfection (virtues, attributes) to be realized in one’s own world, developing one’s own personality. Instead, this “person” would (in the highest intensity of) all of the world’s divine potentials be the presence of Godself, his “person” refecting the nature of God as love, compassion, and peace (GPW, 230–2). Nevertheless, as every event is free to accept its initial aim and transform it into a fulfllment of activation (satisfaction), this human person is not in any sense reduced by the presence of the Logos (constituting its Self), as in diverse Christian heresies, or added-on to the divine person, since this inherent relation is the fullness of God’s relation to humanity (and the fulfllment of humanity) in general. This solution also avoids the problems of Adoptianism since the Logos present in this “person” was always the Logos present in all events and processes; and of Docetism, since it is the human nexus of personal events that is the concretization of the presence of the Logos “in the person” of Jesus (Cobb, Christ, ch. 8). In addition, while this presence of Logos and Wisdom-Spirit is kenotic, as God is the fellow sufferer in this process of experiencing the world through the life of this person (PR, 351), neither is divinity lost in it (as in more recent kenotic theologies suggest) nor is any mixture of divinity and humanity concocted. While this divine process always induces a co-constitution of the events of the Self of the person, nevertheless, Jesus is not relieved from fulflling the Will of God by refecting the Logos in the freedom in which these events of his life are posited. Furthermore, the person of the presence of the Logos is also the person in the Wisdom-Spirit that gives every event its divine response to the world, and also refects the person of the Manifestation in God’s consequent nature (GPW, 237–8). Finally, some process thinkers even explore the

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trinitarian dimension of this process model, situating the dipolarity of God as Logos and Wisdom-Spirit in the reality of Creativity as the mystical well of the Godhead (GPW, §34). The peaceable “nomadic” Bahá’í conception of Manifestation correlates in many and astonishing ways with this process analysis. Bahá’u’lláh holds that the “stations” and “twofold nature” of the Manifestation are such that divinity (lahut) and humanity (nasut) are not mixed, nor are human parts exchanged (ch. 7), nor is “its” humanity excepted from bodily life, suffering, and death (KI, 45). Divinity does not in a kenotic manner empty itself to “become” the human person, nor does Reality (like a material cause) distribute itself into the world (hulul). If we accept the proposition that Whitehead’s God means Bahá’u’lláh’s manifest God (lahut), then Logos-Wisdom and Wisdom-Spirit are united and differentiated in the Bahá’í writings as in Whitehead’s dipolar God (SAQ, #54). In a “horizontal” view, the trinity of creativity, primordial nature, and consequent nature is present in God (lahut)—as all unfolded folds of the threefold or fvefold cascading of the Manifestation (ch. 5) is enfolded in the in/difference of hahut in both Whitehead and the Bahá’í writings. This correlates biblical formulations, such as: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one” (1 John 5:7), with Bahá’í formulations, such as: “in the Most Great Horizon,” it is “the breath of the Word of God, [that quickens] the dead bodies with a fresh spirit. Within every word a new spirit is hidden” (ADJ, 82–3). Yet, “vertically” there is an apophatic suspension of all such attributions and differentiations regarding the Beyond of the nameless God (hahut) in both Whitehead’s and the Bahá’í writings. This seems to be closer to subordiatianist formulations especially of the Fourth Evangelist: “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). Yet, as they are both “one” (John 10:30), it is the Logos who is (or says: I am) “God” (GL, #22) and refects, expresses, and presents this apophatic Reality (John 1 and passim). It is not the apophatic Godhead that “becomes” the person of Jesus, but the Logos (John 1:14) and the Wisdom-Spirit (Luke 4:16–22). Pre-existence (SAQ, ##27, 80) is presupposed for both the Logos and Spirit, as the primordial Manifestation harbors the origin of creation (SAQ, ##53–4) and Christ is (has become) the live-giving Spirit (as the Spirit is now Christ-like) (1 Cor. 15:45; SAQ, #29); and the Spirit is present as the Christ-like Wisdom-Spirit by Christ’s “concurrent” exultation into the consequent nature (PR, 350). In all of that remains a healthy ambiguity regarding trinitarian implications of such conceptualizations in both Whitehead (GPW, §§32, 38) and the Bahá’í writings (SAQ, #27) since for both of them “the tradition” seems to have known too much of the mystery of the divinity (lahut) of Christ and its identity with, and difference from, God (hahut) (chs. 6–7). Yet, trinitarian formulations can be a symbolism to be embraced in the Bahá’í

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context (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, On Christ and Christianity, §§18–23) if we uphold the oscillation between the vertical unknowing into the Godhead of any conceptuality—as in the already transreligiously conceptualized understanding of Raymond Panikkar (Trinity, ch. 2)—and the horizontal diversifcation of nomadic crossings between the use of the names “the Son, the Spirit, and the Father” for the Manifestation (SAQ, #57; PDC, 52–3). Contrasted with the Christian limitation to one Manifestation, however, Whitehead’s view—as already explained earlier—allows, under the conditions of the all-presence of the Logos, the unique presence in different “persons” of many Manifestations (ch. 7), and not only historical ones— Whitehead includes Prometheus (RM, 19). This would also upset any strict division between the historical and the symbolic presence of a Manifestation, which is often used to exclude Avatars and Bodhisattvas from being counted as “true” Incarnations (Parrinder, Avatar, chs. 15–6). The process analysis has only led to weak arguments for the restriction of the Logos-Wisdom (primordial nature) to only appear in one historical “person” (Cobb, Christ, 142) or, for that matter, only in historical personages, rather than symbolic “incarnations” in a wider cosmic feld (GPW, §38), while not contradicting the uniqueness of such Manifestations (GPW, 232–3). Since the Manifestation embraces the threefold (or fvefold) cascade of the Bahá’í ringstone symbol (Figure 1), “it” will, as Bahá’u’lláh asserts, appear on all levels, and in all worlds, and regarding all the different constitutions of worlds, in their respective and ftting form. [VI] [1] Every world among the worlds of thy Lord, hath been established for the sake of the theophany of the Manifestations of God (zuhur mazahir Allah), the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting. [2] In every world (`ālam), He [the Manifestation of God] is manifested according to the capacity (bi- isti`dād) of that world. [3] In the world of spirits (`ālam al-arwāḥ), for example, He reveals Himself (yatajalla) and is manifested (yazharu) unto them through the modes of the Spirit (āthār al-rūḥ). [4] So, likewise, in the [world of] bodies (ajsād), in the worlds of [the Divine] Names and Attributes (`awālim al-asmā wa’l-ṣifāt) and in other worlds (al-`awālim) which none comprehendeth save God. (Bahá’u’lláh, Tablet of Manifestation, transl. Lambden, section VI)

Since the importance of any historical event (its universality) is its symbolic, trans-historic presence (Lampe, God, 106–7)—the presence of the imaginal world (Corbin), of the world of similitudes (‘Abdu’l-Bahá), of the kingdom of God (malakut)—some Manifestations, although they have more mythological than historical reality, such as Adam, Noah, or Krishna, are real expressions of a symbolic presence. However, since, as Corbin explains, the imaginal world is not less real, but more real—the real spiritual reality

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of which the physical world is only a symbol, and not the other way around (Corbin, Alone, 189)—not only is the symbolic reality the intended presence of a Manifestation (as it is not reduced to its historical appearance and situation), but it leaves, for the same reasons, in the Islamic context the impression of Docetism (which Corbin defends against Christianity as a failsafe against the Islamic understanding of “Incarnation” as hulul). Yet, the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, while rejecting hulul (GL, #20), understand Manifestation (zuhur) not as a mere “theophany” (Parrinder, Avatar, chs. 14–16), which Christians have again identifed as, and argued against, Islamic imitation of Incarnation, such as Ibn ‘Arabi’s “divinity” (lahut) of Muhammad. Rather, the Islamic zuhur negates Incarnation on the basis that lahut is not interested in becoming nasut, history or body, as in Christianity, but, contrarily, it is “by an assumption of the sensible to the plane of theophanies and events of the soul that the manifestation of lahut in the attributes of nāsūt is accomplished” (Corbin, Alone, 165). Hence, even the Shaykhis, who were the spiritual environment of the rising of the Báb (and as the later Shaykhi leader Karim Khan Kirmami in opposition to the Báb argued), were probably, in general, not expecting the endtime appearance of the Mahdi or Qa’im ever to be physical. It is in this context that we must understand the important revolution of terms and expectations that happened when the Báb claimed to be the presence in history, not in mere symbolic representation, of the last Imam, the Qa’im— not as the appearance of a mythological fgure (like Elijah was thought to be in waiting in some sort of heavenly realm) and not as hulul, but as a new SelfManifestation of Reality/God (Saiedi, Gate, 275–6). Bahá’u’lláh, again, other than the main traditions of both Sunni and Shi‘i Islam, did not literally deny that Jesus died on the cross because of the common Islamic “docetic” interpretation of a verse of the Qur’an (Q. 4:147) (Cole, Behold the Man, 47–71). Instead, Bahá’u’lláh confrmed the real death of Jesus (GPB, 188). And while we might think of lahut and nasut in the Islamic context in an Arian manner (so as to avoid trinitarian “partnership”), what should we make of statements of Bahá’u’lláh that forcefully go beyond any Arianism or Subordinationism: affrming that the Manifestation “is born of the substance of God Himself” (GL, #27); by turning the very Surah of the Qur’an that rejects that God is begotten or begets (Q. 112:3) on its head, declaring: “He hath been born Who neither begeteth nor is begotten” (Lambden, Mysteries, 178n254); and most strongly, by identifying the “identity” (in/difference) of the Manifestation with the apophatic God as of the essence of the believe in the oneness of God: “The essence of belief in Divine unity consisteth in regarding Him Who is the Manifestation of God and Him Who is the invisible, the inaccessible, the unknowable Essence as one and the same” (GL, 84)?

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In the Christian context, contrarily, questions raised by claims of the “Sonship and Divinity of Jesus Christ”—both of which the Bahá’í writings “fearlessly” confrm (PDC, 109)—can also not easily be situated on either side of the divide of Logos- and Spirit-Christology (ch. 7). Like for Whitehead’s dipolar God, both modes of Christology (and against the perpetuated opposition of their respective proponents) are expressions of the manifest Reality/ God (SAQ, #54) with different functions addressing indeterminate aspects of the mystery: While the Manifestations are trans-historically (in malakut) preexisting, and, moreover, are the mirror of the pre-existent Logos-Wisdom of God/Reality “itself,” that is, are expressions of “its” Self, which is variously signifed as the Word, Logos, Spirit, Will, Mind of God (Dunn, Christology, chs. 7–9), they are also raised as human beings in the Spirit as well as a highpoint of the evolution of humanity in the Spirit to the point at which humanity can express the attributes of God (SAQ, #64), thereby actually only really becoming humanity (Lampe, God, ch. 1). With the scriptural and post-scriptural basis for the Logos-Wisdom Christology (McCready, He, chs. 2–7), Bahá’í scriptures confrm the pre-existence of Christ and all Manifestations (SAQ, #28), and that “the reality of Christ was a clear mirror wherein the Sun of Truth—that is, the divine Essence—appeared and shone forth with infnite perfections and attributes” (SAQ, #27). But with Spirit-Christology (Lampe, God, ch. 4), the Bahá’í writings affrm that the “Holy Spirit is the outpouring grace of God which was revealed and manifested in the reality of Christ” (ibid.). Therefore, both types of Christology, in the Bahá’í scriptures, function confrming the biblical dialectic of the uniqueness of the person of Christ and the presence of the Spirit of Christ as the Christ-like Spirit of God: “Prophethood is the station of the heart of Christ, and the Holy Spirit is the station of His spirit” (ibid.). Finally, while Bahá’í writings connect to the oneness of Reality with the “monotheism” of Abrahamic religions, they also connect to the “panentheism” of modern religious discourse and Dharmic transpersonalism (ch. 7). In this manner, they can both relate to Jewish and Islamic rejections of Christian Trinity as excluding (like Whitehead) either the kenosis of the substance of God into (or as) the human person of the Manifestation (hulul), or avoiding making “partners” with God (shirk), or joining other gods with God (Q. 4:171; 5:72–4; 112). Yet, they can also stand with Christianity, holding fast to the concept of the Trinity that, as explained by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, is an essential means to understand the Manifestation (SAQ, #27)—similar to Whitehead (GPW, §25)—as perfectly mirroring, that is, being not “like” (Baillie, God, 66), but “being” (in/ different from) the apophatic Reality, and the Spirit being the personal presence and power of divine grace fowing over from the essence of Reality and exuding “its” light of existence through the Manifestation to all beings (Lampe, God, 24–5). Bahá’í writings also safeguard this trinitarian view (Matthews,

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He, 54–64) against Arianism (Baillie, God, 70)—recently as soundness of the “economic Trinity” over the “immanent Trinity” also argued by Keith Ward again (Christ, part 3)—as they agree with the biblical statement that “He is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), the one “Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3), in whom “we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father” become fesh (John 1:14)—as Bahá’u’lláh translates as “Glory of God.” We are, then, (as the text of Hebrews leaves us with several potential translations of hypostasis as “express image” or “person” or “concrete nature,” and character as “person” or “essential nature” or “character”) exposed to the meaning of the “image of the nature of God” or “the person of the character of God” to resonate deeply with Bahá’u’lláh’s statement that “the invisible Essence was revealed in the person of His Manifestation” (GL, #91) who is “the Mirrors refecting the divine Essence” (KI, 66) and in whose face nothing can be seen than, and which is but (in/different from), “the face of God Himself” (GL, #13). While the Bahá’í writings can connect with the “unique” (rather than “literal”) Incarnation with its Logos-Wisdom symbolism (Hebblethwaite, Incarnation, ch. 1) and the metaphorical (sometimes wrongly called “nonincarnational”) school with its Spirit-Wisdom symbolism of the presence of God in Christ (Hick, Metaphor, ch. 10)—although claiming neither as such— and appreciate the importance all of these approaches attach to the imaginal world (malakut), the Bahá’í writings also differentiate both Logos-Wisdom and Spirit-Wisdom, like Whitehead’s dipolar God (GPW, §§25, 34–5), but by differentiating them from the apophatic Reality/God. Hence, the Bahá’í understanding can intend what a Christian trinitarian model can achieve, especially if it allows itself to reformulate classical categorical limitations in light of transreligious sensibilities. In this sense, the Bahá’í understanding of God as Trinity is, I dare to say, virtually identical with Raymond Panikkar’s trinitarian differentiation, which not only claims Christian orthodoxy but also connects closely with Hindu Brahman and Avatar symbolisms (Panikkar, Trinity, ch. 2). For Panikkar, the “Father” is the unknowable, apophatic Reality, which neither is nor is not, has no name, and is beyond any description, like nirguna brahman. The “Son” is God, that is, the Being of God. As with Whitehead’s dipolar God and the Bahá’í Writings’ primordial Manifestation (lahut), there is no other God than the Son (GPW, 200)! And the Spirit “is” the presence of “God” or presents God, which is the presence of nothing but that which Bahá’í revelation signifes as the Self of Reality/God/Truth (ch. 7). In the Spirit, the “Son” is the “God” that is (in-sists), being (in-sisting as) the Self of Reality/God (SAQ, #29); but (note the nuance:) what in-sists is the selfess (empty) Self of Reality, which “is” and remains beyond these differentiations in/different, that is, “the most manifest of the manifest and the most hidden of the hidden” (GL, #155)!

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My own early formulation of the apophatic-polyphilic pattern underlying the Christian trinitarian language has led me to the same analogical difference operating between both God and the world and between God as principium sine principio and the “other” trinitarian “persons” (Faber, Selbsteinsatz, 92–140); and in Whitehead’s structure of an event (Faber, Trinity, 137–72), between its creative well (initial aim) and its expressions in mentalphysical polarity in combination with its twofold process of concrescence and transition (GPW, 197–200). I understand “analogical difference” as that difference in which the “unity” of the difference is not of any (numerical or substantial) identity or similarity, but of infnite dissimilarity between Reality and everything else, be it the Word, the Spirit, or the world, but, at the same time, from this apophatic hiddenness as the active self-engaging of Reality (Selbsteinsatz) in the “other” (the Logos, the Spirit, the world) as “its” very self-expression in (elevating the other into “its”) similarity. If so, we may gain a surprisingly resonant set of conceptual symbols with which to understand the Bahá’í reservation against both the classical formulation of the “consubstantiality” between God and Logos-Wisdom as well as Wisdom-Spirit—which Cobb, on a Whiteheadian, basis shares, since the whole category of “substance” is given up on in process thought (Cobb, Christ, 170)—and the Christian rejection of their “subordination” to Reality—which presupposes again a reiterated understanding of divine “substance”—alike. In fact, both of these categorical patterns would only be simplifcations of the “analogical process” of the apophatic self-engagement, in which “it” remains the apophatic Reality of which anything is only known through “its” self-engagement in the Will, Word, Wisdom, Spirit, and Mind of God, while what is known is its apophatic essence as such, that is, “its” very unknowability (Faber, Selbsteinsatz, 434–9). In these manifest modes of divine “selfsimilarization” (the Manifestations), Reality is not only passively visible but absolutely engaged such that in “its” Manifestations (as Word, Spirit, and in the infnite attributes enfolded at the innermost heart of the existence and all existents of the worlds) nothing remains but Reality. The light of Reality, as Bahá’u’lláh (GL, #19) and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (SAQ, #59) say, mirrors “itself” (“its” Self) as “Godhead, Divinity, Supreme Singleness, and Inmost Essence” (GL, #22) in “its” becoming manifest (zuhur-i haqq) to the world in in/difference and in-sistence. If Incarnation is about the Word and Glory of God become fesh (John 1:14), what are we to make of Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration that the “whole world hath been set ablaze by the Word of thy Lord, the All-Glorious, a Word softer than the morning breeze. It hath been manifested in the form of the human temple, and through it God hath quickened the souls of the sincere among His servants. In its inner essence, this Word is the living water by which God hath purifed the hearts of such as have turned unto Him” (SLH, 135)? That

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this “glorifcation” is in no way a docetic evanescence of the humanity of the Manifestation is obvious when we add Bahá’u’lláh’s confrmation that all Manifestations “are in the fesh” of the world of becoming: although they are “sent down from God, assert His ascendancy over all the peoples and kindreds of the earth, and claim Himself to be the goal of all creation,” they “have been subject to poverty and affictions, to hunger, and to the ills and chances of this world,” they “were subject to such needs and wants” that all humans are, appeared “in the image of mortal man, with such human limitations as eating and drinking, poverty and riches, glory and abasement, sleeping and waking,” and were defned by “the tribulations, the poverty, the ills, and the degradation” heaped on them (KI, 73). It is precisely the acceptance of the infnite worlds of God in which Manifestations appear at once differently—from the in/difference of lahut and the transhistorical differentiation of their sphere of their message (amr) in malakut, to their historical, unique, and limited appearance as human beings in the world of becoming (nasut)—that makes understandable that they are in different contexts shining with divinity or humanity, with translucency or human limitations. This “nomadic” at-one-ness of the worlds “in the person” of the Manifestation, as in the vertical line (ba) of the image of the Bahá’í ringstone symbol of the Most Great Name (Figure 1), cut through all (potentially misunderstood) stratifcations and allows for the vast religious differences to become contrasting layers of depth and divine engagement, far reaching beyond the dogmatic limitations and mutual oppositions into their coincidence of these opposites of divinity and kenosis, personality and transpersonal in/difference (ch. 7). Were any of the all-embracing Manifestations of God to declare: “I am God!” He, verily, speaketh the truth, and no doubt attacheth thereto. For it hath been repeatedly demonstrated that through their Revelation, their attributes and names, the Revelation of God, His name and His attributes, are made manifest in the world. . . . And were any of them to voice the utterance: “I am the Messenger of God,” He also speaketh the truth, the indubitable truth. . . . And were they all to proclaim: “I am the Seal of the Prophets,” they verily utter but the truth, beyond the faintest shadow of doubt. For they are all but one person, one soul, one spirit, one being, one revelation. . . . And were they to say: “We are the servants of God,” this also is a manifest and indisputable fact. For they have been made manifest in the uttermost state of servitude, a servitude the like of which no man can possibly attain. . . . Were the eye of discernment to be opened, it would recognize that in this very state, they have considered themselves utterly effaced and nonexistent in the face of Him Who is the All-Pervading, the Incorruptible. (GL, #22)

And if “the doctrine of the Trinity really asserts . . . that it is God’s very nature not only to create fnite persons whom He could love, and to reveal and

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impart Himself to them, even to the point of incarnation (through His eternal Word) but also to extend this indwelling to those men who fail to obey Him, doing in them what they could not do themselves, supplying to them obedience He requires them to render (through His Holy Spirit),” if “this outgoing love of God, His self-giving” really “is of the eternal nature and essence of God” (Baillie, God, 122–3), then isn’t that which the following quote from Bahá’u’lláh, condensed as it is, with ease demonstrates as the non-conformal, but multi-directionally “nomadic” integration of the branching divergences of religions and schools on questions of Incarnation and its diverse alternatives such that the vast desert of the Christological, the trinitarian, and the interreligious discussions may be transformed into a transreligious diverse Garden of many forms and colors, all of them under the same sun and rain of Reality?

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These Suns of Truth are the universal Manifestations of God in the worlds of His attributes and names. Even as the visible sun that assisteth, as decreed by God, the true One, the Adored, in the development of all earthly things, such as the trees, the fruits, and colors thereof, the minerals of the earth, and all that may be witnessed in the world of creation, so do the divine Luminaries, by their loving care and educative infuence, cause the trees of divine unity, the fruits of His oneness, the leaves of detachment, the blossoms of knowledge and certitude, and the myrtles of wisdom and utterance, to exist and be made manifest. Thus it is that through the rise of these Luminaries of God the world is made new, the waters of everlasting life stream forth, the billows of loving-kindness surge, the clouds of grace are gathered, and the breeze of bounty bloweth upon all created things. It is the warmth that these Luminaries of God generate, and the undying fres they kindle, which cause the light of the love of God to burn fercely in the heart of humanity. It is through the abundant grace of these Symbols of Detachment that the Spirit of life everlasting is breathed into the bodies of the dead. (KI, 33)

If we take into account the process approach, especially of John Cobb, that neither mixes nor divides the divine and the human constitution of Christ, but integrates them with both the presence of God in any event (as its Eros, instigating every event’s “initial aim”)—much like Spirit-Christology thoroughly recognizing the evolutionary and immanent divine movement toward the Manifestation of God in a human “person”—and the presence of the primordial (and consequent) nature “itself” (its Self) in this “person,” we may come closer to the Bahá’í reservation against both a mere metaphoric of divine presence and hulul as deepest possible interpretations of the “two-fold nature” and the “two stations” of events of Manifestations. If we also include Whitehead’s understanding of “incarnation” as that of God as Eros in all events of all worlds (AI, 198), we hold a powerful explanatory instrument to at least refute any simplifcations lurking in Adoptianism (essentially human,

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not divine), Docetism (essentially divine, not human), Arianism (neither human nor divine), and all forms of mixtures, exchanges, and fusions of lahut and nasut in the “person” of the Manifestation. But we may also become able to see through extreme oppositions built up between these Christian views and Dharmic alternatives such as Avatars or Buddha: They all want to present us, by whatever intellectual instruments imagined, with the presence of Reality “in person” in the human being. Being such an embodiment of the self-revelation of Reality/God, these Manifestations of Reality resonate with our inherent touch of the divine Eros, and they motivate us to express this spark in the realization of the Harmony of Harmonies (AI, 295–6). We may still be far from grasping the deep meanings of Bahá’u’lláh’s claim to be the expression of (the Self-revelation of) Reality, the zuhur al-Haqq, but oppositional patterns are, as Bahá’u’lláh teaches in the Tablet to Jamal-i Burujirdi, not the way to uncover these meanings. What I have tried to demonstrate with these three examples is that the relativity of oneness in multiplicity, of nonviolence, and of contrasting confuences mediated through events of novelty is far from being an expression of the all-pervasive commodifcation, potluck collection, irrelevant choosing (making no difference), nihilistic fragmentation, and disappearance of spiritual depth, diagnosed as the religious situation of our time (Rasor, Faith, ch. 3). Transreligious relativity is not an expression of the tragic, postmodern, debilitating relativism or even an agent working for the inevitable loss of religious identity and for a hopeless syncretism (ch. 4)—but their de/construction. Bahá’u’lláh’s claim of the mutual relativity, surrelative unity, and polyphilic multiplicity of all Manifestations and all religions is not “the end” of Truth/Reality, but the transreligious appearance (theophany, incarnation, revelation) of Reality/Truth. It demonstrates how, today, a prophetic voice can, under the postmodern condition of mutual cultural, social, political exclusion and the global binaries of winners and losers, elites and marginalities, address the oneness of humanity and the ecologies of the world as the very condition of the overcoming of the shortfalls of these current conditions. This transreligious relativity is not articulated in opposition to Truth, but is, as “its” relativity, “its” very expression—responsive to the overcoming of binaries of race, class, sex, religious exclusivism, and war (Hayes, Peace, ch. 4; Ikeda and Teherani, Civilization, 31; Lee, Circle, passim), responsible for a new spirituality and ethics of virtue (virtual) multiplicity, coinherence, and novelty, and loyal to the events of peace that resonate with our inherent desire for its realization (PT, part 2). If, contrary to my hope, all of these (and many other) questions concerning mutual understanding and misunderstanding between (and often within) religions, schools of thought, and cultural embodiments of conceptualities, seem not to contribute much practical value in light of the predicaments that

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humanity faces today and the driving forces of peace-making, ecological recovery, and postcolonial emancipation, questions of the future of humanity in its various political, social, cultural, and ideological diversifcations and clashes, I would respond: They are, in fact, always waiting to reappear with destructive force as long as they are not addressed directly and as important element in the creation of horizons for, and methods to achieve, transreligious peace. The insight into the relativity of religious truth must not be mistaken as a detour, or even distraction, from the enormous hindrances of any other nature for the unifcation of humanity into a future civilization of peace, because we always need to clear again the conditions of our thinking and probe where alternatives may lead us. However, as the categories of our thought with which we construct our worlds, infuse our experiences, and uphold the landscapes of our orientation, are part of a wider sphere that creates blockages on the way to reconciliation, I will now turn to questions that relate the relativity of truth and the motivation for transreligious peace to matters of the transformation of civilization.

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Theopoetics and Cosmopolity

This last chapter will, in the series of the last three chapters, return once more to the relativistic gate of transreligious connectivity and close the series of all nine chapters with the question of the truth of transreligious relativity, considering the good (the “ought”) of omnirelativity in the interest of peace. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has given us this insight with a strong conviction: “It is evident that the fundamentals of religion are intended to unify and bind together; their purpose is universal, everlasting peace” (PUP, #41). This conviction houses one disturbing element: the tempestuous ocean of divine revelation within this transreligious journey of humanity, which, although it may be embedded in and surrounded by providence, resists simple logic and logos, but is driven instead by aesthetics and (what Deleuze calls) the nomos of polyphilic multiplicity (TDM, ch. 3). It lives from the unprecedented and the surprising, from novelty and (what Whitehead calls) adventure (AI, ch. 19). The truth of this nomos is concerned with the potentials for the future of a peaceful civilization for which “spiritualization” does not mean to become a fugitive from the world of becoming and perishing (TDM, ch. 10). Instead, we may live to embrace a “concept of Civilization” that “remains inherently incomplete.” As we reach “for the premises implicit in all reasoning,” a “gap” indicates its fulfllment to wait “amid the dim recesses of [our] ape-like consciousness and beyond the reach of dictionary language” beyond any “logical argument” (AI, 295): So is all Adventure; but Adventure belongs to the essence of civilization. The incompleteness of the concept relates to the notion of Transcendence, the feeling essential for Adventure, Zest, and Peace. This feeling requires for its understanding that we supplement the notion of the Eros by including it in the concept

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of an Adventure in the Universe as One. This Adventure embraces all particular occasions but as an actual fact stands beyond any one of them. (AI, 295)

In the process of this self-transcendence, we will (have to) lose the ability to just name ultimate Reality as our point of “literal” reference, of a truth that—like the Dao—is exempt from the complex evolution of symbolism and meaning in our becoming human in a vast world of becoming (ch. 3). Yet, we may also learn to embrace the dawning truth of this adventure not as one that forces us to return to silence, to hope for a fnal state beyond suffering, to seek the overcoming of the world, to surrender to our return to the silence of the graves, or to escape into a realm of motionless perfection. Instead, we may reconcile ourselves to a world of becoming in which its process without beginning and end and within it the divine efforts for harmony and intensity can express the very meaning of this chaosmic adventure itself: this Process in the infnite movement of Reality/God is the “form” of the Oneness of the Universe (AI, 150), and Reality is the Truth of its Adventure (AI, 296). This “Adventure of the Universe as One” (AI, 295) is not aimless, as it is moved by love, fueled by beauty, and directed toward overcoming of all coercion toward a “Civilized Universe” (MT, 103). As it lacks fnality and is always pregnant with novel possibilities streaming from the nature of Reality, it is Wisdom that holds its becoming together as a cosmopolity (RM, 160), Compassion that feels, and is felt by, all Life by the heart of existence (PR, 351), and theopoetics that inspires the awe of this mystery always anew (PR, 346). We may only be comforted by the faith that the infnite horizon of Reality/ God/Truth is always present in “it/self,” in “its” (manifest) Self (Faber, Tears, 96–7), motivated by love: that “from the beginning that has no beginning to the end that has no end, a perfect Manifestation has always existed” (SAQ, #50), “He [who] is that End for Whom no end in all the universe can be imagined, and for Whom no beginning in the world of creation can be conceived” (KI, 168). As the Manifestations of love strive “to establish the Cause of Universal Peace” (WOB, 37) in “the world of existence, this endless universe, [that] has no beginning” (SAQ, #47) and “that has no end” (SAQ, #50), the world of becoming lives from the “divine bestowals [that] are, therefore, without beginning, without end. God is infnite; the works of God are infnite; the bestowals of God are infnite” (PUP, #57). 1. THE NEW AXIAL AGE It is an interesting thought experiment to consider whether and to what extent Karl Jaspers, when he introduced the concept of the Axial Age (Origin, ch. 1), was conscious of the fact that he actually lived in the middle of a New

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Axial Age (ibid., 193–213). In Jasper’s view, the epoch that issued in the great civilizations of Greece, Syria, Persia, India, and China was preceded by an age of disturbing complexity, itself being “an interregnum between two ages of great empire” (ibid., 51), harboring new possibilities of experimentation. Maybe Jaspers evaluates this time between the eighth and the second century B.C. to have been “a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness” (Jaspers, Origin, 51) much like the Renaissance, when in a transitional mental and cultural space the German Roman Empire and the Kingdom of France in the North and the papal Kingdom to the South had cancelled out their infuences (Burckhardt, Civilization, part 5) on Northern Italy, and precisely like Whitehead’s dictum that “Life lurks in the interstices” (PR, 105) of organization. Although we might be unsure about the dating of some of the related developments and fgures, it was roughly a time in which the great philosophical and religious movements, personages, and scriptural texts that still infuence our world today were leaving their indelible mark on all facets of human civilizational development: Laozi and Confucius and all the other great schools of Chinese thought; the Upanishads, Mahavira, and the Buddha in India; Zarathustra in Persia; the great Hebrew prophets in Palestine; Homer and the birth of Greek philosophy; but also the counter-movements of skepticism and materialism, atheism and relativism— all had their thriving (ibid., 2). It ft Jasper’s existentialist philosophical bend to highlight resonating features of those times for which religious and philosophical streams, and prominent personages, as they engage in questions of existence and elevated human existence itself into prominence, are far more important than coping with the necessities of life, of warfare, economic survival, or living in the grip of the fate of a vast and unpredictable nature. And, although this concept had and has its critics, especially in times of postmodern reconsiderations of differences and divergences over comparative simplifcations (MacCullock, Axis, passim), what may be a lasting insight of Jasper’s “naming of this event” (ch. 6) is that two paradoxical moments seem to build up the backbone of the “axiality” of an age: frst, its diverse movements occur in between sedimented religious, political, social, and cultural orders and fxed power structures imposing their regime—freed from the archaic past and not yet settled into modern ages of again highly stratifed and organized powers, or, at least, they happen amid imperial claims for the organization of the world of becoming against, and devoid of, the feared interstitial space for axial thriving; second, the axial movements occur with their own universal proclamations regarding the nature and meaning of humanity in between and mediating the spheres of the universe and a divine, raising new questions regarding humanity’s purpose in light of the equally new consciousness of the human predicament. It is a liminal space (Thomassen, Anthropology,

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321–42), born from the awareness of the impossibility for controlling orders to succeed, but paradoxically suggesting another order of salvation (from the human predicament) on a universal scale. In this sense, the Axial Age might be looked at as the birth of a chaosmos of freedom of thought and universal refection on a humanity that has lost its fxed and ordained place in the universe, thereby releasing a plethora of (political) powers, but without being able to create the means for, and sometimes even without desiring to set the rules for, a new universal order of salvation that even the social organization of the future and the political powers will have to follow, although, conversely, these powers have used the axial insights to strengthen and settle their dominions again. While Zoroaster’s insight was universal by being profoundly ethical (the difference between good and evil lies in good thought, speech, and acting), the Zoroastrian priesthood became the backbone of the Persian Empire (Boyce, Zoroastrians, chs. 2, 5); Confucius sought a king who would realize his vision of order, but Confucianism became the backbone of Chinese political power structures for centuries to come (Smart, Religions, 112–21); Plato’s infamous vision of dictatorship of the philosopher-king in his Republic fortunately never worked (Republic, 1–4); the ideal Buddhist human being besides the Buddha was the Chakravarti king, the turner of the wheel of the order of the universe (Lopez, Story, 181–3), and Emperor Asoka came close to its incarnation by building a globally inclined empire (Kitagawa, Quest, 41–2); Jesus wanted the Kingdom of God, but Christianity became the backbone of the order of the Roman Empire. This paradox of chaosmic freedom of existence and the desire for universal order inherent in the search for salvation, the paradox between individuation, complexifcation, and divergence, on the one side, and the universal Kingdom of God or the ordering of the world according to the Dharma, on the other hand, cancel one another out: If this “kingdom” was ever reached, the condition under which the whole movement of liberation started would be erased. But will we have reached salvation from freedom, then, or of freedom (from oppression)? In the axial paradox lies deeply engrained the problem we still face today and that the present considerations are meant to address, namely, of the always-uneasy relation between freedom and organization, religion and polity, and especially of the explosive nature of a freedom that discovers its own universal relevance and necessarily becomes entangled in the mutual exclusivist claims for universal superiority as it diverges into the diverse philosophical and religious systems it produces. It makes sense to assume that Jaspers discovered such an axial pattern right at the time that might have felt the same complexities: the new kinds of universal wars (WMDs, the global reach of incitement of violence, and state terrorism), the political and economic revolutions, the totalitarian political ideologies, secularism, scientifc discoveries, social fragmentation, and

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capitalistic stratifcation of societies—all with a halo of global entitlement. It makes sense, then, to name this current age the Second Axial Age and to seek the roots of this new uncertainty in the Enlightenment movement from which it was released (Armstrong, Transformation, 356), but also to follow the current patterns of deconstruction of its trajectories in the midst of new global demands for many rivaling orders to be applied universally (Bondaranko, Second Axial Age, 113–36). The axial paradox is still the same, but it has a new surface (Lambert, Religion, 303–33). While the rivalry between the orders that hatched from the old axial claims of universality is still intact (Christianity against Islam, West against East), it has a new facet: The mutually assured destruction of all contenders, born from their global interdependence, has led many religious and political movements either to fall back on the archaic claim of superiority (colonizing with parochial unity) or to relax into a secularized public space of free-foating forces either in the form of democratic or green or postmodern movements (chaosmic universality without common patterns). In the midst of all claims of universality, postmodern prophets like Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze, Irigaray, Kristeva (Gutting, Philosophy, chs. 8–11), or Butler (Faber and Stephenson, Secret, passim), who have diagnosed the death of all global myths and meta-narratives (Best and Kellner, Theory, ch. 2), the end of universalizing colonialism, and the death of the (modern) Subject, act as counter-weight in race for a new “paradigm” or (even less pretentious) “strategy” (rather than “order”) that would not repeat the error of the old Axial Age inherent in its seemingly unavoidable dialectic of chaosmic freedom and sedimented power structures. Instead, their new “universality of mutual limitation and inclusion” would seek new ways to address global peace beyond the modernist hierarchical stratifcations of class, race, gender, and prestige—beyond that which Deleuze calls the arboreal paradigm (Prologue)—in a rhizomatic uncertainty, indetermination, and de-systematization of all global claims of fxed, right, and defnitive structures and fantasies of superior order (ch. 3). These new postmodern paradigms are easily misunderstood as the culprit of nihilistic relativism, the loss of orientation, the vanquishing of responsibilities toward humanity, the care for the world at large, and so on (Rasor, Faith, ch. 3; Kluge, Postmodernism, 61–178; idem, Relativism, 179–238; Saiedi, Gate, 7–14)—and this accusation is understandable since the postmodern social condition of seemingly endless consumerism, weightless local constructions of meaning, global capitalism, debilitating relativism, and the commodifcation of everything, including any serious attempt to articulate Reality, is the very context in which, and against which, such new paradigms arose and arise (Lyon, Postmodernity, chs. 5–6). Yet, if one is perceptive enough and inclined to see the prophetic voice in the philosophical articulation of postmodernity (Faber, Introduction, 1–50),

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the opposite is true (Faber, Intermezzo, 212–38): Those “characteristics” of the postmodern condition were the logical outcome of the paradox of modernity, on the one hand, to further the Subject and Reason, independence and universality, but, on the other hand, to create capitalism, the fragmentation of the Subject, the mutual isolation of all spheres of life, the stratifcation of societies on a global scale, and the disappearance of ethical and spiritual responsibility as well as human agency, as the modernist “paradigm” was built on commodifcation, slavery, genocide, holocaust, and the exclusion and marginalization of minorities and the masses (Rasor, Faith, ch. 3). What postmodernity as philosophy, at its best, recovers is the voices of minorities, the differentiations of cultures, traditions, and religious diversities within and beneath the global colonization of Modernity, which ought to be heard. What seems to be postmodernity’s “fragmentation” is really the recovery of the univocity of all voices (ch. 2), and its “deconstruction” is not destruction and fragmentation, but the recovery of the complex multiplicity of our existence (Deleuze, Regimes, 304) and of the manifold of exclusions (Best and Kellner, Philosophy, chs. 7–8) with which those colonial constructions left the body of humanity dead on the side of the road (ch. 4). Justice is for the new postmodern mind within the postmodern human condition that which cannot be deconstructed, but deconstructs all injustices (Derrida, Force, 3–67); and it is its messianic expectation for justice that motivates its counter-cultural openings for a peace beyond totalizing orders (Caputo, Prayers, chs. 2–3). The question is: Can religion play a role in such an endeavor (Bryden, Deleuze, 1–6; Sherewood and Hart, Derrida, chs. 2, 6)? Can it escape the axial paradox (Greenway, Belief, chs. 6–8)? Can it contribute to peace without being the death-knell to the consciousness of the chaosmic freedom that created its desire for peace in the frst place (Faber and Keller, Taste, 180–207)? And can, in this New Axial Age, religion—and humanity—escape total secularization (mere naturalism), total desecration (mere atheism), and total re-sacralization (mere integralism) alike (TDM, ch. 15)? We may fnd signs of such a new consciousness, a new spirit of religiosity, even of a new spiritualization of the secular global world (Kurtz, Gods, chs. 6–7) or an awareness that the peaceful rhizomes of togetherness will not do without spiritual awakening, at least in the long run (Keller, Cloud, part 3). But the movements that exhibit these signs will not necessarily in themselves be either aware of the axial paradox, or they might still work from within its “old” frame (Kepel, Revenge, passim), or they might be unable to imagine solutions beyond the paradox’s deadly viciousness (Berger, Desecularization, passim). Nevertheless, we live in a time of religious and spiritual resurgence, of even new secular spiritualities beyond the sometimes shiny, but really bland materialisms of Capitalism and Marxism alike (Rue, Religion, ch. 1); a time of the emergent evidence for the misgivings of a materialism of the mind (Kelly,

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Mind, ch. 9); a time of interreligious dialogue at least supplementing missions for visions of superiority (Panikkar, Dialogue, chs. 3–4); a time of the New Age as an understandable disappointment with any or at least the old organization of the Spirit (Visser, Wilber, ch. 6); a time of interspirituality and intercontemplative movements, even the new embrace of the perennial insight in mystical unity of all religious ways (Teasdale, Heart, chs. 1–4); a time of spiritual and religious hybridity where mature individuals are not fnding themselves only welded to one articulation of Reality by chance of their birth and rearing (Cornille, Mansions, 1–6); a time of intense search for truth in sometimes syncretistic, but really rather sympathic (ch. 4) or transformational manner, uniting the insights of divergent traditions to interpret the fullness or emptiness of one’s heart, or falling in love with foreign and strange ways of elucidating what one feels deeply (Panikkar, Dialogue, chs. 9–10); a time of a new global spiritual consciousness of our ecological embededness in rhythms of the Earth (Tucker and Grimm, Worldviews, passim); a time that may force us to cooperate globally if we want humanity to survive at all, mostly despite the multiple convictions of competitive superiority (more of religious leaders and activists that the generality of humanity) often defned as mutually exclusive “civilizations” (Ramadan, Quest, ch. 13); a time that sometimes may even be guided by a new enlightenment: the insight into the global and ecological oneness of humanity and Earth in a vast cosmos (Elgin, Universe, 1–18). The real insight of this age that, if we grasp it (as it is already grasped by many), could be named a New Axial Age, would be this ability, by apprehension or at least by inevitability, to seek global peace from the roots of spiritual relativity (Faber, Process, 6–20). While there may still be a long way to be gone for this insight and conviction to become realized and activated, and while its eventual form might be hidden behind the cloud of our future decisions, the events we will create, the histories we will thread, yet the insight itself is new, its quality is unprecedented, its power is different. It does not seek the mutual exclusions and sedimentations of the Old Axial Age, but life; it does not desire an order or organization that stops movement, but lives from apophatic modesty and in affrmation of polyphilic becoming. It seeks the peace promised by the Garden of Relativity. We have already seen how Whitehead’s philosophy of process and relationality reformulates the problem of freedom and order by eliminating the unilateral stability of substances and essences (chs. 7–8) with the relational becoming of events (ch. 1); where any (not only the human) society is a living organism of diversity the unity of which is both that of stabilizing patterns and of khoric self-emptying; where unity in diversity does neither hinder freedom of divergence nor movements of convergences, but prefers (with Deleuze) “nomadic” connectivity of differences over “monadic” subsumption under the same (TDM, ch. 2). Even God for Whitehead seeks “intensity,

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and nor preservation” (PR, 105), and the harmony of harmonies of the making of Reality is not a logos that “lies upon the universe as an iron necessity,” but a nomos that by the “rule” of aesthetic freedom, intensity, beauty, and harmony, stands always before (in rank and in the tense of the future) the chaosmos “as a living ideal moulding the general fux in its broken progress towards fner, subtler issues” (SMW, 18). God’s activity is not coercive (AI, 166–7) such that it takes basically the whole human history to gain this insight (which is still out there to be grasped)—the insight that constitutes the New Axial Age: that peace is self-transcendence without oppression, the motive force of the Spirit against the demands of petrifcation of order (AI, 295–6). This Peace is the name of Reality, its Wisdom and Compassion (AI, 285). This Reality/God is in “its” Wisdom the polyphilic inspiration of a diverse world, the instigation of creative forces resisting any sedimentation and suspension of the life-movement by any grave-rest (GPW, §35); and this Reality/God is in “its” Compassion the transformative measure for Truth (TDM, ch. 11):

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The truth itself is nothing else than how the composite natures of the organic actualities of the world obtain adequate representation in the divine nature. Such representations compose the “consequent nature” of God, which evolves in its relationship to the evolving world without derogation to the eternal completion of its primordial conceptual nature. (PR, 12–3)

This relativity of Truth does not seek the “rightness” of my beliefs, articulations, symbols, and religious institutions, but it always will seek the “rightness in things” (RM, 66) to guide us, not with the sword, but like the “character, apprehended as we apprehend the character of our friends” (RM, 61), refecting the image of Reality for us to participate in, and to imitate the goodness of “its” Manifestations (RM, 18–9) and to always attain to greater goodness in the process (RM, 155–6). Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas presents human history as a long and slow struggle in which the disguised violence of religious authority is dismantled as the compulsive impulse to follow the animalist instincts of being “better” in the image of human fantasies of power and prestige. And like Bahá’u’lláh before him (GL, #113), Whitehead differentiates from this history of power the intentions of the great religious traditions and their founding fgures: they were not seeking the power of universal superiority, but the spiritual depth of a peace that is engendered by the enlightened selfess Self (ch. 7) and realized by the transformation of humanity into a civilization that must be motivated by self-transcendence (AI, 295). The life of Christ is not an exhibition of over-ruling power. Its glory is for those who can discern it, and not for the world. Its power lies in its absence of force. It

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has the decisiveness of a supreme ideal, and that is why the history of the world divides at this point of time. (RM, 57)

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That the Manifestations of the Self of Reality throughout the ages sought this “force without power” as the Way (Dao), the Dharma, the “straight Path,” that Reality demands them to endure and promote is attested by Bahá’u’lláh (TB, 171). It is by the implications of this absence of seeking superiority through power that they can “expect” to be countered with the physical forces and the religious, intellectual, psychological, and political powers of the time in which they appear, making their suffering the expression of Truth/Reality (PT, #38), and the “omnipotence” of God/Reality, which the times “expect” to be dictatorial and coercive (TB, 117–20), in their bodies to be transformed into divine suffering (HW. P, #52). But therewith they express the power of Reality itself as one of nonviolence (GPB, 132), of persuasiveness (PT, #22), of beauty; not one of the fst, but of the heart (PT, #27), directed toward a harmony in which divergence lives and breathes and intensifes the character of the peace intended (SAB, #225). It is this universal peace through the Truth of self-transcendence (AI, 295) that eliminates all confusion with physical forces that marks, makes or breaks, for Whitehead, the new era of the divine poetics. Divine theopoetics is the poetics of God as the Poet of the World who does not engage in the “combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force,” but leads “with tender patience” the world of becoming. And it is by God’s poetic “vision of truth, beauty, and goodness” and “in the patient operation of” divine “harmonization” that God “saves it [the world]: or, more accurately, [that God] is the poet of the world” (PR, 346). It is this relativity of harmonization that constitutes the heart of Bahá’u’lláh’s (authority to claim) revelation (wahy) of peace for a New Axial Age, which he sees inaugurated with his proclamation of universal transreligious relativity: O people of the earth! The frst Glad-Tidings, which the Mother Book hath, in this Most Great Revelation, imparted unto all the peoples of the world is that the law of holy war hath been blotted out from the Book. Glorifed be the AllMerciful, the Lord of grace abounding, through Whom the door of heavenly bounty hath been fung open in the face of all that are in heaven and on earth. The second Glad-Tidings: It is permitted that the peoples and kindreds of the world associate with one another with joy and radiance. O people! Consort with the followers of all religions in a spirit of friendliness and fellowship. Thus hath the daystar of His sanction and authority shone forth above the horizon of the decree of God, the Lord of the worlds. (TB, 21–2)

Bahá’u’lláh’s proclamation captures the essence of the novelty of this New Axial Age in the awareness that Reality must be sought without promotion

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of violence or the feeling of superiority of one’s own parochial perspective (PT, #41). This revelation lives from, and wants to awake us to, the (prehensive) insight that Truth/Reality is apophatically and polyphilically one. So, “when you meet those whose opinions differ from your own, do not turn away your face from them. All are seeking truth, and there are many roads leading thereto. Truth has many aspects, but it remains always and forever one” (PT, #15). In Bahá’u’lláh’s view, it is the novelty of the New Axial Age that the desires and visions of the religions of the frst Axial Age of the Day of God, of the coming of the Kingdom, of the reign of justice, of the golden age, “which must successively lead a bleeding humanity, wretchedly oblivious of its God, and careless of Bahá’u’lláh, from its calvary to its ultimate resurrection” (PDC, 124), has become event. It is the insight of the New Axial Age that it does not just “dream” of such a peace, as it knows it as always already pervading the world as Truth/Reality/God (AI, 285–6), but perceives a translucency that releases an awakening to such a transformation: indeed, that we can gain the ability to recognize that the “day is approaching when We will have rolled up the world and all that is therein, and spread out a new order in its stead” (GL, 143). It is the consciousness of the New Axial Age, from a Bahá’í perspective, that we are not anymore just entertaining an idea of peace, waiting for it to happen, but that we concede its event and perceive its becoming as a process actually happening now. It is because of this new consciousness, this sudden insight or realization, this awakening to Reality, that we also realize that the infnite aspects that always escape any superiority complex of parochial particularity are not lost; rather that the concreteness of the divergent movements toward peace and the universality overarching the particular events of religious identity, as they present themselves in the diverse fgures and movements, make these infnite aspects translucent to one another (GL, #22). Approachable in their relativity, relationality, connectivity, these divergences can now be understood to be in the apophatic mystery in/different from one another. Together they become expressions of transreligious Truth/Reality in its infnite facets, as they are threaded, webbed, and entangled in a chaosmic history that points to this Day, this insight, this awakened consciousness. It is the Day if we see ourselves within the becoming of this event for which it is not blasphemous, but most enlightened, to discover patterns of symbolic convergences between the Manifestations (Fazel, Approaches, 50–1) and cherish the theopoetic fuency between the religious intuitions, experiences, and universes even to the degree of their in/difference (Panikkar, Silence, 164–76). It will be an event of deep connectivity when we suddenly can see Reality in the suffering of all the Manifestations (KI, 6) and “its”/their intention to generate that which we are not yet: humanity (Saiedi, Birth, 1–28), the expression of all names and attributes of Reality/God/Truth (GL, #27). It is with this “Poetics of Religious

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Pluralism” (Cole, Poetics, 447–76) that Bahá’u’lláh can repeat the Islamic hadith “I am all the Prophets” (GL, #22; Cole, I am, 447–76), transforming our view of Reality’s engagement with the world into one process in a multiplicity of events—in exemplary manner threading through the appearance of Abraham, Moses, John the Baptizer, Jesus, Muhammad, Imam Husayn, the Báb, and Bahá’u’lláh: Praise be to Thee, O Lord My God, for the wondrous revelations of Thy inscrutable decree and the manifold woes and trials Thou hast destined for Myself. At one time Thou didst deliver me into the hands of Nimrod; at another Thou hast allowed Pharaoh’s rod to persecute Me. Thou, alone, canst estimate, through Thine all-encompassing knowledge and the operation of Thy Will, the incalculable affictions I have suffered at their hands. Again Thou didst cast Me into the prison-cell of the ungodly, for no reason except that I was moved to whisper into the ears of the well-favored denizens of Thy Kingdom an intimation of the vision with which Thou hadst, through Thy knowledge, inspired Me, and revealed to Me its meaning through the potency of Thy might. And again Thou didst decree that I be beheaded by the sword of the infdel. Again I was crucifed for having unveiled to men’s eyes the hidden gems of Thy glorious unity, for having revealed to them the wondrous signs of Thy sovereign and everlasting power. How bitter the humiliations heaped upon Me, in a subsequent age, on the plain of Karbila! How lonely did I feel amidst Thy people! To what a state of helplessness was I reduced in that land! Unsatisfed with such indignities, my persecutors decapitated Me, and, carrying aloft My head from land to land paraded it before the gaze of the unbelieving multitude, and deposited it on the seats of the perverse and faithless. In a later age, I was suspended, and My breast was made a target to the darts of the malicious cruelty of My foes. My limbs were riddled with bullets and My body was torn asunder. Finally, behold how, in this Day, My treacherous enemies have leagued themselves against Me, and are continually plotting to instill the venom of hate and malice into the souls of Thy servants. With all their might they are scheming to accomplish their purpose. . . . Grievous as is My plight, O God, My Well-Beloved, I render thanks unto Thee, and My Spirit is grateful for whatsoever hath befallen Me in the path of Thy good-pleasure. (GL, #39)

There is nothing cheap in this convergence. It does not let us forget or underestimate the divergences of the times and circumstances of these Manifestations. In their translucency, we can rather discover these divergences to be diverse facets of one thorny Garden of Reality, the bloody colors of which revealing the hidden love of God, demonstrated by every “Holy Soul [as it] accepted calamity and death in His love for mankind” (PUP, #133). We may begin to see that the events of these Manifestations resonate in all creatures, mutually undisturbed, not to the exclusion of one another, because Sinai and the Christ cry in all creatures (GL, #153; SAQ, #29), as does the call of the

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Dharma (Fozdar, Revivifcation, 51–67), in/differently in their divergence. We may learn of their intertextual and inter-symbolic (not necessary causal or historical) transreligious connectivity, their surprising convergences in a virtual space of potential foldings. Furthermore, we may discover deeper patterns of apophatic convergences (Cole, Zen Gloss, passim), why diverse holy fgures expressed Reality/God so differently: one time as an active God in history, another time as our own self; one time as no God at all, another time as a cloud of multiplicity; one time as the all in all, another time as nothingness (Panikkar, Silence, ch. 9). When Bahá’u’lláh proclaimed the inauguration of the Day “in his person” (haykal, temple) to be the advent of the promised One of all religions that “has been heralded in all the sacred Scriptures” (GL, #3), it was this confuence that became event, nonviolently, for the ones perceiving it, as the confuence of transreligious relativity in a world of becoming on its providential way toward a humanity of peace (Lundberg, Adam, 59–82). This peace demands the recognition of mutual relativity of our limited minds and limited hearts (PUP, #93) whereby becoming-humanity also means an unprecedented ecological unity with the Earth that already always had revealed this connectivity (Faber, Ecotheology, 75–115). For a last time, in Bahá’u’lláh’s words, this is the New Axial Age: They who are the beloved of God, in whatever place they gather and whomsoever they may meet must evince, in their attitude towards God, and in the manner of their celebration of His praise and glory such humility and submissiveness that every atom of the dust beneath their feet may attest the depth of their devotion. The conversation carried by these holy souls should be informed with such power that these same atoms of the dust will be thrilled by its infuence. They should conduct themselves in such manner that the earth upon which they tread may never be allowed to address them such words as these: “I am to be preferred above you. For witness, how patient I am in bearing the burden which the husbandman layeth upon me. I am the instrument that continually imparteth unto all beings the blessings with which He Who is the Source of all grace hath entrusted me. Notwithstanding the honour conferred upon me, and the unnumbered evidences of my wealth—a wealth that supplieth the needs of all creation—behold the measure of my humility, witness with what absolute submissiveness I allow myself to be trodden beneath the feet of men.” (Bahá’u’lláh, Tablet to Jamal-i Burujirdi, in Fananazapir, §6, actually translated Shoghi Effendi: GL, 5)

2. A NEW COSMOPOLITANISM (OF THE EVENT)? Religion and war are welded together. Some say it lays in the nature of religion to be divisive (Pinker, Angels, ch. 1), and we should overcome religion;

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others would view this fusion as a degeneration of the religious intuition (Lawson, Bahá’í Tradition, 137–57). Spirits may have to be discerned here. But where is the measure, whence comes the remedy? Do we need a remedy? Bahá’u’lláh’s forceful insight is that we are not welded to violence and war, that humanity has not yet developed as humanity, and that only a recognition of its unity can reconcile its differences and transform the bifurcations it so stubbornly holds on to into a mutual relativity; that we must become aware of our mutual limitations and different personal, cultural, political, ideological, and religious “places” (we call home), which are to be lived in a spiritualization the content of which is nothing other than the recognition and activation of a new character of the coordination of all of them in mutual immanence, which again equally implies also a mutual transcendence and divergence (Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, ch. 10). Whitehead has supplied this view with a philosophical framework that I have explored in some perspectives of its potential in this book. But the process perspective also generates the resources to go one step further, presenting this organic organization as an evolutionary, though never fnal, a pluralistic, though never bifurcated, process of vast, cosmic depth that exhibits in itself the measure for its own aims: that of ever-new and ever-greater intensity and harmony; that of the development of a consciousness of being involved in, and interwoven with, a diversifed, varied, and unending progression to ever-new forms of beauty, as beauty is the only self-justifcation of existence (AI, 285); that of “progressing,” if at all, not by striving for any “states” to be reached, but through processes that incarnate modes of non-coercion, wisdom and compassion, freedom and life, even an entirely liberated life (the entirely living nexus) of “persons” (khoric threads of such nexuses), which are not self-contained substances, but strains of cosmic unity of khora, the medium of intercommunication in which all worlds and universes are bound together beyond form and structure; and that of the unity of creativity, in which ever-new embodiments of self-transcendence are actualized (TDM, ch. 7). This is really a vast, pluralistic, open-ended, relational, and deeply relativistic form of cosmopolitanism (Keller, Cloud, ch. 8) in which humanity appears neither as endpoint of cosmic development (or even divine intention) nor just as an insignifcant moment of nature, but as divinely intended and still serendipitous mode of this divine cosmic consciousness (TDM, ch. 14). Should we then not, in light of this (on the one hand) ethical, prescriptive, value-creating, but also (on the other hand) serendipitous, creative, and adventurous relativity, organize ourselves, our lives, and our societies as a polis that does justice to its own essential processual nature? Should we not, in the light of the dawning of this cosmic consciousness, perform this process by explicating the values of a self-conscious and self-transcending, khoric and creative, aesthetic and compassionate, wise and peaceful cosmopolity?

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The Bahá’í writings bind ethnicities and religions together, being in the same categorical position, in their attempt to understand the scope, character, and origin of the resistance against their reconciliation (PUP, #130). For them, ethnic and religious reconciliation is neither captured by the restoration of an original state nor caught in the hope for, or the attempt to force a fnal state, but is released in a process that must be creatively evoked through its own divine nature, namely, to be the harmonization of the names and attributes of God. This mutuality includes also minorities, the excluded, and the poor, as the hoped-for or activated states of salvation, as far as religions related them to this world, are visions of mutuality in which such exclusions and structural oppression would be gone (Karlberg, Culture, ch. 4)—often couched in the image of the kingdom/realm/domain of God on Earth (SAB, #188). Yet, other than the particular horizons of liberation discourses that must strive for specifc liberations, or only if they, which today has become more prominent, strive for universal (even ecological) mutuality as their aim (Razor, Faith, ch. 6), will satisfy the Bahá’í understanding of reconciliation (Cole, Bahá’u’lláh, 79–98). As conceptualized by Plotinus’s and Leslie’s divine Mind (ch. 5), the realization of reconciliation will have to situate and actualize itself in a cosmopolitical consciousness, not one that excludes multiplicity, furthers by silence the structural racism, classism, sexism, and the cry of the excluded and the poor, but that, by spiritually unraveling these “despiritualizing” antagonisms and their deep-rooted prejudices (Perry, War, ch. 2), nevertheless and most fundamentally, knows itself as the prehension of the divine consciousness pervading the whole universe (Matthew 5:45–6; PUP, #34). The future of humanity is about this harmonization (and mutual intensifcation) of theopoetics and cosmopolity, beyond the actual and conceptual instigation of confict and warfare, from an enlightened consciousness of being infused by the divine Mind (GPW, §46), or in religious terms: to be spiritualized through, and the infusion of, the divine Spirit (PT, #51), the same “Most Great Spirit” (SLH, §50) that can be witnessed in nuclear fgures of the diverse religious history of humanity. The Bahá’í writings call these fgures Manifestations of the Self of Reality/God/Truth; or, here, the Manifestations of the Spirit that is Reality/God/Truth (SAQ, #31); or, again, the Manifestations of the Wisdom and Compassion of Reality/God/Truth (PM, #99; TB, 118). It is in this sense that Bahá’u’lláh considers the zuhur al-haqq in the maturation of humanity as zuhur al-‘aql, as the manifestation of the Mind of God—the Mind enlightened by the Spirit (PT, #54)—in humanity as a whole, as humanity fnally learns to abstain from political power of oppression and coercion (Eschraghi, Kommentar, 346–9; KA, ¶119). The Bahá’í writings also know that religions, like ethnic identities, as long as they are enmeshed in their mutual superiority complex and their theologically and cosmologically “justifed” (rationalized) mutual prejudices, are

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used for the opposite of such an enlightened cosmic zuhur-i ‘aql. That the parochial insistence on the superiority of one’s cultural and religious home as well as the corresponding entitlement to the universalization of one’s regional political power to world-domination are also instigators of grave deformations and violent corruptions of religion is attested by these harsh worlds of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, exploring Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings:

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His third teaching is that religion is a mighty stronghold, but that it must engender love, not malevolence and hate. Should it lead to malice, spite, and hate, it is of no value at all. For religion is a remedy, and if the remedy bring on disease, then put it aside. Again, as to religious, racial, national and political bias: all these prejudices strike at the very root of human life; one and all they beget bloodshed, and the ruination of the world. So long as these prejudices survive, there will be continuous and fearsome wars. To remedy this condition there must be universal peace. To bring this about, a Supreme Tribunal must be established, representative of all governments and peoples; questions both national and international must be referred thereto, and all must carry out the decrees of this Tribunal. (SAB, #202)

I will not be concerned here with the important theoretical or practical question of the form of political organization of such a future cosmopolitan society of the whole of humanity proposed by Bahá’u’lláh. He conceptualized its aim with (what Shoghi Effendi envisions as only realized in) the “Most Great Peace” (GL, #119). Yet, while it is in itself not of political, but of spiritual nature (PUP, #5), this peace does, as declared by Bahá’u’lláh, presuppose a parliament-based federation of global mutual exchange, but without centralization (WOB, 41–2), which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá defned as promoting despotism (PUP, #57). Instead, I am concerned here with the role of religions in this cosmopolitan transformation process; with their theopoetics; how religions contribute to the success of this transformation if they acknowledge their mutual relativity; in what way their apophatic negation of mutual superiority may be an expression of their maturation, realizing themselves to correspond to a vast universe that is ordered as polyphilic process; whether religions will be able to perceive themselves only to exist in the midst of an evolution toward a universal peace that, for the enlightened consciousness, was always already their “nature”; if religions can recognize Reality/Truth as the origin from which this process proceeds. The democratic, pluralistic, diversifed nature of this cosmopolitan unity is based on the peace-making proposition expressed in the theopoetics of the apophatic gate of relativity insofar as it has immediate polyphilic implications, because “within every atom are enshrined the signs that bear eloquent testimony to the revelation of that most great Light” (GL, #90). Hence, if all creatures, even the last particle of existence, reveal the infnite Wisdom

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of Reality/God, then nothing without value is real and nothing real has no value; everything participates in Truth and is a sign of Reality/God. Even if in the evolutionary emergence of humanity this universal consciousness of the Mind of God has become a different reality, liberated to its conscious recognition of oppositional diversifcations, but being enabled also to converge from oppositions to a “nomadic” unison with all becoming (or at least is meant to reach this quality), no one can in light of this universal immanence of Reality/God/Truth claim one’s superiority (Momen, Mysticism, 107–20). Bahá’u’lláh discards any hierarchical stratifcation: be they one of Suf orders or the elitist stratifcations of society. While such stratifcations were justifed by divine hierarchies and the use the image of a cascading (threefold or fvefold) “hierarchy” of mystical worlds (ch. 5), Bahá’u’lláh, instead, in the Tabernacle of Unity forcefully proclaims that in this dispensation all are in the same station (maqam): “At the time of the appearance and manifestation of the rays of the Daystar of Truth, all occupy the same station” (TU, #3:11). And in the Tablet of Unity (96–7), Bahá’u’lláh in even stronger terms decrees the very absence of (any possible claim to) whatsoever rank or station for the new age his revelation inaugurates, not only for his community but humanity (Momen, Tablet of Unity, 93–4). No difference, whether of status or knowledge, of righteousness or depth of mystical maturity, may be used to create spiritual bifurcation or stratifcation. This “oneness of humanity” is (with Deleuze) one of univocity, of “equality” (PUP, #100), “reciprocity and cooperation” (PUP, #102). It is based on, and correlates with, the cosmic mutuality that is fundamentally one of mutual reciprocity of all creatures since “mutual aid, assistance, and interaction are among their intrinsic properties and are the cause of their formation, development, and growth” (SAQ, #46). While there can be ecological stratifcations of societies of organisms embedded in wider societies and organisms and being themselves the milieu of further organisms and societies (PR, 96–105), all of them are inhabiting the non-social nexus of khora (GPW, §22) and, hence, are immediate expressions of the incarnation of the “Supreme Eros” of God in all creatures (AI, 198), providing them with their own possible greatness for realization (RM, 155). The human polis is embedded in this evolutionary process of cosmic societies in the contrasting movements of patterned organization and liberated non-social living nexuses (Faber, Bodies, 200–26) that create the conditions for the cosmic rise of consciousness (Faber, Intermezzo, 212–38). In the adoption of mutuality and its spiritualization toward peace, the polis becomes the very expression of the Mind of God (GPW, §§44, 46). It is this insight that makes all the difference between parochial, ethnically, or religiously based tribalism and a differentiated cosmopolitanism (RM, 23–41): that “the religions agree” and “the nations [become] one, so that they may see each other as one family

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and the whole earth as one home” in which all may “live together in perfect harmony” (PUP, #41). The cosmopolitan theorist Heikki Patomäki, in his overview of the history of cosmopolitanism from antiquity to the present, suggests his own critical version of it, crediting four personalities from the turn of the 19th century with introducing this new cosmopolitanism, among them prominently Bahá’u’lláh. He detects that “the early 21st century science seems to be moving toward the world views of Kant, Krause, Bahá’u’lláh, K’ang, and Wells.” It embraces (again) that there is “more coherence and connectedness to the universe than previously appreciated,” assumes that “morality has emerged from the process of cosmic evolution,” and engages in considerations of “global governance, sustainability, justice and democracy” (Patomäki, Sources, 199–200). Patomäki’s inclusion of Kant’s promulgation of a cosmopolitan society, although limited to Europe (Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch), is based on the strong connection between cosmology and morality that he sees Kant to have declared a “necessity.” The conclusion of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason states:“Two things fll the mind with ever-new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we refect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within” (Kant, Critique, 360). Although it was the critique of Whitehead that Kant cannot really express this relationality (ch. 6) because of his mutual isolation between mind and matter, self and physical universe, epistemology and metaphysics, and because he was missing a processual and prehensive understanding of how to be “feeling” the world and to be this feeling (PR, 113), nevertheless, it was at least Kant’ intention to “connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence” (Kant, Critique, 360–1) and to insist on “universal and necessary connections” (ibid., 361) “between the starry heavens and moral law.” Kant was “thus maintaining that consciousness, morality and reason—far from being arbitrary—have cosmic grounds” (Patomäki, Sources, 191). Bahá’u’lláh, in his restatement of the archaic Hermetic maxim “as above, so below” and by adopting the long tradition of correspondences between macro- and microcosm (ch. 7) that was already expressed in Plotinus (Brown, Hermes, 153–87), is of the same conviction, but with an evolutionary twist: that, frst, all worlds are reverberations of the primordial Manifestation (the Mind) of Reality (and pervaded by the Spirit); second, that by the cyclical coming of Manifestations spirituality and morality must evolve toward the consciousness of diversifed unity without opposition in the emergence of a civilization of peace (Taylor, Reality, 143–87); and, third, that such a cosmopolitan consciousness has, in the long run, evolved through a process that comprises the emergence of the Earth itself and of humanity on it in the evolution of the cosmic matrix (Mehanian and Friberg, Religion, 55–93), and develops itself through different stages of spiritual maturity to the eventual

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kairos of its actual feasibility (SAQ, #47; PT, #5). As in Whitehead (RM, 160; PR, 350–1; AI, 185–6, 295–6), the correspondence and coinherence of cosmopolitan and cosmic consciousness in an merging humanity within an evolving cosmos was always already the divine intention and the reality of creation, intended for a realization of peace (SAQ, ##46, 50).

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The Great Being saith: O ye children of men! The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men. Suffer it not to become a source of dissension and discord, of hate and enmity. This is the straight Path, the fxed and immovable foundation. Whatsoever is raised on this foundation, the changes and chances of the world can never impair its strength, nor will the revolution of countless centuries undermine its structure. (GL, 110)

While other theorists were concentrated on the cultural and political dimensions of the cosmopolitan insight and its organization, Bahá’u’lláh explicitly directs his interest toward the transreligious (and trans-ethnical) relativity as the precondition for any practical realization (TB, 129–30; GL, #131). It is on this condition that he expresses the hope “that the world’s religious leaders and the rulers thereof will unitedly arise for the reformation of this age and the rehabilitation of its fortunes,” and he admonishes them “after meditating on its needs, [to] take counsel together and, through anxious and full deliberation, [to] administer to a diseased and sorely-afficted world the remedy it requireth” (GL, 110). The axiom of transreligious relativity as precondition for peace, not only in a corporeal, international, but in a mental and spiritual sense, makes all the difference here for a theopoetic cosmopolitanism of univocity in multiplicity, especially as it is itself constituted by a cosmopolitan consciousness (PT, #54; SAQ, #55) for which the human polis is embedded in the vast and infnite cosmic mutuality of poleis out of which any differentiation arises, not as motive for bifurcation, strive, mutual depreciation, and extinction, but for the evolution of unison in diversity (SAB, #12). The motivation and inherent power of this cosmopolitan vision lies in the apophatic nature of Reality in which all connectivity is univocal and any divergence is detached from considerations of the preferences of particular ethnicities, cultures, and religious systems. Only if the motivation comes from such a detachment can we be free enough to rise above the prejudicial self-aggrandizement of our “own” possessions over (and the owning of) the stranger, the other, the foreign culture, and can accept the incommensurable and different lives as a necessary constituent of a diversifying evolution of societies and poleis. “Detach yourselves from all else but Me, and turn your faces towards My face, for better is this for you than the things ye possess” (GL, #121). “This, surely, will be better for you than the whole of creation,

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could ye but perceive it” (GL, #76). Bahá’u’lláh’s understanding of this Reality-ward orientation, which does not seek possessions or reward, is not a detachment away from the world, as it intends to realize the names and attributes of Reality/God in the world of becoming (chs. 7–8), but a detachment from any self-gratifcation, much like karma yoga (to not expect any outcome of acts of duty) or bhakti yoga (to love God without seeking reward) or jnana yoga (to seek insight independently of tradition) (ch. 5). How easily, in missing the apophatic reason for univocity, this motivation becomes perverted into “religious fanaticism and hatred [which] are a world-devouring fre, whose violence none can quench” (GL, #132), can be demonstrated with two interpretations of this Qur’anic verse: “Say, ‘O you who are Jews, if you claim that you are allies of Allah, excluding the [other] people, then wish for death, if you should be truthful’” (Q. 62:6 Salih). In its fanatical interpretation, the verse could fall victim of a mind-set in which one must until death fght by word or sword for one’s own God to the exclusion of all other religions, even as this martyrdom promises heavenly remuneration. In its mystical interpretation, however, the verse means that one looks only at Reality, detached from any people (and their bifurcations), but by excluding no one, in order to realize peace nonviolently and even to accept suffering for its realization as providentially intended means of its appearance, establishment, and growth within human consciousness and social organization. It is the second interpretation that permeates Bahá’u’lláh writings (KI, part 1). As Patomäki’s review leads us through the centuries of developing cosmopolitan ideas, a paradox or even impasse seems to present itself. The novelty of the emerging cosmopolitanism in antiquity consisted in the fact that it was undermining the privileging of the Earth in the cosmos (as the Earth was widely held to be the center of the universe in Aristotelian and Ptolemaic physics until Johannes Kepler and beyond) as a justifcation for elevating one’s own culture and social organization over that of all others as well as exempting the “better ones” from the fate of the mass of underlings and slaves (even early democracies such as that of Athens or equal-minded societies such as Iceland were slave societies). It engendered a consciousness of cosmic interwovenness. The scientifcally underpinned cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment after the Copernican turn, however, led to a strong feeling of irrelevance and nihilism, so dramatically detected by Friedrich Nietzsche (and Jacques Monod), because the vast cosmos was now understood as empty desert of hurling particles and worlds, insignifcant and worthless. Craving for “locality” (Heidegger) and a home in the dark nothingness, the overwhelming cosmic emptiness could now paradoxically motivate a swing back into diverse forms of nationalism, religious parochialism, and the antagonism of “us” and “the others.” Now freed from any moral limitations, this new elitism became committed to the survival of the fttest or any particular value just

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preferred by a whim or interests of power, the satisfaction of animal desires, or money (Patomäki, Sources, 196–7). I will add that the current poststructuralist discussion of cosmopolitanism, which concentrates on divergences and mistrusts any general expansions or expansive unisons as oppressive and colonizing (TDM, ch. 2), has led to a similar dilemma, thereby opposing the two gates of relativity (of multiple worlds and connectivity) to one another (GPW, §§16, 24). If difference does not know of connectivity, the world falls apart into a self-contained plurality of worlds (why name them even with the same connotation?); in other words, “substances” (in Whitehead’s understanding) now independently demand their own sovereignty against oppressive powers. It is in such a context that Whitehead’s warning against the consequences of substantialization comes true again. Where any generality is excluded by assuming that it is just the generalization of one’s particular values and colonizing interest hidden under universals, only mutually exclusive particulars remain (GPW, §37). While this fragmentation is a danger, it is also unavoidable in light of histories of oppression, but remains bearable as long as we hold fast to the belief that we can communicate at all. But taken to its extreme, this diversity of “substantially” different cultures and poleis (with their claim to now defne their own “identity” alone) is prone to fall prey to yet other particularistic interests of hidden power using diversity as means for bifurcation and opposition: to sweepingly condemn, for instance, Western infuences, academia, human rights, global justice, global institutions, and, contrarily, to seduce the silent masses to blindly accept and amplify the hatred that those oppositions drive, but now for the price of the manipulation of the blinded ones. While such a development can be fought on the turf of Derridian différance and its own relativization (Abizadeh, Identity, 45–60), Whitehead’s nonsubstantial lens on events and processes, prehensive relationality and evolutionary divergence, khoric unity of communication and creative novelty, and Deleuze’s new conceptuality round multiplicity of foldings, seem to me to be by far the most immediately intuitive response (Faber and Stephenson, Secrets, passim). So, if the insight of the new cosmopolitanism is that its “orientation should now be grounded on the notion of cosmic evolution, which is not only contextual, historical, pluralist and open-ended but also suggests that humanity is not a mere accident of the cosmos” (Patomäki, Sources, 181), this evolutionism must overcome both simplistic models of unity and simplistic models of difference. Then, the most sophisticated philosophical permeation of this task—considerate of forerunners like Teilhard de Chardin and ancient Indian thinkers such as Ramanuja (Overzee, Body, part 2) as well as alternatives like Dzogchen (ch. 7), Integral Philosophy, perennialism, and rhizomatic poststructuralist approaches (ch. 8)—is provided by Whitehead’s philosophy

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of process, relationality, and organism (PR, part 1), its mutual inclusion of physicality and mind (PR, part 3), the mutual coinherence of the world of becoming with the Wisdom and Compassion of Reality/Truth (PR, part 5)—all of these features contributing to its evolutionary expectation of the realization of divine consciousness through a civilization of chaosmic selftranscendence toward peace (AI, 295–6), if it will happen at all. Hence, this new cosmopolitanism receives its religious urgency by a motivation that transcends mere intellectual engagement with inevitabilities and discovers in its own emergence “the motive interests of the spirit” (AI, 285). In the proclamation of events of such a divine consciousness of peace (AI, 166), the Manifestations of God in their awareness of universal Reality (SAB, ##19, 21) and the religions historically or mythologically gathering around them, can become the motor for a cosmopolitan civilization (BWF, 343). So, if we follow Whitehead’s cosmopolitan orientation, its inherent claim is that the “great social ideal for religion is that it should be the common basis for the unity of civilization” by its “insight beyond the transient clash of brute forces” (AI, 172). This insight into the function of religion for the unity of civilization precisely by overcoming the brute forces that crowd human history necessitates religion to be embedded in a process of evolution from, with, and for a society that increasingly “ought” to constitute itself by less and less use of these brute forces, although regression and catastrophe are never impossible (Faber, Religion, 167–82; Faber, Process, 6–20). At a point of global and ecological consciousness today (Faber, Intermezzo, 212–38), the fate of religion will be decided over the question whether its proclamations of such an event of peace itself will remind us of the destiny of humanity to become a cosmopolis (SAQ, #59), a destiny that humanity has to accept and realize in a consciousness of being a cosmopolity of peace that must become greater than the disillusionment in the face of its lack of realization (SAQ, #64). Here, transformation works through the reversal of ideal and event so that the event precedes the ideal (PT, #15; SAQ, #50). In this view, it is the inauguration of such an event of remembrance of the Reality of peace (as we “are” Luminous Mind) that will overcome the fact, demonstrated by the “history of religions,” that “religions are so often more barbarous than the civilizations in which they fourish,” because “countless generations [are] required for interest to attach itself to profound ideas” (AI, 172). The idea of universal peace is not new, not in the Bahá’í Faith, not in any religion, not even to religion as such (Chew, Religion, ch. 7); however, it has still not attached itself enough to the particular cultural and religious interests and identities so as to become the motivation to transcend their violent limitations into a self-transcending civilization. The reason may be that it is not the idea that can make the difference, here, but the permeation of our consciousness and social life by the event of peace in which we can realize

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that we must become what we already are: vessels of universal consciousness of interconnectedness (zuhur-i ‘aql, pabhassara chitta, turiya) or, with Whitehead, manifestations of “world-consciousness” (RM, 42). It is this cosmopolitan event that Bahá’u’lláh proclaims (Sours, Station, chs. 6, 7, 13). His is not a (new) cosmopolitan religion, but the (mysticalethical) Spirit of the event of Reality itself redirecting our divergent religious imaginations (ch. 8) toward one cosmopolitan consciousness of theopoetic relativity that can facilitate the activation of the Spirit of peace, rather than following ideals, and vastly transcends the mutually obstructive interests of a divided humanity and a dying Earth (SHL, §67; Lawson, Globalization, 35–54). In light of a wider ecological cosmopolis, we may fnd the following proclamation and confession that Bahá’u’lláh lays into our mouth, mind, and heart, to be valid for all living populations of the Earth, humanity being their advocate (Latour, Politics, chs. 2, 4), because it has extirpated the strive for superiority among itself and among all living poleis: The Great Being saith: Blessed and happy is he that ariseth to promote the best interests of the peoples and kindreds of the earth. In another passage He hath proclaimed: It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens. (TB, #11; italics added)

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3. THEOPOETICS AND THE NOVELTY OF TRUTH Resistance against a cosmopolity that stands or falls with the consciousness of a unison of differences—based on deep experiences and imaginations and thoughts of the event that enlightens it to the in-sistence of the Reality as the spiritual motive force for the realization of a corresponding peaceful civilization—comes from three abstract restrictions: the identifcation of the “Most Great Horizon” (ADJ, 82–3) of Reality with one’s own limited mind, cultural and religious circumstances, and sacred experiences; the reduction of always fowing, moving, and evolving religious intuitions, experiences, and refections, to the trodden modes of past generations; and the occupation of the unfnished horizon of the projected future of fulfllment (of one’s own religious imagination) with the present state of its perception. In short, we are bound by, and toward, violence on the basis of our poleis as long as our religious projections are misunderstood as absolute Truth, which we feel to be worshiped only properly if we dedicate our limited understanding to it as superior, superseding, and fnal. Supremacy, supersessionism, and fnality of one’s truth are the enemies of religious peace and the evolution of any future civilization of peace (Faber, Religion, 176–82).

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Not in opposition to, but by undermining the power of, these bifurcations stand the three corresponding gates of relativity (ch. 1): of the affrmation of polyphilia, of the divergence of infnite worlds or their multiplicity, and of apophatic subtraction in any affrmation of polyphilic diversifcation and connectivity. They respectively de-escalate superiority, supersession, and fnality (TDM, chs. 3, 8, 11, 13). Another way to put this transformation is to say that instead of dogmatic certainty we need to rediscover (with Ibn ‘Arabi and Bahá’u’lláh) the theopoetic imagination (TDM, chs. 2–3)—that is, the relativity of our mind’s and heart’s reception and imagination, but instigated by the divine revelation or polyphilic presence of Reality (ch. 8)—at the depth of these limitations. Instead of falling into the trap of “substantialized” fxed entities of reverence, we need to open (again) to the depth of the infnite processes of Reality-realization they hide (TDM, chs. 14–15). On the basis of the work of Derrida, John Caputo has given this transformation the expression: to save the event in the name of God (Weakness, ch. 1); Alain Badiou has called it: the naming of the event, which cannot be discovered otherwise in the situation in which it arises without being its outcome (Being, ch. 16; Thought, 5); Gilles Deleuze invokes the Cry of the Event that he sensed in Whitehead for which God becomes the Process conveying and going through all the divergences of the infnite worlds (The Fold, 81); and on the basis of Whitehead’s work, I have called this transformation the discovery of a theopoetics of love instead of power (TDM, ch. 11). The primum movens of this movement of theopoetics toward peace is the truth of novelty (GPW, 326). Yet, before I explain this last conclusion further, let me back up again, and begin with the three reasons for resistance to reconciliation. The tragic fact that religions contrary to the all-pervasive messages of love, compassion, salvation, and peace, in their actualizations seem to be inescapably bound to acts of violence and destruction, experienced either by their martyrs or by the ones that they themselves produce through the violence of their own co-religionists, is based on the deep trauma inficted on any personal or collective religious identity by the otherness and novelty of other religious intuitions, experiences, and proclamations. A shock of self-limitation seems to be impressed on one’s own identity by the new horizon of another or new religion in which one’s old identity appears to be relativized, belittled, or reduced to a mere moment of a far greater and wider consciousness (AI, 65). Every religion violates the heart of any other religion. Every “other” or “new” religion violates the sacred stabilizations held dear at the heart of the identity of the “old” religion: Christianity claims Christ, not the Law of Moses to be eternal; Islam incorporates Jesus among other prophets and despises Incarnation and Trinity; Dharmic religions discard creation, resurrection, and fnal judgment, and even consider the naming of Reality as “God” an illusion; Buddhism disavows the atman, the gods, and the Vedas of Hinduism;

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Jainism thinks little of both Buddha-nature and brahman; the Bahá’í Faith reformulates both resurrection and reincarnation as symbolic truths (SAQ, ##23, 81), denies the once-and-for-all of Christ’s sacrifce (GPB, #11) and the “lastness” of the Prophet of Islam by reinterpreting the meaning of the Seal of the Prophets (GL, #25); Abrahamic religions know of only one timeline and despise cyclicity of time as pagan, but Dharmic religions fnd the small universe of Abrahamic religions ridiculous. And so on, indefnitely. Nor do any schools or sects within these religions agree on any of the named matters, so they view one another as heretics, unbelievers, traitors, or apostates. Depending on one’s temperament, one may accept these limitations, fall silently back onto the trodden path, venture into a new horizon, or attack them as heretical deviation, abominable invention, or outright insult to the sacredness of one’s own (religion’s) imagination. The process of moving planes of immanence hurts (ch. 5). The irony of the “progressive” function of religion in the attainment of civilization is that religion must progress (ch. 5); yet progress is blocked. In Whitehead’s analysis, because religion claims “a freedom lying beyond circumstance, derived from the direct intuition that life can be grounded upon its absorption in what is changeless amid change” (AI, 67), it is very hard for religion to change.

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Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development. This evolution of religion is in the main a disengagement of its own proper ideas from the adventitious notions which have crept into it by reason of the expression of its own ideas in terms of the imaginative picture of the world entertained in previous ages. (SMW, 189)

However, it is not so much, as one could think, that the adherence to the truth of one’s own religious claims locks us into eternal warfare; rather it is the mode in which this truth is entertained, namely, as an expression of superiority over, and the exclusion of, the other and the new, and the moving character of, religious systems. The Chosen Ones feel legitimatized to eradicate the “others” who cannot perceive the same truth or deviate in their interpretation, not because of the truth of their own claims, but because of the “sacred authority” bestowed on them to overcome all other forms of holding this truth or any other truth instead. The resulting violence is not only externally enforced, if military and political means allow, but internalized and prescribed as spiritual discipline or as a means of purifcation—for instance, with spiritual internalizations of violence in the Bhagavat Gita, the Kalachakra Tantra, and with the jihad (the worth of which, externally or internally, Bahá’u’lláh categorically denied: Eschraghi, Kommentar, 40, 162–3, 250–1, 342)—that establishes and reinforces the superior character of one’s own truth (ch. 4).

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Superiority, again, is often a matter of supersession, of the authority of the progress of one’s own innovation over tradition, against which the “tradition” strikes back in its fght for triumph over innovation. The sad, vicious cycle that supersessionism invokes consists of the fact that one’s innovation, if it becomes a new tradition, also becomes a heresy within the old tradition in which it had arisen as an event, while an event that might be elucidated from the new situation will equally be understood as merely an obnoxious innovation. When Whitehead affrms that criticism of both tradition and innovation is an inevitable part of the “progress” of religion—as this novelty is not only a necessity to stay alive (AI, 274) but “a progress in the framing of concepts, in discarding artifcial abstractions or partial metaphors, and in evolving notions which strike more deeply into the root of reality” (RM, 131)—it becomes obvious that mutual violent hatred of religions (or its factions) is based on a limitation: the inability to grasp the contrast between both repetitive and creative modes of becoming in the cosmopolitical correspondences of world and society (SY, 87–8). The hatred instigated by diversifcation and reformation within a religion fnds its counterpart in the superiority created by the supersessionism between religions. It can consist of the dismissal or the absorption of the older traditions or in the re-absorption of innovations or in a mixture of both: Christianity superseding Judaism, Islam superseding Christianity; Hinduism superseding Brahmanism, Buddhism superseding Hinduism; Daoism superseding Confucianism and Buddhism (and also in reverse); Manichaeism superseding Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism. Processes of counter-supersession are inevitable: Buddhism integrating Daoism and Confucianism; Judaism defning itself against Christianity; Hinduism defning itself against and reabsorbing Buddhism; and everyone fghting against Manichaeism. Forms of internal elitism assume superiority over the religions of the masses by claiming to be their original fulfllment, and rival sects violently generate the proliferation of profound splits of the unity within developing religions (Faber, Religion, 167–82). It might be true that the reason for the violent expressions of alleged superiority is either the existential fear of a serious disturbance of the cultural integrity of one’s way of life, that is, a cry for a social, political, or cultural self-defense against an external or internal aggressor, or the political functionalization of religious superiority as a vehicle of conquest (Mehta, Possibility, 65–88). In both cases, supersessionism needs not only manifest itself in the crude form of physical violence but can instead be sublimated, for instance, into the arena of intellectual demonstrations of superiority, thereby transforming the violence of competition into a means for conversion. I have already mentioned the complex history of the Jain anekantavada (ch. 8). Sankara states that the Buddha developed an incoherent theory about anatta, which demonstrates either his intellectual inferiority or a conscious confusion

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of his followers because of his hatred of all beings (Yandell and Netland, Buddhism, 108). Christians and Buddhists have mutually claimed the intellectual inferiority of their opponents. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries, for instance, manufactured the argument that if Buddhism is essentially about the eradication of ignorance, the Buddha expresses the gravest ignorance, because he did not know of God while everyone self-evidently (and as the New Testament states) knows God through God’s creation. However, if he knew God and was silent on the Divine, he must be seen as the greatest rebellion against God (Schmidt-Leukel, Buddhism, 6). Conversely, the venerable Mohottivatte Gunananda, in a famous interreligious debate in Panadura, Sri Lanka, in 1873 made the argument that if the biblical God regrets creation (Gen. 6:6), God cannot be omnipotent as believed by Christians and hence cannot be the creator they claim to exist (Peebles, Debate, 65–6). Projections of one’s religious identity into the fnality of an apocalyptic future is the third strategy of facilitating a stagnating halt of religious imagination; but it is also a means of deferring physical violence. Apocalyptic imagery can function as a means of defense of a people suffering through violence directed against it, because it promises retribution when the end comes (as is claimed for the biblical book of Revelation). Yet, this move ambivalently creates either the deferral of reactive violence to an event in the future or it incubates and feeds into the active violence inherent in revolutions against the social, cultural, or religious status quo in situations of oppression. A very revealing example presents itself in the Kalachakra Tantra. As already mentioned (ch. 4), its time of creation refects the Islamic invasion in central Asian countries and the aggressive rules of Islamic kingdoms in India, which contributed to repeated destructions of Jain and Buddhist temples and monasteries and radiated the fear of repetition (Kitagawa, Quest, 128–30). In an early instantiation of comparative lists of Prophets that will lead up to the eschatological war, the Kalachakra focuses the Hindu and Buddhist Manifestations of Vishnu/Krishna and of the Buddha in the form of the bodhisattva Manjushri, on the one hand, and opposes them with the Western/ Islamic chain of Prophets including Moses, Jesus, Mani, and Muhammad, with the expectation of the eschatological Promised One, the Mahdi, on the other. This in itself is a transreligious deed! But the Kalachakra now imagines that the last Kalki ruler of Shambala will be manifesting the Buddhist/ Hindu “messiah” who will fght against the aggressor under the ascendency of the false messiah, the Mahdi, and will win this battle to then establish the fnal realm of peace on earth (Newman, History, 54–8). The deference of violence is threefold: frst, by integrating Buddhist and Hindu eschatologies into an effort to extend the invitation to join in the face of a common enemy in a Hindu-Buddhist alliance; second, by opposing the true Manifestation of

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eschatological victory against the series of false Prophets from the West, signaling to believers the urgency to converge on the right side of history before it will be too late; and third (similarly to spiritual interpretations of the situation of warfare in the Bhagavat Gita or of the jihad by a doubted, but today often embraced hadith), by internalizing the eschatological fght as a means to compensate and overcome interreligious hatred by meditation (or ethical strife). Yet, even in this third stage, hatred is not necessarily eradicated, but only sublimated or deferred. Paradoxically, because of these three hindrances of religious “progress” toward a civilization of peace: superiority, supersessionism, and fnality, it was (and is) the suffering of the religious fgures revered as founders or reformers of religion who inaugurated a new event in a situation or named this event for posterity that became the sign of “progress.” They exhibited and mirrored the “reaction” of Reality/God to the limited imaginations of Truth by way of the event of peace in their suffering (ch. 4; PT, #38). Whitehead hints at these unfortunate, rare, extraordinary beings—like “Mahomet brooding in the desert, the meditations of the Buddha, the solitary Man on the Cross” (RM, 19–20)—who not only have understood, were inspired by, and have conveyed the message of this peace-making proposition by suffering gravely from the very violence and hatred they were determined to overturn. Bahá’u’lláh also makes the sweeping observation that “as far back as the First Manifestation, all [Manifestations] have at the time of Their appearance suffered grievously. Some were held to be possessed, others were called impostors, and were treated in a manner that the pen is ashamed to describe” (ESW, 92). A new consciousness, a transformation, is needed, says Whitehead, reverting the human-made “Gospel of fear” (RM, 75) back into the message of these fgures, the disentanglement of religion from hatred into their “Gospel of love” (ibid.), purifed from superiority, supersession, and fnality, back into and forward toward the fundamental relativity of apophatic unity, allrelationality, and surrelative embrace of divine polyphilia (Faber, Ecotheology, 75–115). Whitehead suggests two procedures: frst, to disentangle the uniqueness of every revelation, religion, intuition, and spiritual effort from superiority; and, second, to situate uniqueness in the twofold structure of event and history. If uniqueness of religious intuition, experience, and truth is not confused with either superiority or supersession, it begins to express its face of the event of peace in the midst of violence, the “over-ruling power” and “glory” that is “not for the world” to discern, but only in the embrace of the event that “lies in the absence of force” (RM, 57). This “glorious” nonviolent expression of religious identity does not take anything away from its uniqueness, however, but it has become conscious and conscientious of the impossibility that Reality/God/Truth can be manifested other than in the

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overcoming of superiority as a sign of mystical, moral, and metaphysical inferiority that always arises in, and perpetuates, the dialectic of oppression (PT, #41). Religious uniqueness—as disentangled from superiority (Fazel, Pluralism, 42–9)—is, therefore, not found in dogmatic systems, as they are only the extension of war with the means of apocalyptic or intellectual patterns that preserve underlying hatred on loftier levels and perpetuate the intention of competition and the forced choice of conversion (Faber, Sense, 36–56). It is only when we forgo the seductions of dogmatic fallacy of a “Perfect Dictionary” (MT, 173) as being in any way expressive of ultimately claimed truth that unique religious experiences, intuitions, and truths become “progressive” toward a civilization of peace that understands itself as built on the ever-more universal and deeper consciousness of its relativity (RM, 131). Then, religious experiences, intuitions, and truths are interpretations that must always be related back to the very events that initiated them (Faber, Transkulturation, 160–87); and in the face of them, religious articulations transform back from stabilized entities into “tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities” (PR, 8) hidden in these events (TDM, ch. 10). Any awareness that “truth in the contention that dogmatic fnality of verbal expression is a mistaken notion” (AI, 172) transforms its perception (prehension) into a means not of competition or conversion, but of polyphilic conversation (Faber and Keller, Taste, 180–207). It reaches back into the Event of its Manifestation by which it became, in its uniqueness universally relevant (Faber, Origin, 273–89). It aims not at superiority, supersession, extinction, retribution, and victory, but reaches for a universal insight that is “derived from the super-normal experience of mankind in its moments of fnest insight” (RM, 32). As, for instance, “Buddhism and Christianity fnd their origins respectively in two inspired moments of history: the life of the Buddha, and the life of Christ,” (RM, 55–6), so Whitehead suggests that the interpretation of their lives as such unique events of the universal relevance of compassion, nonviolence, and love might be the most fruitful way to overcome the hatred that has become a synonym for religion (RM, 57, 144). Whitehead considers uniqueness as the ineradicable “essence” of every event (PR, 25). Every event in its becoming (concrescence) grows together from a unique world, which is its perspective of appearance; it becomes creatively one with its unique vision of a world-perspective; and it leaves itself behind to others with its unique perspective on the world it had united and for a world in which it will make a difference with its becoming for any other event to come (GPW, §11). There is no superiority attached to this uniqueness; here, we fnd only the recognition of (universal) relevance in the way the creative unifcations of unique events contribute to a self-transcendent cosmopolitan world-harmony, instead of the havoc of self-enclosed rivals

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in their resistance against relationality (AI, 268–9). Bahá’u’lláh celebrates this uniqueness (ahadiyyah) both as an expression of the incomparable unity (tawhid) of Reality/God (which/who has no partners), but even more surprisingly so as bestowed on all creatures as expression of this divine uniqueness.

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Just as Thou hast assigned no partner to Thyself, in the same way, whatever Thou hast called into being hath no peer or equal, since Thou hast revealed Thyself in each thing through the effulgent light of Thy divine unity. . . . In truth, every thing that proceedeth from Thyself is the most excellent and most exquisite of all things that exist betwixt Thy heaven and Thy earth, and by it the tokens of Thy glorious sovereignty are revealed to Thy creatures, and Thy proof is perfected to all mankind. (Bahá’u’lláh, Tasbíh va Tahlíl , 88–9, quoted in Brown and Kitzing, Evolution, 111; italics added)

And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá emphasizes that it is precisely the unity of God that can, in any appearance beyond itself, only appear in the uniqueness of any phenomenon, event, world, or composition of material elements or divine attributes (SAQ, #81)—not least indicating the necessity of the uniqueness of (Manifestations and) religions and their mutual coinherence. What we can learn from this disentanglement of uniqueness from superiority and by situating it in the event and in history is twofold. The event signals a novelty that is irreducible to its surrounding and religious inheritance (the situation) and, hence, is relevant as such (PR, 28, 108). Yet, since every event is also a refection of its situation in which it synthesizes its own complex history (PR, 161), this history of situations culminating in an event demonstrates the intimate interweaving of the whole religious history in all of these unique events (ch. 4)—as (if) they are one Reality (AI, 295): one in the apophatic Reality by which they are also all-relational, in-sisting in, and surrelatively comprising, all events and their situations (ch. 8). Hence, we must not fear successions of religious expressions in their metamorphosis through different events of religious innovation, but could instead learn to understand what they have ever been, namely, “the total cooperate religious complex of mankind, composed of different but no longer separate religious communities” (Smith, Meaning, 200). In fact, this is the Bahá’í reaction. It may best be viewed from this quote from the Báb. It is clear and evident that the object of all preceding Dispensations hath been to pave the way for the advent of Muḥammad, the Apostle of God. These, including the Muḥammadan Dispensation, have had, in their turn, as their objective the Revelation proclaimed by the Qá’im. The purpose underlying this Revelation, as well as those that preceded it, has, in like manner, been to announce the advent of the Faith of Him Whom God will make manifest. And this Faith—the Faith of Him Whom God will make manifest—in its turn, together with all the

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Revelations gone before it, have as their object the Manifestation destined to succeed it. And the latter, no less than all the Revelations preceding it, prepare the way for the Revelation which is yet to follow. The process of the rise and setting of the Sun of Truth will thus indefnitely continue—a process that hath had no beginning and will have no end. (SWB, 105–6)

The religious divergences are real, and they are vast. They indicate true incommensurabilities (MT, 51), that is, they cannot in any coherent way be held all at once or together in one doctrine or horizon (Knitter, Theologies, ch. 10). They live in different worlds or planes of immanence (chs. 5–6). Yet, as they all, in their particularity, historical situatedness, and unfortunate dialectic of developments under the pressure of their imprisonment in mutual opposition, are in their own dynamics and by their own criteria of universal implications and relevance (TDM, chs. 4–5), they can be sensed to be connected. We may use the symbolism of a branching tree or a chaosmic rhizome of mutually crossing felds and planes of consistency. And we may gain a deeper understanding of their connectedness as mutually infuencing threads of their very existences in a divine khoric “space” of Reality, a divine and khoric matrix of worlds, if we begin to understand their mutual exclusiveness also to be a necessary ingredient of a providential history of the revelation of Reality/God/Truth in which they have their “limiting” (“concretizing”) function. This was Whitehead’s insight, namely, that divine infnity needs and wants concretization in events of particularity to exhibit value, importance, and truth (Faber, Movement, 171–99). Since this chaosmos of worlds of the religions—and this was Deleuze’s insight about Whitehead—is also one of incompossibilities, not hindering an polyphilic view of Realty that in “its” Manifestation(s) “becomes Process, a process that at once affrms incompossibilities and passes through them” (Deleuze, Fold, 81), we do not have to fear the Garden it creates, the new fowers it generates, the storms of the rain of grace it endures, the heat of the Sun it must sustain. The consciousness we need to awake to, instead, must (and will) allow the apophatic indetermination in the process of subtractive affrmation of the divergence of these religious worlds (ch. 1) to become a measure of our truth claims (Faber, Sense, 41–51). It will be a “nomadic” measure (ch. 8): not a logos of logic, but the aesthetic nomos of these divine divergent life movements (Deleuze, Difference, 36). It was the Báb who formulated clearly, before Whitehead (ch. 3), with irresistible poetic power that this search for the polyphilic nomos of Truth/ Reality/God (TDM, ch. 3) must reorient itself toward a receptivity for the provocative and sustained divine process of tempestuous novelty that always saves the apophatic mystery from any limitation imposed on its own polyphilic divergences, but also saves us from the grave of religious strife and the eventual numbing peace of its grave. Thus, so the Báb, “all who are associated

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with this Revelation have witnessed such manifestations in the ocean of the Will” in which “the alteration of the Eternal Essence as the alteration of the Will, and His confrmation as the confrmation of the Will” in-sists. Therefore, we “must gaze upon the evident alterations in each Revelation, [to] have ever been and will continue forever to be like unto an infnite and tempestuous ocean” (Saiedi, Gate, 212). The process of overcoming the hindrances for a cosmopolitan maturity of religion—superiority, supersessionism, and fnality (if religious reality is meant to be, and wants to further, the reality of a civilization of peace)—is equivalent with translating eternity, that is, that which transcends the mere fashes of becoming and perishing (we remember this to be the justifcation of religion for Whitehead), into becoming, that is, into the uniqueness of events and the complex history of their congregation to life-lines in a chaosmos, a complex interference of threads of nexuses and societies of all kinds, complexities, and magnitudes. Yet, while novelty is necessary for the world not to suffer and die “from the slow atrophy of a life stifed by useless shadows” (SY, 88), in order “to maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system,” and to reverse “the slow descent of accepted thought towards the inactive commonplace” (MT, 174) that always haunts a society that cannot value novelty, its contributions, which are “the major advances in civilization,” will also always “all but wreck the societies in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child” (SY, 88). Hence, for Whitehead, the “art of free society consists frst in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision” (ibid.). If religion wants to be the motive force of this civilizing movement, it needs to embrace novelty with eternity; and it always needs also to entertain a symbolic code that is open to constant revision and polypoetic reconciliations (TDM, ch. 5). In fact, this is what Bahá’u’lláh presupposes and proposes a cosmopolitan turn to consciously embody: that our theopoetic codes and symbolisms, as they strike religions and societies with novelty, are not just products of inventors, reformers, and visionaries, reinventing religious symbolisms to revive societies, even in their effort to become a cosmopolis of peace, but that this process is the divine Poetics of Reality “itself.” “Its” Self, in the Manifestations, indicates the (apocalyptic symbol of the) “day when faith itself is renewed and regenerated by God, the Almighty, the Benefcent”; “its”/their novelty that havocs sedimentations and regenerates the mystery against its human limitations comes “from the Source of everlasting life” (GDM, #61). While Deleuze saw the revolution of thought in Whitehead in the overturning of the paradigms of eternity by novelty (Fold, 79), for Whitehead novelty and eternity are not mutually exclusive, and they are not just movements of symbolization, but themselves symbols of Reality’s subtractive affrmation of

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polyphilia, the love of the manifold universe in which “it” (“its” Self) in-sists in always novel symbolizations of “its” apophatic infnity, hence embracing both within the cycle of love, or (with Plotinus) of exhaling and inhaling, or (with the mystics and Deleuze) of enfolding and unfolding (chs. 5–6). Both eternity and novelty are, as the Báb presupposes in the quotes above, caught up in relational mutuality within a world in becoming: it is the eternal Will (mashiyyah) that changes (badi‘) with the needs and predicaments of the world of humanity and becoming, but also with and for the achievements of cosmopolitan harmonies (GL, #25). If God is, as Whitehead claims, the “Poet of the world” (PR, 346), the Manifestation of Reality is always, frst, beyond imagination, but only in many unique imaginations; second, related by the Poet’s connective Poem, saving our fnite creations of value in a history of becoming that realizes as names and attributes of Reality/God; and, third, distinctively transforming creation, societies, and persons into expressions of the Poet. These three elements connect history as divine economy of education (WOB, 19): as history of salvation (Heilsgeschichte); as cosmopolitan vision of the realization of malakut on Earth (nasut) (PT, #4); as the symbolic realm (‘alam al-mithal) embodying itself (haykal) in the world of becoming and persisting (‘alam a-khalq); as realizing the Spirit in the body of the world; or as becoming human, becoming ecological, becoming minor, becoming divine. This is the truth of novelty in the coinherent and (between God and the world) mutually oscillating theopoetics: Realizing eternity in novelty within the spatiality and temporality of the world of becoming (TDM, 24). This is the original meaning of “theopoetics” (still preserved in the Eastern Orthodox Christian traditions) as “becoming divine” (theosis), but not in a fight from the world (a sanctifcation from the world), but in realizing divine names and attributers in the world of becoming, always uniquely, always novel, in a cosmopolitical awakening, “so that by your endeavor the world of humanity may become the Kingdom of God” (PT, #32). Not to seek, not to become sensitive to, and to miss embracing this novelty of eternity or eternality in novelty or the “interweaving of absoluteness upon relativity” (AI, 264) is, then, the major hindrance for religious peace. All three self-inficted restrictions of superiority, secessionism, and fnality come down to this insight. It has a threefold implication: First, our theopoetic differences must not be seen as opportunity to save truth from error, but they should be used as an opportunity to embrace the differentiation of divine infnity in the fniteness of values without which there was no realization of anything worth to be realized (GL, #89). This diversity and divergence must persist—it is of the essence of the Garden of Reality (SAB, #225). Second, such a polyphilic transformation of our “character”—personal and social, cultural and religious, psychological and political—is not identical with a relativism of value or an egalitarianism of directions of the realizations of

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values (ch. 3). To the contrary, there is always the theopoetic direction of realizing peace and harmony, intensity and beauty, peace and unity in diversity that takes precedence over uniformity, reductionism to the same, or the false equality of anything goes (GL, #59). It is a movement of “becoming divine” by seeking this direction in all religious expressions we embrace, and all we leave behind. Third, we cannot embrace a harmony or unity that is not disturbed by novelty if we want to remain true to Truth/Reality (MT, 51; AI, 259–60). To embrace this Reality/Novelty, we are challenged spiritually and ethically to seek the always greater Truth/Reality in any religious realization of its apophatic call for peace we embrace, but never by excluding the transreligious fow that is necessitated by this divine Novelty of theopoetics, of Reality/God as Poet, of the Truth of Novelty (GPW, §17). This divine fow will, like the concrescence of an event in a nexus, challenge and creatively transform what it fnds without excluding the world it leaves; rather it will save the left-behind world with “its” translucency (PR, 346) to all of the earlier events that fow from the world into “it” and back (PR, 351). We have truly revealed the signs, demonstrated the irrefutable testimonies and have summoned all men unto the straight Path. Among the people there are those who have turned away and repudiated the truth, others have pronounced judgment against Us without any proof or evidence. The frst to turn away from Us have been the world’s spiritual leaders in this age—they that call upon Us in the daytime and in the night season and mention My Name while resting on their lofty thrones. However, when I revealed Myself unto men they rose against Me in such wise that even the stones groaned and lamented bitterly. (TB, 254)

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4. DECONSTRUCTIONS The coextensiveness of diversity and novelty demonstrates that Reality/Truth is neither to be grasped by the embrace of one choice to the exclusion of all others nor by the mere embrace of all options to the exclusion of the novelty to come, as this novelty always challenges such an embrace. This twofold danger has not only led to the perennialist’s differentiation between exoteric divergence and esoteric unity, or the postmodern, rhizomatic differentiation between directionless syncretism and ethically as well as socially responsive and responsible mutual participation (ch. 8), but also to an interreligiously engaged, comparativist particularism (wedded to one religious tradition, or a few, over others) that halts at the cautious hope for “spiritual convergences” without the demand to give up on core beliefs, which “a tradition will not be prepared to surrender” (Ward, Religion, 339). Yet, if we embrace the possibility that the prophetic voice is not stilled (and frozen in any time of the past), that there will always be new Manifestations (ch. 7), then, there

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will also always remain the challenge of novelty while embracing diversity. Hence, this Truth of Novelty appears as a deconstruction equally of any rigid exclusions and mindless inclusions, of a mere non-directional pluralism (which is “blind” to differentiations) as well as any form of unifcation that would leave either multiplicity or novelty behind to fnd its reduced harmonizations at less intense a level of experience (which is “deaf” to experiences and experimentations). It is this twofold peril that in Whitehead’s view compromises divine Truth/Reality (in the consequent nature of God) and confuses it with the limited fantasies of our interests or abilities to “suffer” a wider embrace of complexities (RM, 95–9). The understanding of the concept of “deconstruction” is important here: It is neither identical with a “critique” nor akin to “destruction.” What differentiates it from a critique—as in the critical philosophy of Kant (asking epistemological questions)—is that it is not meant to seek transcendental conditions of all possible experience from which to critique the actual modes of experience as possible or impossible, but to seek—with Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” (Difference, 57)—the actual conditions of experience (TDM, ch. 1), that is, the conditions that are coming into existence while experiences creatively construct these modes as they become: planes of immanence and events populating them co-create one another (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy, chs. 1–2). Also, in Derrida’s use, deconstruction does not destruct entities, integrities, or identities, but recovers the shades of complexity, difference, and multiplicity obstructed, reduced, excluded, and oppressed by the unifcation or systematization or construction process, especially of binaries (Gutting, Philosophy, ch. 10), which—as Whitehead has demonstrated (PR, 15)—is always one of simplifcation and emphasis (CN, chs. 1–2). While this unifcation process is unavoidable, since it is the very process by which value is created and facts are released into the world (AI, 281), it is also always limited such that others, novel and different ones, forming a nexus, society, organism, or world with the beauty of their differentiations, will transcend, expand beyond, or overcome any such event of unifcation or construction (PR, 21). We remember also that Whitehead saw substantialism as the symbol of this process of simplifcation, as it takes the secondary construction of independent entities of the mind from relational connectivity of events and nexuses and transforms them into the illusion of the ground of the process of becoming from which they were abstracted (ch. 8). What then is deconstruction? Deconstruction is really de/construction, that is, the ongoing sensitive reconstruction of new unities of connected events and nexuses, instead of isolated substances, in an ongoing process of differentiation (différance) and novelty (TDM, chs.1–2). It also correlates with the Buddhist understanding of the Luminous Mind, which indicates that which is not

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constructed at all and, hence, is the salvation and creative ground for any construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction (ch. 7). Given this use of de/construction in the context of the paradoxical mutual disturbance of diversity and novelty, the question arises: What, in the process of deconstruction, is only a limited expression of one event, of the emphasis of a nexus of events, of the simplifcations of the “character” of a society, and what, contrarily, is undeconstructable because it is not constructed in the frst place? Derrida excludes deconstruction itself and justice as undeconstructable: both remain always unrealized in any realization, but are the driving force for any further realization. This justice is, in Derrida’s view, messianic—much like Walter Benjamin’s Messianic Angel (Faber, Zeit, 68–78)—insofar as it always “comes” unexpectedly (from the future) into time, has to be restated all the time, but is never realized itself fully “in the fesh” once-and-for-all (GPW, §33) as a fnal eschatological realm (Caputo, Prayers, §10). This is much like the Bahá’í view of the “presence” (liqa’u’llah) of Reality/God/ Truth (Savi, Summit, 290): in-sisting always in novel Manifestations, never exhausting themselves in a “metaphysics of presence” (GPW, 268); but—as in the Buddhist understanding of the dharmakaya or Luminous Mind (ch. 7)—while they are creative, infusing, healing, transforming, and educating, they are, at the same time, shining into the world (in-sisting in it) from an unconstructed and, hence, undeconstructable Reality without “inherence, egress, commingling, or descent; for egress, regress, inherence, descent, and commingling are among the characteristics and requirements of bodies, not of spirits—how much less of the holy and sanctifed Reality of the Divinity” (SAQ, 54). Those Suns of Truth Who rise from the dayspring of ancient glory, and fll the world with a liberal effusion of grace from on high. These Suns of Truth are the universal Manifestations of God in the worlds of His attributes and names. Even as the visible sun that assisteth, as decreed by God, the true One, the Adored, in the development of all earthly things, such as the trees, the fruits, and colors thereof, the minerals of the earth, and all that may be witnessed in the world of creation, so do the divine Luminaries, by their loving care and educative infuence, cause the trees of divine unity, the fruits of His oneness, the leaves of detachment, the blossoms of knowledge and certitude, and the myrtles of wisdom and utterance, to exist and be made manifest. Thus it is that through the rise of these Luminaries of God the world is made new, the waters of everlasting life stream forth, the billows of loving-kindness surge, the clouds of grace are gathered, and the breeze of bounty bloweth upon all created things. It is the warmth that these Luminaries of God generate, and the undying fres they kindle, which cause the light of the love of God to burn fercely in the heart of humanity. It is through the abundant grace of these Symbols of Detachment that the Spirit of life everlasting is breathed into the bodies of the dead. (KI, §33)

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In other words, in the Bahá’í view, Truth/Reality in-sists in the world of becoming as “Divine Presence” if and when it is “itself” recognized in “its” Self, that is, in “its” Manifestations (GL, #88). The Manifestations are the place of Novelty and Truth. From their appearance all inheritance of existence is deconstructed and a new creation is formed (KA, n23 on ¶15). This divine de/construction “hath revolutionized the entire creation,” inaugurating a transformation by which “all created things were made to expire” and were “endued with new life” (GL, #33). This is why Bahá’u’lláh in his Tablet of the Uncompounded Reality (ch. 7) has made it his central point to defer and defect any emphases on either monism or theism, unity of being (wahdat al-wujud) or unity of experience (wahdat al-shuhud), and so on, to the Event of Novelty of a new Manifestation in light of which all of these emphases become secondary, not in the sense that they do not count, but that they have to be discounted if they are opposed to one another and these emphases become dogmatic statements of exclusion, especially that of the novel event (UR, 215). The divine de/constructive Event breaks through all substantializations, transforms them back into a feld of relational diversities or connected (always moving) planes of immanence (and consistency), and directs them at the Novelty as the Truth in the direction of which it must be demonstrated that diversity is affrmed, saved, and even encouraged; that trans-categorical unity can be achieved by relegating oppositions to contrasts in apophatic subtraction; and that the transreligious past becomes translucent toward the realization of their inherent threads of peace-making propositions—all of this because of the manifestation (zuhur) of unconstructed and undeconstructable Reality in the Event of the new Manifestation (mazhar). There are many paradoxes related to this event- and process approach of the de/constructive event that Whitehead elaborates philosophically and that the Bahá’í Faith in some signifcant way incorporates religiously. I will name only three, as they related to the question of the use of theopoetics for an ecological cosmopolis that avoids the hindrances to transreligious fuency through superiority, supersessionism, and fnality: the paradox of both the “incarnation” of Truth and “its” apophatic inaccessibility, which leads to the problem of how to avoid fragmentation without giving up on the cosmopolitan intention (the postmodern anxiety); the paradox of the transcendental and the categorical realization of religion, which leads to the problem of how to avoid relativism without giving up on the limitations of any positive religion (the anxiety of unbound spirituality); and the paradox of unifcation and divergence through novelty, which leads to the problem of how to avoid blindness to otherness in the process of renewal (the postcolonialist anxiety). In general (in Whitehead’s terms), all three of these paradoxes point to the same chaosmic pattern of renewal. As every event must leave its past and will always appear in a situation that cannot detect its presence or will only

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cognize it for the price of a challenge to this situation—be it cultural, political, or religious—no event can fulfll the whole transcendental horizon of all events, nexuses, and societies, especially since it already creates a new transcendental horizon while it happens (PR, 21, 334n3). This means also that every event must leave its past (AI, 177), but will all the more transmit the complexity and intensity of its confuent past if it also integrates them with utmost diversifcations, appreciating the lost strains of the past simplifcations instead of closing them away in the past (AI, 207–8). As every event opens a new horizon, but cannot fulfll it absolutely and fnally, this horizon, seemingly at the edge of possibilities, will become one horizon among others as new events arise and their becoming de/constructs the elements from which they depart so as to save them into a new future as yet unknown (Epilogue). This basic pattern is in the background of the three more specifc problems to which I turn presently. The frst problem pertains to the impression that, since the new event of a religion or revelation or Manifestation seems to be the ultimate event in which Reality “shows itself as it is,” the appearance of Truth/Reality is always selfunifying and countering any fragmentation that it tries to fnally overcome, as every religion in some way (and with different means) seeks wholeness of society and well-being of the individual in and beyond the world of becoming (Rue, Religion, 159–64). It is, however, said that the postmodern age is one beyond such unifcations as all the meta-narratives and the creation of a unifed and even progressing history (in which Modernity, Enlightenment philosophy and Hegel believed) have been deconstructed as a myth of progress, leading either to totalitarian ideologies or capitalist globalization (Razor, Faith, ch. 2–3). Opponents of postmodernity (as philosophy) feel that this approach, even if it represents the spirit of the time (Zeitgeist) from the late 19th century on (and still ongoing), only leads from a description of a situation to the prescription, and active pursuit, of the fragmentarization of society the method of which, it is believed, is “deconstruction” (Hyman, Predicament, ch. 3). Instead, holism and unitary thinking was tried as a remedy by some (Elgin, Universe, passim; Medina, Faith, ch. 1)—sometimes in the form of perennialism or integral philosophy (ch. 8), sometimes under the heading of “constructive postmodernism” (Gelpi, Varieties, ch. 2), even adopted by process thinkers (Griffn, Founders, passim; Wang, Process, ch. 2); for others, it is leading to mere relativism of the freedom to live one’s life beyond any prescription, ethical or religious, as long as it does not hurt others (Hanegraaff, New Age, ch. 10). While both alternatives are praiseworthy— that is, we have come to understand holistic approaches as ecological alternatives to globalization of exploitation while preserving universals such as human rights (Kearns and Keller, Ecospirit, passim)—the presupposition on which these alternatives (if they consider themselves as opposites) are built

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or from which they feed their energy is problematic. Since deconstruction is actually not a method to further fragmentation, while also not prescribing holistic views, it is really de/construction, that is, the recovery of (the easily lost) multiplicity in the process of either modernist (capitalist) or holistic (eco-centric) unifcations, as well as pluralistic isolations and fragmentations (TDM, chs. 2, 14). This de/construction is, therefore, of utmost importance to a cosmopolitan thinking, and Bahá’í writings have coined the term “unity in diversity” for its complex balance of oscillating movements between unifcation and diversifcation (WOB, 206). Fragmentation is, in fact, not an implication or a consequence of deconstruction, but is a persistent residue of substantialism, of the billiard ball universe, of the push and pull of entities, that transfer the function of oppressive power to the play of the market or the accumulation of effective power instead of deconstructing this power dynamics in its relational and diversifying events, nexuses, traits, local histories, and polities as well as religious communities (TDM, 88). It is based on the apophatic-polyphilic nature of the subtractive affrmation of Reality/Truth to appear in the world of becoming as diversifcation that is unifed not by entities, structures, and characteristic forms (like Laws), but by the entirely living nexus of the tradition of novelty (PR, 107) in the relational khora of a chaosmos (AI, 134) that is always beyond any systematization (GPW, §§22, 38). Hence, onceand-for-all incarnation of Truth as well as mere pluralism of truths are both falling short of the dynamics divine de/construction offers (PT, #8) with a cyclical renewal of religions and (given the direction of) new horizons that approximate to harmony and peace without the loss of diversity and intensity. The second problem names one of these reductionisms that would be tantamount to a resurgence of superiority, supersessionism, and fnality if we were to understand the sacred history of the divine renewal of religions for a civilization of universal peace as a straight line, as a history in the paradigm of modernity, that is, as a simple progression or the reinstatement of a new metanarrative of totalitarian closure (a foreclosed Heilsgeschichte), instead of nonlinear openness (Keller, Face, chs. 13–4). Again, if no religion can claim to fulfll the eschatological, apocalyptic, or transcendental horizon (while it always creates a new one), it is outright dangerous to presume the presence of absolute Truth/Reality in one’s own religion (Knitter, Theologies, part 1), especially if it is the latest one (Fazel, Pluralism, 1–3; Schaeffer, Clash, 60–83). Such a claim is based not only on the fear of fragmentation and the ensuing relativism but, on a deeper level, a mind-set that has never given up on superiority in the frst place (Kluge, Postmodernism, 71–168). Such a view fnds in the assurance of the Manifestation—be it Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, or Bahá’u’lláh—the balance of truth (GL, #98), because one might wrongly think that such a supreme revelation Truth shows its face without

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interference of limiting horizons of our mind, potential shaded perceptibility, the absence of limited and limiting emphases, and limitations of spiritual receptivity (Momen, Relativism/Ideas, 367–97). What counters this resurgence of superiority and supersessionism is the warning never to forget that Reality always appears concretely (in a concrescence) within divine limitations by which the “Manifestation of God hath a distinct individuality, a defnitely prescribed mission, a predestined Revelation, and specially designated limitations” (GL, #22; italics added). To overrule these divine limitations and concretizations with superiority, oppositional binaries, and supersession would, in the Bahá’í understanding, violate the most basic conviction of the unity of all Manifestations (Sours, Station, chs. 6–7). Therefore, there is no Archimedean point in any human understanding from which to survey everything with the eye of God—except that the gazing “with the eye of God” (GL, #125) is meant as the divine movement within us toward the openness of the horizons, opening our eyes to that which is always already beyond closures and their rationalization. When Bahá’u’lláh reminds us of the fnality of all revelations (in temporal extension and the depth of truth that it is allowed to divulge), even his own (!), we should take this warning seriously since the alternative is an absolutism that equates one’s own understanding with Truth/ Reality (Fazel, Understanding, 239–82). Although this is a thoroughly postmodern insight, it already animates Bahá’u’lláh’s admonition that no one can know God’s essence (ch. 6) and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s warning that we cannot even know the essence of any creature: “Never shall that immemorial Reality lodge within the compass of a contingent being” (SAB, #24). Hence, as explained earlier (ch. 8), any access to divine attributes instead of divine essence does not, as some in an Aristotelian substantialist mode of thinking believe, mean that we could break through this apophatic subtraction of Truth/Reality and their relativity and multiplicity to gather at least some part of “its” essential Reality. There is just nothing to know! Any claim of such “true” (uninterpreted) knowledge would only fnd its truth in the limitations of our own Selves (SAB, #24) and the constructions of our own minds, because “whatever heights the mind of the most exalted of men may soar, however great the depths which the detached and understanding heart can penetrate, such mind and heart can never transcend that which is the creature of their own conceptions and the product of their own thoughts” (GL, #148). However, as much as this essential apophatic unknowing at the basis of all theopoetics must be relativistic, it is relativistic in the form of the three gates of relativity (ch. 1). It is not bald formlessness or bland confusion or deserted blithe. Rather, it points us back to the emptiness of divine selfess Self (ch. 7), a performative activation of our transformation into the divine emptiness of love, as it is mirrored in the example and infused in-sistence of the Reality in the Manifestation, and as it reveals the intention

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of love and peace, harmony and intensity—of unity in diversity and a novelty that raises the awareness of universal univocity. Indeed, “the meditations of the profoundest thinker, the devotions of the holiest of saints, the highest expressions of praise from either human pen or tongue, are but a refection of that which hath been created within themselves, through the revelation of the Lord, their God” (GL, #148; italics added). In this theopoetic in-sistence, we are not caught in mere wane imaginings (ch. 6), but are co-creators of the poem that is infused by the Poet’s revealing Self “itself” (TDM, ch. 1). Paradoxically, it is only by this insight that we, in our minds, can also confne the apophatic horizon to the theopoetic intensity and harmony gathered from the message and example of one Manifestation and confound the particular constrictions, ways of worship, and spiritual methods of one religion as a particular appearance of Truth/Reality with the absolute horizon. It was this tendency that has led Karl Rahner to identify the Christian expression of this in-sisting revelation of Truth/Reality in Christ with the transcendental horizon of religion and revelation, itself fulflling all revelation and religions—thereby establishing an inclusivism that constructs all other religions as anonymously Christian (Duffy, Experience, 43–62). The same is, of course, true for other religions: so is, for instance, Jain anekantavada meant to transform the beginner’s relativism into the defnite truth of Jain cosmology and soteriology (ch. 8); and Buddhist enlightenment to Truth/Reality is meant to free us from all constructions in the form of the Buddha-nature (ch. 7). It is important here to follow Kitagawa’s advice that religious peace is only available if we understand religion not only from the inside autobiographical perspective but in light of the multiplicity of such autobiographies and also from the perception and reception by other religions which co-write the biography of a religion (Quest, 1–13). As the ancient way to express this fulfllment of the transcendental horizon of all religions was symbolized in apocalyptic terms, Bahá’u’lláh demythologizes these attempts of the catastrophic coming of the Truth/Reality (KI, part 1), ending all imagination and divergence, as theopoetic metaphors for the renewal of religions through a new Manifestation (Lambden, Catastrophe, 81–99). He turns the images of the apocalyptic break-down— in the Tanakh, the New Testament, and the Qur’an so often imagined as the crumbling and vanishing of the heavenly bodies and the landscapes of the Earth, in other traditions with the confagration of the world—into the processual images of the transcendental horizon of a certain religion (worldview, cosmology, soteriological construction, and accumulated doctrinal settlement) to be upset by the Novelty of the event of Manifestation and the renewal of the appearance of its Truth (Sours, Prophesies, 13–26): “My decree be such as to cause the heaven of every religion to be cleft asunder” (KA, ¶7). The appearance of the event of Manifestation de/constructs the

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transcendental horizons of the past into what they always were, namely, contingent relativistic planes of immanence, always taking part in a process of challenge and renewal. This is what “incarnation” means (in Whitehead’s sense): that Reality always anew induces the transcendental horizon of an event to transition into one among many as new events arise, while the new events of Manifestation integrate in their concrescence the horizons to a new (and always renewed) constellation for its kairos (GPW, §38). And it is this process eschatology (Faber, Adventure, 91–112) that the Bahá’í writings exhibit (Momen, Thinking, 243–70). Here, the uniqueness and de/constructive nature of the Novelty of a new Manifestation, the new Day, lives from the contrast of the connective and revolutionizing nature of its divine rhythm (Fananapazir, Day, 217–38). On the one hand, every new religion might be seen as a contrasting shade, adding to the infnite colors of the Garden; but, on the other hand, it also shines with its Novelty in such a way that it de/constructs—refgures and transforms—the assemblage of the whole religious (and cosmic) landscape with (and in the form of) its own new concrescence through the new horizon that it opens: “In the Rose Garden of changeless splendor a Flower hath begun to bloom, compared to which every other fower is but a thorn, and before the brightness of Whose glory the very essence of beauty must pale and wither” (GL, #151), symbolizing even “that within the realms of holiness, nigh unto the celestial paradise, a new garden hath appeared” (HW. P, #18). Bahá’u’lláh, comes close to identify his revelation with the fulfllment of the eschatological horizon when he proclaims that it represents not one more revelation in a series, but the Day prophesied in all religions in the expression of their eschatological hope of messianic and universal fulfllment (Sours, Station, ch. 13). While “every age in which a Manifestation of God hath lived is divinely ordained, and may, in a sense, be characterized as God’s appointed Day,” his “Day, however, is unique, and is to be distinguished from those that have preceded it,” as it appeared in fulfllment of the Day promised after the “Seal of the Prophets” so that the “Prophetic Cycle hath, verily, ended” and the “Eternal Truth is now come” (GL, #25). Yet, as Bahá’í scholars have warned, this uniqueness is related to the situation of humanity to be able to sustain the notion of a cosmopolitan outlook such that the uniqueness of the renewal of religion and of civilization coincide in this kairos (Fazel, Pluralism, 42–3). The message of all Manifestations remains fundamentally the same (Sours, Station, ch. 6), culminating only by the potential to be refected in a more universally perceived way, within a new transcendental horizon, as humanity evolves such a universal, cosmic, ecological, connective, cosmopolitan consciousness. What this contrast of continuity and de/construction demonstrates is not (merely) that its interpretation should not give way to simplifcations that

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misuse its Novelty for a reintroduction of superiority and supersession; rather, this contrast makes exceedingly real the more complex process of transreligious relativity itself as a process of de/construction and novelty. If we really want to embrace all religions, we must understand their unity not only in relenting to their dialogical fate or their permanent fragmentation (Knitter, Theologies, parts 3–4), but from the Novelty with which they are brought into contrast (GPW, §39). We must trust the mutual and successive de/constructions without which we would either reduce all religions to mere continuity without Novelty or discontinuity without reference to the Novelty to the situation in which it appears as Novelty (and from which it cannot be deduced). Hence, the processual unity of religions cannot be had without the recovery of the Spirit of these religions in the Novelty as their fulfllment. If this Novelty is situated at the culmination of the sacred promises of their fulfllment in a universal Day, because “the soul of every Prophet of God, of every Divine Messenger, hath thirsted for this wondrous Day” (Bahá’u’lláh, quoted in ADJ, 78), the uniqueness of this Day is the de/constructive fulfllment of their desires. It is in this sense that Bahá’u’lláh claims this dispensation not to be a new religion, but the fulfllment of the vision and promises of old, in which all religions become transreligiously translucent because “for it is as the eye to past ages and centuries, and as a light unto the darkness of the times” (ibid.). Nevertheless, as any horizon gives rise to a new horizon beyond itself, and as the worlds of God/Reality are infnite, the bold uniqueness of the Day as stated by Bahá’u’lláh becomes the symbol for a cosmopolitan universality that far exceeds our imagination. Herewith the third problem instantly arises: How can we avoid the fallacy to assume that the de/constructive Novelty of this event should be, or is unavoidably to be considered, superior to, and, in fact, superseding the past (transcendental) horizons of religions, even if the new event of Manifestation (as it implies the establishment of a new religion or the renewal of religions past) is not understood to be fnal? This is a great challenge (Fazel, Approaches, 41–53). As a frst line of defense for the de/constructive nature of this sacred process we need to be aware of the apophatic de/ construction of the theopoetic process itself by which every religion, revelation, and spiritual construction, will point beyond itself to a messianic Day and fgure: the coming of a prophet of the rank of Moses and the return of Elijah before the Day of God (Deut. 18:15–18; Acts 3:20–22; Lepard, Glory, 171); the second coming of Christ and the promise of the parakletos (John 14:26; 16:12–4; Lambden, Prophecy, 69–124); the coming of the Qa’im, the Mahdi, the twelfth Imam, Christ, Imam Husayn, and a new Book (Momen, Islam, chs. 3–4); the coming of the saoshyant (Boyce, Zoroastrians, 42–3; Buck, Bahá’u’lláh, 15–33); the coming of the next Kalki Avatar (Momen, Hinduism, ch. 4); the coming of Maitreya Buddha (Momen, Buddhism, ch.

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3). But while most religions expected the event of this renewal to confrm the Truth as they gathered from their teachings and as they imagined it in their local symbolisms, the novelty of the Báb’s and Bahá’u’lláh eschatological expectation is that its messianic transcendence is transreligious in nature and scope: the Báb hails the coming of “Him Whom God Shall Make Manifest” (man yuzhiruhu’llah), whom Bahá’u’lláh claims to be, but in the context of an infnite multiplicity before, besides, and after them in this world and the infnite worlds (Lundberg, Adam, 59–82). As another line of defense, we need to admit that even if the harmony and intensity by which one event can raise the cosmopolitan consciousness for, and approximate the realization of, peace, universalizing its potential and actual pervasiveness, is of greater value than a limited realization that would concentrate only on a certain community, time, or place, the wider realization can only claim its greater value if it does not devalue the value gained by the other events confuent in its nexus, even if they seem more limited from the new perspective. In other words, no religion must devalue another one even if it thinks it is closer to the realization of the virtues of peace, such as love, compassion, and wisdom, because this devaluation does deny the contextual nature of any realization of values (without which there was no value at all), and because it would contradict the very values to be realized through such a universalization of the past horizons, contexts, limitations, and situations (GPW, §§23–4). It is the seduction of supremacy to think that even if all other religions have some truth, because we have all the truth, we do not need to be listening to the values realized in these other religions (PT, ##40–1). This deaf and blind superiority is the opposite of love, compassion, and wisdom. We fnd it in conservative Catholic reinterpretations of the Second Vatican Council’s document on the world’s religions, Nostra Aetate (1965), which had admitted genuine truth in other religions (Teasdale, Heart, 40, 161), and we must recognize it also to be a danger for potential Bahá’í interpretations of the status of other religions—using the necessary paradox between unity and novelty by tilting it toward such a unity within novelty that would swallow the multiplicity of religions in a complete reduction, suspension, sublimation and eradication of the other in the new (Fazel, Pluralism, 1–2). I have already demonstrated that the paradox of Novelty/Truth demands that the de/ construction of the horizons of religions through a new event of Manifestation does not mean the destruction or fragmentation of these religions, but a new release from the constructions that have sedimented around their deepest intentions (WOB, 57–60). But since these intentions are not the same in all dispensations—if we remember the divine limitation and differentiation of Reality in all religions—the new horizon does not fulfll the eschatological, apocalyptic, or transcendental horizon of a religion or religion per se in the infnite process of apophatic-polyphilic becoming (in-sisting) of Reality. And

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again, as it is the uniqueness that refects the unity of Reality (SAQ, #81), it is the immediate consequence of this insight that we cannot stop to listen to the way the Wisdom and Compassion of Reality has realized itself in these multifarious Ways of Truth, in all their difference and mutual enrichment forming the Garden of Reality, which only then is the Garden of Reality. As a last line of defense against the creeping in of supremacy and supersessionism, even if in a processual context of admitted non-fnality in the Bahá’í Faith, is the cosmopolitan conviction and scope of its teachings. Neither is it possible to divide the world into the community of light and into the mass of darkness, which was the solution for many self-enclosed communities within many religions that claimed their new way of life for themselves and left the world to the forces of darkness, nor is it possible to become the only light on the hill for all the world, while all others must pilgrimage out of darkness. On the contrary, since it is essential to the Novelty of Bahá’u’lláh renewal of religion to propagate a world-embracing view, the equalization of all races, ethnicities, genders, classes, and religious commitments in the light of one humanity, populating our common Earth, and the commitment always to contribute (individually and collectively) to the well-being of all of humanity and its Earth, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and religious commitment (TB, 87)—what more can be said than that this imperative performative pattern does not tolerate any suggestion of superiority, but demands as “superior” only the character of acting in favor of, and with, all of humanity (PT, #45). “Let your vision be world-embracing, rather than confned to your own self” (GL, #43). It is the loss of this vision and the according way of acting that Bahá’u’lláh condemns as “The Evil One,” meaning the inability to listen to, learn from, be enriched by, work with, coalesce around, contribute non-discriminately to, appreciate the divergences of, and help to establish this ecological cosmopolity, and disregard, violate, and neglect its necessarily accompanying, equally demanding de/constructive theopoetics, because it is this attitude that in the deepest sense “hindereth the rise and obstructeth the spiritual progress of the children of men” (GL, #43). 5. THE GARDEN OF RELATIVITY (OMNIRELATIVITY) As my considerations on the relativity of religious truth and the truth of transreligious relativity in a world of becoming comes to a close, and given the impossibility of a summary or recapitulation, I will end with the beginning (ch. 1), the literary witnesses introducing, proclaiming, and boldly stating the unavoidability of the insight of transreligious relativity. And I will end with a hint toward a loose end, guarantying the non-closure of these considerations, but presenting them as a starting point for its further meditation (as there will

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not be any solution to it, but a choice of attitude toward it). First, I will quote four passages in which Shoghi Effendi has formulated the theme of relativity of truth from a Bahá’í perspective. As most of its elements have been driving the refections of this book, these passages may suffce as their dense symbol, and I will only comment on certain elements emphasizing the questions of this chapter on theopoetics and cosmopolity. Then, second, I will, for the last time, concentrate the whole argumentation of the last three chapters, but also all of the nine chapters, in their different dynamics to the three gates of relativity. This triad is my condensed icon for how the whole question of relativity can become a religiously meaningful, philosophically responsible, and spiritually engaging approach in the contemporary discourses to the future of religions and their contribution to a future civilization of peace. If such a peace will, in order to be socially and ecologically harmonious, need to be generated by, or based on, an intensely diversifed, spiritually transformed, cosmopolitan consciousness, the actualization of such a transreligious peace must refer to something that is not constructed, but rather is undeconstructable. Because it is Reality/God/Truth, “it” indicates the process of “its” (Self’s) becoming-realized within progressive and cyclical, never fnal and always new, all-comprising and all-shattering, unifying and diversifying approximations. Finally, I will only mention why I have not found it worth to engage the “transcendental argument” against the relativity of truth, which I call the Transylvanian argument. Although one can engage with its sphere of conception in conversation with analytic philosophy and, at the same time, hold on to an unavoidable and unadulterated relativity of the conceptual schemes, which cannot be reduced to any a priori logical monism of argumentation, and although one can use the insights gained from the work of philosophers such as William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and A. N. Whitehead for such a relativistic reformulation of religious pluralism (Runzo, Reason, passim), I will forgo this approach. The main argument of “cognitive relativism” that this approach proposes (ibid., chs. 1, 8) was already rendered meaningful and has been applied throughout the book, mediated through references to Madhyamika Buddhism, Suf theosophy, and Bahá’í epistemology (Momen, Religion, 195–9). Instead, as the countering of the Transylvanian argument will lead beyond the interest of the body of this book, I will tackle some of the related issues in the Epilogue on an experimental basis. The frst of Shoghi Effendi’s statements is the one with which I have begun the differentiation of relativity (ch. 1). It does not have to be commented on, here, as it can function as an adequate summary of the Bahá’í claims I have elaborated up to this point throughout all of the chapters. The fundamental principle enunciated by Bahá’u’lláh . . . is that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that Divine Revelation is a continuous and

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progressive process, that all the great religions of the world are divine in origin, that their basic principles are in complete harmony, that their aims and purposes are one and the same, that their teachings are but facets of one truth, that their functions are complementary, that they differ only in the nonessential aspects of their doctrines, and that their missions represent successive stages in the spiritual evolution of human society. (PDC, v; italics added)

The shortest, most concise passage of Shoghi Effendi appears in a refection on the spiritual meaning and physical appearance of the symbolism of Bahá’í houses of worship, the “Dawning-Places of Remembrance” (mashriq al-adhkar), which “symbolize the fundamental verity underlying the Bahá’í Faith, that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that Divine Revelation is not fnal but progressive” (BA, 185; italics added). In both, this quote and the one before, Shoghi Effendi relates the relativity of Truth/Reality with the nonfnality and progressiveness of “its” (Self’s) revelation. What is worth emphasizing, here, is that this progressiveness does not imply any hint of supremacy or supersession. This becomes clear when we contrast the characteristics these quotes attach to the relativity of religious truth rather than just understanding them as a string of characterizations. Progression and continuity contrast the novelty that creatively disturbs continuity with the transreligious translucency of continuous relationality between religions. This relationality is even heightened by the unity of the source, namely, apophatic Reality, and the harmony of the principles of religions; but harmony is, of course, not uniformity, but unity in diversity. The unity of purposes and aims must, in the light of the investigations of this book, be understood as the divine persuasiveness toward harmony and peace, love and compassion, and must not be framed in terms of sameness of philosophical adaptations and theological constructions, spiritual practices, or culturally diversifed language and symbolisms. To understand the diverse teachings of religions as facets of one truth will best be elucidated if the “one truth” is understood in terms of al-haqq, the apophatic-polyphilic Truth/Reality, of which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says: “‘Seek the truth, the truth shall make you free.’ So shall we see the truth in all religions, for truth is in all and truth is one” (PT, #41)! Hence, the functions of religions for the world and for one another are not merely successive (one overcoming the other), but complementary. This means, that only if we seek Truth in all religions, if we listen to their (in our eyes and ears) even strange and undiscovered facets of Truth/Reality, we will discover that they all contribute (always) to the Garden of Reality (haqq) their own shades, unique and indispensable in the whole process of continuity and progression. Differentiation and mutuality must, henceforth, not be considered to contradict one another, but to complement their importance in every stage of the evolution of humanity to the cosmopolity of which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, “that the policy of God is greater than

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human policy. We must follow the Divine policy and that applies alike to all individuals. He treats all individuals alike: no distinction is made, and that is the foundation of the Divine Religions” (SAB, #225). In the next quote, Shoghi Effendi emphasizes the cosmopolitical necessity to implement an affrmation of all religions and their intuitions, experiences, and explicated facets of Truth/Reality, the contributions of which are not abrogated by the Novelty of new Manifestations, but subtractively affrmed (ch. 2). This affrmation goes so far as to demand that from the perspective of the new event it is counter to the intention of its release of Novelty to undermine the allegiance to the cause of these religions, which safeguards against the feeling of superiority that always will be enkindled precisely when we forget to appreciate their sacred events and horizons, the Truth of their teachings and the Spirit that animates them.

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The Revelation, of which Bahá’u’lláh is the source and center, abrogates none of the religions that have preceded it, nor does it attempt, in the slightest degree, to distort their features or to belittle their value. It disclaims any intention of dwarfng any of the Prophets of the past, or of whittling down the eternal verity of their teachings. It can, in no wise, confict with the spirit that animates their claims, nor does it seek to undermine the basis of any man’s allegiance to their cause. Its declared, its primary purpose is to enable every adherent of these Faiths to obtain a fuller understanding of the religion with which he stands identifed, and to acquire a clearer apprehension of its purpose. It is neither eclectic in the presentation of its truths, nor arrogant in the affrmation of its claims. Its teachings revolve around the fundamental principle that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that Divine Revelation is progressive, not fnal. Unequivocally and without the least reservation it proclaims all established religions to be divine in origin, identical in their aims, complementary in their functions, continuous in their purpose, indispensable in their value to mankind. (WOB 57–8; italics added)

In our context of a cosmopolitan theopoetics this means that it might, in the end, not be about winning members over to one’s new religion, but to affrm their seriousness and, as Shoghi Effendi so clearly states, that the primary purpose of transreligious discourse and communication, from a Bahá’í perspective, might be to enable every adherent of these Faiths to obtain a fuller understanding of the religion with which he stands identifed by making the transreligious connectivity between them clear so as to heighten the common purpose for humanity united in a cosmopolity of peace and diversity (indispensability). The reason for this relativistic approach of teaching the novel religion is clearly stated in this quote: because religious Truth is not absolute, but relative—“its” absoluteness being addressed by “its” apophatic nature and “its” polyphilic in-sistence.

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The fnal passage mentioned here of Shoghi Effendi ends with a quote from Bahá’u’lláh that emphasizes the infnite process of revelation of Truth/ Reality/God that per defnition cannot be closed off at any point. While this process does not discount connectivity and translucency, it also avoids any claim of fnality. Hence, no progress will ever lead to the eschatological halt of fulfllment, but will—in a manner that Whitehead has so clearly worked out—persist as de/construction through Novelty as long as there will be a world of becoming. This, according to Shoghi Effendi, is the not a philosophical construct or a mere theological opinion, but the bedrock belief of the Bahá’í Faith.

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It should also be borne in mind that, great as is the power manifested by this Revelation and however vast the range of the Dispensation its Author has inaugurated, it emphatically repudiates the claim to be regarded as the fnal revelation of God’s will and purpose for mankind. To hold such a conception of its character and functions would be tantamount to a betrayal of its cause and a denial of its truth. It must necessarily confict with the fundamental principle which constitutes the bedrock of Bahá’í belief, the principle that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that Divine Revelation is orderly, continuous and progressive and not spasmodic or fnal. Indeed, the categorical rejection by the followers of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh of the claim to fnality which any religious system inaugurated by the Prophets of the past may advance is as clear and emphatic as their own refusal to claim that same fnality for the Revelation with which they stand identifed. “To believe that all revelation is ended, that the portals of Divine mercy are closed, that from the daysprings of eternal holiness no sun shall rise again, that the ocean of everlasting bounty is forever stilled, and that out of the tabernacle of ancient glory the Messengers of God have ceased to be made manifest” must constitute in the eyes of every follower of the Faith a grave, an inexcusable departure from one of its most cherished and fundamental principles. (WOB 115; italics added)

The Garden of Reality is really a Garden of Relativity and this relativity is the omnirelativity of Reality/Truth/God. I have endeavored to analyze this relativity of apophatic Truth and the polyphilic Truth engendering transreligious relativity with three gates or perspectives or planes (themselves relative to one another), namely, of apophatic subtraction, of the polyphilic affrmation of many divergent worlds, and the surrelative potency of Truth/Reality/God to always surprise with Novelty. Together they form a process that paints Reality in the colors of the multiplicity of fowers and plants of a garden, while it remains one Garden comprised by the symbols of the khoric oneness of the Earth, the always renewed cycling of one Sun (engendering many Days), and the apophatic “coming from above” of the same Rain, which really is a multiplicity of abundance. Rather than being an absolute being or repeating the

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one truth like a simple formula, divine presence is that of omnirelativity. Far from the medieval absolutisms of classical theism with its omni-predicates (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence) in their expression of a substantialism of absolutist power (Hartshorne, Relativity, passim), here, all divine attributes are omni-relative to one another, a multiplicity united and released by the Reality as it becomes manifest beyond “itself” as “its” Self. Here is an alternative to Whitehead’s accusation that religion has constructed God in the image “of him [as] a sublimation from its barbaric origin” in which “He stood in the same relation to the whole World as early Egyptian or Mesopotamian kings stood to their subject populations” so that in “the fnal metaphysical sublimation, he became the one absolute, omnipotent, omniscient source of all being, for his own existence requiring no relations to anything beyond himself” (AI, 169). The omnirelativity of Reality is “its” (Self’s) in/different (and in/differentiating) in-sistence in the multiplicity of the world by Wisdom and Compassion, Love and Harmony, Intensity and Peace—animating with “its” (Self’s) Spirit all transformation toward these attributes, making us the mirrors and conduits and receivers and amplifers of their surrelative unity in the Manifestations, of their translucent mutuality in our spiritual realizations, and the diversity of their multiplicity. With this non-binary, ecological, cosmopolitan consciousness of omnirelativity, as well as the assumption that its appearance on the world scene is not just a mere accident, but the expression of the immanence of a universal consciousness (of the primordial and consequent nature) in the evolution of the universe (and its inherent articulation), a new transcendental horizon may have become event: the universal reality of the Mind of God (‘aql) “incarnating” (zuhur-i haqq) as culmination of human maturity (zuhur-i ‘aql). Bahá’u’lláh prophesied this event. His cosmopolitan paradigm, as articulated by the Bahá’í writings, may be heard as the prophetic voice of resilience in a time of lamentations against the late- and postmodern social and spiritual condition, which drowns in fragmentations (Karlberg, Resilience, 245). Yet, it may also escape the holistic simplifcations, which rejoice in an unbroken “implicate order” of the universe. While both reactions to the postmodern condition have occupied the understanding and effect of relativity as either meaningless many-ness or totalizing whole, Whitehead’s oscillation between coinherence and novelty as well as Bahá’u’lláh’s proclamation of the new event of the unity in diversity of humanity do not fail to address transreligious truth as a connective multiplicity in which none of the powerful binaries of domination may remain intact—neither the binaries of fragmented society under the globalization of the substantialized differences of class, race, gender, or religion, nor the ones of the holistic stratifcation of levels of achievement and missed opportunities. In this new horizon (of this new event), the relativity of religious truth is not a concession to inevitable conditions, but

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a recovery of the future, a faint perception (prehension) of that Novelty that has just began to raise its shaking of any totalizing horizons of closure. Transreligious omnirelativity is the voice of tomorrow trying to persuade us of its reality today, as prophetic harbinger of a civilization of true conviviality and spiritual peace. If I have not engaged one argument, it was the transcendental argument against relativism, so easily put out there as a discourse stopper: that if all is relative, this claim is itself absolute, which is self-contradictory and, hence, relativism must be discarded and Truth is absolute. Maybe. Maybe not. The simplicity is deceiving—if we remember Whitehead’s wisdom: “Seek simplicity and distrust it” (CN, 163). Simplicity is always an abstraction from the complex multiplicity of experiences, which are mutual becomings and movements between event and nexuses, forming and discarding characteristic organisms, aesthetic forms, and societies. This view is based on substantialism, the fallacy to believe that the most simple is the most fundamental and, hence, must be closer to Truth. Instead, Whitehead writes: “It is the assumption, unconscious and uncriticized, that logical simplicity can be identifed with priority in the process constituting an experient occasion” (PR, 54). Whitehead was himself a logician and mathematician and produced with Russell probably the most infuential and last work on the integration of logic with mathematics, the Principia Mathematica (1905), but left this endeavor as he realized that mathematics cannot be reduced to logics and that the self-contradictory nature of the transcendental argument (visible in the so-called logical paradoxes) cannot be solved logically. Instead, logic has a limited function in the constructions of experiences (PR, 3) and in no sense an absolute or absolutely overriding one. To the contrary, it is experience that is basic and, hence, the aesthetic of experience (PR, 102, 113) of which logic is a mere, if important, abstraction (SMW, 18) and as abstraction a mere, yet important, form of a possibility, which may or may not be realized (PR, 276). All abstractions are connected and moving in their multiple plain of consistence within the primordial nature, but they are always subject to events, which accept them or refute their realization. At least in the primordial valuation process of divine becoming (PR, 31), they are subject to the aesthetic of the Wisdom of divine evaluation as well as the receptivity of the Compassion of the consequent nature of God (PR, 345–6). I have called the transcendental argument the Transylvanian argument (Faber, Wahrheit, passim; Epilogue)—may the area and their vampires forgive me!—because it sucks the blood out of any meaningful discussion of Truth. This argument reduces Reality to a mere statement of absoluteness. While it may claim to demonstrate the unsoundness of arguments for omnirelativity since they presuppose the opposite (an absolute claim of relativity) as the very condition of the act of claiming relativity (Taylor, Arguments, ch. 2),

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I think the reverse is actually happening: in the very act of (the transcendental argument) stating itself, “absoluteness” only becomes subject to Derrida’s deconstruction, as it only adds itself to a host of other evaluations, that is, differentiates the plain of absoluteness as that of relativity even further. What is more, it also is subject to the power dynamics Derridian deconstruction has set out to uncover: that the one who has the power to stop a discourse in its tracks, who silences all, is an expression of the power of obliteration and eradication in a colonizing endangerment of any culture of diversity and cosmopolitan communication. It is a game, rather than a reality. It really says nothing about the complexity of Reality the simplicity of which is never an abstract formula, but always an apophatic-polyphilic movement of Life. Here, Life and logic do not coincide as in Hegel (The Science of Logic), but they contrast one another, always engaging one another in a process that transcends any fxed transcendental horizons and uncovers them as limited contingencies in the vast process of the world of becoming. With Deleuze, we may affrm that Life is “different”: it is difference; it differentiates, defers, complexifes, diverges; and still, it is one (khoric) process of such diversifcation of the incompossible of which Truth/Reality/God as the Poet in the Wisdom and Compassion of which Truth settles all things (PR, 12) without disengaging the Process of its polyphilic effusion. In light of this, I want to end with a statement of Shoghi Effendi—headed by the title “Unity in Diversity”—that forcefully and sweepingly captures the cosmopolitan impact of transreligious relativity, if we are willing to see its radical implications. The call of Bahá’u’lláh is primarily directed against all forms of provincialism, all insularities and prejudices. If long-cherished ideals and time-honored institutions, if certain social assumptions and religious formulae have ceased to promote the welfare of the generality of mankind, if they no longer minister to the needs of a continually evolving humanity, let them be swept away and relegated to the limbo of obsolescent and forgotten doctrines. Why should these, in a world subject to the immutable law of change and decay, be exempt from the deterioration that must needs overtake every human institution? (WOB, 42)

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Epilogue Clouds of Truth

1. REALITY, CLOUDED Bahá’u’lláh uses the theopoetic term “clouds of Truth” when he says:

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There can be no doubt whatever that if for one moment the tide of His mercy and grace were to be withheld from the world, it would completely perish. For this reason, from the beginning that hath no beginning the portals of Divine mercy have been fung open to the face of all created things, and the clouds of Truth will continue to the end that hath no end to rain on the soil of human capacity, reality and personality their favors and bounties. Such hath been God’s method continued from everlasting to everlasting. (GL, #27)

The “Truth” of these clouds is al-haqq, ultimate Truth/Reality/God, which/ who appears in clouds that rain down grace on the Garden of Reality/God/ Truth (ESW, §§16, 86, 203). Bahá’u’lláh uses the term “cloud” with different connotations: He symbolically transforms the biblical image of the eschatological coming of the Son of Man in the clouds of heaven (Matthew 24) into the incarnation of the Wisdom-Spirit of God in the temple of a human body; and he uses it to indicate the challenge that this bodily appearance of the Spirit provides for its spiritual understanding (KI, part 1; GL, #17). But he also wants to convey with this metaphor the grace of Reality/God/ Truth that infnitely, indefnitely, and with infnite grades of intensity endlessly creates worlds and infuses “itself” (“its” Self) in them (GL, #151). It is a symbol of the Garden’s diversity to be replenished by divine polyphilia (SAB, #220). It mirrors the unknowable essence of Reality, which is a “hidden treasure” beyond one and many, an inconceivable multiplicity of overfowing life, light, love, goodness, and the waters of refreshment (TB, 114). But 449

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it is also a dark cloud, a cloud of unknowing, of puzzlement and apophatic astonishment, of evanescence of limitations, painfully de/constructing all of our imaginations and self-preservations with an intensity that no one can bear directly, without a cloud hiding this sun (GL, #17). The clouds of Truth also alludes to Bahá’u’lláh’s early poem Sprinkling of the Cloud of Unknowing (Rashh-i ‘Ama’) in which he meditates on the hadith of the “place” of God before creation to which Muhammad is said to have answered that God abides in a cloud with nothing around (but air). Bahá’u’lláh’s poem ponders over the bursting forth of rain from this cloud which is the symbol of the habitation of Reality/God/Truth in a new revelation “in his person”—although (at this point in time) shrouded by the thick darkness of the messianic secret, by the scandal of its bodily appearance in his “temple” (haykal), and by the impossibility that Reality/God/Truth can actually ever be encountered without the multiplicity that hides its naked essence from the dissolution of everything different from “it,” as only that which (the one who) is (in/different from) this essence can encounter it (Lambden, Poem, 4–114; Cole, Zen Gloss, passim). The cloud is a play on the theopoetic nature of the hiddenness of Truth, the scandal of its concreteness and limitation in its appearance, and the polyphilic multiplicity with which it distributes its infnite aspects in infnite worlds (TDM, chs. 5, 8, 15). In a sense, this Truth cannot be known and any limitation of its infnity to any appearance within its own process of actualization, although it appears (zuhur) within this process always in limited form, is futile (SAQ, #37). One of the most interesting appearances of the “clouding” of al-haqq can be witnessed in Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet of Reality/God/Truth (Lawh-i Haqq). In explication of the most daring claim, for instance of the last great “summary” of his teachings, the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf (Lawh-i Ibn-i Dibh)—and reminiscent of the Persian medieval mystic Mansur al-Hallaj’s declaration “I am Reality/Truth/God” (ana al-haqq), for which it is assumed he was martyred (Eschraghi, Kommentar, 469–70)—namely, that Bahá’u’lláh “is” al-haqq (ch. 7), that al-haqq has come (“in his person”) (ESW, §16), the Tablet of Reality/God/Truth is basically an “infnite” permutation of the term al-haqq in all of its meanings, making it in itself omnirelative (Lambden, Introduction to The Lawh-i haqq, passim). There is no anchor in the text to discern or determine its specifcs meanings, that is, whether it does, at any given place, indicate either God or ultimate Reality or Truth or the One Beyond. There is no measure in which we could project one or the other onto al-haqq as it always escapes all predication. It is the name of the nameless that only appears in many names or many signifcations (ch. 6). As in the Tablet of Manifestation (ch. 1), where Bahá’u’lláh states that his “LogosSoul (nafs)” is “the Ultimately Real (al-haqq)” (Lambden translation, section 2, §2), “it” is the apophatic per se that only appears in the multiplicity of

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meanings, in the clouds of “it/self,” that is, “its” Self, which is (in/different in) the Manifestation (SAQ, #37), but cannot be defned in any categorical manner. Here are a few verses from the opening section:

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He is the True One (huwa al-ḥaqq). Assuredly was he, as befts the Real Truth, in very Truth (`ala al-ḥaqq bi’l-ḥaqq), made manifest from the horizon of the Ultimately Real (`an ufq al-ḥaqq). O concourse of the Ultimately Real One (malā’ al-ḥaqq)! The Truly Real One (al-ḥaqq) has, in very Truth, been made manifest from the horizon of Ultimately Real (`an ufq al-ḥaqq f hadha al-ḥaqq), for he hath dawned forth from the Dawning-Place of the Ultimately Real (maṭla` al-ḥaqq). (Bahá’u’lláh, Lawh-i haqq. transl. by Stephen Lambden, section 1, §§4–5; section 2, §§1–2)

Not the concept, as “it” is of a cloud, or a multiplicity, or omnirelativity of Reality “itself,” but the event of “its” happening creates the very horizon of “its” (always new) meaning, wherein “it” becomes particular (time-, place-, history-related) and (in a new way) universal at the same time. This Reality cannot be known, and yet, is happening; this God cannot be addressed, and yet, appears in our reverence and realization; this Truth cannot be articulated, and yet, presents “itself” in the haykal of the mazhar-i ilahi—and our heart (KI, 192–7). The clouds of al-haqq are impossible to imagine (as all imaginations are limited projections of “its” infnity), and yet, beyond any possibility “it” appears (zuhur) as the universal horizon, the boundary condition of all horizons or the unbounded boundary of indetermination (ch. 1)—to which I will recur in “The Last Word” later. As such an event, Omnirelativity, is not debilitating relativism, but the polyphilia of peace, of the Garden of al-haqq (to which the corpus of this book is dedicated). It is, then, in the event of alhaqq, not the logic of transcendental absoluteness (the Transylvanian argument) that the impossibility of relativity is stated as an existential, aesthetic, and spiritual reality. Yet, it is this impossibility of the event (being not possible, but actual!) in which not absoluteness tames relativity, but the event’s Omnirelativity becomes the horizon of absoluteness: al-haqq has come—as, well, al-haqq. From it follows not “that the rest is silence” but that “it” is the silence in which the word/world is spoken (TU, #3), the sound, AUM, BHA’, in its unfathomable openings of multiplicity and novelty, always again, until the end that has no end. 2. THE TRANSYLVANIAN ARGUMENT The following considerations will counter the Transylvanian argument (ch. 9) against the relativity of Truth from this angle: that Truth is not primarily a logical category, but is another name for Reality/God, and that divine logic is

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not confned by any logic we can come up with (Prologue). Despite the wit of any logic, it remains a child’s play compared to claims like that of the Gospel of John that the Logos became fesh (Joh, 1:14) or that Truth/Reality has appeared in Manifestations (zuhur-i haqq) since such claims defy any logic with which we could come up. As the clouds symbolize the eternal hiddenness of Truth with the process of appearing only in a cycle of love (ch. 5), it also reminds us that Truth is not to be had only or primarily by the analytic, rational mind or intellect, although Mind is never excluded in its discovery; it rather is itself surrational (ch. 1). Even the Mind (nous) of Plotinus is not analytic, but visionary (ch. 8), and the highest engagement of the Mind for Aristotle is not logic, but the mystical experience and immediate contemplation of Truth (theoria) (Bénatouil and Bonazzi, Theoría, 1–16). Hence, the Transylvanian argument of the logical impossibility of omnirelativity is always already coming too late to the party, as it has started already with the leading act: the “ought” of Goodness (the reasonless reason of existence), the divine love of existence (polyphilic affrmation), and the unknowability of “its” essence (apophatic subtraction). As, for Whitehead, the reason for anything cannot be found in any abstractions, and be it that of Aristotelian logic, with their seemingly universal necessity, but only in the actuality of events (GPW, §§13, 18–19)—which he calls his ontological principle (PR, 26)—we may assume that Truth is always concrete, an event, in becoming (PR, 13). With Deleuze, we could say: The Truth of an event is the universality of its singularity, not the generality of its repeatable pattern (Faber, Origin, 273–89). The uniqueness (ahadiyyah) of Reality is universal, but not any generality. As such, as absolutely unique Reality, “it” embraces everything in surrelativity (PR, 12) in which all access has been removed, or has been emptied, of any identifying or identifable object or subject (ch. 6). This is the “perspective” of the Luminous Mind (ch. 7). Yet, as the essence of such uniqueness must also be absolutely hidden (the Hidden Treasure), “its” appearance must always be multiplicity, like the raining clouds of grace in which Reality/Truth hides and reveals “itself” (“its” Self) always completely, but never with any completion (ch. 6). Truth must be experienced in the multiplicity of these experiences (ch. 9). It appears from unique experiences, which are, as Whitehead assures us, religious in nature (RM, 31), as they present us with the universality by which the rationalities and imaginations of our mind’s generalities must be (as Bahá’u’lláh says) “rent asunder” (PM, #101) so as to make present the unique incomparability of “its” universal nature (GPW, §11). In the fnal analysis, Truth is not a logical, but an aesthetic category (RM, 105), or better: is not an abstraction of general nature, but an experience of unique universality, which needs always events of Truth to become true. The Truth of these events is the novelty that always upsets any logic that tries to grasp it (TDM, ch. 8).

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The transcendental argument (against omnirelativity) is built on the contrary presupposition, namely, that truth is an unavoidable rational generality without exceptions and that it is clearly defned without ambivalences and uncertainties. But this is a chimera (Faber, Wahrheit, passim). It is based on the foundation of certainty rather than truth, a certainty that comes either from the fear of the ambivalences of the world of becoming and perishing, its chances and changes, or feeds off of the self-serving interests of power to control the universe or discussions around truth and relativity with one’s little devices of mind (TDM, chs. 1, 6). It were not worth any discussion if it did not seduce many to discard the truth of the relativity of Truth as “absolutely” true, because they cannot fnd their way into the clouds of Truth, but prefer the clarity of defniteness, or because they are taught to fear movements of indetermination (ch. 1). But, all the more, it should be clear that this is itself a cyclical argument since it is only “true” on the presupposition that indeterminacy was already excluded (Faber, Sense, 41–5). If we do not exclude indeterminacy, however, we enter the clouds (Keller, Cloud, chs. 2–3), and Bahá’u’lláh’s clouds of Truth invite us to mystical unknowing (Cole, Zen Gloss, passim), but also, in/different from this movement, the polyphilic affrmation of infnity, infnite processes of approximation, and the trust in the unknowable in these moves (TDM, ch. 12). I am also not satisfed with “defenses” of relativity and uncertainty even if they indicate a healthy amount of “doubt” against absolute claims in light of debilitating relativism, but in favor of a lively culture of limitation of (religious) claims (Berger and Zijdervelt, Praise, chs. 2, 5–6), because such approaches are still presupposing the paradigm of (the limitation, but acceptance of) certainty as the basis for considerations of uncertainty. One can mount a defense of “robust” relativism in conversation with analytic and Continental philosophy on the basis of the differentiation of relativity from relationality (“deep” relativism) in order to unleash multiplicity and uncertainty (Margolis, Truth, ch. 12). Yet, as this discussion might repeat arguments between unitarian and differential pluralism (ch. 6), I have tried to demonstrate the meaningfulness of the different appearance of the polyphilic multiplicity of Truth/Reality in both the gate of Relationality and that of the Many Worlds on other grounds throughout the book. The application of the remaining logic of opposition (between relativism and relationalism, connectivity and multiplicity)—unlike the clouds of Truth and their aesthetic character—seems to me at least in danger to remain bound by a limiting rationalization of divergences as antagonisms (ch. 8), which I have, in light of the surrational release of connectivity and multiplicity from apophatic unknowing (ch. 1), tried to avoid. So, what follows is not a direct argumentation against the Transylvanian “dead man” argument, or for the apophatic-polyphilic triad of relativistic gates (from a logical standpoint),

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but an experiment with some of the aesthetic implications (in Whitehead’s sense) of the three gates of relativity explicated in the text of this book for a reformulation of a religiously relevant and intellectually satisfying different kind of “logic”—in the sense of Deleuze’s “logic of multiplicity” (TDM, ch. 2)—on the basis of the movements of indeterminateness, in/differentiation, polyphilic in-sistence, and multiplicity (TDM, ch. 8) that the Transylvanian logic seems to have excluded from the outset. I will present this experiment in the form of short sketches of connected propositions (P), arguments (A), and conclusions (C), neither in the form of any logical system (which would be self-defeating), nor in any recognizable way imitating the devices of analytic philosophy, but as an adventure in indetermination. The anchor of these considerations is the holy grail of the Transylvanians: the mutual reinforcement of the three rules of Aristotelian logic—the laws of identity, noncontradiction, and of the excluded third—that feed this logic’s complete and hermetic inescapability, throwing its necessity against any paradoxical resistance to their closure by the claim of the relativity of Truth. Although, in general, one may want to follow the law of noncontradiction, which seems to be the central weapon against the claim of the relativity of truth, as in its light the claim of omnirelativity is in itself selfcontradictory and, hence, necessarily false; yet, I have not found anyone who after making this argument has demonstrated anything convincing in the form of a “proof” besides throwing a weapon of destruction against the thought process itself (Nozick, Explanations, 1–24). Rather, any “proof” of the absoluteness of the truth of the Absoluteness of Truth will disappear in the mud of différance—think of Bertrand Russell’s paradoxical classes (Sorensen, History, ch. 22). If it were otherwise, we would have solved all puzzles with the devises of logic—puzzles, which are visible in the fantastic array of logical paradoxes and aporias (Sainsbury, Paradoxes, ch. 6)—and we would have found absolute Truth at our fngertips. We could point to absolute Truth; any discussion would have ended; all differences of opinion would have faded; all would be silenced in light of the power of such logic. Silentium! But I wonder whether this silence is not rather that of a cemetery. Thesis: The Transylvanian argument is based on the three laws of Aristotelian logic, especially the law of noncontradiction (Sullivan, Introduction, 72–4). While one can successfully challenge such a colonizing universalization of one mode of “logic” by venturing into the non-closure of any (only apparent) transcendental exclusion inherent in the third Aristotelian law, that of the excluded third (tertium non datur)—and without denying such an attempt to be successfully opening up a new space for alternatives of many worlds’ divergent logics (Margolis, Truth, 190)—I will rather concentrate on the non-contradictory nature of the transcendental argument against the self-contradictory nature of omnirelativity (that the three gates of relativity

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seem to inherently express). My thesis is, instead, that the truth of this (Aristotelian) logic (especially of the second law of noncontradiction), and per exemplar any truth at all, is—even if it was true (which I do not contest)— neither necessarily nor universally true. This truth, in turn, is in itself neither necessary nor universal; instead, it is supremely relative. I will develop this experiment in clouds of Truth virtually without references since all themes used for its argumentations constitute the body of the present book.

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3. AN EXPERIMENT WITH TRUTH First Proposition (P1): The necessity of Truth is not necessarily necessary. First Argument (A1): There are some truths that are not necessary, that is, some truths are contingent. For instance, that there appears a concrete Manifestation, say, Christ or Bahá’u’lláh, is contingent on the Will of God (the Primal Will) and on the conditions of the world. Here, we fnd neither the operation of necessity in time, place, and historical development, nor of any evolutionary stage in this process, as this is a process engendered by mutual freedom and driven by the creativity of all players. In different religious contexts, it is claimed that the recurring Manifestation of Truth/Reality, for instance, of Krishna and the Buddha, happens in times of the destruction of the moral truth of the universe (Dharma), that is, these appearances of Reality are contingent on a historical and evolutionary situation as well as the very contingency of their appearance itself in its mode and form within the limitations of that history. Furthermore, any assumed necessity, if we then accept it as such, of the whole process as a natural or divine rhythm of happenings is still not identical with unconditioned Reality “itself,” but “its” activity, which in relation to its unconditioned essence is always contingent. When the Bahá’í writings (with many other religions’ scriptures and traditions) call this divine contingency the Primal Will (or with equivalent terms such as Logos or Mind or Spirit), they capture this paradox of the contingency of divine necessity insofar as it is understood as causa sui, that is, as being contingent on itself, being self-creative, without necessary reason beyond itself (in light of the absolute apophatic essence of Reality/God). Second Argument (A2): The frst proposition (P1) implies also that no necessary truth can cause all truths to be or become necessary. Because the highest cause of creation, that is, the Primal Will, is itself supremely contingent (A1), no truth can be understood necessitating everything true to become, or be, necessarily true. The deepest secret (sirr) of divine revelation, for Bahá’u’lláh exemplifed with the theophany on Sinai (and every revelation in relation to it, that is, at least in all Abrahamic religions), can be stated as explicating the freedom of the Will of Reality/God/Truth such

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that supreme Truth only appears by the self-creative contingency of “its” own Self (as, for instance, expressed in the Tetragrammaton, be it YHWH or BHA’). The innermost mystery of the Manifestation of Truth/Reality/God is contingency, not necessity. What is more, the Báb accepted the Shaykhi view that the Divine Will does not just (automatically) operate out of (or is bound by its own divine) necessity either, but can change: “it” can become a novel event (badi‘) in “its” self-revelation and in reaction to the activity of creation, and, as event, “it” cannot be deducted from the situation in which it appears. First Conclusion (C1): The truth of the rules of logic must necessarily, in some sense, be contingent. Even if the truth of the laws of Aristotelian logic might be necessary in themselves (which has yet to be proven), in the wider horizon they must necessarily be contingent in some profound sense. Otherwise, necessity would override the second argument (A2) by which no logic can hold a position of such necessity that it would hinder some truths not to be necessitated by it; and, hence, it would also deny the frst argument (A1): that there are, in fact, contingent truths. Second Conclusion (C2): The highest and most ultimate truths, expressive of Reality, are contingent. Since creation is contingent on the Primal Will and the Primal Will is self-contingent, all existence is relative to the nothingness of the essence that cannot be accessed by any existents, although “it” is in/ different from them. This coalesces with the apophatic gate of relativity: that the absoluteness of Truth is unknowable. Hence, absoluteness (of Truth) is inaccessible except by its own omnirelativity, the surrational gate of relativity, and its polyphilic in-sistence on/in mutual relationality, the connective gate of relativity. Absoluteness in any other sense is irrelevant to, because inaccessible by, the world of becoming (PR, 4). The highest truths, even if they were necessary, are contingent on the self-creative Primal Will. Second Proposition (P2): The universality of Truth is not necessarily universal. As Truth is contingently universal (C2) “its” contingency limits “its” exclusive universality. Third Argument (A3): Since there are some non-necessary truths (A1), no truth can be universally true to the exclusion of other truths (there is always a Multiplicity of Truth), nor can any truth exhaust Truth to the exclusion of contingent truths (there is always a Becoming of Truth). Although their reach and intention is universal, none of the Manifestations manifest Truth (even if it were necessary) without, and independent from, the relation of their universality to the contingencies of the time, culture, language, and religious experience and imagination into which they are born, to which their revelation is related, and for which Truth is manifested and formulated. Even the “universal Manifestation” that Bahá’u’lláh (in his higher Self) claims to be, as he brings the promises of all religions to a unique event of concrescence, is relative to these conditions and will, with the (intended and unintended)

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changes of other times, be overcome or renewed by further Manifestations. Even while they are one and equal and without difference in lahut, the Manifestations are, despite their inherent universality, different and relative to one another in jabarut, the Creative Wisdom of the primordial nature, always recreating the world at any moment, as well as responsive to the contingencies of the world of becoming in the Compassion (of the consequent nature) of malakut, transforming the contingencies of the world. Like William James (Connolly, Pluralism, ch. 3), so does Charles Hartshorne hold that there cannot be any one universal truth that includes all truths, as there can be no inclusiveness of all actuality in such a whole as long as the world and the creativeness and compassion of the Primal Manifestation (Whitehead’s God) has not stopped to be (and become) actual and, hence, self-surpassing. Hartshorne claims that all-inclusiveness does not necessarily mean the fxity of all events, as if they were included only by internal relationships (Relativity, 92–3)—which would lead to a block universe without movement. And with Whitehead and Deleuze, I think of eternity as life and infnite movement (TDM, ch. 6). Hence, the universality of inclusion must be understood as affrming its own incompleteness, because the relation “being included in” is an external relation for the included ones (not one of necessity, but contingent on their own actualization). Hence, there is a profound asymmetry between the all-inclusiveness of universal Truth, which has an internal relation to the included, while the included has an external relationship to its inclusion. Whitehead makes the same argument not only for actuality but even for potentiality (the eternal objects): not even they are only internally related to one another, as the fxed rule of an irrelational mind (and its algorithm) or any logical necessity, but only in a limited, incomplete way, because they are perpetually reconfgured by their relationship to the contingent states of actuality (SMW, ch. 10). Since it is the divine evaluation process that “creates” the connectivity of the potentialities to one another in the primordial nature (PR, 257), and this “Will” of God, that is, its unity of intellect and creativity, cannot be derived from mere rationality or logic (Faber, Mystical Whitehead, 213–34), no logic can claim universality to the exclusion of other potential logics. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá also makes a case for the impossibility of purely intellectual necessity as the basis for the order of the universe, but also—like Whitehead—excludes the mere chaos of possibilities as the basis of its contingency. Instead, his “third” solution is that of a purposeful relationship—like Whitehead’s divine valuation process (PR, 31). This implies that these relations are neither only indifferent and contingent nor only necessary, nor even an internally fxed a priori set of arrangements in the Mind of God that takes on the function of necessity; rather, they are relative to the actual (divine) purpose for, and connectivity of, the actual becoming of the universe (BWF, 342). The

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same is true for Whitehead: the world is not absolute chaos because of the aesthetic immanence of God (RM, 155). And as for Whitehead, so partake for Bahá’u’lláh all creatures in the Will of God and are the expressions of its creativity and contingency (TB, 142) such that surprising Novelty (badi‘) can happen, contingent on the community of becoming in relation to the Will and Purpose of Truth/Reality/God. Further, with Corbin, we can say that the divine attributes, although universal, and in the essence of Reality identical with “it,” as well as among themselves, are not merely inclusive of one another and, hence, never form a complete standstill of the movement from divinity to the world of becoming and back, as they are not yet realized, and as they desire always anew their realization, differentiation, and combination. In this sense, they are universal in their incompleteness. Even if they were universally realized, they would, in light of the apophatic infnite intensity of Reality, ever more strive for an infnite variety of realizations, which is the only way to mirror the inexhaustibility of the divine essence. Hartshorne claims that complete universality can only be realized through the integration of cause and effect (Relativity, 83). Hence, the world, as effect, is only “complete” if God’s effect is “universal,” that is, when this effect becomes an aspect of God, but does not indicate a counter-God (as the Church Fathers held against the Gnostics in relation to the eternity of the world). This is the motive for Whitehead’s two aspects (natures) of God. If God must be understood as completely universal, then God must also be the creator and creature (PR, 88), like the Manifestation. But then, this universality must be incomplete since it includes the all-inclusiveness of actuality, which cannot be complete as long as it is in actual movement of becoming. Universality is only supreme by being supremely inclusive of particularities and mutually connective with other universalities, but is, at the same time, surrelatively differentiating itself in ever-new universalities. Fourth Argument (A4): Because of their universality of incompleteness (A3), truths are complimentarily true, that is, they allow for complementation of always other truths (TDM, Intermezzo, 1). Think of the coincidence of opposites in Nicolas of Cusa, Nagarjuna, and Bahá’u’lláh, and think of the cascading manifold of states in ultimate in/difference (with and from “it”) in Suf mysticism where cosmological states coincide in higher levels by the unifcation of lower opposites. Whitehead is aware of an ultimate mutuality of ultimate perspectives that are not identical, but are not different either, such as God, the World, and Creativity (GPW, §33). John Cobb and David Griffn, among other process thinkers, have used this oscillation of in/differentiation to address the manifold of religious approaches to ultimacy in different religions. And Buddhist differentiations between sunyata, Wisdom (jnana), and Compassion (karuna), perform the same in/differentiation. The Buddha

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withholds answers to questions that imply ultimate oppositions, such as that whether the world is eternal or temporal, whether atman exists or not, or whether the Buddha after reaching parinirvana exists or not. The Theravada Brahmajala Sutra operates under the assumption that in considering ultimate Truth, one must always recognize the excluded truth in any statement or position, which is always a limited construction the presumed universality of which remains incomplete, and contrast them with the infnite (always incomplete) movement of the overcoming of all potential views (BJS, §146). Third Conclusion (C3): The universality of Truth must be intensively incomplete, even if its expansion is universal. If its intensity were all-expansive, a certain truth would be alone true to the exclusion of any other truth, whether compatible or incompatible (Deleuze, Fold, 79–81), which would contradict the second conclusion (C2) by which it is claimed that no truth can necessitate all truth to be necessary. And since contingent truths are not necessarily true (C1), every truth must allow the full scale of intensity to be fulflled by infnitely other truths in their respective range of intensity, even if such a range were infnite. This non-universality of intensity is the basis for the cascading worlds, the threefold and the fvefold, and the infnity of the worlds of Reality/Truth. Even if for Whitehead the primordial nature is the “absolute standard” of all intensity (PR, 47), it is not all-expansive since it contrasts with the consequent nature, which encompasses infnite intensities of actual truths relative to this primordial intensity. In other words, Truth/ God does not fulfll all intensities without encompassing their actualizations and, hence, remains in itself in an infnite process of incompletion. Fourth Conclusion (C4): As the theorem of infnite worlds (the multiverse) shows, if they instantiate an infnite variety of orders and proportions of intensities, no truth can even be extensively universal. As for Leslie’s infnite divine Minds: they are not realizations of the same, but infnite variations of the Mind’s attributes (and thoughts) in infnite variation (as would be true for the infnite Manifestations in the Bahá’í context). Truth is universal in all Minds, but varies not only in intensity but also in the extensity to which they realize the infnite grades of intensity in the infnite expanses of worlds. Like an infnite series of “1s,” which is infnite and complete in its own expansion over its grade of intensity, but leaves out all other possibilities for intensity (all numbers besides “1”), nothing that holds true for one universe (even necessarily so) can be assumed to be true for any other universe or all universes since it would otherwise not make sense to speak of the multiplicity of infnitely many Mind’s and their infnitely many universes. These two conclusions (C3 and C4) harbor two important ethical implications. First, as Leslie demonstrates and Whitehead also holds, not only does no actual world fulfll all possibilities, that is, it is contingent in its truth. Moreover, actualizations of infnite worlds within infnite Minds may exclude

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what “ought” not to be, such as a world without any potentiality of becoming, a world of fxed states, a world of only evil confgurations, as these “worlds” are not worth the divine Minds contemplating them (Leslie, Immortality, 38–9). Second, the scale of intensity demands that not only the maximal intensity is of worth, as nothing would exist at all if this was the case, but that we must value even the least among the intensities: the poor, the excluded, the stranger, the minor, the oppressed, the least among the people and beings. Third Proposition (P3): The completeness of Truth must be supremely incomplete; “its” completeness is the infnite movement of incompleteness in mutual immanence (Faber, Immanence, 91–110). Fifth Argument (A5): All truths are incomplete, as all of them allow for complimentary truths (A4), because they are completely in/different only in apophatic Truth and incomplete in relation to “its”/their supreme complimentary differentiation. As for the Báb, so for Hartshorne, the essential divine attributes such as Hearing and Seeing, which in Islamic philosophy are not attributive, but essential activities of God (Cole, Concept, section 1), cannot be complete since they are perceptive and relative to what actually happens. Further, since the Reality of realities is unknowable and the highest Truth is the Manifestation of this Reality of realities or Truth of truths, the Primal Will must be considered supremely “incomplete,” frst, by its selfcreativeness; second, by its relativity to, and receptivity of, its creation; and third, by the sheer actuality of its creativity, which in Bahá’i view is eternal activity (PUP, #93). Completeness of Truth could only be reached by claiming one or several or all of these aspects to be false. This is also the reason that religions are not the same, but their respective supreme Truths (‘Ibn Arabi’s “Lords”) are complementary to each other. Sixth Argument (A6): The characteristics of necessity and universality of Truth are relative to their complimentaries (A4): contingency and fnality, respectively. The Absolute is relative to this complementary in relation to which it is understood to be absolute. Since the Absolute releases and comprises this relativity, the relativity between the absolute and the relative must be absolutely incomplete, because otherwise neither of them, absoluteness and relativity, could be differentiated and no world besides complete Reality would exist (FPT, §31). Hence, the supreme Truth must be supremely relative or surrelative (not nonrelative) by way of the mutual incompleteness of the in/difference between absoluteness and relativity. And this supreme relativity, again, must be supremely contingent on the actuality of their mutual implication. Note Hartshorne’s defnition of the Surrelative as selfsurpassing, but supremely all-relative by inclusion. For Bahá’u’lláh, Reality/God, as the ultimate horizon, includes all existence (panentheism) and, hence, must, frst, be supremely relative to this effect, since it would otherwise be merely indifferent to it (and not the love

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of in/difference); but “it” must, secondly, as horizon be incomplete with regard to the reality of this included existence as the actuality that moves. However, it is this supreme relativity of inclusion that cannot be grasped by the included, except as a mystery. This inability to grasp its own horizon of inclusion is in itself a sign of the (purposeful) incompleteness of the inclusive Mind of God; it indicates (with Whitehead) the freedom and creativity of creatures, as forms of actuality beyond being mere thoughts in God. In this context, the identifcation of actual world with the thought of the Mind of God in Leslie actually demands revision, that is, the differentiation not only in, but from the Mind’s thought would be that which “ought” to be. The all-inclusive is incomplete, because it always includes the subtraction (and affrms this subtraction!) from “its” inclusiveness as condition of the relative existence of the included (C3 and C4). Isaac Luria’s concept of the zimzum comes to mind, the contraction of God so as to allow an infnitesimally small spot “in God” for existents other than God, but other than in Moltman’s rendering (Keller, Face, 17–8), in the Bahá’í context this contraction is not a god-emptying or god-forsaking negation, but surrelative affrmation (GPW, §35). Fifth Conclusion (C5): Even if truths were necessary in themselves, they are incomplete and, hence, universal truths must essentially (necessarily) be contingent on their mutuality (A5) and mutually inherent complementarity (A6). The contingency of necessity is vital to understand Whitehead’s “necessity in universality,” the relationality of all existence, and the absolutely apophatic nature of any Beyond (PR, 4), which (for the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh) is captured by the self-creativeness of Primal Will; and it is essential for the possibility of the actuality of any universe besides the unmanifest attributes of God (otherwise contingency is just a chimera besides necessity). Bahá’u’lláh (in his Commentary on a Verse of Rumi, §6) renders contingency a function of the manifestation of divine attributes without which they are incomplete, that is, not actualized. But as they are actualized (which belongs also to their necessity), their realization is incomplete, too, because of, frst, the infnity of possible realizations as well as the variability of actualizations, and, secondly, the possibility and potential actualization of their opposites is included in the very actualization of themselves. Hence, for Bahá’u’lláh, incompleteness need not be a sign of the bifurcation between attributes of Reality/God in the material realm, although this can be the case if one attribute is exclusively emphasized over others (Bahá’u’lláh, The Ridvan of Justice; Lawh-i Ridwan al-‘ahd). But their differentiation and divergence can also be a sign of the infnite variability of realizations of one attribute, some of which may be privations of this attribute (ch. 2). Fourth Proposition (P4): In the all-inclusiveness of Truth/Reality, process includes abstraction, movement includes form, actuality includes possibility,

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novelty includes preservation, and apophatic freedom includes necessity— not the other way round. Seventh Argument (A7): Contingent truths are not less, but more than necessary truths, because they enfold the complimentary states of this necessity in actuality (C5). In Hartshorne, surrelativity includes absoluteness, the society of actual divine states includes the primordial divine character, becoming includes form, divine life include eternity (A3). In Whitehead, the consequent nature includes the primordial nature, (living) everlastingness includes (timeless) eternity (PR, 345–6), love includes knowledge (PR, 350–1), and aesthetics includes logics (SMW, 18). The converse assumption would falsify the movement of love in its originating of creation. Since for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá love and beauty are the originating primordial inner-divine movement and motive forces for creation (in hahut), the frst creation (in lahut), namely, the forms and archetypes, corresponding to Whitehead’s potentials (eternal objects) in the primordial nature, are the outcome of love and beauty, not logic and necessity (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Commentary, section A: The Hidden Treasure). Again, Aesthetics precedes logic, perceptivity precedes conceptualization (as events are primordially prehensive), and love precedes all necessity of thought; and, by the same token, aesthetics includes logic, without being exhausted by it; perceptivity includes conceptuality, without being exhausted by it (GPW, §35); and love includes knowledge without being exhausted by it. Eighth Argument (A8): Since contingent truths include necessary truth and their complementarities as precondition for their actualizations, and insofar as contingent truths are already their actualizations without being exhausted by them (A7), only supremely contingent truths can be all-inclusive. Seventh Conclusion (C7): Aristotelian logic must, even if it were necessary, be necessarily contingent in relation to it being included in a universally incomplete Truth that is more supreme than a truth that establishes its allinclusiveness only by the exclusion of complementarities and their actualizations. This conclusion is demonstrated by the argument from the coincidence of opposites (A4), which, as in the case of the fourfold logic of Nagarjuna, includes, and even supersedes, the oppositional noncontradictory logic of penultimate truths with their ultimate nature and appeal to their reconciliation and in/difference. Eighth Conclusion (C8): The Truth of the coincidence of opposites within supreme in/difference (A4) does not state that only in abstraction from actual states a necessary truth arises as implying “its” own possibility of complimentary or even opposite realization, but, to the contrary, that is, because of “its” all-inclusiveness, “it” implies an actual inclusion of the necessary states and the contingent realizations of their complimentary features (A7). This is Hartshorne’s idea in transforming Whitehead’s two natures of God into an eternal character (primordial nature) with actual

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states (consequent nature) with the twist that the actual states include the eternal character—and not the other way round. It is based on Whitehead’s observation that either both divine natures must be supremely incomplete, mutually relative, and relational since they infnitely move with regard to their actualizations in events and nexuses, or, at least in the sense that the consequent nature includes the primordial nature, because the primordial nature would be world-insensitive (and blind) without the prehensive receptivity of the consequent nature to the world (PR, 345). It is this blindness that differentiates mere thought from all-inclusive surrelativity, which allows the world to be actual beyond mere thought, even if it were the thought of the Mind of God. This corresponds with the realization of the divine attributes into actual states, which concretization is more than the mere abstract enfoldment in the Self of Reality (the Manifestation, or Whitehead’s God). Ninth Conclusion (C9): Necessary truths are knowable, but because they are incomplete in their mutual connectivity (A3) and with regard to the actualization of events of Truth (A7), contingent truths including them are (to that extent) unknowable. Hence, the all-inclusive Truth, which is supremely contingent, is absolutely unknowable. And since “it” manifests in, and comprises, the actual state of the All (A7 and A8), “it” is also supremely incomplete. Tenth Conclusion (C10): All-inclusiveness is not only unknowable because of the ever-incompleteness of its actual states (C7 and C9), but because, as infnite movement, it is in itself supremely incomplete, that is, neither merely (or only abstractly) necessary nor merely (exclusively or in an alldetermining fashion) universal. Otherwise, all-inclusiveness would necessitate its own completeness (necessity and universality), excluding its supreme incompleteness, that is, non-necessary and non-universal inclusiveness. This is only possible if all-inclusiveness is not itself inclusive of itself (although it may be included in itself), that is, if “it” (Whitehead’s God, Bahá’u’lláh’s Manifestation) is open to the unknowable “in the horizon of which” it is allinclusive, that is, by contrast to the unknowable. This was Plotinus’s insight: that the nous is open to the apophatic Beyond without which it would be closed and mere necessity. This is another way of stating the insight that Panikkar derives from various Western and Eastern religious connotations of Reality with ultimate mystery, namely, that the all-inclusiveness of the Mind (of God) is not closed in itself, but open to the apophatic Beyond in “relation” to which it is incomplete; by the same token, the all-inclusive Mind in its all-inclusiveness is creatively incomplete, releasing “its” actualizations in infnite worlds. Eleventh Conclusion (C11): That Truth is either necessarily or universally true cannot in itself be a necessary or universal truth. Instead, this truth is

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supremely contingent, relative to the unknowable and unknown opening to the mystery (C10) that justifes its all-inclusiveness. Twelfth Conclusion (C12): The contingency of all-inclusiveness is not a “negation” of the Good (i.e., a privation), but its supreme affrmation (A6) if it is understood as affrming its incompleteness in light of its contingency and, hence, by affrming the unknowability of the Truth of truths and the Reality of realities (C11) as supremely good—that it “ought” to be this way. Here, again, Leslie’s argument for the reason of existence (even of God) on the basis of the necessity of the “ought” of the Good is in question regarding its “relation” to its appearance as divine Mind or Logos or Primal Will. What “ought” to be is this Mind, Logos, Primal Will, First Manifestation (lahut) as necessarily contingent, all-inclusively incomplete, and omnirelative. Only in not claiming completeness, (manifest) Truth abstains from the illusion of claiming to be, or be “identical” with, ultimate Reality instead of being in/different from “it” and in-sisting as “its” Self. Only by abstaining from the claim of such an “identity” with ultimate Reality is “it” (in-sists as) “ultimate.” That is, ultimate Reality is not an object or subject of discourse or truth claims, but is the very “medium” (khora) by which the affrmation of all-inclusive, supreme incompleteness and omnirelativity “situates” truths as true in relation to their state in this all-inclusive actuality (ESW, §233)—like Whitehead’s claim that truth is what is situated in the consequent nature (PR, 12). To repeat the implications for a last time (C10): Bahá’u’lláh’s invocation of Truth/Reality/God reveals “it” as ultimately unknowable so much so that any notion of “it”—be it theistic or monistic—is relatively “situated” in the Manifestations of the Primal Will and the even more diversifed relativities of the worlds and contexts of recognition within their worlds. Reminiscent of Rumi, the Báb secures apophatic Truth with the insight that any truth is (is in/different from) the Truth (Manifestation of Truth) if it partakes in the servitude, which defnes divinity, and is really nothingness in “relation” to apophatic Truth; this is the “character” of the Primal Will or Mind, which therefore is manifest in Truth. With (and against) Plotinus, (the concept or signifcation of) “the One” is “itself” (in “its” Self) the Manifestation; in it, beyond it, “it” is/is not “it/self” Reality. With (and against) Hartshorne and Hick, neither is the ultimacy of divine personality more ultimate than the necessity of God’s abstract nature (because of its all-inclusiveness in actual states) nor does the ultimacy of the impersonal divine, of which personality is only a manifestation, ever reach completeness either, but only the “supreme incompleteness” (the “completeness” of servitude) of the Manifestation as event allows for the compatibility with, the comprisal of, and divergence into, both theistic and monistic “ultimacy.” Against Hick, we might say that ultimate Reality is not impersonal (nor is it personal), but “it” indicates this inexpressible horizon in which Reality is the

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medium by which the appearances within the medium “become” in events both (either) personal and (or) impersonal, monistically connected and (or) theistically transcendent. Beware of the Brahmajala Sutra’s story of a Brahma divinity that has fallen from intoxicating bliss only to realize that it is alone, then substitutes the openness to the Beyond of Reality with the impression of this “manifestation” to be the fulfllment of the ultimate Horizon (without servitude): because when the next Brahma appears, the frst One “thinks” it is the creator of the Other and all the worlds, while it was only through the Dharma (the Law of Reality) that it was reborn and of which its view was a mere illusion (BJS, §§40–2). Gnostic myth has it that the demiurge is evil, because it believes falsely that it is “God,” the ultimate creator of the world, while it is only the creature of the unknowable God beyond. Missing supreme servitude, that is, being (and being the awareness of) the Mirror of the Unknowable, instills the desire to “be like God” (Genesis, 2). While the unknowable God-beyond truthfully instills this desire—as the desire to realize all attributes so as (for them) to be reunifed with God (Ibn ‘Arabi)—it becomes a temptation by which the very nature of the openness of Reality as medium (and condition of existence and divinity) is obscured. Fifth Proposition (P5): Aristotelian logic with its three rules (of noncontradiction), which is used in the Transylvanian argument against ultimate Relativity of Truth, is not necessarily false, but not necessary (P1), as it is included in the supreme Contingency (P2) the inclusive Universality (P3) of which is supreme Incompleteness (P4). Sixth Proposition (P6): Neither supreme Contingency (P2) nor inclusive Universality (P3), nor supreme Incompleteness (P4) “is” Truth/Reality, as Reality is not (and cannot be) constructed in any way. As event, Truth/Reality in-sists in deconstructing these supreme Contingencies and any truths as contingent, appearing “itself” (as horizon) in “itself” (as event of “its” Self) as subtractive affrmation of Omnirelativity. 4. THE LAST WORD (MAGNITUDES AND DOMAINS) Once more advancing beyond this more propositional experiment, I will end with a last, and maybe even more important, permutation of the theme of the clouds of Truth, that is, of the “diffused structure” of the relativity of truth claims, within and beyond religion, be they epistemological or ontological in nature, by once again binding omnirelativity back to the three gates of relativity (ch. 1) in a different, but deeply related way, namely, by formalizing the major elements of the three gates as moments in the movement of the infnite non-closure of connectivity of multiplicities and multiplicities of

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connectivity. Because multiplicities remain surrelatively related as a whole through subtractive affrmation of their unity-differentiation, that is, through apophatic non-closure avoiding any motionless static “state” or any oneness that could be articulated, computed, represented, or captured in any kind of stabilized abstraction, apophatic subtraction is the condition of the multiplicity to always be affrmed as a multiplicity beyond reductionist stabilizations of such abstractions (ch. 1). The formal elements of the three gates, as they are related in the preceding sentences, could be articulated thus: there is a boundary condition of “infnite non-boundary,” binding all infnite boundary conditions together as multiplicity. This connectivity would assure that the multiplicity of “enclosed” boundaries within the non-boundary boundary (and its peculiar infnity) are states and movements of relationships of enclosed universes in such boundaries and universes that enclose such universes without ever coming to a boundary—that is, infnitely stretching from a minimum to a maximum of dimensions of relationships, approximating, but never reaching, or always (as their boundary condition) excluding, any minimum or maximum. At the same time, however, such bounded universes do not exclude infnitely many other boundary conditions (in the non-boundary condition) of an infnite multiplicity of universes beyond their own inclusiveness of, and included-ness in, an infnite multiplicity within their own boundary conditions. This is congruent with Nicolas of Cusa’s (and even earlier thinkers’) conjecture that the circumference and the center of a circle will meet in the infnite (Bond, Nicolas of Cusa, 119–20). Similar to the formulation for the meeting of parallels in the infnite (but never in any fnite state of affairs) in Euclid’s geometry, circumference and center of the circle are indifferent beyond the boundary of fniteness while they are ever only approximations, lacking this “identity” with one another, in any fnite state. There is a relation of mutual exclusion and inclusion between these infnite states of fnality “before” this non-boundary boundary is reached, while they are all included “within” this “non-boundary boundary” without exhibiting any of its “characteristics,” that is, especially that of non-difference. But, at the same time, it is this exclusion (subtraction) that guaranties (affrms) the relationality of all fnite states as multiplicity (and multiplicity of multiplicities). Cusa named this non-boundary boundary “the wall around the paradise” (murus paradisi), the entrance into the realm of the divine beyond fnality and difference, which, nevertheless, harbors all of its potential differentiations in non-difference (Ziebart, Laying Siege, 41–66). This same thought is articulated in the Bahá’í writings on the universe and questions of the relationship of the apophatic Godhead to “its” Manifestations in infnite worlds, or of the Hidden Treasure to “its” creations (ch. 7). As the “infnite and unlimited Reality cannot be bounded by any limitation”

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(PUP, #131) and “the reality of phenomena is limited [in] . . . an unlimited reality” (PUP, #125), the non-boundary boundary, which is the apophatic Reality/Truth/God, is understood to be nothing of any kind of differentiation, while harboring all such differentiations: First, God is “One”; there is no difference between essence and divine attributes, and there is no difference between those attributes. However: this is a hidden “Treasure,” that is, “it” is neither barren nor flled with different things (or characters), but “that in which” emptiness and fullness coincide, “in which” they are non-different, are beyond identity and difference alike. Second, the world or creation, or the infnite universe or the multiverse of infnite divine worlds, on the other hand, can only articulate the differentiations of this One Treasure/Reality in an infnite multiplicity of characteristics or attributes and their infnite combination in fnite realizations under the subtraction of the One/Treasure as apophatic Beyond, which cannot even be adequately articulated in “its” Oneness/Multiplicity. Third, the “relation” between these two “realities” of the One Reality/ Treasure and the infnite worlds is not a “third (whatever)” in between (which would initiate creating a relation proper). Rather, this “relation” indicates nothing but the non-boundary boundary that “conditions” (as khoric medium) their mutual exclusion and inclusion. There is no way in which the infnite worlds could reach beyond this boundary into divine in/difference, but they are enclosed in, and mediated by, “it” as the non-boundary boundary that guarantees their relationality and multiplicity (PUP, #131). To say this again in Bahá’u’lláh’s and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s diction: There is no relation between Reality/Truth/God and the world as to “its” presence or absence, while, at the same time, “it” encompasses and mediates this infnite movement of creation, a creative movement of infnite fnality (PUP, #125)— as in “it” all relationality is sundered by its apophatic disconnectivity (ch. 1). As such, “it” is closer to any fnite reality than reality is to itself (GL, #93). In fact, this is the formal place of the Bahá’í concept of the Manifestation: the impossible concept of being (at) this boundary of unity and multiplicity, difference, and non-difference—impossible, because (as in Cusa’s example of the coincidence of fnite mathematical fgures) this “boundary” cannot be reached by any possible world, but it can happen as event. And fnally, the infnite worlds are, thus, inherently connected with one another as multiplicities, like a quantum state of entanglement and its decomposition, that is, without simplifed holistic reduction, always releasing concretizations, breaks, the freedom of events and processes in fnite affrmations of the infnite variation of this non-boundary boundary condition, that is, of the Manifestation (the Will, the Mind, the Word of God) (SAQ, #53). Here, the boundary that is the mazhar-i ilahi names both omnirelativity and apophatic non-closure at once—as in the “identifcation” of samsara and nirvana, divided and united, different and non-different, as through a “river” (the boundary); and the

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“identity” of pratitya-samutpada and sunyata, both articulated within (and as the concept of) the dharmakaya, the impossible non-boundary boundary (chs. 6, 7). The thematic element that, throughout this book, has “related” Truth/ Reality to multiplicity and, hence, the Absolute to, and as medium and condition of, omnirelativity, is the relativity of multiple cascading planes, worlds, and universes (ch. 5). They become, at this point, crucial as they articulate the truth of the neoplatonic (and many other philosophical and religious system’s) truth of the cascading approximation of the unfolding of Reality in the infnite fnality of world boundaries and, conversely, the infnite approximation of infnite worlds to the non-boundary boundary of the Primal Manifestation, beyond which nothing can be articulated, known, intimated, or extracted, of the One Reality, except “its” in/difference (ch. 8). The “characteristic” of the cascade of unfolding and enfolding planes is, in the current context (reformulated as) the infnite expansions and contractions of the magnitude of fnite, encompassing boundaries. They are fnite as they only expand over a certain magnitude, inclusive of certain planes of immanence and consistency, exclusive of others. But they are, at the same time, infnite by excluding and including other such planes of consistency of other magnitudes, that is, always, as a condition, excluding and including others of any magnitude. Both conditions together are holding only true under the condition of the non-boundary boundary without which such an infnite process of becoming of magnitudes would break down and come to a halt at a certain level of magnitude, which then could be (fnally) articulated and, hence, would represent a fxed Oneness devoid of “its” inherent apophatic character that holds this movement indefnitely and infnitely open in both directions, that of expansion and that of contraction. The relativity of (religious) Truth, then, is the articulation of this omnirelativity of magnitudes. As magnitudes (truths) of “something,” they are always related, as planes of immanence or transcendental consistencies of pure consciousness, as in Deleuze (ch. 5), but only as being infnitely relative to one another, without ground (foundation) or apex (highest Oneness that could be articulated). They are only related to one another without relation beyond the whole, which is only approximating the non-boundary boundary of Openness that “does,” at the same time, subtract “itself” from the Whole by inaugurating the infnite cascade of magnitudes as a whole. One of the perhaps most stunning articulations of this way of presenting the three gates of relativity can be found in a tablet of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’: The Tablet of the Universe (Lawhi-Afákiyyih). Here are the relevant passages. Know thou that the expressions of the creative hand of God throughout His limitless worlds are themselves limitless. Limitations are a characteristic of the

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fnite, and restriction is a quality of existent things, not of the reality of existence. (TOU, §5) This being the case, how can one, without proof or testimony, conceive of creation being bound by limits? Gaze with penetrating vision into this new cycle. Hast thou seen any matter in which God is bounded by limits which He cannot overstep? Nay, by the excellence of His glory! On the contrary, His tokens have encompassed all things and are sanctifed and exalted beyond computation in the world of creation. (TOU, §6) These are spiritual truths relating to the spiritual world. In like manner, from these spiritual realities infer truths about the material world. For physical things are signs and imprints of spiritual things; every lower thing is an image and counterpart of a higher thing. Nay, earthly and heavenly, material and spiritual, accidental and essential, particular and universal, structure and foundation, appearance and reality and the essence of all things, both inward and outward—all of these are connected one with another and are interrelated in such a manner that you will fnd that drops are patterned after seas, and that atoms are structured after suns in proportion to their capacities and potentialities. For particulars in relation to what is below them are universals, and what are great universals in the sight of those whose eyes are veiled are in fact particulars in relation to the realities and beings which are superior to them. Universal and particular are in reality incidental and relative considerations. The mercy of thy Lord, verily, encompasseth all things! (TOU, §7) Know then that the all-embracing framework that governs existence includes within its compass every existent being—particular or universal—whether outwardly or inwardly, secretly or openly. Just as particulars are infnite in number, so also universals, on the material plane, and the great realities of the universe are without number and beyond computation. The Dawning Places of Unity, the Daysprings of Singleness and the Suns of Holiness are also sanctifed beyond the bounds of number, and the luminous spiritual worlds are exalted above limits and restrictions. In like manner the worlds of bodily existence the mind of no man can reckon nor the understanding of the learned comprehend. (TOU, §8)

Besides the intricate interplay between infnities (of the universe, of magnitudes, of the worlds, and of Reality) and the fniteness of different kinds (of existents, universes, magnitudes, or worlds) in this tablet, we may recognize the most astonishing features of relativity inherent in their interplay: that the expansions of magnitude as domains of reality and truth within the reign and perception of Reality/Truth, although bounded in themselves, have no absolute boundary, but are bounded by the non-boundary boundary of Manifestations; and beyond this boundary, since it is not “a boundary,” is the unarticulated, unknown, and unknowable mystery of Reality/Truth. Truth within the cascading infnity of fnite (or even infnite, yet bounded) magnitudes is omnirelative: no truth ever reaches the Absolute, which is not bound by any of its expressions within the cascade, but encompasses the

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cascading movement, manifests “its” non-boundary boundary, and subtracts “itself” from this open whole. This whole is a world (a multiverse) of, and in, process, because “Divine and all-encompassing Wisdom hath ordained that motion be an inseparable concomitant of existence, whether inherently or accidentally, spiritually or materially” (TOU, §3). This cascading constellation of magnitudes and domains (of planes of immanence of reality and truth) corroborates several of the settings in which this present book has tried to explicate the relationship of planes of immanence and consistency among themselves and to Reality/Truth (ch. 1). First, they exhibit the radical relativity of all daos (to one another and to the Dao) as a matter of meta-levels of magnitude of “true ways” without ever reaching the all-encompassing and all-present Dao “itself”—thereby remaining steeped in profound relativity without ground and apex (ch. 3). But, as with the Dao, this omnirelativity is not a mere relativism; rather, it is a matter of domains of (reality and) truth, over which certain truths (or ways) hold sway, integrating otherwise differentiated or even opposed daos (ways) in their unifed domain (to which “it,” the Dao, seems in/different) while allowing their mutual otherness in their own domain. These enfoldings do, as in Whitehead, allow for different ways and planes of valuation, of processes of integration and differentiation of values in the process of contrasting in the creation of events, as they refect the primordial nature as archetypical process of valuation (ch. 2). Hence, the cascading integration and differentiation of domains of truth does not imply a merely chaotic relationship between values and valuation according to which such domains are constituted in relation to one another (and the non-boundary boundary of the primordial nature as unfettered valuating of all potentials in relation to all actualizations). Rather, like the ways of the Dao, they exhibit a tendency toward coordination beyond opposition, toward self-transcendence, harmony, and peace (on an individual and collective level), and always toward movements of novelty beyond any reiteration—all within the limit-less limit (the domain-less domain) of the “harmony of harmonies” (ch. 5). The second correspondence of this pattern of enfolded and unfolding magnitudes or domains relates to a better understanding of the differentiations and divergences of, and within, the multiverse as being caught up in these cascading manifolds, be they symbolized as a threefold or fvefold, or any other mode of conceptual simplifcation of infnite folded-ness (ch. 5). On the one hand, magnitudes are self-similar patterns on every level or plane, allowing for limited, but expansive domains of enfolding of realities (and truths) and the non-different integrations of otherness of the levels or planes integrated or enfolded. Their modes of unifcation are similar to one another on any magnitude; they are not, even in any perceived opposition in their own domain, absolute strangers to one another although their enfolded unity

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becomes effective only in the integrative domain (ch. 9). Examples abound: Cantor’s magnitude of infnities (for instance, integrating the infnities of natural numbers with whole numbers, or the infnities of uneven numbers with even numbers, or the infnities of rational with irrational numbers); the scale invariance and self-similarity of magnitudes in fractal geometry; the hierarchy of physical, chemical, and biological laws; or Bahá’u’lláh’s claim that “all these planes and states are folded up and hidden away within him [human being]” (SV, 55). This all fts also ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s radical fractalization of the universal mirroring of magnitudes in the currently discussed tablet, for all of them “are connected one with another and are interrelated in such a manner that you will fnd that drops are patterned after seas, and that atoms are structured after suns in proportion to their capacities and potentialities” (TOU, §7). On the other hand, differentiation and opposition between domains of similar magnitude may prevail without violation of their integration within other domains and magnitudes. Integration does not hinder divergence or force a simple holistic unity on the universe, be it physical or spiritual (ch. 5). Taking both self-similarity and divergences into account, we can repeat: Religions will be greatly differing if we compare their respective domains, but may, at the same time, be integrated to the “unity of religions” or the process of the one Religion within another domain—even as the Manifestations as “grounds” of these domains are self-similar and one in one respect (as exercised by the Bahá’í Faith with it infnite Manifestations and by Mahayana Buddhism with its infnite Buddha-felds) and, at once, appear vastly different in their own domains (ch. 7). A third correspondence arises from the second: All magnitudes of reality and truth are integrated or enfolded within the “limit” of the limitless boundary that characterizes the “frst emanation” of Reality as “universal reality” (SAQ, #53) and, hence, are, within this Universal Reality, unifed in their divergences as in one world, this universe (ch. 9). The truth of the “hierarchical” cosmology of ancient religions and philosophies lies not in the presumed, perceived, and often (especially in modern scientifc views or any “fat ontology”) criticized hierarchical structure of the universe, but in this insight: that these planes are cascading magnitudes and domains that are “hidden in the innermost reality of this world” (GL, #79; italics added). Like the domains of the stones do not realize the reality of plants and animals, and as they, in their own turn, do not realize the consciousness of human being to be in their world-domain either: “that world is within this world. The people of this world, however, are unaware of that world, and are even as the mineral and the vegetable that know nothing of the world of the animal and the world of man” (SAB, #163). And so are infnite material and spiritual domains enfolded in any of their realities for “every part of the universe is connected with every other part” (SAB, #137). But these “parts

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of the universe” enfold these realities implicitly, that is, they are “unaware” of their existence in the same world, while their own reality is hidden from themselves, as they are enfolded in vaster planes of integration only on which this integration becomes explicit—beyond their reach (ch. 5). At the same time, while these limited domains can make explicit all contrary domains of lesser magnitude in their own world, they might get a glimpse of vaster domains enfolded on their plane of consistency. Since these farther domains, although implicitly present, might seem inconsistent with the world of lesser magnitude, they might be experienced as “breaking in,” in fact, as in Meister Eckhart, “breaking through” (Roy, Consciousness, 88–93) to consciousness in mystical experiences of such enfoldments. Yet, these experiences will also instill the impression of the essential mystery as always remaining beyond any consciousness—the openness or emptiness of Luminous Mind beyond any mind (ch. 7)—that for Bahá’u’lláh characterizes the “confession of helplessness which mature contemplation must eventually impel every mind to make” as “in itself the acme of human understanding,” that “marketh the culmination of man’s development” (GL, #83) and is the “apex of consciousness” (SV, 91). It is at this non-boundary boundary that we might consciously experience the Manifestation(s) and the revaluation of values in the world we are living as our domain (ch. 9). It is here that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s differentiated view between a pantheistic interpretation of the “unity of being” (wahdat al-wujud) and, in similar fashion, the Hindu conviction of Brahman as the material cause of the world (ch. 8), in which it distributes itself like the “imperfect waves [that] are identical to the pre-existent Sea” (SAQ, #82), on the one hand, and the equally monistic reduction of all existence to Reality alone in such a way that all else be mere illusion or nonexistence, which might, from the same background, hint at Advaita Vedanta and, in different form, at the illusion of all existents (maya) in light of the Buddhist dharmakaya (ch. 7), on the other hand, demonstrates its intelligibility. By using, instead, the image of the sun and the infnite mirrors, he counters the former monism with the threefold cascade (ch. 5) in which Reality remains apophatic, but the Word, Will, Mind of God “has emanated from God and has appeared in the realities of all things, even as the rays emanating from the sun are refected in all things” (SAQ, #82). As these cascading worlds indicate horizons of different magnitude, not only can monistic and theistic images of the sea and waves and the sun and the mirrors fow into one another at the level of the Mind of God instead of apophatic Reality (Momen, God, 20), but the relativity of the magnitudes in relation to one another also hinders the latter monism. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains all such material and spiritual horizons, such as the worlds of matter, life, humanity, and the spiritual worlds beyond, with relations of relative existence and relative nonexistence. There are two limits, the one of mere nonexistence, which

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is absolutely nonexistent (i.e., a mere concept), and the divine Reality, which is existence itself, and, hence, beyond any limited relativity omnirelative to all worlds.

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In like manner, the existence of created things is sheer illusion and utter non-existence compared to that of God and consists in a mere appearance, like an image seen in a mirror. But although this image is an illusion, its source and reality is the person refected, whose image has appeared in the mirror. Briefy, the refection is an illusion compared to that which is refected. It is therefore evident that although created things have no existence compared to that of God, being instead like a mirage or an image refected in a mirror, yet in their own degree they exist. (SAQ, #79)

The relative nonexistence mirrors not only Bahá’u’lláh’s statements on the nonexistence of anything (GL, #14) and even the Manifestations in relation to apophatic Reality (GL, #22)—although in the sense of in/difference (GL, #80)—but also the relative existence of any magnitude for itself in its own horizon. These horizons are not mere illusions—which is basic to the current argument. As all horizons are enfolded in the same world, which again, in its infnity of enfolded magnitudes, is limited by the all-pervading and all-encompassing non-boundary boundary of Reality, any greater magnitude that encompasses the minor or more limited horizons enfolds them all in its own reality in which it has relative existence (SAQ, ##57, 82), but is itself both enfolded in other magnitudes the horizons of which are as nothing to it (SAQ, #59), as they are beyond its grasp and sensitivity, while the realities of horizons it enfolds in its own reality are also as nothing to it, not because they do not exist in themselves, but because they are elated into its own existence to a new seamless wholeness of its own horizon (ibid.). So, as humanity does enfold the worlds of matter, plant, and animal, and their respective spirit (powers), they are a seamless part of its reality of mind and spirit, while they in their own reality have no horizon to fathom the human integration of them into its reality. It is in the same sense that the spiritual worlds are in the same world, but beyond human horizons of comprehension. Yet, mutual transgressions between these horizons are possible and even necessary. As the nested horizons are a matter of unfolding and enfolding, the whole process of becoming of worlds is one of the arc of descent and ascent; materialization and spiritualization through which Reality emanates and everything returns to “it” (SAQ, #81). Without such a divine transgression, the pervasiveness of Reality in all as haqq al-haqq, as innermost reality of and in everything, could be not be expressed (GL, #79); the humanness and materiality of Manifestations of the Primal Mind were impossible to ascertain (SAQ, #38); and the spiritual ascent of humanity beyond its limited horizon of the mind was unintelligible (SAQ, #55). We could not even be

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able to communicate with other beings, be they animals or the dead, and even evolution might be impossible to be fathomed (SAQ, ##49–52). But these transgressions are resonances of difference, not similarity, which is the reason that they express themselves in symbolisms (SAQ, ##22–3), that scriptures have spiritual meanings, that dreams are of symbolic character, and that no symbol exhausts its own meaning, as it is nested in infnite horizons of different magnitudes, even less so that of Reality. This relativity of existence and nonexistence (and their respective symbolic meaning) is another rendering of the omnirelativity of Reality, that is, the relativity of Truth in all of its appearances in infnite and infnitely nested horizons of magnitude, fusing the apophatic, connective, and multiple dimensions of relativity in one oscillating movement of mutual enfolding. And as planes of immanence, these magnitudes and horizons of mutually immanent worlds (and universes of transcendental consistency) form not a concentric cascade of spheres with a common center and a universal horizon, which would still be bound to this center, but, as in Deleuze and Guattari, a chaosmos of mutual movements of mutual crossings and disconnections (Philosophy, ch. 2). Hence, I will also, at this point, risk the conjecture that the puzzling fourth part of Whitehead’s Process and Reality, which is concerned with “coordinate analysis” (PR, 283) of the world process—in the form of generating the foundations for the pre-geometrical “space” that constitutes the “extensive continuum” (PR, 35–6) of the world—may gain a new life and place, as it connects the “genetic analysis” (PR, 222) of the third part with the theopoetics (PR, 346) of the ffth part. It forms a rendering of the nonduality of emptiness/fullness of sunyata with the all-relationality of all events, pratitya-samutpada, connecting all domains of events, processes, organisms, and societies (PR, part 3) and the limit-less limit of God in the primordial and consequent natures (PR, part 5) by way of an analysis of extension, mathematically called mereology—today a mode of mathematical and cosmological topology (Calosi and Graziani, Mereology, ch. 4)—as it explores all forms of internal and external extension and the overlapping of extensions (PR, 296). In fact, this “extensive continuum” (PR, 61–82) with its manifold of limited domains of extension (which are part of the actualization of potentialities) names the contact of mere potentiality and the limit-less limit of God’s process of valuation of these possibilities as potentials of becoming (PR, 31); it indicates the placeless space of realization and actualization, we experience as the world, universe, or multiverse (GPW, §15). As khora, it is the domain of all communication (AI, 134); as creativity it is the domain of creative actualizations of worlds (AI, 295); and as “the Adventures of the Universe as One” (ibid., italics added) it addresses the divine limit of all domains, “this initial Eros and this fnal Beauty which constitutes the zest of self-forgetful transcendence belonging to Civilization at its height” (AI, 295–6).

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A further implication of such a mereological approach in a processual context such as Whitehead’s might be that we can, now, see more clearly again how, despite the importance of the relationship of parts and whole that it analyses, any violation of the apophatic gate of relativity can be successfully avoided. A non-processual approach, in which instead of creativity another “universal of universals” stands for the whole (as the ultimate), such as any holistic, holographic structure, pattern, stabilized hierarchy of values, and so on (ch. 2), remains fxed along a pre-established spectrum (although we may wander along it, select from it, or integrate and realize the whole of it). Or it fnds itself in an “implicate order” (ch. 3), even overriding quantum uncertainty with hidden variables of order (Bohm, Wholeness, ch. 3)—a position that Hartshorne (against Whitehead) was considering (Hartshorne, Theorem, 183–91). Although the merely hierarchical ordering of levels of magnitude— or “holons” (Wilber, History, ch. 1)—may exhibit a non-foundational view of relativity, as there is no end below or above to orders of magnitude (Rescher, Metaphysics, 86–91), the non-boundary boundary is, in such a non-processual view, easily converted into a divine guarantee of a monoculture of stratifed order of values (ch. 8), which would, in a Bahá’í context, count as the beginning of the dogmatic fxations of fanaticism (PUP, #82). It is a danger that Deleuze and Guattari so clearly saw (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy, ch. 2), countering with their rhizomatic alternative (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 1–25), and that Whitehead avoided by the process of (divine) valuation in relation to any event and even all phases of their becoming (Ford, Theism, 46–9). In Whitehead’s process understanding, as in the view of the Laozi (ch. 3), wholes and parts are spread among the oscillations of becoming (present) and being (past) of events, the life and character of societies of events, the coordinate (of the extension of the actualized) and genetic analysis (of becoming actualized), such that any universal whole is bound back into new particular events of becoming, avoiding any fxed stratifcation (PR, 334n3). As a consequence, the holistic mirroring of part and whole remains in process and in mutual immanence that expresses itself as the world of becoming and the mutual intersection of all planes at any event, despite all hierarchical differences in magnitudes and domains (TDM, ch. 14). So, the normativity of any “gradualism” in spiritual progressions and cosmological views is avoided—which was also an important insight of Dzogchen and Bahá’u’lláh alike (ch. 7). As another consequence, then, of the processual avoidance of fxed hierarchies of spiritual or cosmological realms, as such a processualism always gives itself over to the apophatic mystery of the bound-less boundary (Bracken, Matrix, 4) and, conversely, remains in the movement of creativity (without fxed ground), is the insight that higher or altered states of consciousness (Medina, Faith, 89)—approximating selfess cosmic consciousness or

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the Mind (Capra, Point, 371)—are not actually hierarchically “higher” than their expression in all other levels or planes of consciousness or cosmic reality (making them somehow merely illusory). Therefore, they remain in the process of infnite realization in this intersecting world of different magnitudes and domains (TDM, ch. 8). Not only does this imply, but it does imply, a cycle of unfolding and enfolding, which demands that we cannot just experientially return to the cosmic consciousness of universal connectedness without realizing it in “lesser” planes of (their) “materialization” (Wilber, Spectrum, 44) and civilization (Ma’sumian, Mysticism, passim)—something the “gradualism” of several holistic stage-developmental models, correlating inward scales of consciousness to levels of social development, are missing, effectively leading in a form of elitism (Medina, Faith, ch. 3). But more importantly, the experimental inwardness of higher consciousness is elementally in need of the multiplicity of its expressions in this world, represented by different religions (Ferrer, Theory, 186–91). “My” universal consciousness is an illusion if it is not both peace-realizing in this world and “participating” in the community of religions in which all Manifestations are giving themselves up to Reality as “incarnated” in them, but, at the same time, beyond their reach, fxation, rationalization, or ability of communication (GL, #22). This is the silence of the Buddha (Panikkar, Silence, ch. 10). This is the bound-less boundary of the sidrat al-muntaha, the tree beyond which there is no passing (KI, ¶100), which in the Bahá’í writings symbolizes the universal reality of the Manifestation/Mind—the Beyond of which is puzzlement, bewilderment, or contentment (GL, #26)—and the multiplicity of “its” emanations (GL, #27). “My” or “our” universal consciousness, if we ever reach it, remains bound by, and bent back into, the infnite aspects of its realizations in different religions, experiences, we can only become aware of in a cosmopolitan consciousness of mutual listening (ch. 9). This polyphilic pluralism (TDM, 353–9), then, is essential for a civilization of peace (Faber and Keller, Pluralism, 58–81). Furthermore, returning to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s text quoted above (from his Tablet of the Universe), the most striking element of this omnirelativity may now appear more clearly in its radicalism. It consists, frst, in the rendering of “magnitude” as the infnite mutual enclosure of, and oscillation between, “particularity” and “universality,” and, second, in the equation of this movement with the inclusive oscillation of “material” and “spiritual” as well as “essential” and “accidental” reality. The implications are far-reaching, here. One implication is that, like Whitehead, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá understands the differentiation between particulars and universals as a matter of standpoint in the cascade of unfolding and enfolding magnitudes of planes of immanence. In Whitehead, this is articulated by the variance with which we can name events and potentials both particulars and universals (PR, 48), to the point that the

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boundary between both becomes thoroughly unstable—although this might be worrying for many process thinkers who are used to build their Whiteheadian “scheme” on the absolute (defned) boundary between them (PR, 22). This is paralleled by Whitehead’s confession that what we call “matter” and “mind” is a question of position, not ontological indispensability of a boundary between them. Because, in the end, it “is a matter of pure convention as to which of our experiential activities we term mental and which physical” (SY, 20). And as “matter” stands for “potentiality” (SY, 36), it is as abstract or as concrete as we consider it to be in the realization of events, processes, societies, organisms, and universes. “Matter” is not in any way opposed to “forms” (as in Plato and Aristotle), because both are potentials for the actualization, which as actualized events are, in their own turn, again “real potentialities” for new actualizations. In this respect, the consequences for omnirelativity are great: First, we must say that our conceptual universals are concrete on one level or magnitude or in one specifc plane of immanence, but abstract in another or infnitely many others. They are omnirelative, depending on the boundaries of concrete and abstract, matter and form, potentiality and actuality, in their position in the respective feld of unfolding and enfolding cascades of magnitude. Second, we must add that there is no universal of universals. In Whitehead this is stated by saying that “‘Creativity’ is the universal of universals” (PR, 21), that is, “it” is that which cannot be universalized, because it names Process and Movement itself without fxation, hindering the closure of a universe that otherwise could articulate its unity as a universal of universals (Faber, Whitehead/Speed, 39–72). Instead, it is as creativity, which in Whitehead is not identical with God, that the ultimate is presented to itself as the impossibility of this closure or, conversely, as the Openness of the infnite world in becoming. The other implication, even more radical than the frst one, overcomes thought in the mode of binaries and, hence, pertains to the equation of these non-binaries of particulars and universals, mind and matter, potentials and activities, in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s tablet with the in/difference of “essence” and “accident.” In Whitehead, as in Buddhist thought, there is no essence that would not be an accident (PR, 25). That is, there is no essence beyond the process of accidents (events) and the universe, because the non-boundary boundary exhibits only an “ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents,” that is, “is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality” and, hence, of essence. It is again this non-boundary boundary—not any divine “essence,” but divine activity—by which in “the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed ‘creativity,’ and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident” (PR, 7), that is, “its” (Primal) Manifestation.

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Transreligious truth in a world of becoming is the Truth/Reality of the becoming of this world (emanating from “it”) in the horizon-less horizon of “its” Manifestations. If, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, “the Dawning Places of Unity, the Daysprings of Singleness and the Suns of Holiness are also sanctifed beyond the bounds of number, and the luminous spiritual worlds are exalted above limits and restrictions” and “in like manner the worlds of bodily existence the mind of no man can reckon nor the understanding of the learned comprehend” (TOU, §8)—how can we avoid to fnd their unity in any other Truth than that of the clouds of omnirelativity in the mystery of the “placeless Friend” (TU, #5:10)?

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The Essence (For the Inclined)

Consider the fowers of a garden: though differing in kind, color, form, and shape, yet, inasmuch as they are refreshed by the waters of one spring, revived by the breath of one wind, invigorated by the rays of one sun, this diversity increaseth their charm, and addeth unto their beauty. Thus when that unifying force, the penetrating infuence of the Word of God, taketh effect, the difference of customs, manners, habits, ideas, opinions, and dispositions embellisheth the world of humanity. This diversity, this difference is like the naturally created dissimilarity and variety of the limbs and organs of the human body, for each one contributeth to the beauty, effciency, and perfection of the whole. When these different limbs and organs come under the infuence of man’s sovereign soul, and the soul’s power pervadeth the limbs and members, veins and arteries of the body, then difference reinforceth harmony, diversity strengtheneth love, and multiplicity is the greatest factor for coordination. How unpleasing to the eye if all the fowers and plants, the leaves and blossoms, the fruits, the branches and the trees of that garden were all of the same shape and color! Diversity of hues, form, and shape, enricheth and adorneth the garden, and heighteneth the effect thereof. In like manner, when divers shades of thought, temperament, and character are brought together under the power and infuence of one central agency, the beauty and glory of human perfection will be revealed and made manifest. Naught but the celestial potency of the Word of God, which ruleth and transcendeth the realities of all things, is capable of harmonizing the divergent thoughts, sentiments, ideas, and convictions of the children of men. Verily, it is the penetrating power in all things, the mover of souls and the binder and regulator in the world of humanity.

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Praise be to God, today the splendor of the Word of God hath illumined every horizon, and from all sects, races, tribes, nations, and communities souls have come together in the light of the Word, assembled, united, and agreed in perfect harmony. (SAB, #225)

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Note: In general, terms included in the text from non-English languages are given without diacritical signs. Exceptions extend only the names of the central Bahá’í Figures and the word (or combinations with the word) Bahá’í, as this is the usual way they are written in an English language context, and terms used in quotes that use diacritical signs. The general reader will understand the meaning without them; the specialist will know where to add them. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, “‘Abdu’l-Bahá on Christ and Christianity: An interview with Pasteur Monnier on the Relationship between the Bahá’í Faith and Christianity, Paris.” Translated by Seena Fazel. In Bahá’í Studies Review, 3:1 (1993): http://bahailibrary.com/abdulbaha_christ_christianity_monnier. ———. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in London. Chicago: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1982. ———. A Traveller’s Narrative: Written to Illustrate the Episode of the Báb. ­Translated and Edited by Edward G. Browne. Los Angeles: Kalimat, 2004. ———. Commentary on the Islamic Tradition ‘I Was a Hidden Treasure.’ Translated by Moojan Momen. In Bahá’í Studies Bulletin, 3:4 (1995): 4–35. ———. Divine Philosophy. New York: Bahá’í Publishing Committee, 1918. ———. Paris Talks: Addresses Given by ‘Abdu’l Bahá in 1911. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 2011. ———. The Promulgation of Universal Peace. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 2012. ———. Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l Bahá. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 2014. ———. Some Answered Questions. Translated by Laura Clifford Barney. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebner & Co., 1908. ———. Some Answered Questions. Translated by Laura Clifford Barney. Newly Revised by a Committee at the Bahá’í World Center. Haifa: Bahá’í World Center, 2014. ———. The Secrets of Divine Civilization. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing, 2015. 481

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Index

Abe, Masao, 308–10 Abjad, 248–49 achintya bheda abheda, 338 Adornment of Mahayana Sutras, 298 advaita, 130, 213, 237, 299, 320, 336, 338, 345, 348, 374, 472 adventure, 32, 55, 76, 149, 152, 202, 313, 330, 341, 343, 375, 377–78, 379, 398, 454, 474; chaosmic, 398 Adventures of Ideas, 102, 109, 122, 404 affrmation: polyphilic, 188, 444, 452–53; subtractive, 69–70, 75, 102, 105, 132, 219–20, 228, 233, 246–47, 259, 340, 381, 426–27, 434, 465–66; theophanic, 12 agape, 222, 293, 349 ahadiyyah, 66, 69, 169, 224, 358, 425, 452 ahimsa, 362–67 Ahmad al-Ahsa’i, Sheikh, 23, 147, 383 aim: initial, 20, 59, 122, 156, 201, 302, 386, 392–94; subjective, 167–68, 386 aisthesis,167–68; omni-prehensive, 168

Akko (Acre), 83 ‘alam al-mithal, 317 ‘alam-i amr, 91, 95 ‘alam-i haqq, 91, 95 ‘alam-i khalq, 91, 95 Aleppo, 15–16, 2–21 aletheia, 32 Alfassa, Mirra, 185 alif, 209, 225 ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, 15 Al-Lah, 318 Allah-u-Abhá, 144 all-inclusiveness, 457–64; of Truth, 461 All-One, the, 231, 250, 308 all-oneness, 290; non-dualistic, 290 All-Relational, the, 38, 228, 230–31, 240, 242–47, 252, 276, 284, 289, 300, 307, 309, 314, 324, 381, 474 all-relationality, 38, 229–34, 242, 247, 277, 280, 289, 297, 309, 313, 324, 351, 381–82, 474; khoric, 230, 233; prehensive, 230 Amitabha, 80, 285, 321 amr, 74, 357, 393 ana al-haqq, 450 analogy, 376–77 anatta, 234, 279, 306–7, 311, 421 523

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Index

anekantavada, 361–68, 421, 436 Anguttara Nikaya, 278 annihilation, 6, 306, 320; of divinity, 306; of Self, 320 anthropos, 144 antitheses, 173, 260; six, 173, 260 apatheia, 172 apocalyptic, the, 30, 43, 71, 74, 82, 422, 424, 427, 434–36, 439 Apollonius of Tyana, 286 apophasis, 65–78, 95, 100, 102–8, 119, 127, 170–71, 174–78, 192, 227, 287, 290; absolute, 69; unity of, 69 apophaticism, 67–70, 160, 227, 231–33, 240–41, 253, 258, 264; Bahá’í, 232–33, 246; ontological, 70, 160 apotheosis, 113, 200, 293 approach, 17; participatory, 159, 374 ‘aql, 125, 282, 410–11, 418, 445 arc, 192, 473; of ascent, 192; of descent, 192 argument: epistemological, 235; transcendental, 441, 446–47, 453–54; Transylvanian, 441, 446, 451–54, 465 Arianism, 296, 304–5, 389–90, 395 Aristotle, 17, 36, 103, 150, 172, 226, 274, 368, 383–84, 352, 477 asat, 224, 301 Asclepius, 268 asma Allah al-husna, 249 aspect(s): God’s mental, 190; God’s physical, 190 Athna’ asheriyyah, 15 Atiyoga, 279

atman, 214–15, 234, 237, 296, 299, 305, 307, 311, 320–21, 336, 349, 363–64, 419, 459 Attar, Farid ad-Din, 24, 355 attraction, 43, 140–41, 145, 147, 149, 153–54, 156, 160, 165, 166–69; sympathetic, 145 attribute(s): divine, 80, 93–95, 131, 216, 264, 288, 290, 299, 306, 317, 319, 321, 337, 363, 369, 379–80, 385, 425, 435, 445, 458, 460–63, 467; essential, 381 AUM, 223, 323, 419, 451 Aurobindo, Sri, 185, 234, 269, 319 Avalokitesvara, 211, 279 avatar, 295–99, 301, 330, 336, 340, 343–48, 353, 366, 385, 388, 391, 395, 438 awareness: existential, 32, 100; luminous, 365–66; unconditioned, 298; unconstructed, 298 axial age, 141, 398–408 ayyam-i ha, 249 ba, 55, 225, 232, 249, 393 Bábi-Bahá’í religion, 9, 26, 123, 136 badi‘, 115, 248–49, 269, 428, 456, 458 Badiou, Alain, 36, 151, 222, 351, 419 bahá’, 55 bahá’ Allah, 144, 225, 292 Bahji, 83 Baillie, Donald, 302 baqa, 320 Bataille, George, 34, 36 batin, 82, 147, 159, 232 bayan, 47, 212, 367 becoming, the, 77, 95, 111; infnite, 33, 38; of God, 168, 206; of Reality, 111; physical, 181; polyphilic, 403, 439

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Index

being/Being, 36, 88, 146, 150, 160, 162, 178, 220–22, 226–30, 234, 250, 288–91, 309, 331, 332, 390–91, 418, 467; divine, 147, 174, 197, 224, 310, 337, 346; noumenal, 241; pre-existent, 340; quasi-divine, 304 Benjamin, Walter, 37, 431 Bergson, Henri, 76 beyond: apophatic, 34, 94, 124, 178, 321, 463, 467; unknown, 22–23 bha, 285 BHA’, 224, 232, 240, 250, 317, 332, 351, 356 bhagavan, 238, 297, 300–301 Bhagavat, 293, 297–305, 312, 314–15 Bhagavat Gita, 38, 185, 213, 238, 296, 321, 379, 420, 423 Bhagavata Purana, 238, 298, 301, 379 bhakti, 147, 213, 238, 297, 300–301, 321, 345, 364, 415 bhakti yoga, 213, 321, 415 bhavanga, 279, 305, 313, 415 bodhi, 305 bodhichitta, 280 bodhisattva, 144, 211, 279, 302, 318, 321, 336, 345, 385, 388, 422 Bohm, David, 114 bonum diffusivum sui, 100, 209, 220, 250, 256, 309 Book of Certitude, 92, 225 Book of History, 117 Book of the River, 118 Book of the Way and of Virtue, 116 boundary: of difference and non-difference, 254; of fniteness, 466; limitless, 471; non-boundary, 253, 466–77; of unity and multiplicity, 100, 467

525

Bracken, Joseph, 242 Bradley, F. H., 221, 228 Brahma, 200, 238, 271, 465 Brahmanism, 138, 296, 421 Brahmajala Sutra, 459, 465 brahmaloka, 212 brahman: nirguna, 177, 227, 238, 242, 276, 337, 391; saguna, 177, 179, 220, 227, 238 Browne, E. G., 353 Buddha(s), 98, 123, 144–45, 143, 159–61, 182, 211, 237–38, 253, 267–325, 336–37, 340, 344–45, 348, 350, 353, 379, 385, 399–400, 421–24, 434, 455, 458, 476; infnite, 274–75, 281, 296, 379, 471; luminous, 283, 315; primordial, 282, 285, 310 Buddha Avatar, 344, 366 Buddha-body, 104, 221, 283 Buddha-feld, 471 Buddhahood, 336 Buddha-nature, 279, 280, 307, 312, 315, 348, 383, 385, 420, 436; empty, 307 Buddha-seed, 275, 279, 312 Buddhism: Chinese, 108, 142; Japanese, 321; Tibetan, 214, 279 burning bush, 223–25 Butler, Judith, 401 Caesar, Julius, 170, 172 calendar, 162, 248–50 Campbell, Joseph, 159 Cantor, Georg, 208, 471 Caputo, John, 222 Carmel, Mt., 80 cascade: fvefold, 180, 188–89, 194, 210, 388; threefold, 180, 472 causa sui, 281, 292, 338, 455 Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, 238, 338

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Index

chaosmos, 332–35; of truth, 334 chi, 274 chitta, 178, 278, 280, 292, 384 Christ, 13, 92, 98, 123, 143–44, 159, 161–62, 222, 272–73, 276, 294–97, 302, 304–6, 310–12, 315, 319, 324–25, 336, 340, 344–49, 376, 385–87, 390, 404, 407, 419–20, 424, 436, 438, 455; cosmic, 315, 347; divinity of, 297, 304, 347; universal, 347 Christ-Event, 222 Christ-fgure, 310 Christ-Logos, 349 Christology, 302, 311, 344; Buddhist, 310; evolutionary, 347; high, 69, 344, 347; incarnational, 349; Logos, 348; Logos-Wisdom, 348, 390; low, 347; of mediation, 349; non-incarnational, 312, 348; Spirit, 347–48, 390, 394; Spirit-Wisdom, 348–49; Teilhard’s, 347; Wisdom, 346 civilization, 122–23, 172, 265, 271, 314, 327, 341, 377, 397, 399, 403–4, 420, 437, 474, 476; aesthetic foundation of, 109; of chaosmic self-transcendence, 417; of conviviality, 446; cosmopolitan, 417; divine, 88, 121; enlightened, 265; ever-advancing, 47, 121, 157; nonviolent, 137; of peace, 98, 112, 156, 190, 268, 313, 361, 374, 396, 413, 418, 423–24, 427, 434, 441, 476; peaceful, 109, 397, 418;

spiritual, 98, 189; universal, 97, 108, 123; world, 108, 155 clinamen, 151 cloud(s), 102, 196, 385, 403; of divine bounty (grace), 163, 170, 394, 431; of multiplicity, 408; of Truth, 449–55, 465 Cobb, John, 26, 241–42, 255, 299, 302, 310, 348, 358, 386, 392, 395 code: relativistic, 57–58, 75, 79, 108, 111, 175, 179; symbolic, 427; theopoetic, 427 coherence, 102–6 coincidentia oppositorum, 66, 91, 173, 239, 246, 256, 259 coinhabitation, 154, 159–61, 175, 180 coinherence: mutual, 39, 47, 114, 193, 197, 417, 425 Cole, Juan, 164 Commentary on a Verse of Rumi, 91, 93, 287 Commentary on the Bismillah, 248 Commentary on the Disconnected Letters, 52 Commentary on the “He is”, 232 Commentary on the Islamic Tradition “I was a Hidden Treasure”, 101, 321 Commentary on the Letter Ha, 232 Commentary on the Mystery of Ha, 232 Commentary on the Surah of the Sun, 176, 210, 225 compassion, 31, 43, 47, 94, 100, 150, 167–70, 191, 206, 208, 234, 238, 243, 249, 261, 264, 279, 289, 299, 369, 378–86, 404, 440, 457–58; all-relational, 238; of the Buddha, 159 complementarity, 61, 461

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complexity, 4, 6, 18, 27, 45, 86–89, 148, 196, 208, 244, 260, 262, 279, 306, 324, 330, 350, 399, 430, 433, 447; aesthetic, 84; ecological, 12; infnite, 363; polydoxy, 142; polyphilic, 338; polypoetic, 131; social, 45 Conference of the Birds, 24 Confagration, 72, 212, 436 Confucianism, 108, 117, 141–42, 400, 421 Confucius, 108–9, 123, 160, 268, 353, 399–400 connectivity, 12, 58–65, 70, 75, 77–78, 87–88, 95, 100, 106, 108, 114, 120, 127, 133–34, 155, 167–69, 175–79, 229, 234, 258, 355, 365, 406, 444, 453, 457; apophatic, 130; beyond, 253; daoic, 114; degrees of, 72; devolution of, 87; divine, 65, 88; ecological, 114; feld of, 157, 163; global, 158; infnite non-closure of, 465; multiplicities of, 154, 465; mutual, 74, 90, 463; nomadic, 382, 385, 403; processual, 171, 173, 351, 371; relational, 314, 430; relativistic (gate of), 104, 152, 240, 252, 268; relativity of, 67, 115, 170; religious, 140; rhizomatic, 54, 365; spiritual, 148; transreligious, 37, 149, 163, 165, 253, 397, 408, 414, 416, 419, 443;

527

universal, 60, 134–35, 160; vertical, 100; world of, 253, 256, 259 Connolly, William, 22, 26, 255 consciousness, 2, 6, 9, 20, 33–38, 43, 49, 84, 107, 124, 135, 183–84, 195, 208, 213, 279, 281–82, 291, 299, 312–14, 397, 399, 402, 413, 417, 419, 423–24, 472; apex of, 472; clear, 183, 305, 309, 313, 322–23; cosmic, 409, 412, 414, 475–76; cosmopolitan, 49, 413–14, 418, 437, 439, 441, 445, 476; divine, 322, 410, 417; ecological, 417; enlightened, 410–11; evolution of, 180; human, 415; lucid, 399; luminous, 309–10, 316, 322; modes of, 215, 237; of the New Axial Age, 406; non-subjective, 34; of omnirelativity, 445; of self-emptiness, 309; pure, 36, 213, 217, 280–81, 284, 297, 307, 322–24, 568; religious, 169; spiritual, 216, 403; spontaneous, 280; states of, 215–16, 375; universal, 214–15, 412, 418, 445, 476 consequent nature, 105, 159, 168, 190–91, 195–208, 214, 243, 261–62, 170–73, 296, 317, 321, 364, 386–87, 394, 404, 430, 445–46, 457, 459, 462–64, 474 contingency, 22, 75, 115, 370, 455–64; apophatic, 73; chaosmic, 135; spatiotemporal, 200; supreme, 465

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continuity, 7, 104, 186, 360, 375, 437–38, 442; non-substantial, 279 continuum, 158; extensive, 474; spatiotemporal, 342 convergence, 214, 278, 285, 307, 314, 343–51, 372, 378, 403, 406; apophatic, 408; multireligious, 380; nomadic, 384; reverberating, 345; spiritual, 429 Convivencia, 99 conviviality, 1–12, 21, 24, 26–28, 39, 40, 47, 77–81, 85–86, 99, 446 Corbin, Henry, 458 core, 35, 66, 136, 139, 158–59, 293, 370, 375, 377, 429; apophatic, 235; mystical, 66, 99, 184, 369 cosmology, 8, 16, 24, 38, 64, 119, 241, 413, 471; Bahá’í, 72; of becoming, 22; Deleuze’s, 52; Jain, 436; mystic(al), 24, 71, 176–85, 198; physical, 72, 116, 199; religious, 259; spiritual, 212, 364; Suf, 52, 180; Whitehead’s, 52, 185, 242 cosmopolitanism, 408–18; differentiated, 412, 432; of the event, 408; theopoetic, 414 creativity, 24; divine, 52–3, 57, 82; groundless, 331; mutual, 261, 369, 373; primordial, 299; spontaneous, 297, 309; textual/textured, 53 Critical Theory, 146

Index

Critique of Practical Reason, 413 cycle: of love, 100, 105, 185–98, 205, 207–10, 229–30, 245, 251, 259, 262, 271, 274, 316–17, 333, 375, 379, 382, 386, 428, 452; prophetic, 437 daena, 121 Dao, the, 108, 113–19, 124, 126–32, 142, 145, 198, 211, 220–23, 227–29, 263, 295, 316, 337, 398, 470 dao jia, 107, 124, 295 dao jiao, 107, 124, 295 Dao De Jing, 61, 107, 116–18, 124–29 Daoism, 107, 110, 112, 116–30, 141–42, 295, 336, 421; philosophical, 7, 109; religious, 129, 295 Daoud, Yousef (Joe Martin), 280, 287 Darwin, Charles, 30 Dasein, 221–23, 228 Dawning-Places of Remembrance, 442 Day: of God, 74, 146, 406, 438; messianic, 438 Days of Ha, 248–50 de/construction, 395, 430–44; divine, 342, 434 Deganawida, 269 Demiurge, 465 Democritus, 151 Denys the Pseudo-Areopagite, 67 Derrida, Jacques, 32, 34, 36–37, 52, 130, 154–55, 223, 229, 232, 330, 331, 401, 419, 430–31, 447 deva, 296, 305 Dharma: Realm, 298; transpersonal, 238, 273; twofold, 297 Dharma-body, 269, 274, 279 Dharmadhatu, 227, 253, 283, 284, 298, 315

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dharmakaya, 38, 104, 179, 221, 227, 237, 238, 242, 253, 274, 279, 180–83, 286, 288, 291, 295, 297–98, 300, 306–7, 307–8, 316, 336, 345, 363, 385, 431, 468, 472 dharma(s), 33, 167, 227, 237–38, 159, 269, 273, 275, 276–77, 279, 289, 295, 296, 297, 305, 337, 349, 382, 384, 400, 405, 408, 455, 465 dhat, 66, 232, 288, 307 dhat-i ghayb, 54 différance, 32, 34, 228–29, 232, 331, 366, 368, 416, 430, 454 difference, 5; analogical, 392; mutual, 105, 108; radical, 167, 303; religious, 123, 235, 361, 393; theopoetic, 102, 106, 243, 428; universes of, 176 differentiation, 18; dualistic, 227, 309; fvefold, 180, 192, 195, 309; resonant, 179; rhizomatic, 429; threefold, 179, 194–95, 227 din, 121, 128 dipolarity, 190, 242, 261, 299, 312, 387 discourse, 441, 446–47, 464; experiential, 237; interreligious, 37, 364, 371; mystical, 67; post-philosophical, 47; religious, 4, 7, 23, 301, 356, 360, 390; transreligious, 175, 178, 258, 289, 341, 343, 443 dispensation, 74, 211, 224–25, 232, 249–50, 294, 412, 425, 438–39, 444 ditheism, 347 divine, the, 13; apophatic, 140, 244; impersonal, 464; manifest, 99, 273–74

529

Divine Manifold, 264, 333 divinity, 8, 90, 98, 108, 151, 174, 181, 210, 212–22, 237, 240, 255, 255, 274, 282, 287, 303, 310, 316, 348, 376, 386–87, 392–93, 431, 458, 464; apophatic, 90, 94, 96, 101, 128–29; Brahma, 465; of Christ, 162, 297, 304, 346–47; creative, 100; of the Logos, 308, 347; manifest, 181, 247, 276, 287, 348, 359; universal, 141; unmanifest, 287 Docetism, 297, 304–5, 386, 389, 395 doctrine, 34, 61, 92, 270, 273, 368, 376, 442, 447; Buddhist, 279; of Christian theology, 172; of Ibn ‘Arabi, 91; of the immanence of the past energizing the present, 313; Jain, 364; of many-sidedness, 362; of the medium of intercommunication, 155; of mutual immanence, 156; of necessity in universality, 252; of real communication, 155; religious, 340, 362; self-differentiating, 185; soteriological, 362; three-body, 305; trikaya, 182, 299; of the Trinity, 393; two-body, 305; two-truths, 364, 370; of the unique Seal of the Prophets, 379; of the unity of being, 317; of the unity of nature, 313 Dogen, 130, 184 dream, 3, 28, 126, 214–15, 234, 256, 288, 322–24, 338, 360, 372–73, 406, 474

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dynamis, 238, 346 Dzogchen, 7, 238, 278–85, 288, 316, 321–22, 337, 365, 416, 475 ebullition, 100, 220 ecology, 81; of the Dao, 115 Ein Sof, 93, 232, 237, 239 Elcesaites, 144 Eliade, Mircea, 269 Elohim, 143, 196, 212 emanation(s), 73, 75, 134, 177, 179, 181, 232–33, 248–55, 259, 309, 355; cycle of, 264; divine, 16, 90, 92, 100, 167, 194; ecstatic, 260, 263; movement of, 316–17; multiplicity of, 274, 476; Plotinus’s scheme of, 287; polyphilic, 290; primal, 90, 227, 471; procession through, 339; process of, 56; world of, 192 embodiment(s), 5, 299, 373, 477; of the apophatic, 6, 23; of knowledge, 45; of peace, 40; of self-revelation, 395; of self-transcendence, 409; symbolic, 176; transreligious, 11, 44, 47, 105 emergence, 2, 44, 62, 122, 139, 155, 189, 412, 417; of a civilization of peace, 413; of the cosmic Logos-Christ, 302; evolutionary, 412 emet, 32, 454 empiricism, 332; principle of, 270; transcendental, 430 emptiness, 28, 32, 171, 221, 236, 245, 268, 270, 274, 277, 284–92, 297–98, 302;

absolute, 253, 284, 331, 382, 403, 467, 472, 474; awareness of, 279; cosmic, 415; divine, 435; essential, 288; Luminous Mind is, 283; mutual, 289; of Reality, 365, 384; Reality is, 234, 283; Sea of, 337; Self as/of, 284, 289, 384, 387, 435; self-emptying, 231, 309–10; ultimate, 242 enfolding, 53, 116, 118, 180–95, 193–203, 209–11, 220, 224, 259, 275, 300, 306, 316–17, 355–56, 365, 376–77, 382, 428, 468, 470–77; apophatic, 183–84, 316 enhypostasia, 306 enlightenment, 32, 121, 135, 146, 162, 184, 211, 235, 241, 278, 280, 284, 292, 305, 310, 321, 330, 365, 401, 403, 415, 433, 436; new, 403 Epicurus, 151 epistemology, 103, 119, 363, 413, 441, 523 epoch: cosmic, 72, 199–201, 379 epoché, 374 eros: divine, 63, 140, 202, 395; supreme, 412 essence: apophatic, 131, 290, 340, 392, 455; divine, 16, 101, 276, 229, 338, 381, 390–91, 435, 458; of God, 226, 274, 288–89, 310, 312, 318, 337, 339, 394; inaccessible, 255, 292; independent, 355; innermost, 90; singular, 66;

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twofold, 298–99; unchanging, 187; unknowable, 54, 68, 232, 247, 287, 289, 389, 449 eternity, 71, 187, 193, 212–13, 269, 280, 308, 323, 330, 338, 385, 427–28, 457–58, 462 Euclid, 466 event: creative, 115, 138, 229, 254, 262; divine, 190, 198; of God, 198, 223–24; historical, 388; prophetic, 377; of Truth, 48 everlastingness, 113, 193–94, 206, 462 evolution, 42, 44, 61–62, 91, 155–56, 185, 216, 342–43, 346, 348, 363, 411–18, 427, 442, 474; convergences in, 214; of consciousness, 180, 208; cosmic, 413, 416; of Greek thought, 36; of humanity, 41, 122, 141, 390, 442; Industrial, 146; organic, 373; physical, 156; process of, 88, 417, 455; of religion, 67, 160; of the Spirit, 302, 320; of symbolism, 298; of unison in diversity, 414; of the universe, 41, 445 existentiality, 31; aesthetic, 35; of existence, 32, 33, 70, 167 experience, 1; aesthetic, 81; Buddhist, 242, 277; Divine, 29, 269; ecstatic , 65, 67; general, 270; immediate, 17, 65–66, 176; mystical, 124–25, 176, 295, 320, 330, 452, 472;

531

religious, 8, 10–11, 37, 47, 122, 138, 160, 182, 197–98, 206–8, 214–15, 219, 231, 235, 242, 245–46, 263, 267, 269–70, 278, 292, 301, 327, 329, 335, 343, 350, 355, 375, 385, 424, 456 ex-sistence, 290; apophatic, 303; ex-static, 220; khoric, 319 ex-stasis, 220, 221 extensive continuum, 474 face: of God, 163, 196, 224–25, 391; of Reality, 38–39, 61, 132, 308 fa-lamma balagha al-amr, 147 fallacy, 26, 133, 172, 188, 438, 446; dogmatic, 424 fallacy of misplaced concreteness, 95, 11, 334, 341 fallacy of a Perfect Dictionary, 424 fana, 320 father, 227, 271, 308, 311, 333, 337, 347, 387–88, 391, 458 al-Farabi, Muhammad, 15 feeling, 18–20, 57, 60, 63–64, 73, 84, 100, 154, 229, 360, 381, 397, 413; modes of feeling, 122; mystical, 66, 86, 158, 370; oceanic, 86, 91 fellow-sufferer, 101, 191, 202 Ferrer, Jorge, 159, 361, 371 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 262 fvefold: cascading, 192, 197, 210, 213, 387 fux, 10–11, 64, 109, 113, 151, 158, 372, 404; processual, 335; religious, 211 fold(s), 10, 135, 153, 181, 197, 254, 332, 387; cascading, 186, 324; of the mind, 188

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formlessness, 212, 221, 293, 435 Foucault, Michel, 24, 34, 134, 352, 354, 401 fourfold, 173, 214, 243, 251, 254, 363, 462; of ultimates, 243 fractalization, 366; radical, 471 Friend, the, 13, 64, 143, 225, 276, 311, 330, 356, 404–5, 478 Fu Xi, 268 Gandhi, Mahatma, 185, 234 garden, 11–13; delightful, 12, 217; English, 28; French, 28; paradise, 28, 82–83; Persian, 83; of Reality, 11–13, 21, 25–26, 29, 57, 79, 80–84, 89, 95–96, 98, 102, 105–6, 132, 197, 217, 351, 407, 428, 440–49; of Relativity, 403, 440, 444 The Garden/Ridvan of Justice, 93 gate(s): apophatic, 102, 234, 267, 269, 314, 327, 411, 456, 475; of connectivity, 179, 252; relativistic, 104, 268, 327, 397, 453; of Relativity, 64, 66, 70, 72, 74, 219, 267, 269, 411, 456, 475; of transreligious connectivity, 379 Gaudiya Vaishnavism, 338 Geist, 146, 433 geometry: fractal, 471 Geschichte des Seins, 221, 226 ghayb, 66 ghayb al-huwiyya, 66 al-Ghazali, Muhammad, 16–17, 273 ghulat, 15, 358 glory: of God, 143, 224, 281, 391–92 Gnostics, 142, 458

gnoti sauton, 358 God: before God, 226; beyond God, 221, 237; dipolar, 271–73, 302, 313, 378, 386–87, 390–91; dying, 344; manifest, 181, 240, 387; personal, 205, 237–38, 246, 271, 274, 290, 345; trinitarian, 340; unmanifest, 181 God-forsakenness, 69 Godhead, 36, 239, 274, 282, 310, 329, 340, 387–92; apophatic, 17, 181, 193, 387, 466; creative, 104; formless, 336; God and, 242; personality of, 238; threefold, 337; trans-differentiated, 181; transpersonal, 237; ultimate, 239 God-Man, 312 Good, the, 19, 32, 100, 149, 208, 210, 227, 245, 250, 256, 258, 270, 274, 331, 335, 380, 397, 464; apophatic, 250, 263, 274, 316; beyond being, 36; Plato’s Idea of, 204; supremely, 446 gradualism, 321, 365, 367, 474; hierarchical, 369 Great Perfection, 279, 280, 365, 376 Gregory of Nyssa, 67 ground: apophatic, 102, 178; creative, 431; groundless, 146 groundlessness, 102, 178, 228 Guattari, Felix, 29, 34–35, 36, 150, 153, 175, 177, 180, 209, 254, 330, 474–75

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Guru Granth Sahib, 296 gymnopedists, 16 ha, 55, 225, 232–33 hadith, 193, 249, 295, 303,407, 423, 450 hahut, 181, 183, 188,195, 197–98, 210, 213, 221, 225, 232–33, 239–40, 247–48, 272–75, 287, 307, 316–18, 365, 368, 387, 462 hamsa, 225 Hanson, Chad, 116 haqaqat-i dhat-i ahadiyyat, 6 haqiqah muhammadiyyah, 144, 285, 320 al-haqq, 24, 54, 73,78, 80, 104, 246, 263, 272, 280, 290–91, 298, 302, 336, 338, 359, 442, 449, 450–51 harmony/harmonies, 53–64, 98, 113, 119, 169, 333, 343, 387; cosmopolitan, 428; divine, 118, 145, 257; of harmonies, 74, 98, 100, 102, 114, 122, 202, 313–14, 395, 404, 470; heavenly, 212; pre-established, 58; pre-stabilized, 87, 331; of science and religion, 45; spiritual, 186; universal, 65; world-civilizing, 113 Hartshorne, Charles, 56, 230, 243–44, 247, 457–58, 460, 462, 464, 475 haykal, 307, 408, 428, 450–51 hayy, 249 Heart Sutra, 279 Hebblethwait, Brian Hegel, G.F.W., 25, 37, 130, 146, 147, 221, 226, 228, 433, 447 hegemony, 18, 232, 335, 373; post-colonial, 257 Heidegger, Martin, 37, 84, 221–28, 415 Heiler, Friedrich, 352 Heilsgeschichte, 62, 69, 263, 344, 359, 428, 434,

533

heliopathy, 318 heliotropism, 318, 356 Hellenism, 138, 144 herd-psychology, 69 Hermes Trismegistos, 268 Hermetics, 142 He who knows himself hath known his Lord, 287 Hick, John, 26, 70, 131, 179, 21, 235–36, 238–42, 245–46, 255, 258, 263–64, 268, 275, 293, 312, 322, 335, 345, 348, 349–50, 353, 373, 375, 464 Hidden Treasure, 101, 217, 247, 321, 369, 449, 452, 462, 466 hiddenness, 69, 101, 233, 250; absolute, 86; apophatic, 66, 70, 74, 392; essential, 231; eternal, 452; of Truth/Reality, 70, 450 hikmat, 17–18, 47, 125, 212 hikmat-i ilahi, 18, 125 Hinduism, 25, 138, 144, 221, 227, 244, 299, 336, 344–45, 348, 352–53, 419, 421 holism, 433; transpersonal, 175 Holy Night, 250 Homer, 399 homo divinus, 302 homo philosophicus, 125 horizon(s), 40, 48–49, 82, 94, 163, 187, 210, 216, 232, 323, 329, 374, 376, 405, 418–19; apophatic, 231, 436; of the apophatic Dao/Reality, 115; of apophatic ecstasis, 213; closed, 33–34, 269; divine, 215, 217, 244; of God/Reality, 215, 398; horizon-less, 478; of human existence, 126; of the indifference of all manifestations, 165;

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of oneness/unity, 100; relativistic, 78; of (spiritual) understanding, 20, 33, 48, 336; transcendental, 222, 248, 355, 433–34, 436–39, 445, 447; ultimate, 460, 465; upon/of horizon, 82, 269, 354 hulul, 182, 358, 387, 389, 390, 394 Hurtado, Larry, 138 Husayn ibn ‘Ali, Imam, 162–64, 407, 438 huwa, 232–33, 240, 365, 451 huwiyya, 66, 101 Huxley, Aldous, 185, 211, 234, 345 hybridity, 372, 403 hypodoche, 150, 177, hypostasis, 306, 308, 346, 391 Ibn ‘Arabi, Muhammad, 16, 17, 23–24, 38, 61, 69, 91, 101, 129, 130–31, 180, 194–96, 212, 224, 236–37, 254, 264, 280, 285, 287, 288–91, 295, 317–320, 354–60, 366, 369, 384, 389, 419, 465 ignotum x, 241 ikk oankar, 221 ilah, 318 illumination, 16, 20–21, 93, 126, 268, 292, 322; conceptual, 156 imaginal, the, 356, 359, 388, 391 imagination, 35, 38, 53, 55, 68, 77, 84–88, 122, 125, 131, 135, 147, 169, 173, 194, 197, 214, 216, 236, 241, 252, 264–65, 276, 314, 328, 335, 359, 376, 418–28, 436–56; religious, 214, 418, 422 Imaginatrix, 194 Imam(s): twelfth, 136, 162, 438 imamology: Shi‘i, 136 imitatio Christi, 319 immanence, 5;

aesthetic, 458; all-Relational, 245, 309; divine, 348; of God, 64, 66, 173–74, 272, 385, 458; mutual, 32, 37, 60, 98, 102, 104, 106, 111, 114, 127, 140, 155, 157–57, 161, 167, 173, 180–81, 187, 193, 197, 205–6, 214, 226–27, 229–31, 243, 253–54, 258, 261, 263, 268, 271, 277, 291, 293, 313, 329, 335, 373–74, 382, 385, 409, 460, 475; perikhoric, 258; plane of, 171, 187, 216, 231, 254, 259, 284, 314, 329, 343, 352, 361, 477; polyphilic, 225, 315; prophetic, 64 immediacy, 156, 168, 201, 342, 346 immersion, 75 immortality, 102, 104, 184, 206, 245, 285 imperfection, 68, 95, 120 impermanence, 98, 160, 171, 193–95, 197–98, 203, 286, 363 impersona(e), 179, 236, 239, 246 impersonality, 238, 313–14 impersonation, 234, 240 impossibility, 43, 68, 70, 73, 142, 173, 216, 296, 341, 368, 400, 423, 440, 450–52, 457, 477 inaccessibility, 37, 68, 180, 232, 340, 366; absolute, 177, 227; apophatic, 175, 432; mystical, 174 Inayat Khan, 185 incarnation(s), 19, 27, 68, 167, 295, 358, 388; Christian, 343, 359; divine, 348; of the love of God, 350; multiplicity of, 348, 353; of Vishnu, 145;

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Index

of the Word, 379; Yogacara, 279, 299, 322 incompleteness, 23, 45, 111, 128–30, 332, 397, 457–65; essential, 120; mutual, 120–26, 129–30, 134, 460; supreme, 463–65 incompossibilities, 332, 426 indeterminateness, 333, 335, 368, 454 indetermination, 75–78, 108, 119–20, 368, 374, 401, 426, 451, 453–54 India, 16, 23, 25, 40, 82–83, 109–10, 112, 116, 140–41, 144, 159, 169, 185, 214, 285, 290, 354, 365, 399, 416, 422 in/difference, 105; absolute, 303, 317; apophatic, 365, 374; divine, 467; enfolded, 300; infnite, 378; in-sisting, 282, 298; mutual, 105, 260, 304; mystical, 254, 271; non-dual, 303; polyphilic, 333; primordial, 307; supreme, 462; transpersonal, 393; ultimate, 458 in/differentiation, 253, 278, 286, 305, 341, 374, 454, 458 indistinction, 115; of suffering, 160–68, 174, 287, 291–92, 297–98 infnity, 12; apophatic, 72, 428; of goodness, 207; of manifestations, 378; of multiplicity, 72, 170; of possibilities, 203; of potentials, 343; of time, 71; of the universe, 109;

535

of worlds, 73, 90, 109, 120, 186, 203, 206, 208 al-insan al-kamal, 357 in-sistence, 277, 234, 252, 263, 269, 286, 301, 303–8, 314, 324; polyphilic, 335, 365, 373–74, 379, 443, 454, 456; theopoetic, 436 Instructions on the Nonduality of Dzogchen, 283 intercommunication, 60, 155, 157, 170, 200, 230, 234, 312, 382, 409 interconnectedness: ecological, 45, 85 interconnectivity, 59, 229, 253; inherent, 175 intercreativity, 243 interdependence, 43, 48, 243, 373, 401 intermezzo, 153, 317 interrelatedness, 11–12, 171, 253 Iqbal, Muhammad, 352 Irenaeus of Lions, 155, 346 irfan, 35 irfan al-haqq, 80 Ishvara, 238, 323, 363 Isis (Goddess), 143, 152, 332 Islam, 15; Shi‘i, 249, 383; Sunni, 15, 145 ism-i a‘zam, 317 Isma’iliyyah, 15 it/self, 220, 221, 223, 227, 233, 247, 254–55, 263–64, 272, 276, 280–81, 292–94, 309, 324, 355, 365, 367, 368–69, 381, 385, 398,451, 464 jabarut, 181, 183, 195–96, 198, 213, 217, 316–17, 321, 366, 457 Jainism, 295, 336–37, 352, 362–63, 366–68, 420 James, William, 22, 26, 207, 441, 457 Jaspers, Karl, 398–400 Jesus, 13, 24, 52, 68, 69, 92, 143–44, 162–64, 182, 268, 270, 293–94,

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297, 304, 305–6, 312, 344, 346–49, 353, 386–90, 400, 407, 419, 422, 434 jihad, 420, 423 Jina: omniscient, 364, 366 jing, 108 jivamukti, 213, 323 jnana, 147, 297, 300–301, 458 jnana yoga, 213, 321, 415, John Scotus Eriugena, 220, 224, 254 Joseph (son of Jacob), 143, 163 journey, 51, 131, 212; mystical, 216, 225, 363–64; personal, 159; of the soul, 55; spiritual, 38; transreligious, 397 Judaism, 37, 138, 142, 227, 231, 336, 352, 372, 421 Jung, C. G., 269 justifcation, 40–48, 117, 177, 203, 239, 262, 427; ideological, 30; power-inficted, 381 Justin the Martyr, 274 Kabbalah (kabbalistic), 52, 93, 144, 225, 232, 237, 239, 318 kabod, 143, 224–25, 232, 281–82, 285, 293 kaf, 52 kairos, 361, 374, 414, 437 Kalachakra Tantra, 144, 420, 422 kalima, 285 Kalki ruler, 145, 422 Kamadhatu, 212 Kant, Immanuel, 103, 241–42, 245–46, 252, 413, 430 Kaplan, Stephen, 255 Karim Khan Kirmami, 389 karma, 147, 259, 297, 305, 330 karma yoga, 213, 321, 415 karuna, 274, 293, 300, 458 kenosis, 303, 310, 359, 390, 393

Kepler, Johannes, 415 khora, 54, 114, 155, 170, 174, 229–30, 234, 240, 243, 253, 283, 301, 312–14, 382, 409, 412, 434, 464, 474 Khuddaka Nikaya, 286 khwarenah, 144 Kitab-i Iqan, 92–93 Kitagawa, Joseph, 436 Knitter, Paul, 234, 255 Krishna, 68, 144, 182, 211, 214, 238, 268, 293, 295–97, 321, 336, 344, 346, 348–49, 379, 388, 422, 455 Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 269 kulliyyih, 160 kullu shay, 160, 248–49, 303 Küng, Hans, 256, 361, 272 Kunjed Gyalpo, 228 Kyoto School, 310, 487 lahut, 181–83, 188, 196–98, 213, 217, 221, 225, 240, 247, 272–75, 287, 298, 303, 307, 316–17, 319, 359, 365, 368, 387, 389, 391, 393, 395, 457, 462, 464 la ilaha illa allah, 224 Lambden, Stephen, 231 Lampe, Geoffrey, 346, 349 landscape: chaosmic, 341; cosmological, 23; differentiated, 187; processual, 331; of religions, 331; rhizomatic, 373; social, 331; virtual, 343 Laozi, 38, 98, 107–24, 129–30, 211, 220–21, 228, 268, 295–96, 329, 353, 399, 475 Laozi. See Dao De Jing Laruelle, François, 28, 34–35, 37 Lawh Basit al-Haqiqa, 290 Lawh-i Haqq, 450–51 Lawh-i madanat al-tawhid, 68

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Lawh-i-Qull Ta’am, 210 Lawh-i Ridwan al-‘ahd, 461 Lawh-i-Zíyárat-Namih-i-Imám Husayn, 162 Leibniz, Gottfried, 32, 58, 109, 221, 331 Leslie, John, 26, 32, 199, 203–8, 226–27, 256, 259, 274–75, 281, 308, 380–81, 410, 459, 461, 464 letter(s), 24, 52–53, 55, 83, 209, 225, 233–48, 316, 323 Letters of the Living, 83, 248 Levinas, Emmanuel, 34–37 Lewis, David, 199, 203 life history, 170–71, 313 light: immutable, 285; Muhammedan, 285, 295, 320, 356–57 Light Verse (Q 24:35), 16, 52 lila, 211, 214, 238 Linji, 67 Lion’s Roar of Queen Srimala Sutra, 286 liqa’llah, 74 Llull, Raimon,17 logic: Aristotelian, 62, 452, 454, 455–56, 462, 465; divine, 294, 451; fourfold, 173, 251, 462; Jain, 361; of multiplicity, 454; non-dualistic, 287 logos, 19, 21, 33–36, 69, 73, 118, 134, 152, 160, 167, 181, 192, 195, 205, 227, 228, 238, 249, 259, 274, 285, 297, 302–8, 336, 340, 343, 246–49, 385–88, 390–92, 397, 404, 426, 450, 452, 455, 464; personal, 238 Logos-Wisdom: pre-existent, 390 Longchenpa, 282–84, 288–89, 291–92, 298, 384 Loomer, Bernard, 208

537

Lord of all worlds, 207, 215 Lord Lao, 295 Lotus Sutra, 211, 274–75, 295–96, 337, 379 love, 12; creative-receptive, 159; connective, 153; cycle of, 100, 105, 185–86, 189, 191, 193, 197–98, 205, 207–8, 210, 229–30, 245, 251, 259, 262, 271, 274, 316–17, 333, 375, 379, 382, 386, 428, 452; divine, 100, 159, 168, 186, 191,195, 203, 273, 452; personal, 330; polyphilic, 101, 106, 299, 333 Lucretius, 58, 76, 151 luminosity, 278–85; apophatic, 292; divine, 285 Luminous Mind, 217, 275, 278–315, 319–22, 323, 338, 365, 377, 384–85, 417, 430–31, 452, 472 lure, 161; divine, 367 Luria, Isaac, 461 Lyotard, Jean-François, 401 Macquarrie, John, 70, 349, 353 Madhva Acharya, 338 Madhyamika, 61, 242, 279, 299, 365, 441 Madhyamika school, 61 magnitude(s), 427, 465–78; cascading, 471 ; metaphysical, 270 mahasattva bodhisattva, 161 302 Mahavira (Bhagavan), 297, 361, 399 Mahayana, 71, 138, 182, 221 Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra, 307 Mahayana Sutralamkara karika, 298 Mahdi, 144–45, 389, 422, 438 malakut, 181, 183, 194, 195–96, 198, 213, 265, 316–17, 321, 359, 366, 388, 390–91, 393, 428, 457

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538

Index

Mandeans, 142–43 Mandukya Upanishad, 214–16, 223, 322–23 Mani (Prophet), 296 Manichaeism, 142, 144, 380, 421 Manifestation(s), 7, 351–62; Bahá’í, 128–29; Buddhist, 144, 422; divine, 95, 99, 100, 128, 145, 164, 168, 182, 195, 207, 225, 247, 267, 272, 379; frst, 227, 248, 423, 464; human, 161; inexhaustible, 74; infnite, 275, 365, 380, 459, 471; in-sistent, 333; novel, 77, 431; of God, 148, 163, 274, 299, 303, 388, 393–94, 417, 431; of Godself, 249; of the impossible, 55; of Reality, 47, 72, 90, 129, 131, 185, 280–81, 284, 286, 293, 315, 379, 389, 428; personal, 128; polyphilic, 171, 250, 272, 299; primal, 299, 367–68, 457, 468, 477; primordial, 277, 281–89, 292–97, 303, 310, 314, 317, 320, 338–39, 356, 359, 365, 379, 383, 385, 387, 391, 413 manifold, 16; cosmic, 78; divine, 264, 333; expansive, 71; infnite, 132, 253, 275, 287, 300; of exclusions, 402; ultimate, 240 Manjushri (Bodhisattva), 144, 422 maqam, 91, 217, 366–67, 412 ma‘rifa, 34,131 martyrdom, 162, 164, 257, 415 mashiyyah, 78, 428 mashriq al-adhkar, 442 Mathnavi, 24, 355

matrix, 8, 155, 242, 274, 283; cosmic/cosmological, 22, 413; divine, 243; fourfold, 243; khoric, 426; natural, 155 maya, 33, 297, 472 mazahir-i ilahi, 164, 182, 357 mazhar-i haqiqat, 307 means: skillful, 211, 295, 315, 345, 360 mediation, 1, 2, 16, 43, 296, 301–2; Christology of, 349; of Bahá’u’lláh, 85; of divine presence, 176; of the world of Manifestation, 100; state of, 184 mediator(s), 8, 176–77, 302, 309, 336–37, 353, 356 medium, 9, 16, 30, 134–35; of divine knowledge, 264; of intercommunication, 60, 155, 157, 200, 230, 234, 312, 382, 409; of spiritual existence, 67 meeting, 77, 466; with God, 74 meditation, 68, 79, 264, 283, 365, 423, 436 Meister Eckhart, 36–37, 67, 100, 130, 181, 220–21, 224, 237, 254, 339, 472 Messiah, 145, 311, 422 messianism, 36–37, 43 meta-level(s): of magnitude, 470; of the Dao, 118 metaphor, 17, 27–28, 45, 54, 56, 81–82, 145–47, 285, 312, 349, 391, 394, 421, 449; theopoetic, 436 metaphysics, 16, 21, 38, 47, 63, 252, 413; Aristotle’s, 224, 384; Heidegger’s, 221; of light, 23;

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mystical, 278; of presence, 431; Persian, 278, 285, 345; Whitehead’s, 72, 103, 125, 149 meta-theory, 375 milpas, 28 mind: divine, 62, 124, 181, 195–96, 205, 274–75, 305, 308–9, 322, 381, 410, 464; of God, 19–20, 125, 144, 183, 199, 201, 204, 224, 226–27, 259, 274–75, 281–82, 288, 292, 303, 305, 320, 349, 356, 359, 363, 377, 380, 390, 393, 410, 412, 445, 457, 461, 463, 472; individual, 276; primal, 227, 285, 473; primordial, 282, 284 minds, 57, 220, 264, 321, 336, 358–59, 366, 369, 408, 435–36; divine, 274–75, 459–60; infnite, 381, 459; of God, 381; types of, 133; world of, 214 mind-stream, 279 minority, 7, 26, 38, 45, 136, 150; oppressed, 15 mirror, 19, 106, 150, 152, 282, 297, 307, 390; divine, 84; of divinity, 303; human, 72; of God, 304; of malakut, 265; of the Manifestation, 307; of perfection, 137, 196; of Reality, 75, 284, 360; of the Sun of Reality, 319; translucent, 210; of the Unknowable, 465 model(s), 72, 111, 208, 255, 258, 260, 263, 476; of difference, 416;

539

differential, 242; of divine activity, 270; epistemological, 241; of the evolution of consciousness, 180; of God, 240, 381; Hick’s model, 242, 245–46; holistic, 114, 180; Kantian, 242, 245; metaphysical, 59, 205; panentheistic, 230, 240; pantheistic, 230, 240; of relationality, 76; of religious pluralism, 255, 263; simplistic, 416; substantialist, 46; transcendent, 240; of thought, 44; of truth, 365; of unity, 416 Mohottivatte Gunananda, 422 moksha, 213, 322, 363–64 Momen, Moojan, 233, 239, 246, 276, 368 monad, 21, 54, 402; apophatic nature of, 351; surrelative, 343 monism, 102, 243, 236, 287, 291, 316, 322, 334, 360, 432, 472; logical, 441; Sankara’s, 290; simplistic, 384; Vedantic, 301 Monod, Jacques, 415 monomyth, 159 Monophysitism, 305 monotheism, 31, 65, 171, 390 morphe, 181 Moses, 13, 52, 68–69, 91, 143–44, 164, 182, 223, 225, 268, 353, 407, 418, 422, 438 Most Great Name, 144, 224–25, 227, 317, 397 mother of all things, 114, 220, 229

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540

Index

mover: of souls, 479; unmoved, 172 Muhammad Akbar II, 40, 140 Muhammad (Prophet), 15, 69, 123, 144, 144, 146, 162, 164, 182, 249, 266, 270, 295, 336, 350–53, 389, 407, 422, 425, 434, 450 Muir, John, 28 Mulla Sadra, 23–24, 285, 290 multifariousness, 120, 158–59, 440 multiplicity, 6, 10, 29, 45, 69, 82, 120, 130, 148, 170, 175, 191, 213, 215, 276, 301, 365, 395, 402, 436, 444, 466, 476; abstracted, 363; antagonistic, 46; chaotic, 196; disjunctive, 151; divine, 273, 332; enfolding, 181; fvefold, 315; infnite, 71–72, 175, 178, 186, 190, 198–99, 219, 288, 363, 379, 381, 439, 466–67; irreducible, 151, 258; liberated, 46; manifest, 180; normative, 119; of actualizations, 379; of all possibilities, 379; of alternatives, 270; of appearances, 17, 273; of characteristics and attributes, 467; of confuences, 353; of daos, 211; of denominations, 353; of diversifcation, 256, 271; of divine attributes and names, 288, 363; of divine refection and presence, 56; of dimensions of existence, 6, 179; of divine perceptions, 262; of emanations, 476, 274; of events, 191, 209, 264, 331, 407; of existence, 260, 297, 300;

of expressions, 11, 123, 263; of felds of relationality, 342; of fowers and plants, 444; of foldings, 209, 300, 416; of Incarnations, 348, 350; of infnitely many Minds, 459; of interacting patterns, 200; of intersections, 175; of levels and realms/planes of existence, 111, 170, 175; of life, 39; of Manifestations, 7, 47, 94, 99, 165, 272, 277, 368, 378, 395; of meanings, 450; of (minority) voices, 45, 57; of monologues, 328; of multiplicities, 466; of overfowing life, 449; of perfections, 120; of perspectives, 81; of (philosophic and religious) traditions, 17, 139; of polyphilic manifestations, 272; of possible realizations, 127; of possibilities/potentials, 177, 196, 271; of religious forms/identities/ motivations, 3, 6, 352; of religions, 3, 9, 11, 158, 179–80, 208, 333, 355, 360–61, 368, 439; of religious symbolisms, 149, 271; of spiritual paths/worlds, 185, 373; of the primordial nature, 312; of the relativistic palimpsest, 56; of (religious) experiences, 11, 57,198, 446, 452; of Truth/Reality, 120, 254, 453, 456; of the primordial nature, 197; of the world of becoming, 9, 103, 336, 347, 445; of universes, 201, 466; of worlds, 51, 57, 71–3, 75, 108, 175, 178–79, 185–06, 191, 197, 199–201, 203, 206–7, 215, 219, 240, 252, 256, 379, 381;

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polyphilic, 165, 207, 240, 287, 395, 397, 450, 453; possible, 200; potential, 177; potentialized, 177; relativistic, 57; religious, 149, 165, 353; threefold, 315; transreligious, 25, 103, 124, 164, 171, 351; ultimate, 254 multireligious, 21, 99, 256, 294; confict, 20; convergences, 360; discourse, x; engagement, 9; oppositions, 299; process of reconciliation, 361; space, 363; tolerance, 40 multiverse, 42, 55, 71–72, 199, 205–6, 333, 369, 378, 459, 467, 470; Bahá’í, 55; infnite, 52; semiotic, 214; spiritual, 354 murus paradise, 456 mutuality, 5, 11, 20, 42, 47, 66, 104–6, 139, 148, 188, 193, 215, 243, 259, 262, 271, 295, 313, 327, 329, 354, 378, 386, 410, 412, 442, 461; apophatic, 174; cosmic, 412, 414; creative, 197; essential, 120; feld of, 154; holonomic, 87; in Chinese religions, 123; in/different, 272; manifold in, 254; nonviolent, 46; of all becoming/being, 106, 156; of cascading worlds, 215; of cyclical movements, 197; of God and the world, 261, 272;

541

of form and matter, 226; of in-sistence, 324; of relationality, 106; of religious intuitions, 314; of signifcations, 233; of traditions, 128; relational, 428; relativistic, 321; translucent, 445; transreligious, 6, 353; ultimate, 11, 243, 458; visions of, 410; worldview of, 123 mysterion, 32, 36 mysterium iniquitatis, 149 mystery, 8, 18–20, 32, 45, 68, 75, 113, 116–17, 160, 180, 333, 348, 351, 373, 377–78, 384, 390, 398, 427, 461, 464; apophatic, 18, 127, 158, 406, 426, 475; apophatic-polyphilic, 245, 335; arbitrary, 66; beyond simple opposition, 126; divine, 119, 387; embodiments of, 373; essential, 472; hidden, 320; inaccessible, 35; incomprehensible, 239; inexhaustible, 126; infnite, 109; of Divine Oneness, 292; of divine presence, 350; of existence, 33, 39, 196; of love, 259; of self-creative origination, 198; of self-subtractive theophany, 74; of the Manifestation, 456; of the unknown essence, 68; of Truth, 332; of ultimate reality, 83, 134, 276; omnirelativity in, 478; spiritual unity in, 373; ultimate, 75, 463;

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542

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unity of, 371; unknowable, 469; unspeakable, 62; unthought, 21 mystics, 68, 226, 263, 336, 428; Christian, 237; Muslim, 225; Suf, 91 mysticism, 38, 42, 65–67, 116, 123–24, 128, 252, 372, 377; Christian, 7, 36, 337; Indian, 214; Islamic, 101; Jewish, 279; of experience, 65; phenomenological, 226; polyphilic, 260; Suf, 458; transreligious, 185 mythos, 35–36 nabi, 295 nafs, 55, 73, 75, 131, 272, 307, 342, 384–85, 450 nafs al-jabarutiyyah, 217 nafs al-lahuttiya, 217 nafs al-qudsiyyah, 217 nafs-i ilahi, 57 Nagarjuna, 38, 61, 66–67, 130, 153, 173, 183–84, 226, 231, 251, 254, 259, 279, 287–88, 335, 363–64, 370, 458, 462 nameless, the, 220–28, 261, 288, 450; Dao, 179; apophatic essence, 131; God, 387 name(s), 92, 94, 100, 107, 114, 123, 249, 271, 388; and attributes, 73, 90–96, 112, 120–21, 190, 252, 255, 288, 317–18, 337, 356–61, 366, 371, 374, 376, 388, 406, 410, 415, 428; of Glory, 249; hidden, 224; ineffable, 282;

Index

most beautiful, 93, 225, 249; nameless, 220–28, 230–34, 240, 251, 450; ninety-nine most beautiful, 93; of Bahá’u’lláh, 249; of God, 90, 92, 251, 419; of Reality, 404; of sunyata, 318; of the Báb, 162, 249 Nanak, Guru, 297, 301, 321 Naqshbandi (Suf Order), 185 nasut, 183–85, 195, 196, 198, 210, 213, 265, 273, 298, 303, 307, 316–17, 320–21, 359, 366, 387, 389, 393, 395, 428 nature(s), 149, 155, 157, 207, 210, 237, 267, 338, 357, 371, 400, 437–39; aesthetic, 167, 208; apophatic, 8, 69, 114, 125, 127, 130, 166, 188, 231, 236, 238–39, 247, 250–60, 272, 282, 301, 303, 306–8, 315, 335, 351, 365, 369, 371, 376, 414, 443, 461; Buddha, 279–80, 307, 312, 315, 348, 383, 385, 420, 436; confictual, 86, 119, 282; consequent, 105, 159, 168, 190–91, 195–206, 208, 214, 243, 261–62, 270–73, 295, 317, 321, 364, 386–87, 395, 404, 430, 445–46, 457, 459, 462–64, 474; cosmic, 141; diversifed, 411; essential, 155, 298, 312, 356–57, 368, 391; human, 3, 27, 30, 37, 161, 296, 302, 306, 312; illusionary, 112; khoric, 312; material, 186; of (all) existence, 208, 281–82, 302; of (all) phenomena, 282; of conceptual opposition, 350; of cosmopolitan unity, 411; of creatures, 68;

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of experience, 38; of God, 95, 113, 125, 161, 168, 190, 194–06, 198, 202–3, 206, 243–46, 270–73, 295, 302, 307, 311–12, 385–86, 391, 404, 430, 446; of goodness and love, 203; of (fxed) harmony, 87; of harmonization, 134; of in/difference, 301; of in/different in-sistence, 301; of Krishna, 344; of love, 259; of mind(s), 284; of multiplicity, 86; of omnirelativity, 454; of peace, 313; of possibilities, 261; of Reality, 70, 245–46, 260, 272, 290, 292, 336, 363, 398, 414; of religion, 408; of the Bhagavat, 298, 301; of the Buddha, 296; of the Christian Incarnation, 359; of the Dharma Realm, 298; of the dipolar divinity, 386; of the divine spheres, 197; of the hidden Dao, 114; of the hiddenness of Truth, 450; of the human soul, 307; of the Luminous Mind, 297; of the monad, 351; of the (Most Great) Manifestation, 194, 277, 294, 307, 318, 368, 387; of the One, 308; of the openness of Reality, 465; of the pre-existent essence, 174; of the Real, 239; of the subtractive affrmation, 434; of the transcendental argument, 446, 454; of the ultimate brahman, 340; of transformation, 82; of Uncompounded Reality, 291, 303, 308;

543

of (ultimate) Reality, 219, 245–46, 272, 287, 290, 295, 297, 336, 365, 398, 414, 437; of Wisdom, 243; polyphilic, 102, 220, 246, 277, 434; prehensive, 375; primordial, 87, 95, 105, 159, 168, 190–91, 195–205, 243, 261, 270–73, 281, 295, 3–2, 317, 321, 343, 383, 336–38, 446, 457, 459, 462–63, 470; receptive, 275; saving, 191; self-contained, 82; self-contradictory, 446, 454; spiritual, 72, 98, 189, 197, 350, 411; theopoetic, 450; two, 159, 243, 305, 386, 462; twofold, 294, 298–99, 305, 387; uncompounded, 287; unnamable, 291 necessity, 85, 107, 112, 115, 131, 177, 302, 336, 352, 361, 365, 372, 404, 413, 425, 455–57, 460–64; cosmopolitical, 443; divine, 132, 455–56; in universality, 61, 252, 461; logical, 64, 457; of divine emanation, 92; of Truth, 455; philosophical, 199; universal, 452 Needham, Joseph, 109 Neo-Confucianism, 142 Neo-Daoism, 142 Neoplatonism, 16, 18, 36, 71, 208, 277–78, 285, 308, 317, 468 Nestorianism, 304–5 Nestorius, 305 Newton, Isaac, 58, 200 nexus, 60, 63, 67, 120, 140, 158–59, 200, 229, 254, 273, 353, 386, 430, 433, 439; entirely living, 409, 434, 446, 463; non-social (living), 412;

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544

of connectivity, 170; of events, 48, 57, 60, 104, 170, 382, 386, 429, 431; of existence, 71; of khora, 412; of processes, 334; of the universe, 66, 71; rhythmic, 170; threads of, 427; universal, 135 New Age, 141, 372, 403, 412 New Day, 53–54, 82, 249, 437 Nicolas of Cusa, x, 17, 35–36, 38, 66, 128, 130, 153, 173, 180–81, 239, 247, 251, 274–75, 458, 466–67 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 87, 226, 415 Nikaya, 278, 286, 336 nirmanakaya, 336, 345 nirvana, 158, 183–84, 191, 197, 214, 231, 275, 277–92, 297–99, 307, 313, 321, 330, 336, 459, 467 nomad(ic), 54, 343, 348, 351, 378, 382–88, 393–94, 403, 412, 426; apophatic, 343 nomos, 397, 404, 426; polyphilic, 426 non aliud, 275 non-action, 119, 319, 338 non-boundary, the: infnite, 466 non-boundary boundary, 253, 466–77 non-closure, 440, 454; apophatic, 309, 466–67; infnite, 346, 465 non-coercion, 409 non-difference, 19, 102, 174, 181, 184, 188, 214, 228, 254, 298, 466–67; logic of, 288; non-static, 224; reconciled, 105, 168 non-dualism, 299; Advaita, 374; Bahá’u’lláh’s, 289; Buddhist, 268, 289, 298, 384;

Index

Jain, 362; qualifed, 338; Ramanuja’s, 338; Vedantist, 290 non-duality, 221; Bahá’u’lláh’s, 291; Buddhist terminology of, 288; radical, 279, 286 non-existence, 473 non-philosophy, 34–38 non-self, 330; non-substantial, 305 non-substantialism, 253; khoric, 171 nonviolence, 31, 44, 156, 161, 21, 364, 368, 405, 424; axiom of, 362; divine, 167; justifcation of, 364; method of, 362; multiplicity of, 385; views on, 97 Norbu, Chögyal Namkhai, 282 nothingness, 88, 181, 220–21, 221–30, 308, 310, 316, 408, 456, 464; absolute, 231, 253; abyss of, 309; chaotic, 151; dark, 415; divine, 247; empty, 330; emptiness and, 268; evil is, 89; ecstasis of, 221; in-sisting in, 221; khoric, 304; reality of, 228; utter, 285, 304 nous, 34, 62, 134, 227, 274, 281, 285, 287, 308, 452, 463 Nozick, Robert, 33 number(s), 248–49, 350, 352, 459, 471; Abjad, 248; and sets, 151;

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Index

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beyond the bounds of, 66, 308, 469, 478; infnite, 187, 215, 381, 469; nineteen, 248; of al-hayy, 248; of levels and stations, 128; of Manifestations, 381; of the name of the Báb, 249; of ultimate realities, 260; of worlds, 176, 198, 215; science of, 248 nun, 52 nunc stans, 187 nuqta, 303 nuqti-yi ula nur muhammadiyyah, 144, 285, 320 Nyingma, 278–79 object, 354, 425; eternal, 111, 243, 457, 462 occasion(s), 39, 76, 396, 446; contemporary, 87, 101; historic, 350; life-thread of, 313; of existence, 170; route of, 194; temporal, 113 ocean, 29, 99, 148, 324, 397; Most Great, 225; of divine knowledge, 306; of divine revelation, 397; of divine unity, 166; of divine wisdom, 80, 273; of everlasting bounty, 444; of inner meaning, 57; of loving-kindness, 251; of reality, 86, 91, 99; of relativity, 330; of tender mercy, 93; of the Will (God), 427; one, 385 Odin, Stephen, 385 olam, olamim, 72, 212 Omega Point: hyper-personal, 312

545

omnirelativity, 118, 397, 440–47, 451–56, 464–70, 474–78; of magnitudes, 468 One, the, 5, 33, 36–7, 52, 149, 151–53, 177, 192, 219, 222, 227, 250–52, 280–81, 291, 297, 303, 308–10, 328, 332, 464, 467; absolute, 378; all-relational, 379; Beyond, 450; God is, 240; in-One, 34; manifest, 221; oppressive, 269; Reality, 467–68; surrelative, 379; transcendent, 35, 250; undifferentiated, 287; unmanifest, 221 oneness, 97, 237; of appearance, 291; of being, 291, 320; of God, 101, 179, 246, 288, 350, 358, 389; of humanity, 125, 395, 403, 412; of manifestation, 320; of multiplicities, 97; of Reality, 18, 180, 371, 390; of religions, 3, 7, 183, 211, 371; the eternal essence, 392; of the Earth, 444; of the universe, 4, 398; of truth, 6, 371; pantheistic, 275; surrelative, 342; One Whom God Will Make Manifest, the, 250 origination, 179, 190; apophatic, 230; complex, 25; process, 25, 75; self-creative, 198 oscillation, 103, 113, 119, 130, 186, 192, 224, 233, 272, 316, 324, 376, 388;

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apophatic-polyphilic, 260, 357; between coherence and novelty, 445; between contrasts, 111; between particularity and universality, 476; cascading, 185; conceptual, 289; contrasting, 129, 300; endless, 220; everlasting, 225; inclusive, 476; in-different, 300; movements of, 114, 226, 251, 261; nondualism as, 103; of becoming, 475; of harmonization, 101; of in/differentiation, 458; of indistinction, 292; of material and spiritual, 476; paradox of, 220; patterns of, 115; polyphilic, 147; prehensive, 299; rhythms of mutual, 127; transreligious, 329 Osiris, 143 otherness, 36, 365, 419, 432; absolute, 38; divine, 38; mutual, 470; non-different integration of, 470 overfow, 93, 100, 269, 318, 449; multiplicity of, 82, 449; of divine love, 102, 207, 376; of energy, 122; of mercy, 92; of the Good, 209, 220, 263, 333; of the One, 252, 309; of Reality, 254, 256; of religious traditions, 250; polyphilic, 324; transcendent, 134 pabhassara chitta, 278, 282–85, 292, 322, 418

paideia, 155 palimpsest, 51–56, 67, 82; relativistic, 56 panentheism, 105, 205, 244, 339, 390, 460 pan(en)theism, 258, 336 Panikkar, Raymond, 70, 159–60, 183, 221, 227, 234, 255, 371, 388, 391, 463 panta en pasin, 147 pantheism, 105, 126, 178, 205, 251, 253, 259 parakletos, 144, 438 paradeigmata, 274 paradise, 79, 86, 466; archetypical, 83; celestial, 84, 437; exalted, 84; gained, 80; garden(s), 28, 82–3; heavenly, 83; lost, 80; Persian, 28, 83 paradox(es), 68, 118, 220, 432, 455; apophatic-polyphilic, 251; axial, 400–2; mystical, 220, 228; logical, 446, 454; of chaosmic freedom, 400; of grace, 302, 312, 319; of incarnation, 302, 312, 432; of infnite relativity, 367; of meaningful regress, 127; of modernity, 402; of novelty/truth, 439; of oscillation, 220; of the nameless name, 228; of unifcation and divergence, 432 parinirvana, 459 path, 120, 131–32, 165, 186, 236, 279, 306, 318, 407; mystical, 321; of faith, 300; of Great Perfection, 279; of knowledge, 300;

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Index

of the prophets, 358; spiritual, 180, 324, 373; straight, 405, 414, 429 pathos, 356 pathway: evolutionary, 343 patience, 106, 151; infnite, 211; tender, 145, 405 Patomäki, Heikki, 413, 415 Paul (Apostle), 211, 222, 297, 310, 312, 317, 376 peace, 17, 66, 169, 361; ecological, 235; interreligious, 134, 362, 367; Most Great, 85, 374, 411; religious, 12, 40, 63, 79, 341, 358, 418, 428, 436; spiritual, 10, 98, 265, 268, 446; transreligious, 4, 24–7, 41, 82, 255, 277, 344, 351, 360, 396, 441; universal, 6, 49, 66, 113, 129, 185, 216, 256, 258, 374, 398, 405, 411, 417, 434 perennialism, 7, 159, 234, 361, 369–70, 398, 416, 433, 479 Perfection of Wisdom, 279 perikhora, 243, 258 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, 413 Perry, Edmund, 159 Persia(n), 15–8, 23–28, 82–83, 96, 110, 112, 136, 144, 172, 182, 250, 278, 285, 290, 354–56, 399–400, 450 person, 314, 336; Buddha in, 307, 312; God in, 295, 345, 382, 385; dharma in, 295; human, 59, 297, 304–6, 347, 366, 387, 390; khora in, 313; khoric, 306; Luminous Mind in, 301; Manifestation in, 315; of an Avatar, 336;

547

of Christ, 272, 304, 306, 312, 346, 349, 386, 387, 390; of (the character of) God, 213, 340, 391; of the Báb, 249; of Bahá’u’lláh, 249; of the Bhagavat, 299–300, 304; of the Logos, 386–87; of the Manifestation, 300, 304, 306, 312, 386, 390–91, 393, 395; of the Son, 236; of the (Holy) Spirit, 236, 347; of the Universe, 337; of the Uncompounded Reality, 307; Reality in, 299, 301, 315, 336, 360, 395; sunyata in, 345; supreme, 243; third, 347; transcendent, 230–31; trans-cosmic, 230; trinitarian, 237; Ultimate in, 268, 295; Uncompounded Reality in, 298, 304; universal, 306 persona(e), 179, 238–39, 245–46 persuasion, 155, 244; divine, 172, 383 Pharaoh, 91, 164, 407 Philips, D. Z., 70 Philo of Alexandria, 69, 274 physics, 81, 151, 329, 331; Ptolemaic, 415 ; quantum, 59, 381 pistis, 300 place, 32–34, 67, 88, 110, 119, 162, 179, 187, 190, 195, 205, 213, 251, 258, 292, 400, 409, 432, 439, 450, 455, 467, 474; khoric, 54, 155, 170, 263 plane(s), 54, 56, 141, 150, 175, 187, 231, 321, 444, 468, 471; all-encompassing, 284; cascading, 213; enfolded, 215;

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fxed, 54; intersecting, 56; multiplicity of, 170; of consciousness, 476; of consistency, 176–77, 191, 210, 214, 231, 472; of existence, 115, 186, 216, 232, 273, 426, 468; of difference, 259; of immanence, 54–55, 58, 115, 171, 175, 186, 209–10, 214, 216, 231, 254, 259, 269, 284, 314, 316–17, 324, 328–29, 333, 342–43, 352, 361, 373, 420, 426, 430, 432, 437, 468, 470, 474, 476–77; of integration, 176, 472; of reality, 188, 225, 233; of relativity, 65, 71, 78; of theophanies, 389; of valuation, 470; sets of, 58; surrelative, 284; spiritual, 318 plateau, 22, 52, 54, 91, 181, 185–86, 189, 192, 192, 209–10, 213 Plato, 19, 25, 36, 71, 98, 149, 155–56, 170, 172, 204, 227, 231, 272, 274, 285, 312, 334, 400, 477 play, 20, 98, 122, 332, 358, 377, 434, 450, 452; divine, 211; that diverges, 333 plenitude, 216, 314; divine, 275 pleroma, 290, 317, 376; of God, 147; polyphilic, 380 Plotinus, 36, 62, 67, 100, 130, 181, 192, 194, 212, 221–22, 224, 227, 231, 239, 250, 252–55, 259–60, 274, 279, 281, 285, 287–92, 304, 308–9, 316–17, 381, 385, 410, 413, 428, 452, 464 pluralism, 245, 236; differential, 242, 255, 258, 260, 275, 453;

identist, 242; mystical, 260, 263–64; perspective, 245; polyphilic, 103, 235, 255–65, 267, 374, 376; religious, 26, 63, 133, 145, 179, 219, 234–35, 246, 255–56, 258, 260, 263, 268, 277, 330, 349, 352, 355, 362, 371, 441; transreligious, 255, 260 plurality, 4, 66, 100, 172, 177, 246, 268; mere, 156, 166; chaotic, 17; of divinities, 271; of revelations, 207; of ultimate realities, 241, 258, 271; religious, 42, 62; self-contained, 416 plurisingularity, 81, 102, 180, 268–75; apophatic-polyphilic, 276; panentheistic, 272 pluralistic thesis, 131, 235, 241, 322, 373 plurivocity, 40 pneuma, 274, 285, 346 Poet of the World, 145, 428, 429, 436, 447 poetics, 355; divine, 405, 427; of God, 405; of pluralism, 164, 356; of Reality, 427; of religious pluralism, 406 point, 153, 156, 159–60, 164, 177, 184, 187, 192, 209, 249; Archimedean, 435; Omega, 302; Primal, 249, 318 pole(s), 369, 243, 261; mental, 190; of (the) omniscience, 368; of determined omniscience, 368; of radical relativity, 368; of relativism of viewpoints, 368; physical, 261 polis, 409, 412, 414

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polyphilia, 12, 96–102, 108, 119–20, 158, 203, 206, 219, 256, 263–64, 298, 315, 378, 419, 423, 428, 449, 451 polypoetics, 33, 130–31, 427 polytheism, 358 postcolonialism, 147 postconstructionism, 29, 171 postmodernity, 401–2, 433 poststructuralism, 7 possibility, 56, 177, 204–5, 254, 446, 451, 461–62; condition of the, 44; infnite, 44; non-actual, 243; pure, 200; realm of, 243; space of, 334; world of, 196 potentia absoluta, 335 potentiality, 177, 299, 457, 460, 474, 477 prajna, 274, 323 prajnaparamita, 279 pratitya-samutpada, 70, 104, 120, 135, 160, 167, 217, 228, 230, 242, 253, 313, 381, 468, 474 Precious Treasury of the Dharmadhatu, 282, 284, 298 pre-existence, 174, 340, 387, 390, 472 prehensibility, 33, 35, 38, 158, 167–68, 184, 257–58 prehension, 21, 59, 76, 167–68, 229, 258, 262, 410, 424, 446; mental, 299; of feelings, 381 presence: apophatic, 69; inherent, 346; of God(self), 55, 94, 190–91, 225, 346–49, 386, 391, 394; transpersonal, 294 primordial nature, 87, 95, 105, 159, 169, 190–91, 195–202, 205, 243, 261, 270–73, 281, 295, 302, 317,

549

321, 343, 383–88, 446, 457, 459, 462–63, 470 principium sine principio, 392 principle: of concretion, 270–71; of empiricism, 270; of limitation, 270; of process, 76; ontological, 452; ultimate metaphysical, 261, 203, 206, 272, 347, 447 Process and Reality, 63, 80, 102, 122, 252, 474 process theology, 7, 66, 128, 302, 310, 348, 385 promised one, the, 162, 248, 250, 408; eschatological, 422 prophet(s), 68, 83, 99, 123, 126, 129, 143, 163–64, 166, 169, 194, 225, 227, 295, 303, 320, 336, 356–59, 379, 393, 407, 419–23, 429, 437–38, 443–44; false, 145; Hebrew, 399; human, 68; list of, 144; of the Bahá’í Faith, 81; postmodern, 401 prophetic, the, 330, 359, 377, 401, 429, 445 Pseudo-Denys/Dionysius the Areopagite, 67, 71, 177, 112, 221 pseudo-pluralism, 424 purposefulness, 148–49, 152 Pythagoras, 71, 212 Pythagorean, 16, 71, 414 Qa’im, 136, 248–49, 389, 425, 438 Qajar shahs, 136 qalb, 232, 384 qayyum, 249 qi, 108 qiyama, 147 Quadiri (Suf order), 185 quality, 195, 313, 403, 412, 469; essential, 370

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Index

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Quddus, Jinab-i (Mulla Muhammad al-Furushi), 83 Qur’an, 16, 35, 53, 93, 100, 164, 168, 210, 249, 336, 389, 415, 436; Persian, 355 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 185 rahim, 170 rahman, 170 Rahner, Karl, 222–23, 302, 310–11, 339, 436 raja yoga, 213, 321 raj’a, 147 Ramakrishna, Sri, 185, 234, 269, 353, 380 Ramanuja, 238, 338, 416 Rashh-i ‘Ama’, 450 rasul, 295 rationality, 60–9, 103, 122, 135, 145, 149, 229, 252, 270–71, 457; ultimate, 32 Real, the, 34, 236, 239, 258; an sich, 239, 241–42; Hick’s, 242; noumenal, 241; unmanifest, 288 reality, passim: all-pervasive, 99; arboreal, 29; apophatic, 38, 67, 70–74, 90, 100–6, 115, 130, 134, 145, 158–66, 174, 188, 212–20, 231, 248–56, 263, 272, 275, 284, 288, 291, 297, 299, 302–5, 309, 314, 316–18, 337–38, 353, 355, 359, 366, 373, 379, 381, 387, 390–92, 425, 442, 467, 272–73; beyond, 19, 45, 90, 120, 197, 212, 217, 224, 245, 253, 272, 286, 291, 335, 366; concrete, 111, 244; cosmological, 130; divine, 8–12, 19, 104, 125, 158, 174, 186, 230, 239, 257, 353, 473; experiential, 322;

impersonal, 345; in/different, 252, 293, 296, 315, 333, 335, 337, 373; indistinct, 295; in-sisting, 277; luminous, 323; manifest, 177–81, 197, 219, 247, 267, 272–77, 293, 295, 390; metaphorical, 145; metaphysical, 243, 274; Muhammedan, 285, 320; mundane, 345; nameless, 94, 114, 253; noumenal, 241, 243; of love, 238; of the Buddha, 253, 310; personal, 237–38, 294; phenomenal, 241; physical, 182, 312, 359; plurisingular, 271, 278; self-subsisting, 249; spiritual, 71, 85, 177, 188, 388, 451; stratifed, 54; transpersonal, 234, 237, 271, 286, 294; ultimate, 8, 11, 45, 54, 61, 65–90, 112, 122, 126–30, 161, 171, 179, 219, 221, 237–61, 276–294, 297, 310–16, 331, 336, 362, 366, 374, 398, 450, 464; unbound, 304; uncompounded, 278, 285–324, 360, 365, 368, 384, 432; undetermined, 337; universal, 134, 282, 287, 304, 314, 324, 346, 417, 445, 471, 476 realm(s): angelic, 317; archetypical, 274; earthly, 71; fnal, 422; dharma, 298; heavenly, 80, 389; hidden, 55; highest, 363;

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human, 357; imaginal, 356, 359; of abstract forms, 73; of creation, 68, 94, 179; of connectivity, 253; of existence, 183, 188, 199; of God, 92; of human freedom, 76; of lahut, 181; of names, 92, 100; of manifestation, 179; of possibilities, 243; of religious traditions, 24; of shadows, 16; of similitude, 317; spiritual, 184, 186, 188, 214, 359; sub-terranean, 71; super-terranean, 71; symbolic, 428; three, 291; two, 317; vertical, 213 reconciliation, 20–21, 44, 49, 100, 102, 113, 125, 166–69, 212, 360–376, 379, 396, 410, 419, 462; logic of, 166; polypoetic, 427; reality of, 166; transreligious, 361, 367, 375 regress, 128, 130, 258, 417, 431; infnite, 117, 228; meaningful, 116–20, 127, 145 relationality, 7, 10, 12, 58–60, 63, 66, 70, 78, 105, 135, 140, 146, 149, 151, 167, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179, 205–6, 219, 229, 252, 272, 335, 373, 378, 403, 406, 413, 417, 425, 453, 467, 472; beyond, 252, 468; compassionate, 198; continuous, 442; cosmic, 135; creative, 172, 178; divine, 245; fabric of, 67;

551

felds of, 342; formal, 59, 343; khoric, 240; models of, 76; mutual, 76, 106, 456; of all existence, 461; patterns of, 63; personal, 276; prehensive, 416; processual, 64, 254; radical, 206; universal, 103, 135 relativism, 157, 202, 207, 367, 399, 428, 432–33, 436, 446, 470; aesthetic, 202; apophatic, 260, 264; bottomless, 116; cognitive, 70, 441; debilitating, 60, 153, 238, 262, 395, 401, 451, 453; deconstructive, 45; deep, 453; Derridian, 368; eliminative, 236; essentialized, 212; nihilistic, 401; ontological, 363–64; radical, 239; religious, 356; substantialized, 153; transreligious, 360 relativity: absolute, 56, 78, 168; apophatic, 70; apophatic-polyphilic, 104; epistemological, 70; existential, 70; mutual, 12, 21, 63, 81, 106, 132, 164, 196, 395, 408–9, 411; mystical, 5; of all daos, 470; of all magnitudes, 472; of existence ad nonexistence, 474; of multiple cascading planes, 468; of multiple worlds, 207;

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Index

of oneness, 395; of truth, 3, passim; truth claims, 3, 465; patterned, 178; polyphilic, 165, 256, 366; profound, 9, 45, 94, 108, 116, 201, 235, 355, 362, 370; radical, 70, 234, 260, 355, 358, 362, 368, 370; spiritual, 403; theophanic, 74; theopoetic, 418; theory, 59, 381; transreligious, 4, passim; ultimate, 115, 244, 465; universal, 51, 124 Religion in the Making, 69, 74, 122 remembrance, 13, 55, 86, 141, 162, 212, 417 Renaissance, 41, 399 resonance, 72, 107–11, 141, 144–45, 176, 191, 193–94, 209–11, 233, 235, 277, 285, 293, 318, 366, 474; Buddhist; creative feld of, 158; deep, 219, 273–74, 282; mutual, 178, 235, 384; mystical, 184, 186; pattern of, 111, 289; surprising, 322; translucent, 301; transreligious, 111, 184, 207, 294, 315, 350 return, 39, 53, 56, 77, 124, 136, 147, 162, 166, 177, 192, 259, 264, 269, 315–17, 336, 355–57, 398, 438, 473; cyclical, 62; eschatological, 359; eternal, 72, 87; imaginative, 264; movements of, 176; mystic, 275; to immediacy, 34

revelation: apophatic, 250; authoritarian, 41; Bahá’í, 7–8, 48, 125, 129, 145, 206, 240, 248, 255, 272, 308, 349–51, 374, 378–79, 391; divine, 18, 60, 62, 118, 145, 157, 181–82, 211–12, 310, 354–55, 365, 397, 419, 441–45, 455; progressive, 62, 77, 101, 146–47, 155, 380; trans-rational, 61 rhizome, 28–29, 31, 41, 54, 153, 186, 324, 361, 365, 371, 373, 401, 416, 429, 475; chaosmic, 426; peaceful, 402 ridvan, 83 rightness, 404, 437; essential, 64; in all things, 267, 404; of action, 58 rigpa, 280 Rigtsal, Tulku Pema, 283 ringstone symbol, 55–56, 91, 100, 179, 212, 315, 322, 376, 388, 393 Risalah f’l-Suluk, 131 Rorty, Richard, 228 Rosenkranz, Gerhard, 352 ruh, 342, 384 Rumi, Jalal ad-Din, 24, 91, 215, 355, 464 rupadhatu, 212 rupakaya, 298, 307, 315 Russell, Bertrand, 446, 454 sabaoth, 212 al-Sadiq, Ja’far (Imam), 303 Sahify-i Shattiyyih, 118 Saiedi, Nader, 156, 368 Saladin, Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, 16 Salih (prophet), 268 salvation, 65–66, 129, 141, 161–62, 165, 182, 190, 195, 197, 213, 256,

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Index

263, 286, 298, 311, 327–30, 337, 344–47, 400, 410, 419, 431; fnal, 71; history of, 428; inclusive, 236; mystical, 19 samadhi, 213 Samantabhadra, 238, 281–85, 290, 292, 298, 338 Sambhogakaya, 315, 345 samsara, 160, 183, 212, 214, 231, 275, 279–87, 297–99, 313, 363, 487 sanatana dharma, 237, 274, 337 Sankara, Adi, 221, 238, 259, 290, 298, 338, 421 saoshyant, 144, 438 satchitanada, 213 Sayyid Kazim Rashti, 249 Schuon, Frithjof, 71, 184, 211, 234 science, 5, 9, 18, 36, 41–45, 63–64, 122, 125, 149, 189, 248, 271, 277, 329–34, 381, 413, 420 Science and Civilization in China, 109 Science of Logic, The, 221, 447 scripture(s), 16, 93, 108, 129, 137, 147, 182, 231, 238, 281, 291, 295, 338, 360, 376–77, 408, 445, 474; Bábi, 52; Bahá’í, 9, 52, 54, 89, 91, 144, 188, 216, 246, 282, 285, 289, 390; Buddhist, 285; Christian, 92; Hindu, 344 seed, 144; Buddha, 275, 279, 312; karmic, 279 Sefer Yezirah, 279 Sein, 146, 221, 223 Seinsvergessenheit, 222 Selbsteinsatz, 392 Selections of the Writings of ‘Abdu’lBahá, 81 Self, the, 288, 307, 338, 352, 386; apophatic, 70; divine, 57, 74, 88, 337, 435;

553

Enlightened, 404; of Brahman, 323; of Christ, 311–12; of emptiness, 289, 384; of God, 264, 272–73, 275, 281, 307, 311–12, 318–19; of immortal light, 292; of Reality, 71, 74, 273, 276–78, 281, 283–84, 289, 292–96, 307–9, 315, 319, 339, 367, 378, 391, 405, 410, 463; of the Bhagavat, 304–5, 312, 314; of the Buddha, 288, 307, 310, 312; of the Manifestation, 304, 306, 312, 315, 317–18, 384; of the Mind of God, 377; of the Uncompounded Reality, 302, 305, 310, 313, 315, 323; selfess, 284, 301–15, 318–19, 384, 404, 436; spiritual, 121; uncompounded, 317 self-creativeness, 87, 196, 198, 229, 292, 309, 312, 338, 455–56, 461 self-disclosure, 264, 288, 293 self-emptiness, 171, 213, 230, 309, 311–12, 349, 403 self-engagement: apophatic, 392 self-existence, 253, 288, 290, 307, 337 selfessness, 269, 283, 307, 310, 318; absolute, 304; apophatic, 312 self-manifestation, 114–15, 284, 291–92, 389 self-similarity, 470–71 self-subtraction, 69, 225, 260 self-transcendence, 38, 288, 398, 404–5, 409, 470 self-unnaming, 223 Sells, Michael, 65–66, 159, 287, 309 sephirot, 232, 318 Serres, Michel, 181, 196 servitude, 303–4, 393, 464; supreme, 465

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554

Index

Seven Valleys, 24 Sevener Shi’ites, 15 Shahada, 224 shakti, 238 Shaykhism, 352 shekinah, 143 shih, 316 Shi‘ism, 249, 352, 358 Shiji, 117 Shiraz, 9, 23 shirk, 358, 390 Shoghi Effendi Rabbani, 7, 9, 11, 60–66, 77, 86, 97, 107, 147, 158, 162, 184, 370–71, 408, 411, 441–47 Siddha, 159 Siddhartha Gautama, 222 siddhanta, 365 sidrat al-muntaha, 476 Sikhism, 138, 221, 296, 301, 336, 352 silence, 19, 32, 39, 65, 84, 179, 197, 221, 223, 225–27, 268, 274, 352, 398, 410, 447, 451, 454; apophatic, 179, 263; of the Buddha, 160, 476 singleness, 66, 131, 469, 478; supreme, 282, 310, 392 singularity, 10, 69, 123, 177, 272–73, 452; apophatic, 177; exclusive, 66 Sirhindi, Ahmad, 290 sirr, 232, 384, 355 skillful means, 221, 295, 315, 345, 360 sleep, 84, 214–15, 322–24, 393 Smart, Ninian, 372 Smith, Huston, 71, 159, 183–84, 211, 234 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 121, 157 Socrates, 21, 269, 353 soma pneumatikon, 317 son, 11, 15, 81, 162, 227, 238, 249, 308, 311–12, 347, 388, 391; of God, 311; of Man, 193, 450

sonship: of Christ, 162, 390 sophia, 274 soteriology, 16, 436 soul-substance, 382, 384, 408, 414, 427, 442 speed, 209; infnite, 187, 209, 226, 284, 330, 343, 352 sphere(s), 7, 12, 42, 45, 65, 134, 181, 186–88, 190–91, 195–96, 204, 257, 301, 393, 396, 399, 441, 474; cascading, 197; divine, 197–99; fve, 180; material, 198; mental, 121; of coinherence, 183; of creation, 65; of creative becoming, 195; of existence, 81–82, 182, 188, 198, 215; of intercommunication, 170; of life, 4, 85, 98, 121, 402; of origin, 183; of the divine mind, 196; of thought, 5; spiritual, 185, 198 Spinoza, Baruch, 251 spirit, 73, 98, 126, 140, 146, 148, 192–93, 197–98, 220, 274, 302–3, 317, 337, 346–49, 374–75, 379, 387–88, 390–94, 403–4, 410, 413, 417–18, 428, 431, 438, 443, 449, 455; divine, 238, 307, 347, 410; gifts of the, 143; of Christ, 346–47, 390; of God, 181, 339, 346, 386, 390, 449; of minerals, 192; of love, 121, 414; realms of the, 192, 317; relational, 69; universal, 237

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Spirit of God (Jesus), 162 spirituality, 18, 28, 38, 71, 180, 187, 192, 198, 232, 334, 372, 378, 395, 413, 432; without religion, 372 spiritualization, 5, 148, 195, 319, 397, 402, 409, 412, 473 spontaneity, 116, 309, 330; matrix of, 283 Sprinkling of the Cloud of Unknowing, 450 Sri Lanka, 422 station(s), 94, 284, 299, 307, 390; of the Primal Will, 282; of the primordial Manifestation, 259; spiritual, 184, 213, 366–67; two (of Manifestation), 299, 305, 320, 394; twofold, 299 Stimmung, 84 Stockman, Robert, 139 Stoicism, 212 Stoics, 19, 71, 274 subordinationism, 389; Arian, 308 substance, 7, 76, 81, 111–15, 152, 187–89, 281–82, 289, 294, 303, 307, 312, 324, 332, 335, 339–40, 358, 381–84, 389–92, 403, 409, 416, 430; independent, 329, 381; irrelational, 173 substantialism, 189, 312, 335, 337, 383–84, 430, 434, 445–46; Aristotelian, 289; ideology of, 334; inherent, 173 substantialization, 230, 416, 432; abstract, 18; of abstraction, 111; dangers of, 230; postmodern, 211 subtraction, 100, 220, 461, 466–67; apophatic, 12, 70, 105, 188, 231, 247, 272, 419, 432, 435, 444, 452, 466; epistemological, 366;

555

of reality, 220 suffering, 161, 168, 208, 318; divine, 161, 167, 318, 405; of Christ, 159; of divine messengers, 162–63, 423; of the Manifestations, 165, 167–68, 406; of the world, 168; redemptive, 165, 168, 273 Sufsm, 35, 180, 184, 221, 259, 278, 280, 352 Suhrawardi, Yahya ibn Habash, 16–25, 34, 127, 285, 375 sun, 27, 93–94, 100, 141, 204, 213, 255, 376, 379, 426, 469, 472, 478; of Reality, 207, 209–10, 296, 319, 355; of Truth, 13, 85, 174, 374, 390, 426 Sunni(s), 156, 145, 162, 389 sunya, 213, 212, 290 sunyata, 171, 178, 282, 230, 234, 236, 274, 277, 280, 302, 310, 313, 315, 318, 340, 345, 374, 458, 468, 474 Supreme Source Tantra, 281–82 superiority, 3, 7, 9, 19, 24–47, 106, 142, 163–74, 263, 267, 328–29, 340, 358, 365–78, 400–6, 412, 418–43 superject, 59, 167, 312 supersession, 36, 378, 419, 421, 423–24 supersessionism, 418, 423, 427, 432–42 supremacy,17, 341, 418, 439–42 surah, 52, 168, 210, 225, 389 Surah al-Sultan, 163 surat al-haqq, 131 Suriy-i-Vafa, 215 surrational, 60, 62–64, 69, 134, 146, 159, 226, 270–71, 252, 453, 456 surrationality, 62, 69, 126 surrelative, 57, 70, 228–34, 240, 243–52, 273–351, 378–80, 395, 423, 425, 444–45, 458, 460–01, 466 surrelativity, 56, 233–34, 259, 280, 313, 324–25, 337, 452, 462; all-encompassing, 289, 463

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suspension, 374, 404, 439; apophatic, 387; skillful, 207–18 Suzuki, T. D., 238 svayam Bhagavan, 238 syadvada, 362 symbolism, 28, 79, 81, 91, 98–99, 176, 178, 185–86, 198, 210, 225, 232, 426, 442; Bahá’í, 248, 322 sympathy, 29, 33, 35, 38, 140, 145, 149, 154–56, 161–69, 273; mutual, 356; physical, 155; polyphilic, 159; prehensive, 235; spiritual, 155; universal, 160, 309 syncretism, 26, 135, 137–40, 154, 159–60, 211, 235, 349, 352, 359, 361, 395; directionless, 429 synthesis, 5, 16, 18, 34, 102, 154, 286, 331, 341–43, 351, 342; Bahá’í, 354; convergent, 355; creative, 167; medieval, 241, 334; reverse, 34; surprising, 104; sympathetic, 103; unprecedented, 341 tabernacle, 224–25, 374, 444 Tabernacle of Unity, 412 The Tablet of All Food, 210 Tablet of China, 110 Tablet of the City of the Divine Oneness, 68 Tablet of the Holy Mariner, 184 Tablet of the Light Verse, 52 Tablet of Manifestation, 73–74, 293, 337, 342, 388, 450 Tablet of Reality/God/Truth, 450 The Tablet of the Universe, 188, 275, 468, 476

Tablet of Visitation for Imam Husayn, 162 Tablet on the Uncompounded Reality, 432 Tablets of the Divine Plan, 86 Tablet to Jamal-i-Burujirdi, 336, 367–68, 395, 408 Tablet to Vafa, 215 tablet(s), 24, 53, 93, 180, 287; of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, 468–69, 471, 477; of Bahá’u’lláh, 68, 91, 289–91, 323, 335 Tafsir-i Bismillah, 248 Tafsir-i Ha, 232 Tafsír-i-Hadith-i-Kuntu Kanzan Makhfíyyan, 101 Tafsir-i Hu [Huwa], 232 Tafsir Hurufat al-Muquatta‘ah, 52 Tafsir-i-Sirr-i Ha, 232 Tahirih (Fatimah Feraghani), 83 Tajalli, 288, 293, 300, 315 Tariqah, 354 tat twam asi, 237, 297 tathagatagarbha, 237, 275, 302, 307 tattvam, 297 tawhid, 224, 232, 237, 247, 350, 425 tawhid-i ilahi, 54 tawhid i-shuhudi, 291, 298 tawhid i-wujudi, 291, 298 Teasdale, Wayne, 159 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 147, 315, 320, 347–48, 416 teleology, 28, 62, 148 temporality, 151, 200, 280, 342, 428; nexic, 64; non-actual, 243 tenderness, 162, 168, 313–14 Tetragrammaton, 223–25, 240, 323, 456 theism, 105, 234, 237, 239, 291, 360, 432; classical, 171–72, 205, 244, 445; open, 205 theodicy, 93 theology, 68, 346; Christian, 93, 100, 172, 241, 245, 259, 344, 346;

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Index

comparative, 26, 33, 330, 352; interreligious, 255, 353; Islamic, 16, 93, 144; philosophical, 66; process, 7, 9, 66, 128, 302, 310, 348, 385; transreligious, 170; Western, 172; World, 159 theophany, 73, 397–448, 455; actual, 74, 90, 144, 223, 270, 293, 299, 320, 337, 339, 357, 359, 378, 388–89, 395; polyphilic, 356; self-subtractive, 74 theopoetics, 474; apophatic-polyphilic, 35; cosmopolitan, 443; de/constructive, 440 theoria, 19, 36, 62, 134, 452 theorem: of infnite worlds, 459 theory, 48, 59, 421; of truth, 335; relativity, 59, 381 theosis, 217, 428 theosophy, 18; Suf, 71, 441 theotropism, 318, 356 Theravada, 278, 286, 295, 299, 302, 348, 459 Thich Nhat Hanh, 153 thinking, 26, 97, 125, 128, 130, 160, 344, 396; Christian, 345; cosmopolitan, 434; divine, 204–5; integral, 237; minority, 150; mode of, 126, 435; processual, 76; representational, 34; symbolic, 345; theological, 345; unitary, 433 Thomas Aquinas, 100, 337, 350

557

threefold, 91, 101, 108, 125, 170, 178–79, 192, 195, 227, 243, 273, 314–17, 322–23, 337, 356, 365, 381, 423, 428, 470; Bahá’í, 195, 213; cascade, 180, 183, 188–89, 192, 194, 197 , 231, 320, 322, 355, 387–88, 412, 459, 472; of realms, 55, 316; of worlds, 212, 253, 383, 365; Suf, 195 throne(s), 35, 68, 212, 429; of divine revelation, 310; of God, 55, 143, 365; of Reality-God-Truth, 78 Tien Tao Buddhism, 142 Tillich, Paul, 174, 221 Timaeus, 155 time, 395–408, 420–22, 431; cycles of, 53; infnity of, 71; linearity of, 71; mode of, 223; movements of, 62; rhythms of, 62; societies of, 44 tirthankara, 268, 295, 297 Togal, 284 togetherness, 21, 71, 81, 152–53, 170, 312, 402; actual, 60, 63, 112, 154; complex, 175; concepts of, 103; connective, 154; creative, 140; eventive, 169; events of, 149; graceful, 100; unique, 138 Torah, 210 transcendence, 34, 37–38, 95, 171–75, 230, 253, 258–59, 280, 314, 335, 397; absolute, 174, 237, 291; apophatic, 169, 231; connective, 48;

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Index

divine, 183; exclusive, 232; forgetful, 474; limited, 5; mere, 272; messianic, 439; mutual, 23, 66, 104, 409; self-forgetful, 474; utter, 175 transgression, 105, 474; coherent, 105; divine, 473; grievous, 304; mutual, 329, 473; of horizons, 104; symbolic, 142 translucency, 210–14, 221, 235, 295, 314, 365, 375, 377, 393, 406–7, 429, 444; compassionate, 217; connective, 312; mutual, 214, 219, 278; transreligious, 215, 293, 355, 442 transpantheism, 105, 253 transpersonal, 118, 175, 183, 232–33, 237–44, 259, 268–82, 390, 393 transreligious, ix–x, 4–12, 17, 22–49, 51, 57, 61, 69, 75–79, 99, 103–6, 111, 124, 128, 139–48, 169–219, 285–316, 328–33, 341–55, 360–62, 367, 371–77, 384–88, 391–97, 405–8, 414, 422, 429, 432, 438–48, 478 Treasury of the Dharmadhatu, 182–84, 298 tree, 28–9, 51, 77, 82–85, 99, 146, 197, 305, 324, 370, 373, 395, 426, 431, 476, 479; of life, 141, 314–25, 379; of love, 367 trekcho, 284 triad, 178, 230, 414; apophatic-polyphilic, 453; of relativistic gates, 453 tridhatu, 212;

trikaya, 182, 283, 299, 302, 315, 317; trimurti, 238, 337 trinity, 232, 237–38, 378, 390–92, 419; economic, 391; immanent, 391 truth(s), 1–5, 11, 21, 35, 82, 95, 115, 139, 150, 183, 204, 207, 256–57, 263, 282, 298, 330, 332–37, 357–58, 368, 420, 424, 434, 443, 455–70; becoming of, 44, 456; complementary, 460; completeness of, 23, 460; contingent, 456, 459, 462–63; exclusive, 144, 235, 271, 377; irrelative, 95; manifest, 456, 464; personal, 238; relativistic, 5–6, 219, 256; relativity of, 3, 7, 11, 22, 26, 35, 39, 42–47, 66, 71, 82, 198, 185, 219, 240, 258, 260, 268, 287, 368, 396, 404, 441–42, 451–56, 465, 474; spiritual, 2, 115, 468; supreme, 456, 460; symbolic, 420; transreligious, 51, 79, 169, 268, 274, 314, 406, 445, 478; two, 183, 242, 282, 264, 370; ultimate, 11, 60, 63, 86, 129, 183, 277, 364–65, 449, 456, 459, 461 Tulku, 268, 383 turiya, 215, 322–24, 418 turiya avastha, 214 turn: Copernican, 415; epistemological, 117; linguistic, 43; mystical, 33, 36, 39; participatory, 361, 365, 373 tvam, 297 Twelver Shi’ites, 15, 136 Udana, 286 ulama, 17, 24, 136, 359

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Index

ultimacy, 111, 269, 304, 353, 366, 375, 458; mirrors of, 70; monistic, 246, 316, 336, 464; of apophatic reality, 353; of mutual immanence, 354; theistic, 246, 464; symbols of, 300 ultimate, the, 54, 184, 221, 237, 239–240, 243, 248, 258, 268, 270, 295, 297, 465, 475, 477; manifold, 240–48; metaphysical, 242; religious, 60, 242 ultimate reality, 8, 11, 45, 54, 61, 65–78, 80–83, 87, 90, 112, 122, 126–30, 161, 171, 179–89, 219–21, 237–61, 267, 276–81, 287–97, 310–16, 331, 336, 362, 366–67, 374, 398, 450 ultimates, the, 243, 254; differentiation of, 242; plurality of, 258, 261, 271 Umayyad (Empire), 14, 164 uncertainty, 30, 453; pattern of, 87; quantum, 475; rhizomatic, 401 uncompounded reality, 278, 285–324, 365, 384 uncompoundedness, 292, 295; secondary, 317, 385; unpresentable, 316 unconditional, the, 162, 257, 298 unconditioned, the, 231, 298, 255 unconscious, 37, 139, 141, 145, 237, 269, 446 unifcation: creative, 76, 154, 424; deconstructions of, 235; eco-centric, 434; essential, 245; events of, 331; ever-new, 149, 151; false, 152, 178, 229;

559

forms of, 316, 430; harmonious, 201; holistic, 434; mathematical, 151; modernist, 434; modes of, 177, 470; momentary, 341; monological, 99; movement of, 71, 176, 229; mystical, 182–3, 220, 234; oppressive, 120, 158, 430; pantheistic, 64; paradox of, 432; peaceful, 21, 123; power of, 135; processes of, 112, 151, 209; rhythms of, 152; singular, 331; surrelative oneness of, 342; systematic, 135; theopoetic, 217; totalitarian, 153; transcategorical, 239; ultimate aim of, 237; unique, 379 unio mystica, 234, 300, 318–20 union, 233, 273; dualistic, 320; mystical, 125, 181, 184, 234, 320–01; of being, 320; spiritual, 194 uniqueness, 4, 10, 25–26, 82, 131, 139, 171, 286, 292, 302, 345–48, 376–83, 388–90, 423–27 unison, 217, 342–44, 355, 414–18; ecological, 265; of becoming, 201–6, 208, 273, 378; of immediacy, 168, 194, 201; nomadic, 412; relativistic, 277; transreligious, 278 unity, 4–12, 17, 96–102, 45, 54–57, 73, 89, 92, 95–102, 108–19, 126–32, 148–53, 159, 164–65, 170–71,

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560

Index

187, 195, 219, 224, 239, 248–48, 251, 267, 284–88, 300, 312, 317, 324, 330–32, 352–55, 366–68, 370, 377, 409, 413, 425, 435, 438–39, 442, 445, 457, 466–72, 477; apophatic, 120, 127, 131, 159, 165, 173, 180, 211, 245, 254, 423; concrescent, 261; connective, 170–72; cosmopolitan, 411; divine, 68, 166, 247, 287, 291–94, 389, 425, 431; ecological, 319, 408; ecstatic, 254; enfolding, 356; esoteric, 429; essential, 299, 359, 361; eternal, 74; existential, 21; inherent, 136–37; khoric, 171, 409, 416; monistic, 291; mystical, 68, 86, 185, 215, 371, 403; novel, 138, 189, 229; of apophasis, 69; of appearance, 298; of civilization, 417; of connectivity, 125; of difference and non-difference, 254; of divine names and attributes, 317; of events, 342; of experience, 432; of God, 54, 66, 164, 318, 339, 425; of humanity, 6, 21, 38, 77, 121, 125, 155, 160–61, 360, 369, 373, 414; of Manifestations, 360, 377, 435; of peace, 167; of reality, 180, 236, 356, 440, 442; of religions, 66, 122, 140, 146, 148, 157–59, 160–61, 256, 267, 355, 369–7, 421; oppressive, 81; polyphonic, 99; processual, 81, 438;

relational, 60; spatiotemporal, 313; spiritual, 79, 370–73; surrelative, 294, 317, 350, 395, 445; sympathic, 159–60, 169; trans-categorical, 432; transcendent, 184; transreligious, 35, 77, 166, 171–72 unity in diversity, 6–10, 62, 77, 80, 86–97, 106, 112, 156–57, 140, 157, 163, 177, 181, 370–71, 392, 403, 529, 434, 436, 442, 445, 447 unity of being, 91, 101, 238, 290, 298, 317, 432 universe(s), x, 71–72, 75–76, 167, 187, 199, 201, 209–13, 293, 324, 406, 409, 459, 466–77; Cartesian, 189; chaotic, 135; civilized, 398; closed, 211, 466; incommensurable, 385; material, 71, 181, 212; of discourse, x, 123, 360; Qur’anic, 52; religious, 324, 335–36; spiritual, 72, 185, 211, 213, 223, 293, 360; symbolic, 83 universality, 8–11, 20, 24, 46, 51, 61, 103, 123, 187, 252, 328–30, 379, 388, 401–6, 452, 456–65, 476; chaosmic, 401; cosmopolitan, 438; exclusive, 328–29; of connectivity, 252; of existence, 63; of incompleteness, 458; of suffering, 161; of Truth, 51, 456, 459–60 univocity, 40, 84–85, 99–100, 115, 125, 198, 412, 414–15, 436; of voices, 163, 402 unknowability, 5, 69, 232, 253, 392, 452; absolute, 104;

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Index

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apophatic, 179, 211, 268; infnite, 45; of reality, 18 unknowing, 37–39, 44–45, 65–67; apophatic, 140, 367, 435, 453; learned, 35; mystical, 69, 71, 453; unknowable, 18, 220; vertical, 228 unmanifestness: Upanishadic, 340 unnamable, 90, 220–21, 291 unprecedented, 6, 48, 53, 58, 77, 124, 152, 185, 189, 223, 239, 269, 341–43, 379, 397, 403, 408 unsaying, 65, 69, 71, 73, 174, 268 unspeakable, 62, 65, 189, 240, 274 unspeaking, 65 Upanishads, 38, 213–14, 296, 322, 399 upaya, 131, 211, 315, 345 Vagueness, 84 vahid, 348–49 vaishvanara, 322 Vajrayana, 278–79 valley, 143, 251, 342; mystical, 55 valuation, 321, 343–44, 447, 470; divine, 196, 367; primordial, 446; principle of, 334; processes of, 95, 256, 342, 382, 474–75; surrelative, 273 variety, 73–74, 89, 91, 95–96, 112, 213, 246, 355–59, 479; infnite, 53, 92, 94–95, 102, 356, 458–59; integrated, 95, 100 Vattimo, Gianni, 36, 43 Vedas, 336, 344, 419 Vedanta, 7, 184, 238; Advaita, 237, 320, 338, 345, 372 Via Dolorosa, 27–31

561

violence, 1, 12, 27–31, 39–43, 46–47, 96, 136, 165–67, 211–12, 400, 404, 406, 409, 415–24; conceptual, 47; cycle of, 97; religious, 96, 165, 256 virtuality, 177, 254 virtue, 20, 42, 59, 92, 94–95, 100–101, 116, 118; divine, 31, 101, 147, 319–21, 140, 152, 171, 190, 299, 306, 318–19, 332, 383, 386, 395, 439, 477; intellectual, 41 Vishnu, 144–45, 238, 295, 344, 422 Vishishtvaita, 338 wahdat al-shuhud, 290–91, 320, 432 wahdat al-wujud, 91, 238, 290–91, 320, 432, 472 wahidiyyah, 69, 169 wahy, 35, 132, 355, 405 war, 395, 400, 408–9, 411, 422, 424; holy, 43, 405 Ward, Keith, 26, 157, 199, 203–8, 226, 234, 391 warfare, 165, 235, 362, 399, 410, 423; eternal, 420 Watts, Alan, 116 waw, 233, 240 way(s), the, 116, 127–32, 150, 157, 187, 213, 220, 228, 321, 368, 396, 405, 426, 440, 470 Way to God, 131 Wayfarer, 180, 213, 251, 320–23 weakness, 42–43, 167; divine, 144; of God, 223 Wells, H. G., 413 White Buffalo Calf Woman, 269 whole, 116, 127, 149, 152–54, 170–71, 178–79, 193, 252, 256, 306, 315–25, 332–35, 343–48, 351, 356, 366, 376–80, 410, 413, 418, 433, 445, 466–68; moving, 64, 76, 78; open, 171, 470

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Index

wholeness, 2, 60, 473, 366, 433; existential, 121; structural, 87 Wilber, Ken, 228, 369, 373 wilderness, 28–29 will: divine, 13, 78, 82, 309, 456; of God , 88, 128, 181, 188, 196, 283, 292, 349, 386, 455, 457–58; primal, 253, 282, 287, 359, 383, 455–56, 460–64; self-creative, 292, 456, 461 wisdom: all-pervasive, 74; divine, 80, 143, 148, 166–67, 183, 196, 202, 215, 229, 263; infnite, 411; interspiritual, 372; of God, 129, 195–96, 201, 208, 390; polyphilic, 264; transcendental, 238 Wisdom-Spirit, 386–87, 392; of God, 386, 449 Wisdom of Solomon, 238, 274, 291 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 67, 441 word: creative, 52, 56, 339; divine, 56; of God, 52, 77, 192, 249, 303, 346, 350, 387, 467, 479–80; transcendent, 57 world(s): apophatic, 100; archetypical, 269; cascading, 118, 183, 192–94, 210, 215, 232, 317, 459, 472; common, 327; divergent, 331–32, 444; dream, 215; fve, 316; fvefold, 253, 265; hierarchical, 192; infnite, 55, 71–75, 93, 101, 119, 128, 133, 146, 170, 175–78, 190, 194, 198–206, 211–12, 231–34,

240, 247, 272–78, 337, 365, 380–81, 393, 419, 439, 450, 459, 463–68, 477; many, 55, 71, 118, 170, 178, 275, 453–54; multiple, 179, 186, 207, 259, 268, 314, 327, 416; of Becoming, 2–12, 44–45, 51, 54, 64, 147, 161, 182, 191, 196–99, 243, 263–65, 273, 280, 301, 312–20, 331–36, 348, 356, 364–67, 378, 383, 393, 397–408, 415–17, 428, 432–34, 440, 444, 447, 453–58, 475, 478; of command, 91, 179, 380; of Creation, 91, 95, 100, 102, 167, 182, 209, 299, 394, 398, 431, 469; of emanation, 192; of God, 91, 100, 102, 179, 316; of names and attributes, 33, 73, 251; of Value, 245, 254; of worlds, 332; spiritual, 71, 115, 185,-86, 193–95, 210–12, 216, 469, 472–73, 478; threefold, 212, 283 world-consciousness, 418 world-harmony, 424 worldview(s), 2, 5, 18, 34, 40, 123, 133–34, 295, 321, 327, 340, 344, 354, 362, 372, 403, 436; metaphysical, 295, 336; universal, 124 wu, 113, 316 wu wei, 108, 117, 119, 126, 319, 338 wuji, 316 wujud, 288 ya hayyu, ya qayyum, 249 Yahweh, 212, 223, 237–38 YHWH, 144, 223–25, 281, 285, 456 Yi Jing, 108 Yin, 108, 119 Yogacara, 219, 299, 322

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Index

Ziran, 108, 117–18 Zoroastrism, 25, 144, 421 zuhur, 147, 182, 293, 368, 388–89, 432, 450–51 zuhur al-haqq, 392, 395, 410, 445, 452 zuhur al-‘aql, 410–11, 418, 445

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Zahir, 232 Zeitgeist, 433 Zen, 7, 184, 228, 231, 274, 308, 310, 365 Zhenren, 108, 117–18, 124 Zhuangzi, 108–9 Zimzum, 461

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About the Author

Roland Faber was born in Austria. He received his MA, PhD, and Habilitation at the University of Vienna. He occupies the Kilsby Family/John B. Cobb, Jr., Professor of Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology, and serves as Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Claremont Graduate University, is the Founder and Executive Director of the Whitehead Research Project, and Co-Director of the Center for Process Studies. Research and publications encompass the felds of Whitehead’s philosophy, Process Philosophy, and Process Theology; (De)Constructive Theology; Poststructuralism (Gilles Deleuze); Transreligious Discourse (epistemology of Religious Relativity and Unity) and interreligious applications (e.g., Christianity, Buddhism, Baha'i Faith); Comparative Philosophy and Mysticism (Meister Eckhart, Nicolas of Cusa, Ibn ‘Arabi), and Theopoetics (an approach to poststructuralist and process theology, which addresses the liberating necessity of multiplicity). His publications include God as Poet of the World (2008), Event and Decision (2010), Beyond Metaphysics? (2010), Secrets of Becoming (2011), Butler on Whitehead (2012), Theopoetic Folds (2013), Beyond Superlatives (2014), The Allure of Things (2014), The Divine Manifold (2014), Living Traditions and Universal Conviviality (2016), The Becoming of God (2017), and Rethinking Whitehead’s Symbolism (2017).

565

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