Nature ….. is God, tooth and claw. That God operates as blind primal drive to life that manifests as highly elaborated nature ‘tooth and claw’ is the basic pantheist proposition. Most mature adults derive the proposition that Nature is God from their everyday observation The pantheist proposition was first articulated in the Brahadaranayaka Upanishad, ca. 600BC, as (unconditional ≈ nirguna) tattvamasi, meaning ‘Thou art that’. The same Upanishad states of the (saguna ≈ conditioned) Braham/Atman, ‘I am food. I am feeder’, meaning that the (saguna ≈ conditioned) Brahman/Atman, i.e. the conditioned (i.e. ‘with marks’) creation urge, is both predator and prey. of objective nature in all its wonder, their brutal struggle to survive and the basic inference ‘By their fruits (and the means to them) shall ye know them.’ It is (conditioned by accidents, i.e. by random collisions) nature ‘tooth and claw’ that represents (pre-local-conditions) God’s survival ‘fittest’, meaning most complete, self-actualisation/application. In other words, all natural phenomena, meaning you and me and every other life form, that is to say, objective nature, serve to complete/perfect an incomplete/imperfect God. Clearly stated, ‘God does not perfect nature but nature perfects God.’ Or “God does not clean up nature’s (i.e. man’s) mess but man (i.e. nature) cleans up God’s mess.’ Because of fundamental (i.e. ‘original’) incompleteness Note that the ancient Hebrew and Greek meanings of the word ‘sin’ was ‘missing the mark’. Due diligence re-reading would suggest that ‘missing the (or a) mark’ means ‘without condition’ or unconditioned. An entity without conditions, hence a virtual entity such as God, i.e. the virtual primal drive to life, is incomplete. Adding conditions, i.e. ‘marks’ (Sanskrit: guna) that limit make the virtual (i.e. limitless/mark-less) primal drive to life capable of contact and hence of actualization (as a real identity), thereby making it momentarily (locally) complete. Hence: ‘The perfect slave is free.’ (formerly called ‘sin’ more) God, i.e. the unconditioned (albeit incomplete) drive to life, is driven (as conditioned nature ‘tooth and claw’, hence suffering pain*) to self-manifest and so achieve completion (i.e. wholeness, fulfilment and so on). It (as the Goddess Durga in India and/or the sculpture ‘Separation’ in Victor’s Way) does that by generating zillions of localised complete (i.e. quantised ≈ finite) albeit momentary self-applications that provide momentary realness and (finite) identity (i.e. consciousness) and joy too (Sanskrit: sat-cit-ananda). Development of the God notion *… ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch.’ For ‘lunch’ read: life. © 2016 Victor Langheld

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