In classical Christian terms the matter is stated: the means of Grace are no longer carrying Grace to where they once were. Or more radically, the means of Grace which formerly served the purpose have been abandoned altogether and new ones have been put into place and, implied, are functioning.
I believe this is our condition today. However, there is no means-less environment. Where there is embodiment of any sort there are means of Grace. Love is not active unless embodied, with all of the potentialities for deformity and misapplication every embodiment embodies. This is the phenomenon which classically Christianity refers to as original sin, not sins or misdeeds but the plain fact that every embodiment implies a distortion of the Divinity/Love/Grace it is. This is an inescapable and universal characteristic of phenomenology itself. Called original sin in classical Christianity. It is always amusing to me that our moderns so rail against the words “original sin” — and use them as a club against what they believe is Christianity — and what they think the words mean, yet they also descry the phenomenology of universal distortion which those words indicate. Of course in the modern context, when the assumptions of the words is forgot, the words are infelicitous, but it is also honest to try to understand what the words really mean and they mean the very phenomenon which so exercises us moderns, the inescapable phenomenon of distortion of everything through the necessary embodiment. This is our existential insight, 200 years old now. Sages give the answers in several languages — religions — to this question.
Sages manipulating religion is an oxymoron. Rather like “religion is organized spirituality” which comes from the parliament of religions crowd. Spirituality is self-organized. That is its point and the balm of understanding and experimental puissance that sages proffer.
I would correct Li to this extent at least, that while the means of Grace we have known are not being used any more, or are in extensive repair back at the shop and so not truly visible, the world is not left in the lurch thereby and Dharma, which is essential, is merely conducting itself in novel means, not eliminated. Any time someone says something is eliminated or ended, I have to laugh. We are aware that that just is not possible. There is nothing new under the sun. Fresh, yes, new, never.
There are three kinds of education: for skills, for conformity or induction into a stochastic structure and for leading out of potentialities. All three are necessary. In a period of changing means of Grace the institutions which are necessary embodiments of Grace tend to emphasize the conformity or induction kind as part of the instinct of self-preservation. This is actually an organic reaction — bodies do the same strategy in their own way and automatically, as part of their genetics — and it has its place, to an extent. We are widely confronted with the phenomenon of institutions in this condition and deplore their tendency to make apparently exclusive emphasis on the inductive type of education, neglecting even skills training as well as potentiality emergence.
Yes, the Avathar’s Presence should be taken as an indicator that things are more than usually distorted — moribund, frozen — and that only that jolt will be sufficient to bring the organism back to dynamics and steady state. Happy times!
AMDG
