Casuistry is the watchword, the guidon of the day among members of the professional guilds just as it was among their counterparts in First Century Jerusalem.

Casuists appeal to law, never to truth. Law they can control, truth they cannot.

Truth can accommodate law, but law cannot accommodate truth. Truth is bigger than law. Law can fit inside truth, but truth cannot fit inside law. Truth can punish law, but law cannot punish truth.

Law punishes a person’s body, but truth punishes their personality. Law reaches the physical dimension of life. Truth reaches all five dimensions of life: physical, mental, intellectual, spiritual, and historical.

The casuist tries to reduce everything to matters of law. He generally demands a high price for his efforts, as well he should, given their purpose is to attenuate nature and nature’s God.

Casuists are found most frequently in the professions of teaching, politics (where that pursuit has degenerated into self-regard as a profession), law and law enforcement, medicine, and ministry.

The most notorious casuists present as clergy, ministers of legalistic religions such as Judaism and Islam and legalistic sects such as Evangelical Christianity (this is Anabaptist-derived), Self-Realization Fellowship, and Transcendental Meditation. The most destructive casuists present as teachers and lawyers. The most persistent casuists present as parents reared in the black art itself.

All legalists are antinomians.

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Casuists lie. Their purpose in life, standing in their guild, and income depend on skewing their profession to attenuate nature and nature’s God, which is to say, on their lying. They will appear as arrogant, bitter, stupid, or worse. But what they really are is frightened on accounts past counting. Reality has them in a panic. They throw their profession’s terms of art at reality to frighten it away.

Casuistry is a giant dam, unable to bleed off pressure behind it, under constant construction to lift its top. The pressure of truth builds up behind the dam until one day, when the dam has reached its vertical and horizontal maximums, truth breaks over the top of it, then through it, washing it away along with those below who chose to shelter in the protection it afforded from the natural course of life-sustaining truth.

Who shall choose sudden annihilation by truth over a simple and natural albeit ambiguous life beside the free-flowing water? Ask members of the professional guilds of Jerusalem circa 70 AD.

Life below the dam, even while the dam stands, is irrevocably ambiguous. What use the dam then? Truth is going to destroy the dam unless, below the dam, its force is bled off for useful purposes. And ambiguity — indeed, the entire VUCA — persists universally. No span of control can control VUCA much less eliminate it. Even the strongest dam has weaknesses and is susceptible to the unexpected.

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Casuistry reflects a desire to remove VUCA from life by appeal to law. Yet, among other sillinesses, pitting law against VUCA is risible: law is puny compared to VUCA. Who could be so stupid as to litigate against reality?

Casuistry is a response to fear, but it is the wrong response. The right response to VUCA, to reality, is to embrace it. VUCA is definitely what it is. It only can be and can only always be what it is. VUCA can be neither escaped, mitigated, denied, deleted, nor erased. VUCA is a facet of truth as that presents itself — Himself — to us.

VUCA is reality. Reality includes VUCA.

In our experience, the truth includes VUCA. Say hello, invite it in, offer it a cuppa. Let it on its way. VUCA brings gifts and leaves gifts so long as it proceeds along by its own merits. Try to arrest its proceedings and VUCA will wipe you away in its own good time, and not just your physique, all of you.

Desire the truth at all times and in all things. Search for it, beat everything up until you have shaken the truth out of it. Truth can withstand any amount of scrutiny and welcomes all amounts. Truth wants to be found, whereas casuistry wants to hide itself along with truth.

The casuist deserves our condemnation. The truth-seeker deserves our encouragement. The truth often upsets but never harms. The casuist, like his buddy the law, always upsets and never helps. Law can punish, albeit ambiguously, but truth can help, always unambiguously. Welcome VUCA: you will be attracted to truth and not be tempted to casuistry.

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You must fill yourself with holy thoughts. That is the purpose of sacred festivals. Sankramana is the time when the inward journey towards a pure and unsullied heart is made. Just as the Sun embarks on his northward journey, Sankranti is the day on which the intellect should be turned towards the Atma for Self-Realisation. Men and women have to change their vision, their thoughts, their words and their conduct. This is the meaning of Sankramana. Unless you purify yourself, what can any number of Sankrantis mean to you? Sankranti promotes mental transformation. It illuminates the minds of people. It induces unfoldment of innermost feelings. It brings about the manifestation of the invisible Atma within everyone. Sankranti is pregnant with such immense significance. Sankranti should be hailed as the harbinger of unity and peace. This was an immemorial message of the Vedas.