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At the foundation of the Indo-European worldview there is a fundamental flaw which distorts existence. This flaw has had a profound effect on the world because it has become the global dominant culture. It has been forced upon the diverse peoples of the world through imperialism and colonialism. Now it is difficult to get a perspective on this particular cultural distortion because it permeates everywhere. In order to attempt to get a final fix on the nature of this distortion, a particular manifestation will be studied in depth. This is the manifestation within Indian culture which evolved from Vedism into early Brahmanism. The book by Brian K. Smith called Reflections On Resemblance, Ritual, And Religion will be used as our resource in this last attempt to get a complete picture of the flawed worldview of the Indo-Europeans. Only a few themes will be treated in some depth in order to encapsulate the understanding that has been gained in the course of this study. This summary will serve as a springboard for our journey into the Void. This is possible because Hinduism served as the fertile ground for the development of Buddhism. In many ways, Buddhism is the antidote to Hinduism. So it is apropos that we begin our journey into the Void enunciated by Buddhism by a reckoning with Hinduism. In Hinduism, we can see a full-blown development of the Indo-European worldview in a version very different from that which has become the dominant global culture. Thus, by comparison with Hinduism, we can see the basic themes of the underlying Indo-European worldview.

B.K. Smith gives us our first clue as to the unique nature of Brahmanism as it evolved out of Vedism in the following quote:

This study of Vedic ritualism and the principle of resemblance that guides its operation and organization is premised on the recognition of a fundamental Vedic assumption: "What is natural is inherently defective;" . . . "From this perspective, the natural is the chaotic, the disorganized, the informed. In cosmological terms, what is merely procreated by the creator god is not a cosmos or a universal whole made up of ordered parts. The origins of the true cosmos are found not in this primary generative act, but rather in a secondary operation -- a ritual act that lends structure and order to a chaotic creation.¹

Creation is inherently defective, and it is sacrificial ritual that makes it whole. Doesn't this sound familiar? We might substitute the technological project for sacrificial ritual and be able to adopt the same point of view in the wake of Western culture's global domination. The Indo-European worldview sees its basic job as making whole the fragments left over from creation. This artificial whole into which the pieces of reality are forged is today called the formal structural system.

For the Vedic priests and metaphysicians, ritual activity does not "symbolize" or "dramatize" reality; it constructs, integrates, and constitutes the real. Ritual forms the naturally formless, it connects the inherently disconnected, and it heals the ontological disease of unreconstructed nature, the state toward which all created things and beings perpetually tend.²

Thus, by ritual, the Brahmans attempted to move from ephemeron to holoid and make their world whole. But as has been discovered in the course of these investigations, both these extremes of ephemeron and holoid are, in fact, illusory shadows of the flaw. They are nihilistic opposites which are indeed phantoms of the Western imagination. It is of interest to note that the state of ephemeron posits as the result of creation by Prajpati (the Brahmin equivalent to the Vedic Purusa) results in two states of excess called Jami and Prthak. Jami is excessive similarity, whereas Prthak is excessive distinction, separation, and isolation.

Things and entities must be differentiated in order to avoid the quality of jami, but they must also be connected to escape the equally dangerous, and ultimately lifeless, condition of prthak.³

So we clearly see here that the defective natural world is seen through the distorted lens of the ephemeron, and that in this state, there are nihilistically opposite states of too much similarity and too much dissimilarity. It is this nihilistic state that the ritual practices are designed to overcome which will lead us to holoidal state which is opposite the ephemeron if everything goes well. Note that nihilism at the ground level translates into nihilism of the opposition between wholeness and hollowness. Wholeness is supposed to solve the lower level nihilism, but instead merely reconstructs the nihilistic opposition at a higher level. This makes us suspicious that nihilism is a necessary component in the construction of nihilism.

The sacrifice is a cosmogonic instrument. for the ritual process completes all the stages necessary for making an ontological viable universe -- sarva, visva, samana. Ananda K. Coomaraswami summarizes the sacrificial structure and its connection to cosmogony:

"And what is essential in the Sacrifice? In the first place, to divide, and in the second to reunite. He being One, becomes or is made into Many, and being Many becomes or is put together again as One."⁴

Sarva means the "all," "an undivided, perfectly complete, and seamless whole" equivalent to the primordial Purusa or Prajapati (c.f. p. 62). Visva means reintegration of the parts. Samna is "a constructed whole, a composed unity of parts." Thus, there is a movement from the primordial wholeness before creation to the defective creation and then through ritual reconstruction to the composed whole made up of the differentiated parts held together. Clearly, the Sarva or primordial unity, exists in endlesstime. The defective creation occurs when this primordial whole enters the intime realm. It is the work of ritual to make the defective creation whole again, bringing it from the ephemeron to the holoidal state. The samna is the approximation to the primordial wholeness of endlesstime in the intime realm. This approximation would not be necessary if the primordial wholeness had not been broken. What is hidden in the exposition is the fact that the instituting of the flaw is what breaks the primordial wholeness and makes it necessary to put it back together again.

Prajapati is reconstructed in a secondary cosmogonic act of ritual construction which also shapes into form the discontinuous creatures of the cosmic emission. Unlike all the king's horses and all the king's men, the gods and man, deploying the formative and connective power of ritual, CAN put the shattered god and his creation back together again -- an operation of ritually produced reintegration which Mus has cleverly called "in-formation."⁵

It is possible to relate this to the movement explored earlier in this study from the Primordial Being to Conceptual Being. We noted that Primordial Being was itself at one time fragmented. This original fragmented structure was isomorphic to the original Indo-European pattern of the differentiation of the gods. The pattern of the gods was fragmented because of the distortion by the introduction of the flaw. Thus the primordial wholeness exists prior to the flaw. This is fragmented into the pattern of the gods which is unified linguistically into Primordial Being. Yet Primordial Being is still a cluster of meanings which is finally completely unified by Conceptual Being.

The movement from Sarva through Visva to Smna has been explored thoroughly in this study. It is the Indo-European project to project a world on the basis of the flaw. The ritual construction of Being has turned into the technological construction of Being.

Prajapati is both the creator and the first practitioner of the ritual, subsequently turning over the sacrifices to other deities. The creator generates the individual pieces of the universal puzzle and leaves them in a chaotic jumble, but it is also he who produces the means for interlocking those cosmic fragments.⁶

The Indo-European project began in the remotest antiquity. The Vedas records its beginning as the sacrifice of Purusa. In that sacrifice, the flaw was established. For the Brahmins, the Purusa became Prajapati, the creator god who preformed the ritual sacrifice on himself to give rise to the flawed world containing nihilistic opposites. In Northern europe, Odin continued this tradition, sacrificing himself to himself in order to learn the secret of the runes: the mysteries of Varuna. The establishment of the flaw rooted in human sacrifice and cannibalism was the basis for the Indo-European project to power; the project of establishing an artificial unity where once a natural unity existed. This is the will to power of the Western culture attempting to remake everything in its own image, either by misconstruing things as being like it, or by destroying those things and building them up again in its own image.

This means of constructing the artificial whole that replaces the natural whole is by establishing connections. The foundation for these connections is called Brahman. In early Hinduism Brhama, Visnu and Shiva are the three supreme gods. Brahama creates, Visnu maintains, and Siva destroys. Brahama is the personal manifestation of the godhead. The impersonal manifestation, which is the core of the Hindu trinity, is called Brahman.

Brahman is the basis or ground of a universe or mutually resembling things and beings, a foundation in which the perpetual interplay of resemblances find their source, condition of possibility, support and end. Brahman is to be understood in light of the Vedic preoccupation with continuity and stability in the face of assumed natural discontinuity and the instability of creation. Gonda rightly insists on the affinity this central metaphysical turn has with other important Vedic concepts such as ayatana (base, support, resort), pratistha (firm foundation in its spatial sense) and samstha (end or temporal foundation).

It would, therefore, be easy to understand if the ancient Indian searchers for a firm ground or foundation for the universe, the human soul included, had chosen a word derived from the root "brh-," "to be firm', strong, etc." to designate that ultimate foundation of all that exists. Anyhow, it is a fact that the concept of a support that is a fundamental principle on which everything rests, and the idea of firmness and immovability are often expressed in connection with brahman or with God who is brahman."⁷

Brahman is the source of the holoidal connection between all things. Brahman is the firm foundation which has been the philosopher's stone that has been searched for continuously in the Indo-European tradition. In the Western world, we have lost this possibility of a firm foundation and have essentially given ourselves up to nihilism. The early Hindus, on the other hand, believed that this possibility of a firm foundation existed. However, whether it exists or not, the drive toward such a possible foundation is the motive force in all Indo-European systems of thought. We note that the flaw is now represented by the trinity of deities Brahma, Visnu, and Siva which before had been represented as Varuna, Mithra, and Indra, and since by the trinity of the Catholic church. The Hindus attempted to look beyond or through the representation of the flaw to glimpse the whole beyond and called it Brahman. Brahman is essentially the same as Purusa and Prajapati, except here it is the possibility of unity within differentiation.

Indologists of the last century liked to compare brahma to electricity, a latent energy that, when switched on by ritual means, produces cosmic order (rta) and individual power. Louis Renon has more recently demonstrated that it is the connective potency of the brahman that is at the heart of the Vedic concept and which links together all the meanings of the word.

Renon argues that the common semantic denominator is brahman as "a connective energy condensed into enigmas." The enigma or mystery of the brahman force "is the equation between human behavior and natural phenomena, the connection between rite and cosmos." The metaphysical, epistemological, and ritual are thus conjoined in a concept that is both the ground of the universe and the possibility for its establishment. "Brahman" concludes Renon "is nothing else but that form to thinking in enigmas consisting of the positing of correlation, an explicative identification: that very thing the Brahmanas designate by the terms nidana or bandhu and eventually upanisad."

Brahman is, therefore, the source and foundation of all that exists -- the nexus of all cosmic connections and the connective force itself lying behind all knowledge and action that constructs ontologically viable forms. It is the fount and terminus of all potential and realized correspondences, the condition of possibilities for wholeness as well as the whole itself. Brahman, in sum, is the connective energy that lies between apparently (and naturally) disparate elements and makes efficacious the ritual action that forges these elements into unity. Brahman is both the neuter counterpart to the Cosmic Man and the analogue to the sacrificial operation: "What is related to ritual activity is related to the brahman."⁸

In the last chapter, we made clear that the out of time single source is conceptually pure discontinuity; thus, it is diametrically opposed to the connectiveness of the brahman. The brahman does the work of logic in the Western world, forging a network of connections between entities to produce artificial totalities. The opposite of this is a logic of disconnection based on pure discontinuity. If one is busy constructing a web of connections, it is not possible to see beyond one's own work which becomes an enigma or the Gordian knot of the flaw. Instead, one must actively disconnect so that what is beyond the flaw might shine through and the flaw be dismantled or evaporate.

The enigma which appears as the so-called mystery of the trinity, the magical runes of Odin, and the mysterious magic of Varuna is the nature of the flaw itself. It obscures rather than clarifies. It is the dark magic which uses the lens of the flaw to make intersubjectively real bindings which are, in fact, illusory. Thus there is a profound connection between the Western worldview and occult magical systems that make use of the flaw doing injustice to those caught up in the distorted worldview produced by the lens of the flaw as it eclipses the sun of the Good. These secret bindings, as well as the overt bindings by which the world is constructed, may only be undone by the sword of disconnection which slashes through the Gordian knot to reveal the truth.

Furthermore, the bonds joining components from distinct worlds are depicted with words other than nidana. Bandha, the most general term for "connection," is often applied in precisely this sense. Perhaps the best example comes from the Rg Veda, where it is said that "the ancient seers discovered in their hearts the bandhu of the manifest (sat) in the unmanifest (asat)" (1.129.4; see also JUB 1.59.10). The word bandhu is indeed often defined in such a way as to put this function of relating the visible to the invisible, the immanent to the transcendent foremost:

"In the Brahmana texts it denotes above all the mysterious connection or relation between the entities of this world and the transcendental "ideal" entities of the divine world, which are the foundation and origin of the perceptible things."

Regardless of the particular term used, it is this ability to link the visible, manifest, and therefore limited counterpart to its invisible, transcendent, and unlimited prototype that is the most spectacular of the supposed effects of making connections.⁹

The enigma of the flaw is very well expressed by this quote from the Rg Veda. Here, it is interpreted to mean that the seers discovered the connection between visible and invisible entities. This means that a connection is set up between entities and their prototype sources which gives power to the entities. However, it is exactly this possibility of connection that must be denied. The intime and endlesstime realms are totally disconnected, and the abodes described in the previous chapter are ultimately an illusion from one point of view. Yet from another point of view, the interface between the intime and endlesstime realms is all that exists, and the individual discrete realms are the illusion. Either way, there is no connection between entities intime and their endlesstime prototypes. There is either no connection, or they are the same as those prototypes. The lines of connection that cross the boundary between intime and endlesstime are illusory. Thus, there is another way to read the Rg Veda quote based on the fact that Sat is the Sanskrit word for Being, and Asat equals non-Being. The seers discovered in their hearts the connection of Being in Non-Being. We may reinterpret Non-Being as the simplest image of Emptiness or the Void which is pure negation and say they discovered the connection of Being in the Void. They discovered that Sat only has vitality when brought together with its opposite which is the Void. The connection of Being is, in truth, disconnection. When disconnection is applied to Sat or Being, then things connect themselves naturally by reference back to the single source. We cannot connect them. We are at a loss to help ourselves, even less capable of connecting all the things of creation into a whole. Instead, we walk into the Void and give up the project of will to power. By ceasing to connect, everything becomes connected of its own accord. This is manifest in the form of the four abodes which only occur because we maintain the disconnection between intime and endlesstime. If we were to attempt to make connections on the basis of the brahman, we would introduce the illusory flaw which has since become so ingrained in the Western worldview. The Hindu project is exactly counter to the correct approach to existence. The Hindu approach affirms the self and attempts to gain power by forging connections between the intime self and its endlesstime prototype. This creates the illusion of power, but in reality, destroys the self which uses its mysterious powers gathered from the enigma to do injustice. On the other hand, the correct approach is to maintain pure discontinuity between the in-time realm and the endlesstime realm. This is the doctrine of Tawhid. One negates the self by embracing pure discontinuity. The flaw evaporates, and the abodes appear naturally, not as an act of will, but as the surfacing of the true face of reality. The single source is, in fact, the interface between the in-time and out of time realm. When the single source appears, the intime and endlesstime realms vanish. All that exists is the interface which appears as the four abodes. The world does not vanish but takes on a new aspect completely. It is the opposite of the magical enigma of the flaw. It is perfect clarity arising from pure disconnection.

Once the abodes have appeared, it might be thought that they represent the kind of connection described by the brahman. However, the key is the self. If the self acts to connect things itself, which is the craving function, then it is constructing illusory connections. If the self is negated, then the connections are truly from the single source. Those connections that arise from disconnection have the strength of the one true reality. Our impulse is to move toward connection so we reap disconnection. If, instead, we move toward disconnection, we will reap a deeper connection as a matter of course. The world works in opposites. The opposite you attempt to lay hold of evades your grasp, and the opposite you seek to avoid grasps you inevitably. Thus, in the connection of brahman, there is a secret known by the early Vedic seers. Seek disconnection and you will find connection. But instead, their brahmanic followers sought connection without disconnection and inherited the illusory connection of the flaw which is, in reality, utter disconnection. The dynamics of opposites is important, not just their static values.

The fourth chapter of B.K. Smith's book is called "The Ritual Construction of Being." This chapter title contains an important truth which should not escape us in this investigation. Being is constructed through ritual. It is easy to forget this as we wind our way through the history of Indo-European phenomena. The whole worldview that posits the connections of Being and Ideation are forged by repeated ritualized actions. If the ritual were to cease being enacted, then the worldview would collapse. The illusory connections would unravel without constant maintenance. In Hindu society, the ritual sacrifices were very complex, seeking to influence unseen realities. So too, the ritual of the socio-technical technological system are, for the most part, directed at managing unseen realities. In one case, the rituals are directed at sacred realities, while in the other, they are understood as physical realities. The only significant difference is that the sacred realities could produce meanings because they were tied to the possibility of wholeness. On the other hand, physical realities make no claims with respect to meanings and leave us in the nihilistic hollow landscape of a broken world. Ritual behavior is a concentrating and honing of intentionality by bringing to bare thought, perception and action in an overdetermined and redundant way. It s an attempt to force a synthesis or totalization. The socio-technical system, though not as dramatic, also attempts to produce a totalization of this field through dominance. As such, there is coordination between intersubjective perception, thought and action which projects Being upon the world. It is a thin glaze that covers everything. Tiemersma calls it undifferentiated Being from which the triangular facets of the body image unfolds which eventually crystallize into objective and subjective designated realities. Loy calls it the non-dualistic overlap between perception, thought and action. This process of unfolding from undifferentiated projected Being into the differentiated socio-technical system is accomplished through ritual practice. Ritual is a confusion of the relation between words and action. Words and actions are opposites and should remain disconnected from the viewpoint of Tawhid. Words embody meanings, and Actions embody intentions. Meanings and intentions are two separate hidden realities by which humans relate to the single source. Meanings and intentions each flow from the single source and intersect in the human being giving direction and fullness to his life. However, if words and actions are not kept separate, then problems occur. Ritual is one of the results of mixing words and actions. Ritual occurs when actions are thought to have meaning. Magic occurs when words are thought to express intention. Through the recitation of a formula, we attempt to embody an intention, and through that, make something happen. This confusion of the relation of words to action and meaning to intention is at the root of the ritual construction of Being. It is not just in Hindu society that this confusion arose, but it is at the heart of the socio-technical systems mode of practice as well.

In the Hindu sacrifice, ritual and magic are combined into a single panoply which attempts to project wholeness by binding together words and actions and cross-fertilizing meanings and intentions in attempt to reach into the unseen realm. Killing is, in some way, the ultimate act because it cannot be done twice to the same victim. Forcing someone to cross the boundary from the intime realm to the endlesstime realm gives the sacrificer himself a taste of the transition. Anyone who has killed animals for food knows how the whole quality of the world can change at that moment. Sacrifice attempts to bring some aspect of endlesstime into the intime realm. It is an act that destroys the primordial unity. It brings on the broken and nihilistic landscape. By repetition of the act that destroys the totality, the sacrificer attempts to reinstate what has been lost. However, the old adage that two wrongs don't make a right holds sway. More apt might be that two wrongs do make a RITE. The first sacrifice of Purusa or Hun Tun in the Chinese version of the story was a wrong that brought about the flawed broken world that we behold as a nihilistic landscape. By obsessive repetition it is to possible to bring back the pristine state before the first sacrifice. However, the obsessive repetition of the act of sacrifice attempts to assuage the guilt of those who introduced the flaw into existence -- the flaw of undifferentiated Being -- that subtle dynamic clinging which permeates the world corrupting it. It is a cunning trick of the priest which tells the layman that the sacrifice will reassemble the world when it is this very obsessively repeated act of sacrifice which is continually breaking the primordial unity. The projection of Being must be constantly renewed for it continually fragments in order to become the mechanism of ideation which spreads its haze of ideational continuity across the surface of things in the world.

By opening the door to endlesstime and doing injustice to the victim, the sacrificer shows his dominance. He, like the Greek gods, preserves his place at the expense of the victim, using the victim as a tool to seal his ritual and magic together. The sacrifice creates a bond of guilt among the community who all participate together. It is the sacrifice of a male -- originally the son of the king and later prisoners or animals. It is the attempt to appropriate inward male unity by a people who only have outward female unity. Placing the victim in the next world is seen as equivalent of achieving inward male unity. That unity becomes a guilt complex that rides over the outward female unity. The guilt complex -- most exquisitely represented within the Christian mythology -- becomes a surface layer that covers the earlier pattern of female unity. The guilt complex provides the internal coherence of the proto-socio-technical system, just as the fertility rites of the outward female unity provide the external coherence. There is a dynamic tension between these two layers of the Western psychic. We have already explored the difference between them in terms of the difference between surface and deep temporality. The human being provides the whole which bonds the intersubjective cohort. By fragmenting the whole of the victim its source is forced into the unseen realm in a magical and ritualistic act attempts to restore the inward male unity which had been lost. Yet, that very act is a corruption and injustice which disturbs the universe, sending it further out of balance. So the Priests call for bigger and better, more elaborate sacrifices which yet again throw it further out of balance. Rta is lost in the very act by which it is attempted to be regained. Need this surprise us when we learn that Prajnapati both gave rise to the defective world and made the first sacrifice.

Thus, the Indo-European system is founded on two injustices. The first is to women who are treated as a commodity which, through exchange in marriage, attempt to invoke an outward female unity. The second is to men who become the sacrificial victim in attempt to forge an inward male unity based on guilt for the communal act. The male victim is hoarded by being thrust into the unseen, while the female is exchanged. This corresponds to the two types of money -- in horde and in circulation. In the economic system, the trick is to circulate 28 times the money held in the horde. In this way, money is produced seemingly from the air. It is the dynamic between money in horde and money in circulation that allows the production of wealth and seemingly unending economic growth. Likewise, it is the cross-over between women in circulation and the male victim that provides the essential dynamic of Indo-European society. This is why the central Indo-European myth is about abduction of women. She is taken in an illegal forced exchange as was Helen of Troy. She is given by the abductor to his mother who is punished instead of the abductor when she is rescued. The mother is the nexus of breaking old vows and instituting new vows. The mother is the point at which the contention between power relations and exchange relations are resolved. Women not only were exchanged, but many times they, as property, were abducted based on power relations. The mother may herself have been abducted, and at least she was exchanged. So the mother becomes the accomplice in the same crime of which she has herself been victim before. She is mean to the victim making her wash clothes by the sea. The changing and washing of clothes signifies the change from the victim's old vows to the new vows. The washing of the clothes signifies the changing of the internal order of society as power relations change the patterns of exchange of women. As power relations are brought to bear, a different gestalt appears in the patterns of exchange of women. In the new pattern, the women must change her clothes, becoming a part of a new external alignment of social relations. The sea represents, in Jungian terms, the unconscious or the unseen realm. The victim washes her clothes in the waters of forgetfulness and as she does so, her rescuers appear from out of those same waters. Not one, but two males emerge from the waters to revoke the change. They punish the one who would exchange the new vows for old, not the one who wields the power. They blame the mother who was in the same position as the victim but was not saved; who drowned in bitterness and turned toward the one in the same position as she once was. The brothers or husbands prevent the change in the gestalt of the exchange pattern. The two males from the sea signify the inward male separation. In order to rectify this inward fragmentation, a victim must enter the sea. Odysseus, on his way home from the battle for Troy, is this victim who is lost in the wilds of the sea. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter to begin the expedition to Troy, and in the end, a single man is lost at sea. Women are exchanged, abducted and even sometimes sacrificed instead of male victims. This is three successively deeper levels of injustice. The first level provides the illusory continuity of exchange. The second level disturbs the patterning of exchange and asserts power relations that create new patterns of exchange. These power relations may only be thwarted by greater power based on sacrifice. When the victim is a woman, then a total breakdown in exchange is signified. Outward unity is broken, and the result is war. The war has its roots in the marriage of Pelus to Thetis. A golden apple from Eris fell at the feet of Hera, Aphrodite and Athena which said, "to the most beautiful." Pelus did not know who to give it to. The jealousies that were provoked between the goddesses ultimately led to the backing of different sides in the war. Thus, when the female external unity breaks down, there appears the female triumvirate corresponding to that of Mithra (Aphrodite) / Varuna (Hera) / Indra (Athena). This split can only be healed by the sacrifice of a man and ultimately, Odysseus is that man who must undergo his hardships lost in the seas and ultimately visiting Hades in order to restore the lost unity. Crossing the ocean to save the abducted woman is only half the battle -- the rest is crossing back to return home. An army crosses in one direction, but the epic only follows a single man crossing back. In this way, the balance of the army is unified by the lone man's struggles. This relation between the single man and the army is demonstrated in the episode concerning the Sirens. Odysseus has himself tied to the mast and fills his sailor's ears with wax so he can hear the Sirens' song without being destroyed. Adorno and Horkheimer have used this myth as a metaphor for the dilemma of modern man as exemplified in the class structure. It is an excellent metaphor for Hegel's master/slave dialectic. In this episode, Odysseus tempts fate as he does so many times, using his cunning to escape death. We might adopt this episode as a metaphor ourselves. The song of the Sirens might be seen as the illusory continuity produced on the basis of external female unity. In order to save themselves, Odysseus and his men take up complementary opposite nihilistic positions. Odysseus and his men are both deafened -- one by the Sirens' song, and the other by the wax in their ears. Yet they are opposites in that one is too close to experience while the other is too far away. Odysseus, like the victim of the sacrifice, goes into another realm; while those left behind are at once unified and deadened by the experience. The ship of Odysseus is a perfect metaphor for the resultant unity produced by sacrifice. In rowing the ship by the Sirens, the crew is sacrificing Odysseus, who is their captain. Odysseus desires this experience and brings back tales of the experience beyond the wildest imaginings of the crew. The guilt of the sacrificer is like the dulling of their senses -- it covers over all creation by distorting the perception of the world. That communal distortion is done in order to heighten the experience of the victim. But the sacrifice is an unjust heightening of experience, just as the attitude which dismisses the suffering of the victim is an unusual dulling of her senses. Sacrifice creates a privileged over-sensitive access point for glimpses of endlesstime at the expense of communal guilt, and dulling of the senses as the subtle clinging of Being is projected on existence. The victim and the group guilt form a nihilisticly balanced whole -- this is an artificial whole substituted within the nihilistic landscape for the lost primordial unity of Purusa or Huntun. This nihilistic whole is merely the obverse of the nihilistic landscape itself. The holoid is like the sacrificial victim, and the ephemeron is like the dulled crew with communal guilt. One is too bright (Yang Splendor) and the other too dark (Closed Yin) -- the epitome of unbalanced states. The wholeness strived after by sacrifice is a meta-imbalance. It is a dynamic reconfiguration of the nihilisitc landscape, turning it into a whole made up of complementary nihilistic opposites in dialectical counterpoint exhibiting external and internal coherence. The external coherence is based on female unity through exchange. It exhibits changes as these patterns of exchange are effected by power relations. The internal coherence is based on communal guilt derived from the sacrifice. It attempts to attain inward male unity by a magico-ritualistic act. That act maintains imbalance in the guise of attempting to regain balance. The injustice of the sacrifice continually throws the system further and further out f balance. To compensate, the exchange rate must increase so that the patterns of gestalt change become greater and greater as the dynamical system bifurcates. Eventually the turbulence increases until chaos breaks out as war. Out of the chaos comes a lone man to begin again, like Aneaus did in Rome. So the cycle begins again this time with the Sabean women for exchange.

Our own socio-technical systems are precisely these dynamic nihilistic totalities. They have an external coherence maintained by exchange. The exchange patterns are maintained by power relations which may shift, causing a new gestalt in exchange patterns. In the economic system, it is exchange of goods and money. In the scientific and technical realms, it is exchange of information. These patterns of exchange exist in relation to hordes. In economics, these are the hordes of the Banks. In academics, they are the universities. The internal coherence of the socio-technical system is maintained by setting up the nihilistic opposites of overabundance and poverty. There is a super concentration of resources and attention to a single facet of existence at the expense of dulling the experience of all other facets of existence. The horde, or point of overabundance, is the nihilistic opposite of the field of poverty within which it appears. The relation between horde and exchange is monopolized by the guild of the socio-technical system. That point of relation is the key control point which is the source of power. At that point, apparently something is created from nothing. This, of course, is an illusion. The channels of exchange merge at the control point. Whoever controls the point of merger controls the whole socio-technical system. At the control point, the bank or university, the dynamical relation between the moving point of focused overabundance and the patterning of exchange form a single system on the form of the formal-structural system driven by ideation founded on the fragmentation of Being. In this way, the ancient pattern of the Indo-European worldview continues to structure the world -- devouring it through our dynamic clinging.

TABLE 35
Murder of women	Chaos of War
Abduction of women	Power relations repattern exchange
Exchange of women	Exchange

You might think this interpretation is far fetched. However, when we consider the myth of the origin of sacrifice among the Greeks according to Hesiod, all the elements come into sharper focus. The myth concerns four Titan brothers: Promethius, Empimetheus, Atlas and Menoeitus. The first two fought with Zeus against Kronos, while the second pair were on the other side of the cosmic conflict. Menoeitus (defying fate or ruined strength) was killed by Zeus with a thunderbolt. Atlas (he who dares or suffers) was sentenced to holding up the heavens. You might think that the two Titans who fought with Zeus would ultimately fare better. But Prometheus became a rival to Zeus, and in the progress of that rivalry, ended little better off than their brothers who lost the war. An excellent account of the Prometheus myth may be found in The Cuisine Of Sacrifice Among The Greeks by M. Detienne and J.P. Vernant. Here, only the highlights will be given in support of the theory that sacrifice attempts to regain artificially inward male unity, and that it is the connection between sacrifice and wife exchange which leads to the phenomenon of the control point where the interchange between horde and exchange take place. The control point is a cornucopia from which emergence flows.

Following the general outlines of the mythic sequence, the first point is the adjudication by Prometheus of sacrifice. It must be decided which portion is man's and what portion goes to the gods of the sacrificial victim. Prometheus arranges for Zeus to make the choice between two bags. One contains the bones covered with fat, while the other contains the meat covered by stomach of the animal. Zeus chooses the bag that appears the best, but ends up with bones, which is actually the worst portion. Because of this choice, man receives the best portion and gives the gods the part which is of no use to men. Zeus is angry at this and seeks to deny men fire to cook their meat. Now in this first scene of the mythic sequence, there are several points worthy of note. First, the two bags of meat are a perfect example of nihilistic opposites. The wholeness of the animal is destroyed, and out of that wholeness is composed two bags which are not as they appear. What looks good is bad, and vice versa. The destruction of a natural complex and the artificial construction of the two bags is analogous to the creation of the defective world whose nature is Afluxion and nihilism. In Vedism, the whole animal is Sarva -- the primordial unity. The destruction of the animal and the allotment to nihilisitc opposites takes us to the stage called Vsiva -- the defective totality. Of interest is the fact that what happens to the sacrificial animal is exactly the opposite of what happens to the human on death. The human flesh is burned, but the human bones are saved and wrapped in fat and buried.

TABLE 36
	Bones & Fat	Meat & Stomach
VICTIM	Burned offering to god	Humans eat
HUMAN	Bones and Fat kept	Burned

In this, the victim and the dead non-victim are opposites. So not only are the human and divine portions nihilistic opposites, but these portions are reversed for the non-victim dead. In this way, is the non-victim distinguished from the victim. In the myth, Zeus' choice inaugurates a fundamental distinction among the Greeks between the victim and the non-victim. It connected human consumption of meat with sacrifice. It also defined the protocol for turning the human into a victim. Merely reverse what is kept and what is burned from the dead body. This reversal suggests the presence of cannibalism which Burkert discusses in Homonecans. This sacrifice may either be of a male or a female. The sacrifice of a female signifies a breakdown of exchange as in Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter. The sacrifice of the male is much more potent. It signifies an artificial attempt to gain inner male unity as seen in the bull sacrifices that were prevalent all over the ancient Mediterranean and which survived in the story of the crucifixion of Jesus and of Odin. The highest sacrifice was of a man, and that naturally was connected with cannibalism. In another myth, Lycaon attempts to feed Zeus the remains of Nyctimus mixed together with the meat of goats and sheep in a boiling cauldron. This precipitated the great flood that all but destroyed mankind. This shows that Zeus does not accept the meat of such abomnable feasts. Men eat the meat of the victim -- human or non-human. Man eating man. What does this do but put a man inside. The group does it together, in silence, each with their allowed portion, as with the drinking festival of Dionysus. The group puts the victim inside and is bound together by the guilt suffered together. This is inner male unity sought by the people of external female unity in an unnatural way which brings the wrath of Zeus. Zeus turns Lycaon into a wolf -- an animal that cannot discriminate victim from non-victim. When the surviving human couple are given advice by Themis after the flood ("Shroud your heads and throw the bones of your mother behind you.") they interpret this to mean the bones of mother earth, i.e. stones, and so from the stones spring people to repopulate the earth. Another interpretation might be to leave the bones of the dead on earth while burning the flesh, i.e. preserve the distinction between victim and non-victim.

The next scene in the myth of Prometheus is of him stealing the fire from Olympus to give to man against the wishes of Zeus. Fire is the destroyer. It destroys the meat of the non-victim and the bones of the victim. Fire has always been sacred to the Indo-Europeans. In the Vedas fire, is Agni, a special god which links man with the gods. In Zoroastrianism, fire worship provided the Axis. Prometheus takes fire form the sun and hides it. It is an artificial light quite different from those celestial lights of Sun, Moon, Planet and Stars from which it derives. The main attribute of fire is its flickering. Also it is a visible separator between seen and unseen realms. Fire makes visible what lies in the darkness when the celestial lights are not visible. Fire represents transformation, change, and thus time, as with Heraclitus. We many liken fire to the position of excrescence in the formal-structural system. Excrescence makes things visible within a nihilistic landscape through artificial highlighting via novelty. Like fire, the consumption of these artificial novelties destroys resources unnecessarily. Over-production breeds waste. Fire is the speeding up of time artificially. Fire is the temporality of the formal-structural system as it consumes the world.

The next step in the mythological sequence is Zeus' revenge for the theft of Fire and being tricked into taking what looked good but was, in fact bad. Zeus takes revenge, not initially against Prometheus (forethought) but instead against his brother Epimethesus (afterthought). Zeus orders Hephaestus to fashion a woman out of clay, and offers her to Epimethesus in marriage. This is the first case of wife exchange. The woman was named Pandora, who was beautiful outside but made from a base material and vacuous. Thus, Pandora was like the bag of bones -- something that looked good but was not good. Thus, the exchange was a bad deal, and Epimethesus refused. Here the crucial element of exchange of women enters the picture. The speeded up temporality of the socio-technical system works by a dynamic of continuous exchange. Yet the exchange is made possible by the Horde represented by the sacrificial victim or destroyed property. The potlatch in some primitive societies replaces the horde. The horde is property intentionally placed out of circulation which balances the exchanged medium -- be it money or whatever. The bones and fat of the victim enter the unseen realm through fire, and the result is the appearance of Pandora. Pandora is the positive face of the socio-technical system, now called "progress." The result of exchange and hoarding, and the interchange between the two, looks good but is, in fact, bad. But it is hard to see what is bad when it is all working. However, when "progress" goes sour, its ugly underside becomes apparent. Progress at what expense? This is the question asked usually too late.

When Epithemus refuses Zeus' gift, then Zeus takes revenge directly on Prometheius. Zeus has him bound to a pillar and harrowed by a vulture that eats his liver by day and then makes it grow back at night. Prometheus gets eternal punishment for his service to mankind. The punishment comes after the counter gift of Pandora is refused. The punishment is about making defective and then becoming whole again in an infinite cycle. This infinite regress signifies the attempt to attain wholeness through destruction or sacrifice. Men now have all the instruments necessary to perform their sacrifice. They attempt, in that act, to regain wholeness as internal male unity. But it is precisely this attempt that continuously repeats the breaking of the primordial unity. Thus, the sacrifice attempts to achieve wholeness by breaking wholeness. It will never reach its goal and is thus really a repetitive oscillation between wholeness and brokenness. Promethesis' punishment is the reality of the sacrifice in the realm of endlesstime. Prometheus unknowingly destroyed cosmic harmony and went against RTA of the dharma. His punishment and the sacrifices of humans are the intime and endlesstime sides of the same coin.

The last scene in the mythic sequence shows Epimethemis accepting Pandora out of fear, and because of her stupidity, she opens the jar (box) which Prometheius says they must not open. This box, once opened lets out all the ills suffered by mankind after the golden age. Once opened, the box could not be closed again. The box is like a cornucopia of troubles. The opening of the box signifies the emergent event which changes the gestalt of mankind. The body itself is the control point. It could be opened or left closed. Once the control point is opened up, many things flow from it which are unpredictable before it is opened. Pandora's box is the singularity within the formal-structural system which when turned inside out, becomes the emergent event (novum) that inaugurates a new epoch.

In the myth of Prometheus are all the elements of the external and internal coherences of the socio-technical system. However, let's look again at the context of this story. The four Titan brothers, Prometheius, Epimetheus, Atlas and Menoeitus, were rulers of Atlantis through the office twin sons of Poseidon. These five twin sons stand for the five Indo-European gods. The four Titans stand of the interfaces between these signifiers. Thus, the Titans repeat the structure of the four kinds of Being.

TABLE 37
for Kronos	Pointing	Menoeitus	defying fate or ruined strength	Pointed at by Zeus with thunderbolt
for Zeus	Grasping	Epimetheus	afterthought	Takes Pandora in marriage "to have and hold"
for Kronos	Bearing	Atlas	he who dares (suffers)	Bears the weight of heaven
for Zeus	Encompassing	Prometheus	forethought	Encompassed by the reality of sacrifice just as the victim is encompassed

Each Titan signifies a greater intensity of the subtle clinging of Being. The greatest intensity is aligned with the reality of sacrifice as endless oscillation between wholeness and defective creation which is called by the Hindus Samana. Thus, we see finally that the magical power of the Indo-European king is derived from sacrifice of his own children. By sacrificing his children, he attempts to create internal male unity as the internal coherence of Indo-European society to balance the external female unity learned in his initiation process.

TABLE 38
INITIATION OUTSIDE SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEM	WITHIN THE SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEM
APHRODITE secret of female principle	FEMALE EXCHANGE external coherence
HORSES dynamic clinging	CONTROL POINT singularity -- emergent event
MAGIC runes and tools	SACRIFICE artificially attempting to gain inner male unity; = Horde; internal coherence.

Returning to the ritual construction of Being, we may now see that each class of Hindu society is like the four Titans. Each has its form of suffering, and sacrifice from its suffering issues its dead, and from its sacrifice issues its victims. Each class, in turn, through its praxis successively approximates the pure sacrifice which renders whole by an inner yang unity which compensates for the outward yin unity of the intersubjective cohorts. The untouchables have no sacrifice, and this signifies defective creation. Men from other classes become untouchables if they are not initiated within a certain range of ages unique to their class. So without sacrifice, men revert to the level of defective creation and become permanently ruined. Each class' sacrifice is a closer and closer approximation of the true sacrifice which yields wholeness. Each higher class takes the sacrifice to the next meta-level until the unthinkable limit is reached. At the unthinkable boundary at meta-level four, the inward interface to the heavens is reached. The class system of the Hindus is a kind of societal tower of Babel which attempts to reach the heaven of the unthinkable beyond Being four. The ritual construction of Being for Hindu society is a massive project analogous to the technological project of putting a man on the moon. The technological project places a man in outer space, while the Indo-European spiritual project places the man in inner space at the core of the community as the secret powerhouse that the king can draw upon to give inward unity to the community.