THINKING FOR PARADISE

Conservatism in actual fact originated at the very moment that the idea of the Progressive/secular was born and is its twin brother. Having taken for themselves the idea of progress, materialist thinking condemned its idealist brother to the fate of having to exist in perennial stagnation, with no possibility to evolve or change its course. Because change itself in the thinking, in the wake of god, or elsewhere was necessarily premised on an ongoing process of sociality, wherein prophetic thought reconfigured the very structures of this thinking through its approximations to the historic moment and to ever new social demands. The event that we call ‘secularism’ is basically a continuation of the binary structure in thought which originated with the idea of the coming of ‘light’, which in actual fact was not simply premised upon the material fact of the creation of light, but was more prominently a theological event. It was this event that generated the idea that the whole social world and the world of ideation was divided into binary structures, with the inevitable consequence that one side of it was deemed appropriate and the other deficient. The Book of Genesis in the Bible reminds us that what we call darkness was there along with god and was spread over the depths and so is not to be judged in the wake o what we call light.  While in Buddhist thought there is actually an imperative to go beyond this binary structure of good and evil (Dhammapada ) through the invocation of a sociality, and a manner of self and social interrogation premised upon a multiplicity of indices (it is important to thought that it is not properly ‘integrated’ into an overwhelming singularity, or a binary which in actuality is instrumental in operating a polarity to the advantage of institutionalized corporeal power, and looks at difference in an inherently condescending or condemnatory manner, that it remains heterotopic).
 Both the structure of total integration with Power (Adwaita)where through the mirage of singularity, the real multiplicity of the social is subsumed and a mode of thought incapable of accounting for difference is put in place (this seems to be the actual ‘maya’ that Brahminism talks about, which though attributed to god was actually a creation of this act of covering up the inevitable multiplicity of the social world by the institution of brahminism, and hence the importance of the Chandala who appears on the scene to throw a question at Sankara) , and the dualism of the binary(Light/ darkness, good/evil, progressive /conservative, secular/religious, cosmopolitan/ tribal, pure/ impure) wherein a division is instituted with the canonization of the aspect that is integrated with social power structures that are hierarchically premised and the inevitable degradation of its ‘other’ half which creates an inevitable ongoing struggle between the two parts everywhere in the world of thought and the world at large.
 The story of the eviction of man from paradise, (which is also an act that mankind repeats ad-infinitum in their personal and public lives) in this sense was an act through which power actually usurped the right to mediate between man and God and thus had given birth to the notion of a mediated ‘heaven’ which in this sense is no more a paradise where everybody could co-exist in the here and now, but a place of displaced desire, which can only be reached by the select few, and from which most people were to be kept away. The person who is thus thrown out from paradise is the prophet (Adam/ Mahabali) himself, and this leads to the destabilization of paradise and this act itself, one can easily see, was done by political power and not exactly by God. This means that any paradise can only be reinstated by the reversal of this act, and that there could only be a paradise in the here and now.   After the two thousand years, it is time now for the re -arrival of paradise, since hell has been locked up and the key thrown away and the people will throw away their shackles and come together. The first step in this gesture towards paradise, then, is to recognize the other, who for a long time in history had to be thrown out, or kept away, deemed impure or corrupt, and corrupting because of his different quest for truth. So think ahead and seize the truth, thereby materialising the ideal in this very present.