Gwyn injected, “Or as the Jesus recognized by Jefferson and Holden tried to tell people:  You are all children of one Father and you can know that Father when you can realize that ‘I am in the Father and the Father in me’.”

“Yes.” Karl agreed, “That states the same perception in different words.  But Lakamba and I did not bring Jesus into our discussion—and certainly not what Nietzsche calls the anti-Christ teachings of Paul that became the basis of the theocratic inquisitions.  Lakamba and I simply recognize each other as two clear-eyed individuals looking at one reality.  We had no difficulty in agreeing on the continuity between the aborigional creative consciousness and the individual creative consciousness.

“Even evolution was not a cause for disagreement between us.  We agree that the only conceivable method of creating diverse personalities by the aborigional creative consciusness was to grant them individual autonomy and allow evolutionary development through perception and correction of past mistakes.  Whether evolutionary development is through the medium of tangible organic continuity and mutation, or through the medium of an intangible unit of creative consciousness being reincarnated, the method remains unchanged.  The method is clearly evident and we both respect it.

“It is only on the question of where do we go from here that our paths separate.  Our difference comes because I view joy as the prime mover of creation, a joy that properly continues as a valid motivation of human will.  Lakamba looks at the mess humans have made of life and wants a karmic reversal that will end in re-absorption of individual will into a Nirvanic oneness.”

“Lakamba wants to blow out the candle,” Gwyn repeated her previous words.

Karl said, “That touches Lakamba’s point of confusion.  Blowing out the candle was the original meaning of Nirvana.  Over four or five thousand years, as you doubtless know, it has gradually changed from total dissolution of individual personalities to making the individual a clean instrument of, or discrete manifestation of, the universal creative consciousness.  the changed viewpoint is the basis of Lakamba’s confusion.  And it doesn’t help him that the confusion has been building up in the main stream of Hinduism for thousands of years.

“Remember that the concept of karma is not limited to counterbalancing past unkindness or past viciousness with present kindness and peace.  The required compensatory action for past mistakes may be extremely violent.  The karma now building a requirement for violent action throughout the whole world must compensate for an excessive past submissiveness and tolerance.  It must compensate for the mercy that spared the underhanded schemer when he was held at sword’s point.  It must compensate for the charity that preserved the incompetent to the end that a whole species of pathetically incompetent zombis might be bred.