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ASMÁ, from the Arabic word asmá for names, is an acronym for Applied Studies in Mythic Analysis™. Here, mythic refers to sacred stories and is not used as a deprecation. ASMÁ centers on the nominalist proposition of the absolute sovereignty of God. Thus, according to divine command theory, God's decree is good only because He wills it. Since there is, in the eyes of God, no virtue apart from His omnipotent Will or Teleology, good and evil function, not as fixed eternal essences or ideal forms, but as names for the commands, the Cause of God, resulting from His Will.
As God has a free Will, so each person has, absent whatever limitations God may elect to impose and accounting for any circumscription by preexisting sociocultural constraints, a free will agency, as well. The individual's prerogative is whether to conform to a personal nominalism, the supremacy of the human will posited by Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre, and Aleister Crowley, or to the divine nominalisms promoted in certain texts of the so-called Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Although one continues to acknowledge one's own will, without attempting to suppress it, one deliberately chooses a path of surrender to the Will of God.
Language Games
There is no direct correspondence between words and realities. Since language expresses only an accidental or intentional relationship with particulars and their categories or connections, a linguistic contradiction is indeed a contradiction.
Acknowledging that narratives are inexact and perspectival (as with the Jain doctrine of anakanta), allowing for diverse, even contradictory, divine and human reality constructions, one should simultaneously recognize, even advocate and celebrate, a radical multidoxy or polydoxy of variegated religious systems.
As to the Christianities, for example, heresy (Greek, hairesis) is presented throughout the Christian New Testament, not as the benign presence of alternative beliefs, but as the self-willed promotion of malignant division. It may even be said that common views of heresy as heterodoxy, serving as they do to divide believers on the basis of doctrinal differences, are themselves isomorphic with New Testament usages of hairesis!
ASMÁ Theism: A Categorical Framework
From the standpoint of ASMÁ, human spirits, as names for the God-given capacities associated with particular individuals, may permit one to conform to God's multiple Purposes for man, but those Purposes refer to God's Will or Intentionality. They do not constitute an innately coactive essence of all human spirits. Moreover, since the purpose of man, distinguished from the divine Will and Purpose, is no more than a nominal universal of the free wills of persons, these spirits are powers only, not powers concatenated with God's Purposes for man. Similarly, the worlds of God might be delineated as existential classifications, as constructions, or as names for beings and entities with similar attributes, not as eternal essences or ideal forms.
From one standpoint, Neo-Platonic ideal forms, essences, or realities are, in the Bahá'í scriptures, analogous to John Locke's nominal essences, frequently revisioned as relative and contingent linguistic categories or names, as divine constructions of reality, as literary narratives, and as typological and comparative classification schemes founded on the observed attributes of single entities.
ASMÁ Spirit: A Second Categorical Framework
What now follows is an attempt to descrbe the capacities (powers), and categories of capacities, named the human spirit.
ASMÁ Praxis: A Surrender to God's Will
Parallels can be drawn between ASMÁ Praxis, the liberative social service dimension of ASMÁ, and certain concepts in various religious communties. Only three will be mentioned.
As expressed in some of the Judaisms, the translation of the Hebrew, and Lurianic Kabbalistic, term, tikkun olam, is repairing the world. Through its reinterpretation by the Jewish Renewal Movement, it has become a clarion call for environmental custodianship, peace, and social justice for the poor.
The word jihád is Arabic for struggle, not for holy war. Many Islámic moderates have situated its significance in the wrestling with one's nafs, the multiple planes of the lower nature or ego, and in an exertion for human equity, peace, and the the rights of the poor. From their standpoint, only jiháds which are purposefully defensive, of one's own or another religious community, should be sanctioned on the battlefield.
With respect to Christianity, a myriad of liberals and postliberals, including those identifying with Every Church a Peace Church or Sojourners, promote inclusiveness, peace, and social justice among both Christians and those of other faiths. In the United States, the United Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ are two of the more open and progressive denominations.
However, conservative evangelicals, constituting one of the more influential categories of American Christendom, are among the most passionate advocates for corporate capitalism, considered by some to be oppressive of the poor, and among the most dedicated opponents of economic socialism. Yet, these positions would be difficult to support from the New Testament literature:
All who believed were together and held everything in common, and
they began selling their property and possessions and distributing
the proceeds to everyone, as anyone had need. Every day they
continued to gather together by common consent in the temple courts,
breaking bread from house to house, sharing their food with glad and
humble hearts, praising God and having the good will of all the
people. And the Lord was adding to their number every day those who
were being saved.
-- Acts 2:44-47 (from NET
Bible)
Jesus also appears to have believed, in contradiction to prevailing evangelical conceptions of salvation without works, that the worthiness of individuals to inherit the Kingdom of God will be judged on evidence of their benevolence toward the poor. This text provides the locus classicus for his position.:
When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him,
then he will sit on his glorious throne.
All the nations will be assembled before him, and he will separate
people one from another like a shepherd separates the sheep from the
goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
Then the king will say to those on his right, "Come, you who are
blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the
foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was
thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you
invited me in, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and
you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me."
Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when did we see you hungry
and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we
see you a stranger and invite you in, or naked and clothe you? When
did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?
"
And the king will answer them, "I tell you the truth, just as you did
it for one of the least of these brothers or sisters of mine, you did
it for me."
"Then he will say to those on his left, "Depart from me, you
accursed, into the eternal fire that has been prepared for the devil
and his angels! For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I
was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink.
I was a stranger and you did not receive me as a guest, naked and
you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me."
Then they too will answer, "Lord, when did we see you hungry or
thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not
give you whatever you needed?"
Then he will answer them, "I tell you the truth, just as you did not
do it for one of the least of these, you did not do it for me. And
these will depart into eternal punishment, but the righteous into
eternal life."
-- Matthew 25:31-46 (from NET
Bible)
Christ clearly expected His followers to serve the poor, and He assessed their qualification for eternal life, in the Kingdom of His Father, on the basis of their philanthropy. "And whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me," (Matthew 10:38, NET Bible), He is quoted as saying.
In a similar vein, the Apostle James asserted that "... faith without works is dead" (James 2:26, NET Bible). While not inconsistent with Paul's condemnation of faithless works as indicative of self-righteousness, James would seem to have considered a workless faith to be a contradiction in terms.
Briefly, among the categories of praxis which might be utilized in ASMÁ are those involving an active participation in social and economic development. Opportunities for volunteerism could run the gambit from assisting non-profit agencies with low-income families and individuals to, perhaps more ambitiously, designing programs for aiding displaced victims, especially the poor, of natural and man-made disasters or planning and building intentional communities for the poor and disenfranchised. The last two of these projects are likely better suited to regional, rather than strictly local, operation.
Application
Spiritual transformation, the higher alchemy, is constructed, in mystical relationship with God, as a process beginning with the exercise of free will -- prayer, meditation, study of spiritual subjects, and service -- attracting the assistance of the magnet of faith and service), which, in turn, enhances one's inner vision (insight) and illumines one's mental faculties, thereby allowing one's body to be coordinated in service to God's Will. The end result is the development of virtues (spiritual attributes).
The object is, over one's life course, to painstakingly replace one's human imperfections, the absence of virtuousness, with an attainment of spiritual qualities. Gradually, as the spirit of faith, or magnet of faith and service, and faculty of inner vision, both capacities of the human spirit, are developed, one's conscience, or will, is uplifted, virtue by virtue, from the world of human imperfection to the world of human spirituality.
The methodology involves the radical destructurization™ (deconstruction) of the old mind, including its socially scripted patterns of reactions. Given that many individuals habitually react to situations from their human imperfections, if a person desires to escape these socialized, reactive constructions of the mind, she must, each time, fall into the habit of pausing, reflecting, and making a spiritually informed, salutary decision. Through this means, and by associating with a community of like-minded souls, her reactive constructions can, reaction by reaction, be progressivelly conquered and replaced with the spiritually proactive constructions of a new mind.
Clearly, not all scripts can, or must, be avoided. The continuity, and effective functioning, of communities, societies, and organizations demands a degree of conformity to certain socialized roles.
Nonetheless, scripted behaviors must be countenanced and deliberate, and the individual, not the script, needs to exercise the final veto. It is she who is required not to forfeit her perquisite to redact, where indicated by her wisdom, any socially constructed scripts, whereas the scripts themselves should never be privileged to dominate her decision-making processes.
Suggestions for scripting ASMÁ include:
ASMÁ, the transformational spirituality surveyed in this paper, is not intended as a program for the masses but, rather, for those reasonably intelligent and educated individuals interested in its subject matter. In surveying the participatory elements of spiritual and social construction (construction), various content delivery systems, including seminars and workshops, will, over time, be developed, and persons will be qualified as ASMÁ Trainers™.
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