As I am neither a semiotician nor a linguist, I confess that I often need a very good dictionary and a history app to glean from Dr. Ellis’s sentences her intended meanings, and yet this effort often yields great treasures.  What a joy it must be to see in normal words the path they took and the influences they brought with them  before they reached us.  To people like Dr. Ellis, words are not just words but storehouses of meanings which delight, inform, and reveal how deeply and richly we are all connected.

I cannot comment on all of what Maureen has said in her Chapter 3, indeed some of it is quite beyond my skills of decryption, but many passages caught me long enough to where I could begin to decipher there layered meanings.  Consider what’s going on in these two sentences: 

“Omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient creator Akaar, preserver Ukaar, and destroyer Makaar ‐AUM invite: ‘Come’. A divine covenant signals consequential karma, ‘If … then’ conditional tryst, causality within (un)conscious Chaos.” 

The first part refrences the familiar Hindu trinity: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva in an uncommon way, revealing them calling to us, each in their own sphere of influence and yet united, forming a whole.  The next part draws us into what this invitation must lead to: a divine world of cause and effect, a romantic relation with powerful seemingly chaotic forces which by our dance with it spins off causality for us and everyone and everything else.    There are dozens of sentences like these that invite unpacking.

Consider next this sentence:

“Logos, Divine reason, dialectically orders chaotic humanity from Manu (first man in Hindu mythology) to Emmanuel (God with us), disciplinary ‐ologies from anthropology to theology.” 

Here, I think, we are being told that God’s great ordering force, Logos, has guided a great evolution from the time of first man (whether Manu or Adam or any other first person) creating along the way the sciences we use to examine these forces.

There’s hidden tensions and sometimes blatant warnings in Maureen’s writing. In the following sentence we see a subtle plea to examine and discover that we all have common metaphoric foundations and that there is so much more than just the joys of trade to share: “Insight, un‐ derstanding, and research into shared metaphoric foundations must inform cultural exchange beyond merciful commerce.”

Consider this one as well:

“Metalepsis leaps across on‐ tological reality – water tasting better than wine; prodigal sons forgiven; and socially‐despised, poverty‐stricken Samaritan proving to be a good neighbour.”

Metalepsis apparently refers to a shift from one narrative level to another, like characters from a movie appearing to step out of the screen. It’s meant to cause reflection and to break down the barriers in our thinking.  In Mauree‘ns culturally rich sentence, things that normally classed one way are now classed another: “water tasting better than wine; prodigal sons forgiven; and socially‐despised, poverty‐stricken Samaritan proving to be a good neighbour.”  This is, I think, a result of the transformative dance with the forces spoken of above.

For Dr. Ellis and all linguists, words are much more than they seem.  You can see this in the quote she used from Badger:  ‘When we begin to take the problem of language planning for world peace seriously, we shall have public language museums in our centres of culture, and they will be essential instruments of civic education’ (Bodmer, 1944: 24), demonstrating human language as organic progressive unity.”  How uncommon to think of language as an “organic progressive unity” and yet, with writing like that of Dr. Ellis, so it seems. 

I love Maureen’s use of Jung here:  “Rationality, ‘a single psychic function’ over‐valued becomes logical one‐sidedness, ‘a mark of barbarism’ (Jung, CW 13:17), yet for those strong enough to ‘sustain paradox’, conversions afford ‘the highest degree of religious certainty’ (Jung, CW 12:19).”  I wish I understood this paradox better.  I take it to mean that we are all, if we come to understand it, much more than we seem. We are mortals for sure, and blood and bones, but also the children of God swept up in an ecstatic wind of grace which does not suffer our reason as it is quite beyond all we can imagine.  It is, as Maureen notes, using Einstein’s words: imagination which ‘encircles the world’ [is] more important than ‘limited’ knowledge. 

From my Baha’i perspective, Chardin had it right, as Maureen noted: “Jesuit palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin’s (1966: 118, 139) Cosmo‐noo‐genesis, Spirit of Earth, fuses Hindu Bhumi and Christian mysti‐ cism, psychic depth of love: ‘the comparative value of religious creeds may be measured by their respective power of evolutive activation’. Vedic Purusha/ Sanskrit: पार्श्व, Jain Pārśva, Judaic Parashat haShavua totalise ‘a new faith: religion of evolution’ (Teilhard de Chardin, 1966: 91).  Religion evolves, because it is carried and moved by a constant dynamic force. Of course the problem is, we often cling to the old not recognizing the progressive forces moving everything else. 

Near the end, it should be noted that Maureen makes strong practical appeals not only to work for peace but also to be better stewards of the planet.  

There is, of course, much more in the chapter, but perhaps what I have written is useful in encouraging continued reflection on the gifts this author has given us.