Any reasonably astute observer would note that there is a dearth of material on this topic on this website, setting aside for the moment my comments on the 'stargate.' This has been as result of my own caution and out of deference to the more academically inclined. The academy has never been hospitable to the weird.

In my twenty years of overt philosophical deliberations, it was only late in the game that I confronted the phenomenological dimension. Even so my contact with this domain is largely through the literature, and to a much lesser degree through personal accounts. What direct experience I may have had has been very limited and already noted.

What I have noted above all is the striking degree of vulnerability of modern civilization and the modern psyche to things anomalous. It is this vulnerability that provides a focus for the humane and cosmic politics of the paradigms. In the end it is the political aspect rather than the experiential that motivates my interest.

If the world is a mental construct, then the most difficult thing for me to explain is the amazing lack of anomalous phenomena. But slippery Smith is going to turn that problem right around, of course! I argue that it is precisely our extreme vulnerability that explains the extreme rarity of the anomalous. I do this by appealing to the power of final causation.

Modern civilization is the logical outcome of the millennia of the pre-modern. Modern civilization is the logical precursor of our spiritual resurrection. It is the telos of the eschaton that enforces the necessary conditions of modernity, which include the success of science and which preclude its violation.

The eschaton is the fulcrum of the world. The vulnerability of modernity is the fulcrum of the eschaton. The political sensibilities surrounding that vulnerability provide the political clout that enables the messiah. The tail (eshcat?) wags the dog (canus?). Thus endeth the lesson in cosmic politics.

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rev. 2/12/98