A Sakta Method for Comparative Theology: Upside Down, Inside Out

A Sakta Method for Comparative Theology: Upside-Down, Inside-Out offers the world’s first Sakta thealogy of religions and a Sakta anti-method, method, and a-method for comparative theology. For Saktas, the thread of religious diversity is part of the rich tapestry of cosmological, topographical, environmental, and bio-diversity, which is the Goddess’ collective (sama??i) and individuated (vya??i) forms. Sakta religious diversity is complex, layered, and paradoxical, allowing ontological similarities, ontological differences, and irreducibility. A Sakta thealogy of religious diversity transcends humans and the borders of religion, politics, society, and speciesism. It is panentheist in that it reveres the material and the spiritual equally since they are knotted and inseparable. As “anti-method,” for comparative theology, Sakta thealogy inverts the standard hypertextual approach to doing comparative theology. As “anti-method,” it proposes engaging theological activities based on the view of the body-mind-sense complex as non-hierarchical and entrenched in a tangled, mutually conditioned world. As “method,” it employs the bodies’ auditory, gestural, and haptic interfaces to create vibrotactile feedback that takes interlocutors beyond conventional, conditioned reality and toward Oneness. Finally, as “a-method,” Sakta thealogy offers an inverted way of being and acting in the world that transcends putting the body-mind-sense complex to work by using the metaphor of the upside-down asvattha tree in the Bhagavad Gita.