Dear Marion,

Wonderful, wonderful, Katenus exclaimed when I showed him
your letter.  That girl is so smart, and she understands
everything. To which I replied: Now you mustn't be patronizing
or condescending, she wouldn't like that. Ok, Ok said Katenus,
I'm sorry, I take it all back. So she isn't smart, and she
doesn't understand everything. Will that make her feel better?
No, I said, it's Ok to say she's smart and understands everything,
you just mustn't say it in a patronizing way.

Let's look at the letter, Katenus said, and we spread it out
on the little table that serves as his desk in his cell.

_    "I am very eager to learn, when you and Katenus
_    have a chance to confer some more, what reality is. 
_    I was surprised when I read that
_     
_    The postulate of God in the Judaic-Christian tradition,
_    Katenus went on, is a deliberate attempt to secure a reality
_    outside of and independent of individual consciousness
_     
_    In the Jewish tradition, isn't God himself residing
_    in one's consciousness? 
_    
_    There are elaborate rules that forbid envisioning God
_    as linked to an object. 
_    
_    This makes it tricky to understand how God,
_    who we may know only through our consciousness,
_    and through communication with others
_    whose consciousness is also inhabited by God,
_    how such a consciousness - dependent God
_    could serve to stabilize concepts,
_    facts beyond one's consciousness.
_     

Katenus proceeded: She questions my saying,

_    The postulate of God in the Judaic-Christian tradition,
_    Katenus went on, is a deliberate attempt to secure a reality
_    outside of and independent of individual consciousness

I stand corrected. I could have said it less ambiguously:
I should have said:

The postulate of God in the Judaic-Christian tradition
is an inward postulate, i.e. a postulate within consciousness
which has the effect of seeming to secure a reality outside of
and independent of that individual consciousness in which the
postulate of God resides.

I'll be interested, said Katenus, in her comments.
_     
The rest of the letter is unambiguous:

_    In the Jewish tradition, isn't God himself residing
_    in one's consciousness? 
_                       YES
_    
_    There are elaborate rules that forbid envisioning God
_    as linked to an object. 
_                       ABSOLUTELY
_
_    This makes it tricky to understand how God,
_    who we may know only through our consciousness,
_    and through communication with others
_    whose consciousness is also inhabited by God,
_
_         THE COMMUNICATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS WITH OTHERS
_         IS THE PROVINCE OF ART. LET'S LEAVE THAT FOR
_         ANOTHER LETTER.
_
_    how such a consciousness - dependent God
_    could serve to stabilize concepts,
_    facts beyond one's consciousness.
_     
"facts beyond one's consciousness." - that phrase is the kicker,
the clue, as Nancy Drew would have said. I wonder where she got the
idea of "facts beyond one's consciousness." asked Katenus. "maybe,"
I answered,  "it's something she picked up in the lab, I mean, like
a cold, a virus or a fungus. I've been quoting over and over from
the other Bible: Das Hoechste waere zu begreifen, dass alles Faktische
schon Theorie ist. Obviously, if all facts are theories already, then
all facts are within consciousness, which is where they belong and the
only location where they make sense." To which Katenus replied: "Facts
beyond ones' consciousness.""Facts beyond one's consciousness.""You
know what facts beyond ones consciousness are: facts beyond ones
consciousness are the Golden Calf. Tell her it's time to stop dancing."

Katenus continued: I've been meditating on that children's song:
Weisst Du wieviel Sternlein stehen, with its assurance that God
has counted them all, all the stars in the heavens, and all the clouds
that stream across the sky, all the gnats in the sunbeam, all the fish
in the cool waters, and all the dreams of all the children. He's counted
and counted, everything, and I mean everything. In meditating on this
miraculous accountant, I was reminded on Leibniz who explained that the
physical and the spiritual worlds were two integrals all of whose
differentials corresponded one with another according to a pre-established
harmony: praestabilierte Harmonie. I understood then for the first time,
the connection between Leibniz the theologian whose God differentiated
the wholes of spiritual and physical existence respectively into
infinitesimals which corresponded one with the other by virtue of a
preestablished harmony, and Leibniz the mathematician who avowedly in
the likeness of God integrated all the imagined differentials of
mathematical fantasy into an integral whole.

One of my mother's social acquaintances in post WW I Braunschweig
was a certain Frau Kramer, the widow of the sculptor Arnold Kramer
of the beautiful Eulenspiegelbrunnen in the Altstadt, who would
habitually conclude long, rambling expositions with the invitation:
"Und nun kommen Sie!" (And now it's your turn.)

Jochen