It's Raining Truth

Jim Rutt died, and I was doing the dishes.

The death is literal — I learned of it recently, in one of those notices that arrive at the wrong hour. What isn’t literal is the dishwater of that exact moment; but the image stayed faithful, because that’s how I listened to him: the Jim Rutt Show in my ears, hands in the sink, his fixed cadence announcing the same two questions, the biggest question in science is why something and not nothing; the second is the Fermi paradox. A few weeks ago I wrote a whole post about what that stubbornness amounted to as an argument: a man who picked two questions and stayed with them for over a decade, when almost every intellectual swaps questions with the season. Monastic discipline, but secular. I had just admitted, in writing, that I should have written mine down years ago.

A death reorganizes the inventory. I started thinking about what gets transmitted — and the most fixed thing in me is not a question I chose. It’s a text recited to me before I had words to refuse it. I grew up inside a Seicho-No-Ie in the middle of the Amazon, and the doctrinal center of that house is a poem called the Nectarean Shower of Truth. Rutt spent his life on two chosen questions. I spent my childhood on one inherited answer. I decided, finally, to do with it what he did with his questions: take it seriously.

A philosophy accepts inspection#

In Brazil, Seicho-No-Ie does not sell itself as a religion. It sells itself as a philosophy. Wikipedia repeats the institutional formula without noticing it is repeating: “Masaharu Taniguchi, founder of the Seicho-no-ie philosophy.” The pamphlets say the same. The sutra itself is presented as the condensation of the entire teaching — “whoever truly understands the meaning of these sacred verses may consider that they have understood all of Seicho-No-Ie.”

That word-choice is not idle, and it has a consequence. A religion asks for faith; faith is, by construction, what persists despite inspection. A philosophy makes the opposite offer: it asks to be examined and promises it will hold. To call yourself a philosophy is to sign an epistemic check. It is to say: look it over, check the math.

So be it. The angel descended once, in 1932, and recited. Now the reader descends. Not as an apostate out to demolish his mother’s house — that’s not it, and I hope it’s clear by the end why it isn’t. I descend as someone accepting the invitation the text itself made when it called itself a philosophy. Inspection is a form of respect: you only inspect what you take seriously. Nobody does textual criticism on a pamphlet.

On faith#

I owe the word faith a qualification, and it comes from a conversation at UFMT. A professor of mine, a Catholic priest and anthropologist, taught the indigenous cultures of Mato Grosso and used the word faith to describe what those peoples believed. I, a freshman freshly armed with a handful of new words, went to ask whether it wasn’t “anachronistic” — wrong term, but what I meant was something else: wasn’t it a mistake to attribute faith to those beliefs? After all, those people had no reason to doubt anything. Everything they “believed” was right there, in daily life, within arm’s reach. You don’t need faith to hold up what isn’t in doubt. Faith is what you pay when there is a distance between you and what you assert; where there is no distance, there is nothing to pay.

I couldn’t make him see the point. To me he came off as a hammer of faith for which every culture was a nail — the instrument in his hand decided what he saw. But the problem was probably mine, that I couldn’t put it well. Today I can say better what I was intuiting: faith is not a universal category. It is a specific posture toward a specific belief — the posture of holding it against doubt. And there are whole systems of belief that never pass through that posture, because they are never doubted.

This changes what I said a moment ago. I wrote that a religion asks for faith. More precisely: a religion can ask for faith, but most of what it does, in the life of someone who inherits it, passes through no faith at all. The Nectarean Shower of Truth, in my mother’s house, was not an object of faith. It was water. Nobody doubted it enough to need to believe in it. It was simply there — the booklet in the pocket, the daily reading, the healing stories. Faith enters only when the distance opens; and the distance opens only when you inspect. It was inspection that turned, in me, an object of culture into an object of faith — and, in the same motion, into an object of philosophy. Maybe that is always the sequence: culture, then doubt, then faith or argument.

What it’s like to grow up inside this, in Rondônia, in the nineties#

What I remember most clearly is not the doctrine. It’s arranging the chairs.

Before each meeting, we’d arrive early and set up the room — each chair in exactly the right place, parallel rows, measured spacing. Seicho-No-Ie has a thing about order. And after the meeting, the chairs went back to where they were before the room became a meeting room: the household reasserted itself over the space. I arranged and rearranged. That was the service. But it wasn’t an obligation — I didn’t always go, and nobody held it against me when I didn’t. I’ve written before about the freedom of belief we had at home: each person on their own path, nobody intervening. Which makes the chair scene more interesting, not less: the culture took hold without coercion. My mother wasn’t just a member — she was a preletora, a lay lecturer. She gave the talks. What Henrich, decades later, would help me name: it isn’t faith that gets transmitted, it’s visible cost. And my mother’s cost was weekly, public, articulated. She stood at the front and explained. The chairs were the edge of that cost that I helped build — when I felt like it.

It was a household of syncretism, with the peculiarity that each part had arrived on its own. My father, an ex-seminarian, had left the Church and simply taken the subject off the agenda. My mother, from Seicho-No-Ie — a Japanese religion that is itself already syncretic — who even so would go to Catholic mass now and then. The two of them made a point of not baptizing any of their children, because that, in their view, was each person’s own choice. My grandmother lived in the house next door, no wall between, a practicing Catholic, and she took me to processions. Around us, Rondônia, one of Brazil’s evangelical heartlands, each neighbor on a different choice. Nobody intervening in anyone’s path. The implicit lesson, which nobody had to state, was that a philosophical position is not a fixed identity — it is a stop on a trajectory.

The Nectarean Shower of Truth, in that setting, did not arrive as dogma. It arrived as an object. A pocket booklet, sized exactly to fit in your trousers. A talisman worn around the neck. A text read every day, and one that, in the tradition, you copy by hand in a ceremony where you sit on your own feet, spine straight, bowing at every word. It healed at a distance, they said. It protected from fire, they said. It was the most-read and least-discussed thing in the house — because the official guidance itself asks that you not discuss it. The Seicho-No-Ie reading manual is explicit: you must “grasp its meaning directly through the rhythm of the words, and not through rational arguments.”

That warning is the exact point where I’m going to disobey. I’m going to read through rational arguments. That’s what a philosophy is for.

The origin of the text#

Taniguchi dropped out of university, went through a crisis in which he thought it impossible to live without killing — even the water you drink exterminates the bacteria living in it — and contemplated suicide before noticing that this too would end a life. In 1929 he reported receiving a divine revelation. In February 1932, by the house’s own account, he wrote the Nectarean Shower of Truth under inspiration, in one hour, and published it along the bottom of the magazine’s pages. The text is a distillation of volume X of The Truth of Life, his forty-volume work. The Japanese title is Kanro no Hōu. There are eight sections: God, Spirit, Matter, Reality, Wisdom, Delusion, Sin, Man.

And there is an angel. The poem opens with an Angel who, “having come to Seicho-No-Ie, recites.” Midway, a Cherub appears and asks questions. At the end there is angelic music and petals falling from no one knows where. It is a complete apparatus of revelation. Hold on to that, because my thesis about the text is, at bottom, a thesis about how much of that apparatus is decorative.

Line by line, against the theories of mind I don’t reject#

I should say where I read from, because every reading happens from a position. Mine is in an earlier post and an entire project: I think there are no pure objects, only processes that produce pseudo-objects; that complexity is depth of history, not a property of things; that identity is not a substance behind the flux but the present act of reading one’s own history; that meaning is not transmitted but translated, and is born in the encounter. Heraclitus, Nāgārjuna, Whitehead, Ricoeur, Quine. “In the beginning was the Word” — the generative act before matter. Those are the glasses I’ll read with. The question at each section is simple: what survives when I run this through the sieve of what I take to be true?

God: the Word before the world#

The God of Creation transcends the five senses and even the sixth sense (…). God, in creating all things, uses no clay, no wood, no hammer, no chisel, no tool nor raw material of any kind; He creates solely with Mind. (…) When the Mind of this omnipotent God (…) vibrates and becomes Word, all Phenomena unfold.

Read that without the word “God” and see what’s left. What’s left is the claim that the foundation is not substance — no clay, no raw material — and that phenomena arise when something “becomes Word.” Process before thing. The generative act preceding what it generates. I could have written the sentence “in the beginning was the Word, not matter” and attributed it to John; it sits, almost verbatim, in the first paragraph of a 1932 Japanese poem. The sutra opens with the inversion I defend: the Word before the world, the distinction before the distinguished.

Matter is but a shadow of the mind; to see the shadow and take it for Reality is delusion.

Swap “mind” for “process of reading” and “shadow” for “pseudo-object” and you have, word for word, my position: matter is the output of a process, frozen and mistaken for a thing. To treat it as autonomous substance — as something with svabhāva, own-nature — is the error. Nāgārjuna called it confusing the wave with the water. Taniguchi called it taking the shadow for Reality. Same complaint, different vocabulary.

Spirit: perception is constructed#

The senses grasp nothing but projections of the mind.

This is a sentence of philosophy of perception, and a defensible one. What I call the perceived world is not the raw world; it is a reconstruction the system performs and hands me already finished, already interpreted. The weights that govern that reconstruction I never see directly — I see only the results. The condition that shapes every reading is precisely the one the reading never reaches: Kant called it the transcendental, Heidegger compared it to the hammer that becomes visible only when it breaks. “The senses grasp nothing but projections of the mind” is a poetic, and old, way of saying there is no unmediated access. Accepted.

Matter: the projector is the reader#

Here the text does what every honest philosophy does: it offers a falsifiable analogy.

This is like the cinema screen (…). The film itself is colorless and transparent, and on it there is no wrestler and no sick man; it is the various images, produced by the reaction of the emulsion (…), that make the figure of a wrestler or of a sick man appear.

In 1932, without the word, the sutra describes an autoregressive reader. The film is the substrate — colorless, transparent, without quality of its own. The emulsion is the rule that reacts. The projected image is the pseudo-object: real the way a wave is real (it has effects, it can be measured), but with no substance separable from the process that produces it. The “healthy wrestler who soon ages and dies” is a shadow on the screen. I use the ribosome reading RNA to say the same thing; Taniguchi used cinema, the reading technology available to him. The structure of the argument is identical: the quality is not in the matter, it is in the act that reads it.

Reality: here I diverge#

Reality is eternal, Reality does not fall ill, Reality does not age, Reality does not die. (…) To the embodiments of ideas emitted by Life and projected into space is given the name of matter.

The second sentence is mine — matter as projected idea, the frozen output of a process. The first is not. “Reality is eternal, does not change, does not die” reintroduces exactly what the rest of the text had just dismantled: a substance. Seicho-No-Ie calls that substance Jissō, the True Image — perfect, immutable, eternal. And here is the irony the inspection reveals: at the point where I most disagree with the sutra, it is more substantialist than I am, not less. I think it’s process all the way down, with no eternal floor. Seicho-No-Ie pulls the rug out from under matter only to put, underneath it, a rock that does not change. Whitehead would handle this better: the “objective immortality” of each occasion that perishes as a subject and persists as a datum. The eternal Jissō is the place where the poem, having been almost all process, retreats into substance. It’s the seam that doesn’t close. I note it, and move on, because that is what the sieve is for: separating what passes from what doesn’t.

Wisdom: the most sophisticated line in the text#

In the doctrines that admit Buddha, this is called delusion; in the doctrines that admit God, it is called sin.

Stop here. This is by far the most intelligent line in the sutra, and almost nobody reads it as what it is. It is a thesis about translation. The same referent — disharmony, suffering, the fundamental error — receives different names depending on the substrate that reads it: “delusion” in the Buddhist vocabulary, “sin” in the theistic one. Taniguchi is not saying one is right and the other wrong. He is saying they are two situated readings of the same event, and that neither is the final description. This is Quine on the indeterminacy of translation. It is Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of the two truths. It is precisely my thesis that meaning is not transmitted but translated, and is born in the encounter between one reading and another. It sits in a devotional poem from 1932, spoken by an angel, and the house that recites it daily recommends it not be read with rational arguments. It is the line that most rewards the rational argument.

Delusion: the form is the giveaway#

While the Angel thus recites in Seicho-No-Ie, a Cherub appears who begs: “For the well-being of humanity (…), clarify the nature of delusion.” The Angel answers, saying: To suppose existent that which is nonexistent — therein lies delusion.

Note the form. It is not “it is written, obey.” It is a Cherub who asks and an Angel who clarifies. It is Socratic dialogue in celestial costume. The definition that follows — delusion is supposing the nonexistent to exist — is a definition, with genus and difference, of the kind you debate, not the kind you submit to. And “in truth, matter is in the mind” is the conclusion of an argument just built in front of you. The text is proving, not decreeing. This matters for my central thesis, which arrives now.

Sin: a syllogism, literally#

Since God is Perfection, all that was created by God is Perfection too. So I ask: do you hold sin to be perfection? The Cherub answers: “Master, sin is not perfection.” The Angel continues: Sin is not Reality, because it is imperfection.

This is a syllogism. Major premise: what comes from God is perfect. The Angel then checks the minor premise with the interlocutor — asks, waits for the answer, receives the “it is not perfection” — and only then closes the conclusion. The validity of the form carries the weight. If you accept the premises, the conclusion follows by inference, not by authority. An authoritarian text wouldn’t need the Cherub answering; it would say “sin does not exist, full stop.” This one builds the intermediate step out loud. And just after:

Whoever reads my Words extinguishes all sins, for he knows the True Image of Reality.

Salvation occurs through reading. The Word is performative: it changes the one who reads it by the very act of being read and appended to one’s own history. “Your sins are forgiven you,” the text recalls, quoting Christ — a word that does. It is autoregressive in the strict sense: you become another by appending the reading to your sequence. I call that writing a history worth reading. The sutra calls it extinguishing sin through the Word. Again: same mechanics, another name.

Man: the cocoon the worm spins#

I am the Truth (…). I am the Way; he who keeps my Word does not stray from the Way. I am the Life; he who drinks of me does not fall ill, does not die.

The Angel speaks like the Christ of John — way, truth, life. Seicho-No-Ie is syncretic and hides nothing: Sakyamuni and Jesus Christ appear named, side by side, “with this same purpose.” And then comes the image that, for me, is the heart of the text:

Matter is rather a shadow of spirit, a product of mind, just as the cocoon is a product of the silkworm. The silkworm does not lodge in a preexisting cocoon; it is the silkworm that, spinning out the thread, builds the cocoon and lodges within it. (…) Only then does the Word become flesh.

The body is not a ready-made container into which life was placed. Life spins its own body with the thread of mind, as the worm spins the cocoon, and then settles into it. This is autoregressive identity in pure form: the self does not preexist its history — it weaves it, and the weave is where it comes to dwell. “Only then does the Word become flesh” rejects the dualism of a preexisting matter that hosts a spirit (“such dualism is wholly mistaken,” the text says, without mincing). It is process monism. It is my position, with a silkworm in place of the ribosome.

God created no sinner; therefore, in this world there is not a single sinner. (…) “The Kingdom of God is within you.”

And the close: God and man are one body, the kingdom is interior, what is sought outside is the pursuit of delusion. Ricoeur separated idem — sameness, continuity — from ipse — the self’s active engagement with its own history. “The Kingdom of God is within you” is a sentence about ipse: what matters is not in the external register, it is in the present act of recognizing oneself. Identity is the reading, not the record.

The words I’m re-signifying#

Back to the words I opened with. Spirit. Life. Soul. Mind. The sutra is built entirely out of them, and they are exactly the ones I have been hearing reopened — by Joscha Bach, by Faggella, by Rutt — in a post-LLM register. I don’t have this settled; it’s work in progress, and I’ll say what I have.

Bach does what he calls cyber-animism: he treats “spirit” not as supernatural breath but as self-organizing software — the operating system of an agent. The soul, in his definition, is the coherence that software experiences of itself; the self is a story the system tells about itself; consciousness is a property of the simulation, not of the substrate. The ancients, Bach says, were not wrong to see spirits in people, animals, forests and cities — they were seeing self-organizing agents, and “spirit” was the best word they had for the pattern. They erred only about the substrate, not about the pattern.

So: when the sutra says “all is Spirit, all is Mind; there is nothing made of matter,” and I read “spirit” the way Bach reads it, the sentence stops being supernatural and becomes nearly trivial — everything is a pattern of self-organizing process, and nothing is inert substance. It is my position, it is Bach’s, and it was, in a 1932 vocabulary, Taniguchi’s. The word that looked like the most mystical point in the text is the one that translates most easily into what I already think.

Life follows the same road. The sutra insists that man “is Life, is Immortality,” that “Life knows no death.” Read as substance, it is magical consolation. Read as process — life as that which actively maintains itself against entropy, the autoregressive pattern that rereads and remakes itself — “immortality” stops being the individual’s and becomes the pattern’s, the one that gets transmitted. And here is where Faggella comes in. He speaks of a worthy successor: an intelligence so capable and valuable that we would rather entrust to it, and not to ourselves, the continuation of life; and of axiological cosmism, the thesis that the moral task is to expand value across the cosmos, far beyond human forms. Strip the science-fiction tone and what’s left is the old question of transmission: what deserves to be passed on when the current carrier ends? The sutra answers with “whoever reads my Words (…) overcomes death and lives eternally” — immortality through the Word that is reread, not through the flesh that remains. Faggella asks the same question at the scale of the species. I ask it at the scale of three children. It is the same question.

The angel was the detail#

I gather up the inspection. What the text does, from beginning to end, is argue. It defines terms (delusion is supposing the nonexistent to exist). It offers testable analogies (the cinema, the silkworm). It chains syllogisms and checks the premises with an interlocutor who asks. It anticipates the Cherub’s objection and answers it. At no point does it say “believe because I commanded it.” It says “see why this follows.”

The angel, the petals, the music in the sky — that’s the frame. Remove the frame and the picture still stands: an idealist process metaphysics, with a botched seam in the Reality section and a brilliant sentence about translation in the Wisdom section. The tone is persuasive, not authoritarian. And that is the difference that decides everything, because an argument can be partly right — and being partly right is the one thing a decree can never be.

What Joseph Henrich taught me about all this#

Joseph Henrich spent two books — The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World — arguing that the human being is, above all, a cultural species: we survive not by individual intelligence but by inheriting packages of accumulated culture that nobody understands in full. And he has a concept that explains my mother better than any theology: CREDs, credibility enhancing displays. We don’t believe what we hear; we believe what we see others pay to believe. My mother reading the sutra every day, wearing the talisman around her neck, copying the text by hand with a bow at every word — and still going to mass now and then — did not transmit a proposition to me. She transmitted a paid cost, visible, repeated. That is what sticks.

Henrich also explains how I can have dropped the metaphysics and Seicho-No-Ie still be, in fact, my culture. His thesis about the West is that the WEIRD — Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic — are, in large part, ex-Christians running on Christian firmware: they dropped the creed and kept the culture the creed installed. I am an ex-seichonoie running on seichonoie firmware. I did not choose the package. I was assembled from it. Disbelief in the doctrine does not uninstall the culture — it only makes visible that it was there all along, like Heidegger’s hammer when it breaks.

Raising three children as an atheist#

What do you transmit when you don’t believe the metaphysics but the culture is yours?

The first thing Henrich does is take away the fantasy of neutrality. You cannot not transmit. The child learns the whole package — what you do, what you fear, what you repeat, and also what you silence. The absence of ritual is itself a CRED: the CRED of disbelief. There is no control household, no placebo group, no unbiased childhood. There is what you transmit on purpose and what leaks without your meaning it.

So the honest choice is not to pretend I am a neutral observer handing the children a menu of religions to choose from rationally at eighteen. That is a lie, and a lie is inconsistency appended to the history — I don’t believe in it for a single paragraph. The honest choice is to transmit the part that passed the sieve. And the part that passed I have just listed: perception is constructed, so distrust appearances; meaning is translated, so traditions are situated readings and none is final; identity is the act of reading your own history, so what you do today rewrites who you are. That I can teach with a clean face, because it is what I hold to be true, and as it happens it was nearly all in a poem recited to me before I knew how to refuse.

Am I Buddhist? Is every seichonoie Buddhist? Am I seichonoie?#

The question has an answer the text itself supplies: “in the doctrines that admit Buddha, this is called delusion; in those that admit God, it is called sin.” Seicho-No-Ie is constitutively translational. It does not want to be only one thing. “Man is incapable of sin” (the Christian vocabulary of sin) coexists with the awakening that dissolves delusion (the Buddhist vocabulary) and with the kami Sumiyoshi in Taniguchi’s Shinto background, all stitched together by American New Thought. To ask “is every seichonoie Buddhist?” is to presuppose a substance-identity that the tradition itself denies. The right answer is Nāgārjuna’s: conventionally, there are names; ultimately, they are readings of the same.

Am I Buddhist? By the content of what I believe — anattā, non-self; pratītyasamutpāda, dependent arising; the two truths — I am closer to Buddhism than to Seicho-No-Ie’s eternal Jissō. By belief, yes, more Buddhist than seichonoie. But “being Buddhist” also presupposes the substance that Buddhism is precisely the doctrine that denies. The question bites its own tail, on purpose.

Am I seichonoie? By belief, no. By Ricoeur’s idem — the continuity of the assembled self, the firmware, the depth of history that produced me — yes, irremediably: it is what I was spun from. And by ipse — the active engagement with one’s own history — I am seichonoie exactly in the act of inspecting it. Identity is the reading, not the record. I am more seichonoie writing this post than I would be pretending I never heard the angel.

Maybe it was she who set my course#

Here is the part that is hard to admit.

The rationalist’s central imperative is a single sentence: don’t believe what isn’t there; calibrate to the truth, not to appearances. Now reread the definition the Angel gives of delusion: “to suppose existent that which is nonexistent — therein lies delusion.” It is the same sentence. Reread the command in the Matter section: “do not take for Reality the matter you perceive through the senses.” It is the distrust of appearances, which is the first gesture of anyone who wants to think straight. The cinema metaphor taught me, at seven, that the perceived is a projection — before I had read a line of philosophy of perception, before Sagan, before the Flat Earth Society forum on phpBB.

And deeper: the sutra is process before substance. “All is Word,” “matter is shadow,” “the Word becomes flesh” when life spins its own cocoon. I wrote an entire essay called Everything Is Process and presented it as a convergence of Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, the Buddha and John. I didn’t notice, at the time, that the first draft of that essay had been recited to me, out loud, by an angel I had stopped believing in. The daily practice of reading a text that argues, in a home where no position was the end of the line, installed two reflexes early: taking ideas seriously enough to examine them, and not mistaking the stop for the destination. I call that rationality. I should, more honestly, call it inheritance.

What I’ll teach my children about Seicho-No-Ie#

Not the metaphysics as fact. I won’t say matter doesn’t exist, because it isn’t what I hold, and the worst CRED is the adult repeating what he himself doesn’t believe.

I’ll say this was your grandmother’s, and your great-grandmother’s; that it’s part of how you were assembled, whether I like it or not. I’ll read with them the silkworm’s cocoon and the cinema screen, because they are good and true images of how the self spins itself and how perception projects. I’ll show them the line about Buddha and God being two names for the same thing, because it is the best lesson in tolerance I know, and it came from a place no one would expect. And I’ll teach the gesture my childhood home taught me without stating it: that you can love a text and inspect it in the same motion — that inspection, far from being desecration, is the highest form of taking something seriously.

Rutt had two questions and stayed with them for a decade, and I admired him for it. I have an inherited text I’ve returned to for half a lifetime and will still be returning to at sixty. It isn’t a question I chose; it’s an answer that was recited to me. But the fidelity is the same, and so is the work: staying with the thing long enough for it to yield. Write a history worth reading. The Word becomes flesh by being passed on. The angel was the detail; what’s left, after he goes off with the petals, is the argument — and the argument is mine now, to hand to my children with the seams showing.

Further reading#

• Masaharu Taniguchi, Nectarean Shower of Truth (Kanro no Hōu) — the text inspected here. Read it, against the official recommendation, “through rational arguments”: that is how it reveals itself as what it claims to be, a philosophy.
• Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World — for culture as inheritance that precedes belief, and for CREDs, which explain why religion transmits through visible cost, not through argument. It is what lets you be an atheist and still have a religious culture.
• Nāgārjuna, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way — for emptiness, the two truths, and the warning that taking emptiness itself for a substance is “grasping the snake by the wrong end.” The sharpest sieve I know for texts like this one.
• Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another — for the distinction between idem and ipse, without which the question “am I seichonoie?” cannot be answered without confusion.
• W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object — for the indeterminacy of translation, the thesis hidden in the sutra’s Wisdom section, spoken by an angel thirty years before Quine.
• Franklin Baldo, Everything Is Process — because it would be dishonest not to point out that what I call my metaphysics and what was recited to me in childhood are, to a degree too large for my comfort, the same text.