Nature exhibits unusually layered orders that have a special intensity as manifest to the self.  These intense complexes act as if they were folds within nature, folds that double back from a point of origin and manifest an increase in semiotic scope and power.  Nature’s folds have an astonishing variety of textures and represent an unlimited prospect for an increase in meaning.  The question naturally arises: where do these folds come from and are they more than human projections?  In what follows, this question will represent the goad that compels us to clarify the ways in which the folds of nature work with and against the momenta of the human unconscious.  In traditional language, these folds have often been referred to as epiphanies of power.  As epiphanies they show forth something that is extrahuman, although not extranatural.  As manifestations of power they stand out from their natural and enabling ground to show the self-transcending potencies within nature (p. 23).     Nature’s religion is not always a comforting one.  It is as protean and complex as any of the other dimensions of nature.  Never friendly to anthropomorphic longing (except by accident), it overturns almost all of what we usually mean by the word “religion.”  Yet it always has a way of breaking into our concresced human religions and of showing them a measure beyond the shells that we have erected.  At the outset the question was raised: is it still possible to use the word “god” in ecstatic naturalism?  This question can be translated into one slightly different: is there any categorial or existential role for the god complex within a generic perspective that makes the ontological difference between nature naturing and nature natured central?  The answer, however painful to some antecedent perspectives, is clear.  Within the vast sweep of nature’s sacred folds, nature’s intervals, nature’s unruly ground, and nature’s spirit, all gods and goddesses, however long-lived or powerful, are always enveloped in the end by the mystery of nature’s abyss (pp.165-166).
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