Author: gnox

Esoteric traditions often turn the distinction between the Word and the world inside out, or upside down, reading both as revelation. The Zohar (1:5a) tells us that the blessed Holy One contemplated Torah four times ‘before actualizing his work of art,’ i.e. before creating the world; and this is the model to be emulated by the ideal reader.

An Islamic hadith beloved of the Sufis goes something like this: I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known, and I created the world in order to be known. In other words, nature is the scripture through which the hidden Creator is revealed; and scripture is the seed in which Creation is concealed.

The seed is planted in the ground. The archetypal sacred text is dug up from underground, like the mysterious letter in Finnegans Wake, or the Book of the Dead in Tibet, where such texts are known as terma, ‘hidden treasures’ (Fremantle and Trungpa 1992). Sometimes the text is burned (like the Blue Cliff Record) and later resurrected or reconstructed by dedicated readers.

The ‘hidden treasure’ as another symbol for this concentration of meaning in Scripture also appears in Thomas 109 and Matthew 13.44-46 (KJV):

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

The point of the merchant’s act is not to appropriate to himself the gift, the eternally given, but to ‘sell all he has’ for that which is given to all who can receive it. For once all that is given is concentrated in that pearl, that mustard seed which is the kingdom of heaven and the point of creation, all things are of value only insofar as they reveal that treasure. Prior to that concentration of Presence, outside of that event horizon, things can only conceal that Presence by the separateness which is their absence from it.

The revelation of the Divine Reality hath everlastingly been identical with its concealment and its concealment identical with its revelation.

— The Báb, c. 1850 (1976, 112)

The act of meaning a verbal revelation collides and colludes with the limits of language. Revelation and creation merge and emerge with ‘the inner world which secretes its own light’ (Corbin 1971, 5).

For with the appearance of the light, the universe expanded. With its concealment, all existing things were created according to their species.… This is the secret of the act of Creation. One who is able to understand will understand.

— Ketem Paz on Zohar 1:47a (Matt 1983, 214)

From the Valentinian Gospel of Truth, 32:

Understand the inner meaning, for you are children of inner meaning.… Speak from the heart, for you are the perfect day and within you dwells the light that does not fail.

— (Meyer 2005, 106)

All thought is in signs (Peirce); all messages are coded (Bateson) – including revelations. The actual encoding of a message conceals all the other codes that could have carried the same message, and even conceals the fact that other codings are possible. The implications of one encoding always diverge to some degree from the implications of another, and those of the unused encoding are concealed along with it. These concealments are inevitable because one inhabits one meaning space at a time, even when we know that other spaces are no less habitable and other codes might just as well prescribe the path (or describe the place) before us.

Specification misrepresents the implicit by making it explicit. Revelation conceals by articulation.

Zohar 1:31b:

‘Let there be light!’ And there was light (Genesis). Every subject of the phrase and there was exists in this world and in the world that is coming.

Matt (ZP I.194) explains:

The Zohar alludes here to the primordial light, which appeared briefly in this world and was hidden away for the righteous in the hereafter. Bahir 106 (160) identifies the hidden light with the world that is coming, which it takes to mean ‘the world that already came.’ The phrase And there was light is similarly taken to mean ‘There already was light,’ i.e. the primordial light.

Deep reading of an ancient scripture means hearing the primal voice with an original ear. Yet the voice can only speak in a specific idiom, marking a point in the ongoing evolution of the human guidance system. To find the turning word in ancient wisdom is to reclaim that evolution as your own. The deep reader therefore calls upon the help of scholars for access to ancient idioms; otherwise, she would be trapped in the cage of her own, and the revelation lie buried under the rubble of history. To read a scripture as turning word is to reclaim and resurrect that whole history – and to carry if forward: if it only repeats the usual monologue, then it can’t be a turning word for you. Shake the dust from your feet and turn the page.

The deeper levels of your being express themselves through the time of your life, but as each expression is called forth by a specific context, and contexts are constantly shifting and changing, words and deeds may come to conceal what they once revealed, or vice versa. Likewise the deep reader of an ancient text could say that implicit truths are buried in it, awaiting resurrection. Or you could say that the text itself is a seed, or is made up of seeds, waiting to sprout new meaning.

A revelation is conventionally supposed to be given by an external agency. But a sudden burst of learning may be a fork in one’s own developmental path. It is a sudden change of the living relation between the system inhabiting and the system inhabited. The source of the change is neither inside nor out – or it is both inside and out. Everbody wholly embodies transformity.

All beings originate from the creativity of Heaven, so all are transformations of the path of Heaven. Being transformations of the path of Heaven, each has the great function of the whole body of the path of Heaven, and is not just a small portion of the effective capacity of Heaven. Therefore they can each correct nature and life.

— Chi-hsu Ou-i (Cleary 1987, 118)

A revelation, if anticipated, must first meet and then exceed the expectations of those who recognize it. It must fulfill the old law even by transforming it. As in Luke 16:16:

The law and the prophets were until John; since then the good news of the kingdom is preached, and every one enters it violently. But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one dot of the law to become void.

— (RSV)

‘For heaven and earth to pass away’ is for historical time to become imaginary – as indeed it is, since all we know of past and future is what we know now. Revelation raises the body of truth, as resurrection raises the true body, from temporary or temporal presence (i.e. location on an imagined timeline) into eternal presence. At the apocalypse, the arrival of ‘the world that is coming,’ even the stone tablets come to life again.

But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.

— Luke 20:37-8, RSV

Resurrection and revelation are not mere historical facts but actual present experiences. Such an experience, seen from the outside, would be a phase shift in brain dynamics, one that changes everything for the bodymind subject to it. Revelation could be triggered, for instance, by an analogy; the violence of which Luke speaks is the feeling of a mindquake shaking the foundations of meaning, destroying and making it new. Mark Turner describes the process thus (1991, 125):

Analogies can inventively induce us to construct new connections, and recast or tune others. A powerful analogy can restructure, disturb, influence, and change our category structures, and successful analogical connections (light is a wave) can ultimately become part of our category structures. Some of the connections that analogies propose might mesh with our category connections and thus be easily assimilated. Others might be deeply disruptive, with the consequence that their assimilation will be resisted by the conceptual apparatus we already have in place. A deep, surprising analogy that leads us to form weird but powerful connections that challenge our category structures will not settle readily into our conventional knowledge. It will remain suggestive, never achieving a location in our conceptual apparatus. It will not be used up – assimilated and naturalized – as we go through it repeatedly: we will be able to return to it again and again, and find it fresh, because the connections it suggests cannot be established in our category structures (or maybe even in our conventional conceptual apparatus) with impunity.

This is what Wallace Stevens (1957) calls ‘poetry,’ a ‘renovation of experience’ which ‘must resist the intelligence almost successfully.’ Turning signs are precisely those that we cannot assimilate, that is, cannot turn over to the unconscious in the form of habits, and thus they are always fresh. But sometimes we are not up to the challenge of reading them anew. Then, if we have a hunger for transformation, we are tempted to look elsewhere for the turning sign – anywhere but within ‘our conventional conceptual apparatus.’ Anything out there can potentially trigger the transformation, but unless the potential is realized, nothing happens. If the epiphany does occur, it is like being struck by lightning, everything is lit up. In either case the transformation cannot be located either in the transformed world or in time.

The days are coming when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of man, and you will not see it. And they will say to you, ‘Lo, there!’ or ‘Lo, here!’ Do not go, do not follow them. For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of man be in his day. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.

— Luke 17:22-25 (RSV)

As Northrop Frye says (1982, 133), the ‘ability to absorb a complete individual is, so far, beyond the capacity of any society … society will always sooner or later line up with Pilate against the prophet.’ Of course a revelation ‘will be resisted by the conceptual apparatus we already have in place’! If it were not, there could be no transformation, only minor adjustments. And as Turner also points out, it is this resistance which keeps a sign such as an analogy fresh. There are some truths you can never take for granted no matter how many times they are granted to you, because they challenge the very basis on which they are understood. For instance: Even though you know that the world is wholly contained in the bodymind and the bodymind wholly contained in the world, these inclusions continue to appear mutually exclusive, and thus to continue as revelations.

‘The mystic believes in an unknown God, the thinker and scientist in an unknown order; it is hard to say which surpasses the other in nonrational devotion’ (L.L. Whyte, quoted by Koestler 1964, 260). The scientific or religious seeker has to believe that the unknown is really out there, which in practice can only mean that it is knowable and not fictional). But neither is it factual: the sense of it is yet unmade.

Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces molded by time, certain twilights and certain places – all these are trying to tell us something, or have told us something we should not have missed, or are about to tell us something; that imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced is, perhaps, the aesthetic reality.

— J.L. Borges (1964, 5)

A revelation as turning sign is an inburst of the unknown. Its meaning is quickly assimilated or incorporated into known forms and structures – or else is quickly forgotten. But the deeper the revelation, the more it transforms the prior framework and continues to inform it.

The leading edge of revelation is what Peirce called the ‘breaking up of habit’ – which ‘will, according to the law of mind, be accompanied by an intensification of feeling’ (EP1:348). The intensity of feeling does not last forever, but one who enjoys it is more likely to learn from it.

The experience of revelation has its roots in the pre-conscious and pre-human, like all experience. Evolutionary biology can even account for it in terms of adaptive value:

The element of surprise is the revelation that a given phenomenon of the environment was, until this moment, misinterpreted. Animals who experience surprise as a pleasure are likely to recognize camouflage and leave more offspring than are their less perspicacious brethren. Selection as nature, filled with live, sensitive beings, is by no means blind.

— Margulis and Sagan (1995, 165)