Category: Apocalypse: Opening Time

As for the Present instant, it is so inscrutable that I wonder whether no sceptic has ever attacked its reality. I can fancy one of them dipping his pen in his blackest ink to commence the assault, and then suddenly reflecting that his entire life is in the Present,— the “living present,” as we say,— this instant when all hopes and fears concerning it come to their end, this Living Death in which we are born anew. It is plainly that Nascent State between the Determinate and the Indeterminate …

— Peirce, EP2:358

It is also what Buddhists call ‘birth-and-death’ (shoji), and the impermanence which according to Dogen is the buddha-nature.

The determination for enlightenment is the seed of all elements of buddhahood … it is like an all-encompassing net, taking in all beings who can be guided.

— Avatamsaka Sutra (Cleary 1984, 1476-8)

The determination (or aspiration) for enlightenment is the turning sign whose final interpretant reveals the nascent buddha-nature. How long does this revelation, this realization take? As long as the time.

The ‘principle of the identity of man and Buddha’ (Bielefeldt 1988, 165) has informed a wide variety of Buddhist practices through which sentient beings might overcome, here and now, the delusions masking that identity. The prophetic writings of Blake develop a parallel idea in three themes: first, ‘the loss of the identity of divine and human natures which brought about the Fall … second, the struggle to regain this identity in the fallen world which was completed by Jesus; and, third, the apocalypse’ (Frye 1947, 270). In Night the Ninth of The Four Zoas (subtitled ‘The Last Judgment’), we learn that all dominator gods are really distorted images of fallen Man. If they resist this recognition of their true nature and try to assert ‘their Dominion above The Human form Divine,’ they will be ‘Thrown down from their high Station,’ and in the apocalypse (after a protracted struggle in the subconscious) will resume their true function

In the Eternal heavens of Human Imagination: buried beneath
In dark Oblivion with incessant pangs ages on ages
In Enmity & war first weakend, then in stern repentance
They must renew their brightness, & their disorganizd functions
Again reorganize till they resume the image of the human,
Cooperating in the bliss of Man, obeying his Will,
Servants to the infinite & Eternal of the Human form.

Likewise in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, we are tasked to recognize the terrifying wrathful gods as projections of our own fears, and thus to overcome our own delusions and recover our true form.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

— Joyce (Ulysses, 42)

And when we do wake up, and the curtain falls on all the struts and frets we call history, what does this mess finally mean?

The gods did this, and spun the destruction of peoples, for the sake of the singing of people hereafter.

— Odyssey, VIII

One day, in all probability, there will be no people to sing. Why not sing now then? For all you know, your chance may be the last.

Now these things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.

— 1 Corinthians 10.11

This, the time you are living, is the end of history. This is where it was all heading: that you should see it now like the moon in a dewdrop. The responsibility to make some sense of it can’t be passed off to eternal or future beings. For them as for you, it will not be the future when they live the time. Even in contemplation, making sense takes time – time and a body. The readiness is all, the readiness to read the signs; and the readings are signs again. Even the Book of Revelation was and is a reading.

We have noted that the last book in the Bible, the one explicitly called Revelation or Apocalypse, is a mosaic of allusions to the Old Testament … What the seer in Patmos had a vision of was primarily, as he conceived it, the true meaning of the Scriptures, and his dragons and horsemen and dissolving cosmos were what he saw in Ezekiel and Zechariah, whatever or however he saw on Patmos. … For him all these incredible wonders are the inner meaning or, more accurately, the inner form of everything that is happening now. Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.

— Northrop Frye (1982, 135-6)

The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared.

— Frye (1982, 138)

The mind that has been authentically transmitted is: one mind is all things, all things are one mind.
Thus, an ancient teacher said, “If you realize this mind, there is not an inch of land left on earth.”
Know that when you realize this mind, the entire sky collapses and the whole earth explodes. Or, if you realize this mind, the earth raises its surface by three inches.

— Dogen, SBGZ ‘Sokushin zebutsu’ (Tanahashi 2010, 46)

We begin in the middle, in the space between you and me, and the sign living there is the means of meaning. When we build relationships or construct guidance systems, we do not begin with ‘fundamentals’ as if we were building with stone. The material of which meaning is made is alive, is life itself, the water of life. Living beings do not have foundations. Instead, they make default assumptions – apply principles which are acted on as if true, unless and until the consequences of acting call them into question. Often it is the failure of the default, or rather an unexpected consequence of applying it, which causes us to become conscious of it for the first time. This opens up new space for the emergence of other possibilities.

And the answers? Sometimes the answers just come in the mail. And one day you get that letter you’ve been waiting for forever. And everything it says is true. And then in the last line it says: Burn this.

— Laurie Anderson, ‘Same Time Tomorrow’

All created things have the nature of destruction. This is the last statement of the Transcendent Lord.

— Shakyamuni Buddha (Thurman 1995, 93)

Here again is Thomas 18:

(1) The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us how our end will be.”
(2) Jesus said, “Have you discovered the beginning, then, so that you are seeking the end? For where the beginning is the end will be. (3) Blessed is one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.”

NHS

Compare Analects 11.11:

Chi-lu asked about serving the spiritual beings.
Confucius said, ‘If we are not yet able to serve man, how can we serve spiritual beings?’
‘I venture to ask about death.’
Confucius said, ‘If we do not yet know about life, how can we know about death?’

(Chan 1963, 36)

If we want to serve God, how do we know that we aren’t already serving God’s purpose without knowing it, as the followers of Bokonon believe?

We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan, that brought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World Ended.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle, Chapter 1

I never finished this book (Turning Signs) either, but i don’t know whether it would count as a kan-kan. I have my beliefs about how humanity is organized, and have tried to articulate some of them, but i can’t see my own mission from outside of it. Every guidance system is situated, and every player sees the game, or the play – or God’s Will – from within that situation, and not as a supreme being would see it. For us (sentient beings) collectively, the only ethical certainty is that our acts will have consequences beyond our intentions, and we will have to live with them as long as we live. We are at best beginners, even to the end.

Another form of discovery (revelation, apocalypse) is Aristotle’s ἀναγνώρισις, often translated as recognition, which he identifies in his Poetics as the key event in a tragic plot, the one of highest significance for the audience – a turning sign. ‘The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal of the Situation’ – with a περιπέτεια, a surprising turn of the path, contrary to expectation and yet ‘arising from the incidents themselves.’ It is a sudden realization which leads directly to κάθαρσις (purgation, purification) of the feelings aroused by the play. Apocalypse brings a more complete catharsis, clearing the way for a new heaven, a new earth.

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.

— Shunryu Suzuki (1970, 21)

Variation on a theme of Rumi (Nicholson 1995, 49-50): Sleepers between dreams, and mystics even when awake, are free of sorrow and joy, fame and gain, personality and self-consciousness, decision and justice and judgment. The trumpet-blast of Resurrection calls them back from that state, calls souls back to their bodies and their world, calls the formless back to form.

According to Mircea Eliade (1949, 85), the ancient New Year ceremony marks the recreation of the whole cosmos; indeed for ‘archaic man’ (primal humanity), any real beginning regenerates reality through the ‘annulment of time’ and history. Death is the prelude to this recreation, just as the new moon begins its return toward the full.

The death of the individual and the death of humanity are alike necessary for their regeneration. Any form whatever, by the mere fact that it exists as such and endures, necessarily loses vigor and becomes worn; to recover vigor, it must be reabsorbed into the formless if only for an instant; it must be restored to the primordial unity from which it issued …

— Eliade (1949, 88)

And then the original creation happens again for the first time. And yet, ‘whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual’ (Blake, PPB 551). The apocalypse is at once Judgment Day and Recreation Day.

Matthew 19:28, King James version:

And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration [ἐν τῇ παλιγγενεσίᾳ] when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

In the Revised Standard Version, παλιγγενεσία (literally, beginning again) is translated ‘in the new world.’ At this end of time, any Judgment is the Last, but in the beginning is the Word, where any verbum, verb, term, rhema is the First.

(1) Jesus said, “From Adam to John the Baptizer, among those born of women, there is no one greater than John the Baptizer, so that his eyes should not be averted.
(2) But I have said that whoever among you becomes a child will know the kingdom and will become greater than John.”

— Thomas 46 (NHS)

The first verse raises many questions. Whose eyes should not be averted? Why should anyone else’s eyes be turned away? Turned away from what?
But the second verse also raises questions: What’s so great about becoming a child, and how does that lead to knowing the kingdom?

Matthew 18:3 says that ‘Except ye be converted [στραφῆτε], and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven’ (KJV). The root of στραφῆτε (‘be converted’) is the verb στρέφω, turn, which is also the root idea of ‘convert.’ How can an adult be turned, or turn himself, into a child? Does this turning reverse the normal development of a child into an adult? Or is it a recovery of the “beginner’s mind” which is often lost in development?

An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn’t the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.

— Annie Dillard (1974, 19)

We all begin as beginners, as startlings. The infant ‘aims to learn,’ and that ‘original intent’ of learning from experience is what it takes ‘to be a philosopher, or a scientific man,’ says Peirce. But, says Dillard, some ‘taught pride’ diverts us from that intent, and we learn to fake it instead, to act as if we already know. This is what happens to the “scientist” as he learns to play the complex social role which his profession is supposed to fill. But to be a real scientist or philosopher, says Peirce, he needs ‘the sincerity and simple-mindedness of the child’s vision, with all the plasticity of the child’s mental habits.’

Dillard says: ‘I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood.’ She implies that a “scientist,” instead of exploring, pretends to explain the neighborhood to the neighbors. But maybe, for the “pure” or childlike scientists, that’s only a front which they use to finance their explorations. Maybe their real question is neither where nor why but how. How does exploring happen, or learning, or pride?

Maybe the scientist (as opposed to the philosopher) has to specialize in order to offer some answers, and maybe some get so insulated in their specialism that they think they own their neighborhoods. But that doesn’t stop us using their maps and models for our own explorations. We’re all specialists in living a particular life – but you, O beginner, O child who has somehow learned to read, are the sole heir of all that mapping, and all the specialists are working for you. It’s your turn to begin.

In the process of living, attainment of a period of equilibrium is at the same time the initiation of a new relation to the environment, one that brings with it potency of new adjustments to be made through struggle. The time of consummation is also one of beginning anew.

— John Dewey (1934, 16)

If one can begin, ever, there is nothing against beginning often; I mean developing new and further conceptual patterns that are not logically derivative from the earlier concepts alone. But neither is it necessary to have sheer gaps which don’t enable one to think, except with either these or those concepts. The continuity between concepts is such, rather, that the new developments further inform and precision the earlier ones. Terms are definable and derivable in terms of each other.

— Gendlin (1998, note 15)

The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.

— Finnegans Wake 452

Vico was the 18th-century scholar whose theory of the origin of language fascinated James Joyce, and whose cyclic model of history became the framework of Finnegans Wake. And by the way, one of the Wake‘s recurring episodes is the discovery by a hen of a mysterious letter buried in a midden-heap, riddled with holes and stains. Five years after the death of Joyce, the letter was dug up yet again: the Nag Hammadi Library.

The names of things are fixed by custom, habit and history. But symbols are subversive as they turn, breaking what’s fixed and fixing what’s broken. Likewise the habit of living seems eternally intent on breaking and fixing itself.

At the beginning of the movie, they know they have to find each other. But they ride off in opposite directions.

— Laurie Anderson, ‘Sharkey’s Day’

The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination. – And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.

— Wittgenstein, Preface to the Philosophical Investigations

I fear I may be producing the impression of talking at random. It is that I wish the reader to “catch on” to my conception, my point of view; and just as one cannot make a man see that a thing is red, or is beautiful, or is touching, by describing redness, beauty, or pathos, but can only point to something else that is red, beautiful, or pathetic, and say, “Look here too for something like that there,” so if the reader has not been in the habit of conceiving ideas as I conceive them, I can only cast a sort of dragnet into his experience and hope that it may fish up some instance in which he shall have had a similar conception.

— Peirce, EP2:122

But I must remember, Reader, that your conceptions may penetrate far deeper than mine; and it is to be devoutly hoped they may.

— Peirce, CP 4.535 (1906)

If I were you, who would be reading this sentence?

Tomasello (1999) begins his examination of The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition with a quotation from Peirce: ‘all the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals’ (EP1:369). Although it is always the first person speaking, yet a whole history speaks through that voice. One example: precursors of Tomasello’s central ideas can be found in Merleau-Ponty (1964), ‘The Child’s Relations with Others.’ – Yet Tomasello does not cite Merleau-Ponty; nor is there any reason why he should. The deeper an idea, the more primary and pervasive it is, the less we are able to locate its origin. Indeed it is ‘easily traced back to almost any desired antiquity’ (Peirce again).

Like any text (or any life), Turning Signs is woven out of path-crossings; like any conscientious researcher, i’ve done my best to point toward some of the paths i’ve crossed with other authors. Wherever i have drawn upon specific “sources,” i’ve documented them in the parenthetical way standard in the sciences of the time. But the more pervasive an idea becomes in one’s thinking and reading, the less point there is in citing “sources” for it.

Some of my “sources” may go uncited simply because their thoughts have sunk so deeply into mine that i can no longer trace them. However, all the sources of which i have been conscious during the writing are listed in the reference list at the back of the book. (The quote marks around “sources” are reminders that a text like this one is not and cannot be assembled from others, any more than your body is assembled from preexisting parts. Rather, each quotation or reference marks a point where another line of thought has crossed paths with this one. (‘Strictly speaking, every word in the book should be in quotation marks’ (Gregory Bateson (1979, 108)).))

Long after inserting this Bateson quote into my draft, i found what amounts to an explanation of it by Michael Polanyi. As he explains it, using quotation marks in this way calls the usage of the word thus marked into question.

We may place a word in quotation marks, while using language confidently through the rest of the sentence. But the questioning of each word in turn would never question all at the same time. Accordingly, it would never reveal a comprehensive error which underlies our entire descriptive idiom. We can of course write down a text and withdraw our confidence from all its words simultaneously, by putting each descriptive word between quotation marks. But then none of the words would mean anything and the whole text would be meaningless.

— Polanyi (1962, 251)

More generally: there is no belief that can’t be questioned, but in practice you can only question one at a time, because the questioning process itself requires the rest of your belief system to function implicitly.