Primal flow

The sacred text is what the sacred river is currently reading, the streambed of consciousness.

(Stoop), if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop) in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all.

— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 14

Drawing nearer to take our slant at it (since after all it has met with misfortune while all underground), let us see all there may remain to be seen.

— Finnegans Wake, 113

The act of meaning the sacred text involves collision and collusion with the limits of language.

Beware lest ye be hindered by the veils of glory from partaking of the crystal waters of this living Fountain.

— Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas ¶50

But give glad tidings to those who believe and work righteousness, that their portion is Gardens, beneath which rivers flow. Every time they are fed with fruits therefrom, they say: “Why, this is what we were fed with before,” for they are given things in similitude; and they have therein companions pure (and holy); and they abide therein (for ever).

— Qur’án 2:25 (Yusuf Ali)

Homage to Uexküll

We owe the concept of Umwelt to Jakob von Uexküll. In a 1934 paper he introduced it to the reader as follows:

This little monograph does not claim to point the way to a new science. Perhaps it should be called a stroll into unfamiliar worlds; worlds strange to us but known to other creatures, manifold and varied as the animals themselves. The best time to set out on such an adventure is on a sunny day. The place, a flower-strewn meadow, humming with insects, fluttering with butterflies. Here we may glimpse the worlds of the lowly dwellers of the meadow. To do so, we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. Many of its colorful features disappear, others no longer belong together but appear in new relationships. A new world comes into being. Through the bubble we see the world of the burrowing worm, of the butterfly, or of the field mouse; the world as it appears to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us. This we may call the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal.
…
We thus unlock the gates that lead to other realms, for all that a subject perceives becomes his perceptual world and all that he does, his effector world. Perceptual and effector worlds together form a closed unit, the Umwelt.

— Uexküll, in Favareau 2009, 90-91 (translated by Barry Stone and Herbert Weiner)

Uexküll’s ‘soap bubble’ is a precursor of the perceptual or ‘cognitive bubble’ introduced in Chapter 6 of Turning Signs. The closure of ‘perceptual’ and ‘effector worlds’ is a version of the meaning cycle concept.

The Guide

My uniform experience has convinced me that there is no other God than Truth.

— Gandhi, Autobiography

For me the voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth or the Inner Voice or ‘the still small Voice’ mean one and the same thing.

— Gandhi, Harijan (1933, July 8)

If intuition is an inner voice— how do I know how I am to obey it? And how do I know that it doesn’t mislead me? For if it can guide me right, it can also guide me wrong.

— Wittgenstein, PI I.213

Who guides those whom God has led astray?

— Qur’án 30:29 (Cleary)

And what good is guidance if you keep it to yourself?

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

— Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

Back to the present

This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day.

— Annie Dillard (1974, 103)

Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and time.

— Annie Dillard (1974, 83)

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)

Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

— Annie Dillard (1974, 82)

Mindfulness is remembering to come back to the present moment. The character the Chinese use for ‘mindfulness’ has two parts: the upper part means ‘now,’ and the lower part means ‘mind’ or ‘heart.’

— Thich Nhat Hanh (1998, 64)

What has gone? How it ends?
Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today’s truth, tomorrow’s trend.
Forget, remember!

— Finnegans Wake, 614

Yet’s the time for being now, now, now.

— Finnegans Wake, 250

The Present

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.

Waking and shaking

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)