New Year: Marking Eternity

Henry Corbin, the French philosopher, relates an amusing and meaningful exchange at a conference in 1954. Present at this encounter were Corbin, Mrs. Fröbe-Kapteyn, Mircea Eliade, and D.T. Suzuki, the Japanese author on Zen. In conversation with Suzuki, the company asked him what had been his first encounter with occidental spirituality. Suzuki answered that his encounter had taken place fifty years before when he had translated four of Swedenborg’s works into Japanese. To continue in Corbin’s words:

Later on in the conversation we asked him what homologies in structure he found between Mahayana Buddhism and the cosmology of Swedenborg in respect of the symbolism and correspondences of the worlds … Of course we expected not a theoretical answer, but a sign attesting the encounter in a concrete person of an experience common to Buddhism and to Swedenborgian spirituality. And I can still see Suzuki suddenly brandishing a spoon and saying with a smile: “This spoon now exists in Paradise…” “We are now in Heaven,” he explained.*

Thoughts along these lines have been running about in my head of late: the difference between what we call time (time-as-motion, as I like to put it) and eternity. I like the notion that eternity is pure duration—and think that we actually experience it whenever time-as-motion, Einstein’s time, you might say, is temporarily forgotten, when events don’t interfere with our experience of being: contemplative or creative time, also physically active times when we are in control and in the flow.

This morning it struck me (or struck me again—this is not an original observation, certainly not in a context in which Mircea Eliade, who wrote The Myth of the Eternal Return, is mentioned)—it struck me, to repeat, that our ritual markings of anniversaries, like Christmas and New Years, are (perhaps paradoxically) assertions of eternity. On days like today, time stops in a way. Our urge to set such markers—and they are absolutely arbitrary—arises, I think, from the very experience Suzuki highlights, spoon in hand, namely that we already are, if we could but keep it always in mind, already in eternity. We keep falling out of it, of course, day after day. We fall into the hectics of a lower kind of existence, into the rapids of ordinary time. But the odd feelings that mark transitions produce in us a kind of suspension; they serve as reminders that, above the torrent that keeps raging on, there is another time, that of duration, that of eternity. Swedenborg himself struggled to give this feeling expression. In Heaven and Hell (and elsewhere) he suggests that the concept of time in heaven is transformed into something else, what he labels “states.” Yes. But in this life too we can sometimes achieve states in which we slip out of the turbulence into experiences—not of magical exaltations, not of remarkable ecstasy, but of sovereignty.

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*Corbin, Henry. Alone With the Alone. Princeton University Press, 1969. p. 354.