Apocalypticism

Today may be a suitable day to speak on this subject in that, based on the biblical calculations of Harold Camping, May 21, 2011 is the first day of the end times. These times will extend and conclude on October 21 of this year. Camping is an 89-year old retired civil engineer and religious radio figure (Family Radio). There have been at least a score of such predictions in my lifetime, of the western variety, thus all based on various calculations using biblical references, particularly Revelation and Daniel.

End-times are a favorite subject of mine, albeit in the much more limited sense of cyclic history—thus the end of civilizations. Thus I thought I’d look things up. Come to think of it, the two subjects are closely linked, certainly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Apocalypse (meaning the Book of Revelation) appeared in a time when the Graeco-Roman civilization was entering its end-stages. The date of the book is unknown but falls somewhere between the first and second centuries of our era. In rough terms, I would say, the Roman civilization fell apart between 44 BC, with Caesar, and 305 AD, when Diocletian’s reign ended. He was the one who formally split the empire. In times like that, above all, sensitive souls intuit that something is wrong. All manner of Gnosticisms rise; in our case, for instance, in the form of existentialism. Sophistication and book-learning are wide-spread. People read—and they do so because others write. Our peculiar version of that is that everybody writes—but nobody reads…

Imposing some sort of structure onto the maddeningly structure-less nature of sheer, brute Duration must be at least one reason why apocalypticism is a perennial fruit of human civilization. It becomes acute in hard times—and attracts particularly the elderly. The latter have actual cause for having end-time feelings. These begin to rise geometrically as we pass 75—and what I feel must be the very law of the universe. Mustn’t it? Let the wicked finally be punished; and let me be saved from the turmoil of the end-times.

I note that the Encyclopedia Britannica, at least my 1956 version, restricts the subject to Christian speculation, but Wikipedia, the now encyclopedia, avoid the word itself and substitutes “End of the World” instead. And it embraces a wider cultural interpretation. We learn there that apocalypticism has the same structure all around the world. There is a definite, precise, calculable end—take that, insufferable Duration. Evil, very often personified, is finally defeated. And the blessings of timelessness are always brought to us by a divine or divine-like grand benevolent figure.

It was already so in Mazdaism, Zoroastrianism, said to be humanity’s first higher religion (second millennium BC). With the end-times will come the Saoshyant, the savior. In China and in a Taoist tradition, Ling Ho will appear and set heaven and earth back into proper alignment. The Hindus have the most grandiose scheme of all, first in showing featureless duration where its place is, second in preempting false alarms by using very long periods and with great precision. Thus they divide time into eras or ages, yugas; these come in sets of four, 432 000 years—but the first is multiplied by 4, the second by 3, the third by 2, and so on. We are now in the last or fourth of the yugas of this particular dispensation, the Kali Yuga. The savior who shall appear at the end of it is Kalki, whose image (thanks to Wikipedia here) I am reproducing. It will be a while yet before Kalki arrives. The Kali Yuga began on midnight on February 18, 3102 BC, therefore we have another 426,887 years to go. Each yuga is divided in turn into ten dispensations ruled by a Great Incarnation of Vishnu, of which Kalki is the tenth. The other image, above, is the monogram for the Antichrist.

I like the Hindu version of apocalypticism best of all. Plenty of time to see if the strawberries we planted, and I enclosed in a protective mesh against the rabbits yesterday, will actually eventually, with a little help from Duration, end up in a bowl with my breakfast.

Are We Volunteers?

A stunningly elegant emanationist cosmology results if we picture the Whole as a spiral-shaped creation divided into cycles. Each cycle of emanation, call it creative outflow, ends with the completion of an open circle, its beginning point is on the spiral below, its end point at the termination of the spiral above. Each cycle transcends the previous, thus represents either another degree of perfection or a new divine idea. The emanation itself contains the idea, a means of its realization, and the agencies required for its manifestation. The agencies may be understood in two ways: as laws designed for the present cycle and as free agents who may indeed oppose the divine intention—and, if they do, that too is part of the creative idea: it is foreseen, it is permitted (to use one of Swedenborg’s favorite notions), it is part of the creative intent. Whatever is is because God is.

Concerning the last point, I’d draw attention to “Ainulindalë,” the creation story in Tolkien’s Silmarillion. That title translates as “The Music of the Ainur,” beings created by Ilúvatar, the ultimate divine. One of the Ainur, the brightest and the best, Melkor, represents Lucifer, ever intent on destroying the splendid harmonies the Ainur produce, but Ilúvatar introduces themes in which the discord becomes the source of yet finer harmonies, showing how, despite the freedom of that the Ainur enjoy, nothing destroys the divine intent and everything contributes to Ilúvatar’s foresight.

This cosmological conception would assert that creation is eternal delight—of which Blake’s energy is merely a facet. Creation, even at the human scale, is an inexpressible totality in which intellect, love, and act are permanently fused. That the act of creation expresses itself through agencies and takes places with their free participation—of which opposition is itself a contribution—is also a matter of human experience. In religious cosmologies it is clearly mirrored in Mazdaism, the oldest higher religion, and echoed in the Kabbalistic tradition of Judaism.

If agencies participate in the creation, their descent into the void of possibilities is not some kind of punishment, fall, or banishment but is, instead, a freely chosen act. Thus it is depicted in Mazdaism, where each human is seen as a volunteer—and voluntarily assumes great risk in leaving the mansions of light to battle with chaos to save the creation; nay, it is also echoed in Tolkien’s great myth, where the Ainur are shown visions of Arda and invited to participate in its shaping. Now Tolkien was a devout Catholic. Ah, yes!

Fascinating Parallels

Those who read very obscure books and have the stomach for extraordinarily outlandish ideas—such people sometimes stumble across fascinating parallels.

To maintain, for instance, that there are choirs of angels that concern themselves exclusively with kidney functions most people would dismiss as beyond—and I mean way beyond—the pale. Yet Emanuel Swedenborg offers this idea in all seriousness not only in his Heaven and Hell, which he intended for the general public, but also in his Arcana coelestia (Heavenly Secrets) intended for the learned. Swedenborg arrives at this idea because he learned, in his contacts with the heavenly realm that—

It is an arcanum still unknown in the world that heaven reflects a single person if it is fully grasped, but in the heavens this is most common knowledge. Knowing this even in specifics and details is a specialty of the understanding of angels there. Many things follow from it, things which cannot be crisply and clearly conceptualized without this as their pervasive first principle. Since angles know that all of the heavens—even all of their communities—reflect a single person, they actually call heaven “the Greatest and Divine Man.” The term “Divine” is used because the Lord’s Divine makes heaven. [Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, VIII, §59]

Such ideas are jarring unless you get used to them—gradually. John von Neumann once said, and his quip applies elsewhere too, “In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” So let’s get used to the idea, for the moment, anyway. You can discard this, if you like, after you’ve absorbed the message here, namely that the heavens are organized “organically” into communities of angels that relate to Swedenborg’s “Grand Man,” the higher reality—and that what is in heaven has direct correspondences down here on earth. As above, so below, we might say, echoing Hermes.

With that, let me go on to the archangels of Mazdaism. In the theology of that religion we encounter, first of all, heavenly counterparts to every living individual here on earth; they are the fravartis—and if you’re reading this, Zoroastrians would say that you have a fravarti too. We also have, above them, holy beings, spentas, archangels, who have charge over—and importantly also act as guides for—humanity, animals, plants, fire and light (we might say energy), minerals, earth, and water. I learned of these matters in Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. That book contains a summary of the cosmology of Mazdaism. The formulation is much more ancient than Swedenborg’s, to be sure; Mazdaism, indeed, has been classified as the oldest known higher religion of humanity. Old it is, but the structure of this cosmology is functionally very similar to Swedenborg’s—and like Swedenborg’s correspondences between a material and a heavenly reality, we also find, in Mazdaism, the notion of interacting realms or dimensions a higher one above guiding and constituting the lower. The difference is that Mazdaism conceives of the upper realm as an infinite column of light rather than as a “Grand Man.” The column of light enfolds the heavens—and their mountains, rivers, waterfalls, plains, cities, and habitations. There too, as above, so below—but in the lower realm another column, of infinite darkness, is mixing with the light. And we, engaged in the work of the creation, will either succeed individually or descend into the darkness if we’re tempted by its allurements.

Now to complete this picture, I would offer the proposals of Rupert Sheldrake, a modern, living scientist. Sheldrake is a biologist. Sheldrake suggests that undetectable morphic fields exist and correspond to all material phenomena. They contain the forms and patterns of the material, not simply statically but dynamically as well, thus they also hold patterns of motion and behavior. And these fields are alive in the sense that they can and do change over time. They are a cosmic memory. And all things are in active contact with these fields at all times. We thus have a scheme that parallels Mazdaism: not only living entities but inorganic stuff also takes its guidance, as it were, from vast accumulations of highly organized banks of memory, the morphic fields. Fields exist at all levels and are hierarchically arranged. There would thus be a morphic field specific to mammals as well as for, say, rabbits and people, the latter fields hierarchically beneath the field for mammals. And above the field for mammals would be a more general field for all living entities. The interesting parallel here is that this undetectable but physical reality is proposed as a naturalistic explanation forced on us by looking at matter. We infer these fields from what we see on the ground—and we need the fields as a hypothesis in order to explain certain categories of events that, thus far, we cannot reduce to a chemical or a mechanical sets of causes. The embryo’s development is usually cited as an example. Our science has not been able, thus far, to offer what might be a hard chemico-mechanical explanation for the changes we actually behold.

Sheldrake’s most relevant works here are A New Science of Life. The Hypothesis of Formative Causation and Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature.

Swedenborg’s proposals, and Mazdaism, too, for that matter, are dismissed as outdated religious mumbo-jumbo. We’re beyond such things today. Sheldrake is dismissed on the grounds of parsimony, chopped away by Occam’s razor. Modern science says it doesn’t need yet another level of explanation. Just wait until we’ve figured things out the hard way, by patient experiment. All right. But that view—alongside the earlier mumbo-jumbo dismissal—depends on a hard commitment to the notion of materialism and its consequent affirmation of the meaninglessness of existence.

People like me don’t wish to make that commitment. And for those who don’t, the ideas sketched in here—just enough to become visible—can take on a certain level of interest. To delve deeper, of course, means to endure trials and tribulations not unlike those that science is condemned to accept. But these may lead to insight; those of science promise more of the same old, same old until the sun burns out.

The World Next Door

Fourth in a series on Revelation and Scripture.

To derive a fully formed subtle world—inhabited by discarnate spirits yet—just by talking about artistic inspiration—and that in order to justify revelation—must seem extraordinarily presumptuous to many. But cut me some slack. Conventional ways of thought are narrow. My projection (but let me say that it isn’t my invention) is derived from the experience of consciousness. And it’s no more outlandish than other projections. Another, equally weird, is to presume that matter can organize itself by accident into living and reproducing species for no reason whatsoever—and that, when the sun goes into nova, all of them will disappear, sight unseen, with no one to remember or to know. Religious systems that project a hierarchy of beings represent just one attempt by humans to understand the world; the evolutionary theory is another. In religious systems the starting point is the personal experience, of being, thus of consciousness. In the evolutionary, the starting point is matter. I’m with Disraeli on the side of the angels—another way of saying that consciousness is prior to matter; without it we wouldn’t even have the concept of matter. Consciousness gives us a sense of meaning. Looking at our life on earth, we see no permanent personal meaning for ourselves. Not surprisingly, we project it beyond our current existence—thus into the world next door.

The point I want to make today is that revelation is always based on a cosmological account. All religions project at least one other world, and if one then it is always higher than this one. They assert that we have either descended or have fallen into this one. And the substance of their teaching is to guide us in our re-ascent. Materialism considers this a delusion and justifies it by saying that hope is more adaptive than despair. Religion will therefore wither away only after the mass of humanity has reached a secure and high standard of living. Troubles multiply? People flock back to church. Adaptive behavior. But it isn’t as simple as that. Some won’t be quite so easily bribed into sleep by panem et circenses. Meaning, dammit! Give me meaning.

Religions offer meaning—and they base themselves on revelation. And those who produce the revelations claim to have obtained them from on high, thus from the world next door. Now here I would like to make a distinction. It is between precise and specific kinds of revelation and the symbolical essences these revelations carry. A precise revelation is that of the fall of humanity by disobedience of a divine command taking place in a specific Garden where the forbidden fruit of the Knowledge Tree of Good and Evil was consumed. Another is the Song of the Pearl, concerning the son of a king sent from the “East” to “Egypt” to obtain a precious pearl guarded by a devouring serpent. I’ve written about that myth here. Yet another is the myth of Mazdaism; it suggests that we are volunteers, descended from heaven, to fight on the side of Light against the uprising revolt of Darkness. Here we have one story of a fall and two of a descent. In all of these stories the central figure of the drama is assisted in its struggles to regain the height by messages (read revelation) provided from the highest point directly by intermediate agents or ministers.

The essence here may be rendered by saying that (1) there are at least two distinct worlds; (2) the lower of the two is inferior to the higher; (3) we are in the lower, engaged in conflicts, for good and sufficient reasons; (4) the aim is to ascend again after some job is accomplished; and (5) those of us engaged in this task get help and guidance from above.

The first and constituting element of this essence is that a world next door really does exist. Without it there is no story at all, no project, no accomplishment, no meaning. But now let us suppose that the real message is the essence—and all of its renderings and elaborations are to be assigned to us, to the people of this world. That is my working premise. What the inspiration from on high really carries to us is this essence. We then formulated it into stories, elaborate it, apply to ordinary life, reify it, in a way—and as we begin to do that, that is when all of the problems of religion begin.

The Sovereign Will

Talking of the spiral (last post) reminds me that the “problem of evil” has another dimension beyond theodicy (see Label Cloud for posts on that). I’m all too familiar with the philosophical solution that evil is “the absence of good.” We encounter it stated and restated in the great traditions. The problem with that view is that it doesn’t viscerally satisfy—an emphatic way of saying that something in the intuition rejects that answer. No, dammit, there’s more to it than that! Certain kinds of evil arising from passivity—like laziness—may be explained that way. People who are lazy certainly don’t move up the spiral toward the greater good; indeed they probably slowly sink. Laziness is a kind of balanced state: the will is lacking to do anything, good or evil; hence it is an absence of good. But we do encounter active evil in the world—the kind of actions where I, for one, find it almost impossible to believe that the deed springs entirely from ignorance. Positive, willful disregard of good must be present in it. I’ve experienced that. And if I have, so have others.

To focus on this a little more sharply, I would propose that good and evil deeds both require active willing. It is only our ability to form habits that deceives us into thinking that we “slip” into evil or do good because we’re “programmed” to do so. We forget that habits are formed out of voluntary activities. I type like a bandit, but I didn’t always. I began by concentrating. Thus even laziness is active—but it is habit, hence I can use it, as I do above, as an example of a neither-nor state of balance.

The very presence of a “sovereign will” automatically produces a polarized reality—because the will, to be real, has to have choices. Mazdaism, to give an example, is one of the most uncompromisingly polarized cosmologies. It projects an image of an infinite column of light in the “upward” direction, an infinite column of darkness in the “downward.” We’re in the mixing zone, as it were; maybe we're created here. The symbol of the spiral is an elaboration of that polarity, a rather creative intensification of it: the spiral suggests resistance to the vector, be it up or down. In ascent the spiral’s curvature is produced by our resistance, our selfishness; in its descent, the same curving is produced by our longing for the good; it brakes our rush to please ourselves.

Conceptualizations like heaven, purgatory, and hell correspond to real states—but they are too simple. We choose to be in these realms. They aren’t granted us, we’re not assigned to them, we’re not condemned to them. What we receive without any merit on our part is being, being of the highest order: with consciousness and with will.

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Illustration courtesy of Wikipedia, available here.

Toying With Time

So far as we can tell, time has no frequency—but everything else does. Everything else has a cyclic pattern of existence and a dual character: things manifest as waves, which have periodicity (frequency) but also simultaneously manifest as particles. The time dimension happily accommodates either version of reality. It is necessary for measuring frequency, which we do in units of time. At the same time it happily accepts particles too. Thus we can at least imagine a totally static and stationary particle, never changing at all, but it also requires time in that form of it we call duration. Movement combined with change gives us a sense of time that flows—but it’s not time but everything else that does the flowing. Maddening, in a way. Not surprisingly, some conclude that there isn’t any such thing as time—by itself; it is simply a necessary aspect of human perception. Immanuel Kant had this take on time.

You don’t have time for this philosophical twaddle? Okay, click away and speed up your time. Time also has a subjective aspect. We can accelerate it by increasing our stimulation or we can slow it down. Just take ten breaths, slowly counting up to five on each inhale, five on each exhale. That’ll do it. The less we do and the more monotonous our action, the slower we perceive time’s flow—or the nothingness that it is.

Our own mode of being is yoked to cycles. The most basic wave we know is that between birth and death, more precisely between awakening to consciousness and our passing. All through this wave we are individuals, particles. And we cycle between sleep and wakefulness.

I got off on this not very fruitful tangent because it occurred to me, after the last post, that higher religions differ from earlier forms because they have very distinct time dimensions, whereas earlier forms of religiousness have annual cycles matched to the seasons. In Hindu cosmology, great cycles follow each other. In the Judeo-Christian and Muslim (call it Western) traditions, one cycle suffices. It begins in a creation and ends in the final judgment. The Mazdean religion (Zoroastrianism), apparently the oldest of prophetic religions, also begins with a creation; Ahura Mazda’s creation arouses a cosmic opponent, Ahriman; a great war between Darkness and the Light commences; the cycle ends when the Saoshyant (the Zoroastrian Savior) appears at the final defeat of Ahriman. Zoroaster lived in the period between 799 and 750 BC. Our materialist cosmology permits either a single great cycle, ending in heat death, or many cycles each beginning in a Big Bang and ending in a Big Crunch. A Big Crunch is in our future if the mass of the universe is sufficient eventually to slow down, stop, and the reverse the expansion we claim to see as a consequence of a Big Bang that started things about 14 billion years ago. Civilization produces big cyclic cosmologies.

Mazdaism, incidentally, later gave rise to an interesting concept of God. The religion is uncompromisingly dualistic. The Persian imagination projected an infinite column of Light in one direction, of Darkness in the other, and the created world situated at their boundaries, the mixing region. We might call that the border zone. This view produces a tremendous logical tension that most humans feel. Our concept of God is unitary. Thus, over time, a heretical version of Mazdaism appeared, Zervanism. In this conception a divine person higher than Mazda and Ahriman was imagined as the father of these two. His name was Zurvan, Time. Time has thus at least in one cultural tradition been imagined as the Absolute Ultimate, beyond good and evil.

I find it interesting that the Hermetic saying (“as above, so below”) applies here as well as elsewhere. The individual’s cycle is the same as that of the great cosmic process in which the individual exists. The individual appears to have been “created” at birth—no memory (for most) of having been before. It ends in a great final battle or “end times,” death, which is supposed to be followed by a judgment. With these facts before us, and with the individual experience much more accessible (and unavoidable—as sure as death and taxes) it is easy to dismiss cosmologies by simply saying that they are a projection of individual fate onto the collective. The truth of the matter may be more interesting. What if Hermes was right? I would suggest that the reader visit this site and play with some of the fractal images presented there. The organization of reality may indeed be analogous to the fractal, where the ever smaller retains the basic patterns of the larger, while yet always changing…despite the steady flow of time which is the ultimate dimension.

Passion or The Human Problem

The problem of evil arises in the context of theodicy. In certain times and under certain circumstances, theodicy is necessary and laudable. Those with a simple but ardent faith do not perceive the problem of evil and never think of blaming God; the mystics, who are at the other end of the spectrum, arrive at the same conclusion but by much experience. Neither of these polar stands rests on analysis. Intellectual approaches, focused on the real world, produce the problem in the first place; hence theodicy, which is an intellectual tool, is applicable in order to deal with the seeming contradiction of a good and all-powerful God and a world bristling with evil. Another kind of problem, however, remains after theodicy has done its work. It is the human problem. How to explain suffering?

Passion is one of those wonderfully ambiguous words. Its basic meaning is “suffering”; this becomes obvious when we consider that “passivity” comes from the same root. The common understanding of passion today is that it is a powerful sexual attraction and, by extension, attraction to anything else (“a passionate stamp collector.”) According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the sexual passion is a relatively new use of the root, dating to the sixteenth century. In Roman times passion was plain suffering, hence in Catholicism people speak of the “passion of Jesus,” meaning his crucifixion. Behind the Latin stands the Greek equivalent, pathos, with the same meaning.

Ponder for a moment the interestingly problematical relationships between freedom, evil, and suffering. Suffering is linked with evil (is evil) in that it is bad; suffering is involuntary when physical evil is its cause (to use Leibniz’s categories of kinds of evil); it arises from injury, disease, or the destruction of valuable properties by natural disasters; but passion in the sexual sense is also physical: we suffer our hormones. Sin is evil because it is the free choice of a lesser good; this is what Leibniz calls moral evil. The problem is especially visible in this category. We suffer whether we sin or we restrain ourselves. If we use our will to overcome temptation, we suffer the loss of something we desire; if we yield, we may achieve a lesser good but lose a higher, and suffering will be a consequence. We suffer physical evil without using choice; we suffer when we do use choice. We can’t win!

The problematical character of our state is made even more plain when we consider that gladly willing what is good is painless; the only time free will actually raises its ugly head is when we want something we shouldn’t. At that point, and only at that point, does the freedom of the will actually matter, and when we then exercise it rightly, we will suffer the loss of something we want—even if it’s nothing more than simple peace and quiet. Real decision-making is always painful—because it only matters when it is!

The human problem is that we find ourselves between the rock and the hard place. But this paradoxical situation actually has a catch. When we suffer gladly, whether it is involuntary pain or the pain imposed by our own right choices, a transformation takes place within us that is very difficult to describe but quite real. It is also cumulative. We change. Something takes place within us. We grow. The converse is also true. If, on the whole, we avoid pain at any cost and live for the moment, if we harden our conscience so that the echoes of the collateral damage we cause are less obvious and audible, we also diminish. That process is also cumulative. Here I’m talking about obvious truths readily observable in every possible category of activity, be it the neglect of body, maintenance, relationships, economies, you name it.

One interesting upshot of such a contemplation is that it produces an alternative model of reality as well. One that I’ve suggested a number of times before is that an order of the soul may have become voluntarily entangled in matter, drawn by its appetite for new experience. But another one is that the dimension in which we find ourselves is meant to serve development—the development of a higher form of that which we are. This is the model of life on earth as a school of hard knocks. The hard knocks will temper us and raise us to a higher level in a spiraling course of development—or, conversely, cause us to slide downward. We may be participating in this process voluntarily, as the Mazdean religion teaches, for example; or we may be here for correction, which is compatible with the Christian view. But, in any case, we must be prepared for the assaults of passion—be they pleasurable or just plain suffering.