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.

The Dance Hall of the Dead

The knights of reason get things right in the hard world of concepts, but for inspiration we look to poets, visionaries, and to mystics. Storytellers belong to the latter tribe, albeit at the humbler working level, hence we often learn something about mysterious and hidden matters from novels and the like. From Tony Hillerman we have The Dance Hall of the Dead, a vivid glimpse into the religious life of the Zuni Indians, a tiny group, part of the Pueblo Indians, about 12,000 all told today, less than 8,000 living the Pueblo life. Yet in that obscure and ancient tradition lives a mythological conception you will find echoing the experiences of Swedenborg, say, of the Tao Te Ching, with hints of reincarnation included. But it takes poetic imagination to do the fusion I’m suggesting.

Here is a summary in Hillerman’s novel put into the mouth of a fictitious Franciscan, Father Ingles. Ingles is speaking.

“What made me think of Kothluwalawa was that business of the dance hall. If you translate that word into English it means something like ‘Dance Hall of the Dead,’ or maybe ‘Dance Ground of the Spirits,’ or something like that.” Ingles smiled. “Rather a poetic concept. In life, ritual dancing for the Zuni is sort of a perfect expression of …” He paused, searching for the word. “Call it ecstasy, or joy, or community unity. So what do you do when you’re beyond life, with no labors to perform? You spend your time dancing.”

Now it turns out that this place, in scholarship as well as in the novel, is a sacred lake near the place where the Zuni river joins the Little Colorado in Arizona. Its formal name is Ko-tluwallawa. Ko stands for “god” and “tluwallawa” for town, city, or pueblo. Thus the name really means “god-town” and also, as I will rapidly show, the Abode of the Dead.

To quote a scholar (A.L. Kroeber, link) here is the original myth of how the watery Dance Hall of the Dead came about: “As the ancient people crossed the [Zuni] river, the mothers dropped their pinching and biting children, who turned into tadpoles, frogs, turtles, and other aquatic animals and descended to the ‘god town’ in the sacred lake, and there at once became the kokko.”

Now the knights of reason will have some problem with that myth—and doubly so when they are told that for the Zuni the word kokko means “gods.” In the Zuni conception the dead are gods—much as in Swedenborg’s writings all angels are former humans. This view has greatly puzzled scholars; they’ve evidently ignored or dismissed voices like Swedenborg’s. The kokko, mind you, aren’t God. That person, in Zuni culture, is Awonawilona, the supreme being, thought of as bisexual, referred to as He-She, the giver of life and present everywhere. Parsed apart further (by Kroeber), the word really means He-She who owns all roads, paths, and ways—and someone like me can’t help but immediately to think of the Tao.

The hint of reincarnation I mentioned above comes from a Zuni belief that every person has an appointed path his or her own—completion of which is mandatory and may not be cut short by suicide, however caused, including excessive grief. Those who thus violate the dispensation must complete that path first before they can descend into the sacred lake and take up their dance in the Dance Hall of the Dead. What little literature is readily available to me does not describe how “finishing the interrupted path” might be accomplished, but it does strike me that in Ian Stevenson’s studies most of the cases of people who recall previous lives feature individuals who died young and by violent means. They remember interrupted lives.

Three Ways of Seeing

If I take the very big view of humanity’s systems of belief, they divide into three categories—and roughly along geographical lines. In the west prophetic religions and materialism form two of the camps. That fact at once suggests that the debate about God’s existence is essentially a western preoccupation; the reasons for that will become clearer as I go on. Asian cultures see reality as a—well, let me call it a dispensation. Using that word I mean “a broad acceptance that reality arises from a transcending source”—but in a different way than we picture that process in the prophetic religions. In China it is Heaven or the Way (Tao); in India it is Brahman, the Ultimate; the cosmic law experienced by humanity is karma.

The chief difference between these systems is how close or distant their adherents imagine themselves to be from the Ultimate Power—and whether or not this power has anything like a coherent self and consciousness. Some scholars in the west are so influenced by their experience of or familiarity with prophetic religions (in which God is most definitely a person) that they hesitate to call Asian faiths religions at all or add words like “philosophical” to modify the world “religion”; some simply call Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism, and Hinduism “philosophies.” Western religions, by contrast, are “revealed” religions; that very word signals the personal qualities of God as understood in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In materialism, ancient and modern, no conscious presence exists behind the cosmic whole. The cosmos is assumed to have a lawful behavior, conceived either as innate in matter and/or arising from random motion. In Lucretius, for instance, atoms, the only real existents, move uniformly; but from time to time, arbitrarily and unpredictably, their movement changes by means of a “swirl.” This motion is the source of all change and also of freedom as experienced by humanity. Consciousness here comes from very subtle atoms—and they also “swirl.” The most severe version of modern materialism in effect recognizes only the law of statistics. What we ordinarily call the laws of nature are, in this view, only movements that recur with a very high probability. In this, the materialistic view, the Ultimate is simply atoms or particles or waves—alone or in some kind of combination. Consciousness, personality, selves (and so forth) are invariably but temporarily emergent properties that disappear again as soon as the arrangement that gave rise to them change.

Now to the Asian traditions. In these the functioning of divinity (or simply of the transcending) is also experienced as law, but consciousness within or behind the cosmos (or both) is accepted but not emphasized. And this for a reason: the cosmos is a dispensation, not a perceivably intentional project the object of which is humanity. Heaven’s actions manifest through the world; they are observable in the world’s very arrangements. Human violation of the dispensation is corrected by the very workings of karma, by the Tao, or by the mandate of Heaven—and we discover these outcomes by experiencing them—whether here or in the realms beyond. We know the law by observation, not by revelation—and it works infallibly whether we observe it or not. In outer forms these religions are similar to the Western prophetic religions—not so in their inwardness. Hinduism, for example, has its own trinity, arising from Brahman, the unknowable ultimate. The three are Brahma (notice the difference in spelling) the creator, Vishnu the maintainer, and Shiva the destroyer. In China Heaven is conceived as the ultimate agent, but subsidiary powers are admitted as well. The difference lies in the fact that the observable cosmos as a whole is the message or contains it. There is no specific communication, beyond or within the cosmos itself and specifically directed at humans. Indeed in this form of religion human beings, narrowly considered, are viewed as a spark of divinity. That conception explains human powers and also translates into human responsibility to discern the law and to apply it to specific circumstances—or suffer consequences.

The third way of seeing reality takes the form of revealed or prophetic religions. All three arose from Judaism. The unique character of this view lies in the manner in which the Ultimate communicates with humanity. The form of that communication is between God and selected individuals—who, in turn, then communicate with everybody else. Thus we have a succession of prophets. Alongside the ordinary laws of nature and the inner intuitions every person has, these religions project a special communication to humanity by an indirect method (God to prophet, prophet to public) as I’ve indicated. In Christianity, finally, one person of God—who is in that faith pictured as having three persons—actually becomes a human. Thus in revealed religion we also have a dispensation, which can be read by people, and a special law directed at humans through humans.

This brief encapsulation should make it obvious why it is that faith is such an important concept in the revealed religions—and why it is that atheism is not really an issue in the Asian cultures. Both materialism and dispensationalism (if I might so characterize the Asian systems of belief) leave decisions to the individual and rely for their authority entirely on human diligence in observation—and individual interpretation of the same. You don’t believe that Heaven has its way and cannot be opposed? That’s up to you. The prophetic religions, by contrast, demand assent to the idea that God would communicate specifically and in various contexts with individual humans and, by that method, provide yet another and higher law than is discernible by direct and personal experience.

Things Must be Thought Through

I was reading some passages by Chuang Tzu, a third century (BC) Taoist philosopher, last night. Chuang Tzu left behind something like Confucius’ Analects, thus a collection of his own and his disciples’ writings. And, like the Analects, much of its content deals with governance—a preoccupation that Confucius impressed upon philosophical thought. Tzu was born about eighty years after Confucius died. The Tao Te Ching, the defining book of Taoism, has a very different flavor. Now here, in The Chuang Tzu, we encounter Taoist thought but applied to governance. While the Tao speaks to me, Tzu’s writings produce a kind of reluctant wonder. Tzu’s fairly consistent solutions to most problem of governance are a kind of do-nothing detachment, which might sound philosophical but would be disastrous in practice. When the kids are tearing up the living room, detached not-doing is not the right response. I fell asleep last night thinking that—and woke up this morning thinking, “Things must be thought through.” That slogan at first lacked all context, but the reference then came to me as I was brewing coffee. Eight hours of sleep later, my last thought of the night had been followed by this one.

In real life we often face this sort of situation. China’s is a distant culture I’ve not experienced directly; I’ve read some of its great classic works—and continue to re-read them. Impressions form—but not based on deep scholarship. One forms opinions nonetheless, but in what I’m about to say, I remind myself that it’s just a reaction…and from a pretty dark shade of general ignorance.

The impression I have is that Confucius had so tremendous an influence on Chinese philosophical culture that casting things in a Confucian pattern tempted all those who followed him. How else to get noticed? Hence we have Chuang Tzu writing in the anecdotal manner of the Analects about the ruler of this, the ruler of that. But my reaction to Tzu’s writings is not-quite-agreement. And here is why, I think. There is a difference in level between Confucian ethics and Taoist mysticism. Each is correct and appropriate within its own range—indeed admirably so—but Taoism applied to governance would be as discordant as the application of ethics to the highest levels of the spiritual life. This is merely to say that a single inspiration guides both, that Confucian and Taoist doctrines don’t really clash—as supposedly they did and do—provided that we think it through. When we do we realize that both arise from the same inspiration, one applied to the personal, the other to the social.

Which brings to mind a saying—from Japan I think. People are Shintoist in youth, Confucian in maturity, and Buddhist in old age. Right on…

Tao: Two Other Translations

Two posts back I gave the first section of Book I of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu. The original, of course, was written in Chinese characters, and quite diverse translations exist. I thought I’d show two others. The first is translated by Lin Yutang, the novelist and at one time the foremost introducer of Asian culture to the West. I read him in my teens. Here is Lin Yutang’s version; it is found in The Wisdom of China and India, Modern Library, p. 583; my version appeared in 1942:

The Tao that can be told of
   Is not the Absolute Tao;
The Names that can be given
   Are not Absolute Names.

The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth;
The Named is the Mother of All Things.

Therefore:
Oftentimes, one strips oneself of passion
   In order to see the Secret of Life;
Oftentimes, one regards life with passion,
   In order to see its manifest results.

These two (the Secret and its manifestations)
   Are (in their nature) the same;
They are given different names
   When they become manifest.

They may both be called the Cosmic Mystery:
Reaching from the Mystery into the Deeper Mystery
Is the Gate to the Secret of All Life.

This next version is a translation by Chang Chung-yuan and available in Tao: A New Way of Thinking, Harper Colophon, 1975, p. 3:

The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao itself.
The name that can be given is not the name itself.
The unnameable is the source of the univers.
The nameable is the originator of all things.
Therefore, oftentimes without intention I see the wonder of Tao.
Oftentimes with intention I see its manifestations.
Its wonder and its manifestations are one and the same.
Since their emergence, they have been called by different names.
Their identity is called the mystery.
From mystery to further mystery:
The entry of all wonders!

Now, with specific reference to the lines that begin with “therefore” in either translation, I would add this relevant quote from Idries Shah’s The Sufis (p. 26):

The Sufi is an individual who believes that by practicing alternate detachment and identification with life, he becomes free. He is a mystic because he believes that he can become attuned to the purpose of all life. He is a practical man because he believes that this process must take place within normal society.

Tao

In a recent comment (made elsewhere) I said, “I think that Taoism represents the most sophisticated view of reality.” And in this post I suggested that “the Tao Te Ching might be called a classical text on negative theology, thus the idea that anything you say about the Ultimate is wrong-headed even before you utter the words.” With these comments I thought I’d quote the first subdivision of the book here. It was written by Lao Tzu; the translation is by D.C. Lau in the Penguin Classics edition of 1963.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.
Hence always rid yourself of desires in order to observe its secrets;
But always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations.
These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mysteries,
Mystery upon mystery —
The gateway of the manifold secrets.

Now here we encounter the core issues of the spiritual life. It operates beyond the intellectual level—as Idries Shah observes in The Sufis—and must be anchored in experience. The words above escape analysis but may be experienced. Hence my characterization. Negative theology is not a kind of know-nothingness; but neither is it a game of conceptual juggling.

Notes on Atheism

There are different ways in which people can couch their disbelief in the religious doctrines of the Hebraic family of religions. People can hold, as I do, that all humans are able to perceive a higher dimension; I usually call this the transcendental order; therefore I view claims of special divine revelation, channeled through individuals or larger aggregates (a chosen people), as an interpretation of personal experiences. Inevitably those who claim the revelation also claim to be pronouncing God’s will—not merely for themselves but others. This I view as “the problem of revelation.” You can find a series of posts on this subject here by clicking the term revelation under Categories. I view it as a problem because, inevitably, this sort of doctrine becomes oppressive when it gains sufficient power. To doubt the claims of those who would speak in the name of God is disbelief, but only from the viewpoint of the believer in the doctrine; disbelief of this kind isn’t necessarily atheism.

Another form of disbelief arises from sincere inability to perceive a transcendental order behind nature, world, and cosmos. This group divides into agnostics and atheists. Agnostics claim they just don’t know, one way or the other; but they leave either possibility open. Agnostics don’t actively push their views. Atheists are convinced that their inability to see the transcendental arises from the fact of its absence; they divide into ordinary atheists and into the militant kind. The latter act as missionaries of their system of faith; in this they are indistinguishable from others who proselytize for other systems that also lack all positive proof, thus proof that can be publicly demonstrated without need for subjective “faith.”

Early in my wanderings I’ve noted that atheism is a peculiarly western phenomenon. It is the Hebraic tradition that introduced the concept of revelation; its acceptance requires “faith”—thus assent in the absence of proof. It is in the philosophical schools of this tradition that proofs for the existence of God have flourished—and have also spawned their atheistic opponents. I’m unaware of any similar clustering of thought in the East. Why isn’t there an analogous movement in China, for instance, centered on showing that the Tao or Heaven do not exist? Here it might be worth mentioning that “Heaven,” in the Chinese conceptualization, is an unanalyzed but well-understood reference to an overweening transcendent sovereignty. We see this in the context, for instance, of a phrase like “the mandate of Heaven.” That such a saying is not merely a cynical equivalent to saying that “what happens happens” is shown by the fact that in Chinese classical literature Heaven’s mandate is withdrawn when the virtue of the ruler flags. Heaven is thus conceived of having a moral aspect. Similarly I note the conspicuous absence of analytical approaches in the writings about the Tao (“the Way”); the Tao Te Ching might be called a classical text on negative theology, thus the idea that anything you say about the Ultimate is wrong-headed even before you utter the words.

The only way I can explain this difference between the East and the West is by noting that, in the West, we have separated from the unanalyzable Ultimate a willful ruling spirit, a spirit that specifically directs humans, as such, to behave in certain ways. I could put this another way and say that we have projected into the unanalyzable Ultimate our own dogmatic dicta; we’ve divinized our own sense of the right; next we proceed to derive our own views, once more, but this time from on High, now as the all-powerful voice of God. And because it is from such a source, we claim for it much more than merely our conviction that right is right. No. It is more than that. The East has avoided this innovation and thus still holds a more reverential view of the divine. Atheism, therefore, at least certain sincere and serious forms of it, might therefore be viewed as a corrective.

Notes on the Prophetic Mission

These notes are occasioned by reading again Henry Corbin’s essay titled A Theory of Visionary Knowledge. It’s part of a collection of his essays or speeches published as The Voyage and the Messenger, North Atlantic Books, 1998. There Corbin lays out the Shi’ite view of the prophetic mission. Pondering a passage there, it occurred to me that the eastern world lacks a corresponding conceptualization—although holy figures are found in that realm too.

The prophetic mission is solely associated with the Judeo-Christian-Muslim cultural continuum. Why is that? My own conclusion is that ours is the only one (large and powerful although it is), in which God is conceived anthropomorphically and, in one sense, a step removed from the creation. Anthropomorphically how? The human characteristics of this figure are evident in its interactions with humanity as an external lawgiver. God is envisioned as intervening in history, in choosing people to be its own, and in sending heralds to make his will known. The interventions become even more complex when we reach the Christian interpretation. A step removed? Yes. In our most elevated scholastic philosophy, we learn that God maintains the world in existence continuously; yet God also sends emissaries to guide us. The need for emissaries suggests a distance to me.

And, for me, this is a problem. If God maintains the world in existence, if God is the source of all existence and of all the laws that organize it (no problem there), not least the gift of free will to conscious entities like us, why is there need for periodic interventions, messages from on high, chosen people, and the like.

The East evidently never entertained a concept of God as an active, intervening ruler correcting his own arrangements at intervals; hence prophets are conspicuous by absence. The East also produces seers, mystics, and holy people—and others who travel in the Borderzone. But their interpretation of these experience has always had a quite different flavor. The Tao Te Ching is a theological work, no doubt about it. In it the Tao is the all-transcending Reality which need not correct its own creation.

The Eastern view fits the facts much better than the Western, in my view. It’s simply more sophisticated. It fits my observation that mystics, seers, psychics, and prophets will invariably interpret their visions and experiences based on the culture they bring to the experience. And if, indeed, reformist messages come from the Beyond and rouse the often reluctant prophet to act in the social realm, I for one assume that the source of these messages may be well-meaning—but it is certainly not God.

Cosmic Models

When we imagine myths of the world, even one of a small part of it, the tale must match the subject. Now any one human life certainly fits the personal scale, but it cannot be viewed except in a broader context: we all live our lives embedded in history’s flow. I was a small pebble but rolled along by the enormous weather of the twentieth century. You cannot reach a moderately educated level unaware of history’s depth or nature’s incredible complexity.

Whatever the human story, it is a vast tale of great moment and scope and cannot be reduced to simple concepts. In effect reality, even the portions of it we can see, cannot be fitted to a line of logic; it requires a saga at the least. To say that much is also to admit that we cannot really know the big picture in the full. It’s damnably difficult even to know a small part of the physical world. I recall one of my incarnations and remember how little we know about something like cement—and we know a lot about it.

This by way of commentary on models of reality. The philosophical attempts that come close to being satisfying have an architectural character or depict a dynamic process, usually triadic. Monistic systems tend to be rather pathetic because they have no point.

The Aristotelian scheme, completed by Thomas Aquinas, is a static structure built up out of the duality of matter and form. These may be rendered as the potential and the actual or, in other phrasing, the virtually nonexistent (unformed matter) and absolute Being, pure form or actuality, God. “Potential” is one of those wonderfully ambiguous concepts; it exists in a way but in another “not yet.” The Thomistic system ultimately feels incoherent; it has matter but doesn’t really need it. In a cosmos where immaterial beings exist, materiality requires some kind of justification; the theory doesn’t justify it. To be coherent this philosophy requires that duality be extended upward (ever more subtle matter to match ever more exalted spirit) or spirit must be extended downward (matter is thus densified spirit).

Taoism is a triadic, dynamic system in that it provides a creative and receptive (Yang, Yin) which account for the dynamism of the Tao. As a description of reality the Tao is flawless: freedom and necessity in motion forming an unnamable third which is their origin and their expression. The Tao is the ultimate cosmic building kit. You find it hidden beneath just about every cosmology ever made. It’s there in Aristotle, Yin being matter, Yang being form. At it is, however, it requires enormous restraint simply to accept as is. People are tempted to elaborate.

Monistic systems take one or the other of the two elements of Tao and exclude the other. There is Schopenhauer’s Will—which is everything. There is materialism’s Matter—ditto.

The philosophies, however, ultimate stop short of meaning. There is no personality here—although in systems where it’s introduced, it is the Yang. The great sagas introduce meaning by way of a drama in which the two are in conflict for one or several cosmic ages. We are usually minor participants, sometimes at the center (as in Christianity). And our fates are part of the greater history of a vast heavenly turbulence.

The really effective cosmologies—such as, for instance, the fable of the Island—provide a story that goes beyond our direct experience in order to explain its intuited origins and its felt continuation beyond death, but do not attempt to lay down an absolute and final meaning for the entire process. Our inner guidance actually rejects a final explanation. Our intuition (mine anyway) says that the ultimate picture is not knowable from our perspective.