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This is the current version of Chapter 1· of Turning Words, a work in progress. (See the note on the Contents page about its structure.) © gnusystems – send comments or questions to gnox -at- gnusystems -dot- ca.
Current 1 November 2011
You have been selected for a secret mission. It is secret because only you inhabit this mission, live through it, see your world from within it. In that sense you are unique – just like everybody else.
That sense (in which you are unique) must be a common sense: how else could we speak a common language? Our private paths can cross because they differ. Where they cross arises the common sense of a path. In this way we can collaborate in asking: Who or what is sending or calling you to your secret mission, and why?
Even before you read it, this book is already a collaboration, woven (like any verbal text) of many threads involving the author with others. Yet its only purpose, for you, is to cross your path at this end of time. Your mission in reading it – should you choose to accept it – is to make some common sense of your mission, by exploring what you have in common with other sense-makers or ‘sentient beings’. You are here to breathe life into this tissue of signs by meaning it now. Although this is a mission within a secret mission, it raises an open question:
How do you mean?
You can't take a question like this to an expert.
You are the problem. No scholar to be found far and wide.If you have a specific medical problem, you can take it to a specialist. But what if your problem is having a body? Likewise, if you wonder about some particular part of the world, you can ask an expert. But what if the wonder is having a world?
To ask How do you mean? is to open up the question of how you read the world. You read it one sign at a time, whether it's a book like this one, or a sacred scripture, a song, a film, a face, the tracks of an unseen animal, the fossil record in the rocks, or the very texture of the universe. The author isn't offering advice, expertise or instruction on reading or meaning; he's a learner like yourself, a fellow beginner. There is no place to begin but where we are.
Yet there's no meaning without a context. There's also a whole history behind our being here, and many ways of exploring that natural and human history. The testimony of every expert in this or that special part of the universal mission arises from such an inquiry, and some are woven into this text. The author has documented these ‘sources’, as any responsible scholar would, providing a reference list and links that you can follow or ignore as your own inquiry allows or requires. (If you are reading the hypertext version of this book, you can click on these links for more information.)
I've spread the net of testimony broadly in order that some of the deeper patterns can appear through various idioms and expressions without getting caught in any one of them. But the depth of this demonstration really depends on you. Specialist, generalist or beginner, whatever we learn of a common truth turns upon ‘personal knowledge,’ as Michael Polanyi called it. As the one in charge of meaning all this, you can rest assured that all the specialists are working for you. And as the beginner of this reading, it's your mission at the moment to
From moment to moment, day to day, year to year, generation to generation, we humans make choices – some consciously and carefully, some not – according to which we live this time. As we navigate the world, a myriad courses fan out before us, even when only one (or none) looks viable. We are blessed, and burdened, with an ability to alter and adjust our courses spontaneously, systematically and recursively. We form and reform habits of doing, being, seeing and saying because we are complex adaptive systems implicated with larger systems (cultures, ecosystems) and composed of smaller systems (organs, cells, routines). We are formed, constrained, informed and guided by a heterarchy of systems within us and without us, our lifeways involved with myriad others.
Or to put it more simply and vaguely, we are spiritual beings.
Because of all this, the one thing we can never do is to know precisely what we are doing. The ultimate effects of our choices and acts are radically unpredictable. All we know for sure is that they will change the situation so that future decisions will be made in different circumstances. Without knowing the ultimate result, though, we can still be guided by our expectations; and our expectations in turn are guided by intimate outcomes of what we've done. Though the world remains a mystery, the difference you make by acting into it can sometimes surprise you, and thus can exceed and recreate your expectations.
Everything you do is part of a dialogue with mystery, a conversation between your island of familiar habits and the vastly shifting seas of an unknown reality. This dialogue inhabits a collective conversation between humanity and the mystery out there, in which we are sustained by our faith that we can learn a little of how the sea changes by reading the signs it leaves lying about. The record of the public and verbal part of the human side of this dialogue has been called ‘the great conversation’ (with typically human self-congratulation). Although it contains the highest linguistic achievements in art, science and scripture, it's only a bit part in the bigger play which Thomas Berry called the ‘communion of subjects’ – the internal dialogue of universe. Your mission is a microcosm of this vast conversation.
The common root of ‘universe’ and ‘conversation’ is turning. A change of direction is a turning; seen from within the new path (or mission), it appears as a beginning. A word or sign that causes such a change – a trans-mission – may be called a revelation by ‘people of the Book’, or a turning word between one buddha and another. This book is about turning words and their deeper roots in natural cycles and signs. Along the way we discover that the spirit and the method of scientific inquiry spring from the same deep source. The study of inquiry itself is called logic, and the study of signs – which pervade all inquiry, thought and life itself – is semiotic. Here, as we often do in this book, we are using the terms established by C.S. Peirce (pronounced purse), whose close investigation of semiotic process or semiosis opens into the very heart of meaning. (Author's note: since the gnoxic inquiry embodied in this book is deeply informed by Peircean philosophy, i have provided on my website several resources for the study of his work, and links to many more.)
Since life goes on within and without us, we have no choice but to simplify our lives with metaphors and models, reducing a fluid process to a play of entities. The ‘island’ of habit and the ‘sea’ surrounding it are metaphors; so is ‘navigating the world,’ a variation on the ‘path’ metaphor which we all use to represent our decision-making. A path by this metaphor is not just a line along which one moves from point A to point B, as in plane geometry, or a trajectory in the 3-dimensional space of classical and folk physics. The path we actually inhabit is a reiterative practice in a space of innumerable dimensions. The navigator in this real space needs a metaphorical map, and needs to read not only the map but the difference between map and world. Otherwise there could be neither expectation nor surprise – nor life as we know it.
You must have done all this reading and mapping fairly well up to now, or you wouldn't be here to read the text before you. So you might well wonder whether it serves any practical purpose to think about thinking, or know about knowing, or read about reading. And while you're at it, you might wonder what makes any purpose practical. As author of the present interlude in the great conversation, i can identify with that. After 60-odd years of living a human life, i'm still wondering how it's done. Now i've left the tracks of my wondering where you can find them. You never know what can happen when you cross paths with another beginner – you might even
Jesus said, ‘The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same.’The Gospel of Thomas, a treasury of turning words from the earliest days of Christianity, is one of the sources deeply embedded in this book. Others, such as the writings of 13th-century Zen master Dogen, exemplify Buddhist views of the Way or ‘buddha-dharma’. Still others are drawn from various sciences, with a special focus on the ground of semiosis common to all sense-making, including science and scripture.— Gospel of Thomas 4 (Lambdin)
In one of his lectures, Peirce identified three ‘mental operations concerned in reasoning’ which will also play key roles in this book: Observation, Experimentation, and Habituation, ‘the power of readily taking habits and of readily throwing them off’ (RLT, 189). Of the latter he said that
Perfect readiness to assimilate new associations implies perfect readiness to drop old ones.… To be a philosopher, or a scientific man, you must be as a little child, with all the sincerity and simple-mindedness of the child's vision, with all the plasticity of the child's mental habits.This is essentially the same point made by Jesus in the logion (saying) above. The ‘scientific’, ‘philosophical’ and ‘spiritual’ views here converge in affirming the value of plasticity in a habit-system. Without it there's no way to
— or even to change course, if you're on some course already. But of course you can only start (or continue) if you have some definite sense, based on current habits, of where you are now. Again, you can't get that from a specialist. Philosophy, said Peirce, is ‘a science which rests on no special observations, made by special observational means, but on phenomena which lie open to the observation of every man, every day and hour’ (CP 7.526). If we can call this a book of philosophy, then, your task as its reader is to test what it says against your own observations – which you alone can do, by recreating this public inquiry in your own image.
This doesn't mean we can ignore the special sciences; rather it means placing their discoveries in a more comprehensive context than any of them can provide by itself. What makes a special science relevant to your mission, or to any human mission, is that it can suggest patterns or connections among the forms, feelings and things making up your world. And the same goes for the signs presented by arts and religions. Drawing threads from these various sources, and checking them against experience, might help us to awaken our senses of where we are and where we are going.
Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premisses which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.— Peirce (EP1:29; CP 5.265)
Though the cable/message/text called Turning Words is woven of many threads, i have tried in this first (obverse) part of the book to present them one at a time, as a series of steps along the path we make by walking on it. This train of thought eventually arrives at a terminal called The Point, which should make perfect sense if you and i have played our parts well as reader and writer, but would make little or no sense if we started there. In the second (reverse) part, the train of thought – having passed through the Point and dispensing with serial order – explodes into a network, where each new point takes its place as a node linked to many others. Though the linking is implicit here, it is the form of the network itself (and not the isolated point) that matters philosophically. And as Peirce put it,
in every age, it can only be the philosophy of that age, such as it may be, which can animate the special sciences to any work that shall really carry forward the human mind to some new and valuable truth. Because the valuable truth is not the detached one, but the one that goes toward enlarging the system of what is already known.Topologically-minded readers may also find that the shape of the book resembles a Klein bottle, or a tesseract, and thus embodies its central theme … but let's not give away the ending.— EP2:48
— As if i could say what the book says, get straight to the point without going through it! The train that can be expressed is not the express train.
This opening chapter is supposed to give a few intimations of the train's itinerary. You might also wonder where that's coming from, and whether its order is related to the personal/historical circumstances of the author's life. Indeed this does make a difference, every mission being unique –
A man cannot receive a heritage of ideas without transforming it by the very fact that he comes to know it, without injecting his own and always different way of being into it.That's as true of me as it is of you. Although very little space is given here to the author's biography, placing it in historical context might begin to explain why beginning is here entangled with apocalypse. I was born exactly one month after The Day the World Ended. That was Kurt Vonnegut's name (in his novel Cat's Cradle) for August 6, 1945 – the day when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. So you might say that mine has been a post-apocalyptic life.— Merleau-Ponty (1960, 224)
40 years later Paul Ehrlich (author of The Population Bomb), speaking at the local university, told us that we humans had a choice: we could render the Earth unfit for human habitation in 50 minutes, by using nuclear weapons; or we could achieve the same result in 50 years by simply carrying on with ‘business as usual’, that is, with trashing the planet. – Or we could change the way we live.
Skip another score of years, into the 21st century CE, and things have changed, as usual. For one thing, the world has been taken over by alien beings from another dimension – we call them corporations. Meanwhile it's projected that the human population of the planet will peak (at around 10 billion) within this century, and then start to decline. (If it doesn't collapse more suddenly, that is.) I suppose the rest of the biosphere, or whatever is left of it, will breathe a sigh of relief at that point, though i can hardly imagine what the place will be like by then. Indeed it's getting hard to imagine with any confidence what the place will be like next week. People have always felt (more or less) that they were living in times of crisis, but until recently they could assume at least that life would go on somehow, for better or worse. But in 2005, we heard from the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (representing 6 years of study by 1366 scientists in 95 countries) that ‘human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.’ And the financial ‘meltdown’ of 2008 revealed our vaunted economic systems to be little more than bubbles held together by surface tension and inflated by sheer greed, liable to collapse at any moment, with unpredictable consequences for human communities.
Still, one thing hasn't changed: every choice you make while you live could make some difference in the world our descendants will live in. There's guidance on offer all around you – more than you can use, probably – about the specific choices before you, in whatever situation you are reading this. In 2006, for instance, there was The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, in which David Korten outlined the 5000-year reign of ‘imperial consciousness’ and pointed the way to a more promising orientation. The present book, however, offers neither local nor global guidance, aiming instead to investigate how guidance systems work in every domain (physical, biological, psychological, cultural and so forth) and how those domains are related. Whether that aim is too ambitious, or not ambitious enough, is for you to decide.
Something else happened toward the end of 1945, something that almost completely escaped the notice of a world distracted by the Bomb and the War. You could say it was an information bomb, secret and slow in its detonation, yet symbolic of a larger life still dawning every day – a wake-up call from two thousand years ago. That was the discovery, near Nag Hammadi in Egypt, of a collection of books written in Coptic and hidden in a large jar in the fourth century C.E. The villager who broke open the jar and found them had no idea what they were, and scholars are still working out their implications; but already they have shifted our sense of what early Christianity was like. Perhaps the most earthshaking discovery in this Nag Hammadi library was the Gospel of Thomas. We will read it here as a sign of what some call ‘the spirit’, and others ‘religious experience’; let it stand beside the Bomb as a kind of counterpoint. Unlikely as it may seem, reading these twin signs of our trying times might serve after all as means to the end of a new beginning.
The disciples said to Jesus, ‘Tell us how our end will be.’
Jesus said, ‘Have you discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end? For where the beginning is, there will the end be. Blessed is he who will take his place in the beginning; he will know the end and will not experience death.’— Gospel of Thomas 18 (Lambdin)
The world as we know it is coming to an end: apocalypse. Apocalypse (ἀποκαλυψις) is Greek for discovery. Blowing the lid off: revealing the secrets inside the tomb (resurrection), inside the womb of the world (new life, new heaven, new earth). The resurrection of the body, bringing forth a world turned inside out. Waking from a living death to reveal the secrets of mission and transmission. Who are you, O Reader? That's the real question.
I can tell you this much up front: Your primary guidance system is made up of your habits, not of conscious deliberation. Consciousness tends to get in the way – which turns out to be useful, because it can clear the way for a change of habit. A change is a turn in the path, anything from a slight shift of practice all the way to revolution, or even beyond that, to apocalypse. We commonly think that apocalypse means the end of the world; actually it's an opening for a whole universe to
Sometimes a startling moment of consciousness comes, when you know that what's now revealed was hidden only by your very immersion in it, by vision buried in the habit of seeing.
His disciples said to him: ‘When will the <resurrection> of the dead take place, and when will the new world come?’
He said to them: ‘That (resurrection) which you are awaiting has (already) come, but you do not recognize it.’— Gospel of Thomas 51 (5G;
for a key to abbreviations used in this book, see the reference list.)
His disciples said to him, ‘When will the kingdom come?’
‘It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, “Look, here it is,” or “Look, there it is.” Rather, the father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.’— Gospel of Thomas 113 (Meyer)
After two thousand years, there's still time to stop waiting. Eternity now!
You can only start from where you are and step into the future. If this book means anything to you – and who else could it mean to? – that's because it will make a difference, however subtle, in what you imagine your mission to be.
Next chapter: Dialogue and Human Nature →
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