Apocalypse: Opening Time (TW .1)

·1 Apocalypse: Opening Time

Turning word: in Dogen's Japanese, ichitengo (see Nishijima and Cross 1997, 161n); ‘a statement that leads a student to realization’ (Tanahashi 2000, 290). Who is this turning the dharma wheel? Who is this turning the page?

Entering is the source, and the source means from beginning to end.
— Dogen, ‘Bukkyo’ (Nearman 2007, 312)

It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.
— Wittgenstein (1969, #471)

Why did i begin with ‘Start again’? Well, clearly any reader of a book like this must have started reading (and thinking and living) well before picking it up; at the same time, you have to drop whatever you're doing in order to enter upon this kind of inquiry. It's a new beginning, but as Peirce remarks (EP2:336),

there is but one state of mind from which you can ‘set out,’ namely, the very state of mind in which you actually find yourself at the time you do ‘set out,’ – a state in which you are laden with an immense mass of cognition already formed, of which you cannot divest yourself if you would; and who knows whether, if you could, you would not have made all knowledge impossible to yourself?

In Peircean terminology, this book could be described as a hybrid of cenoscopy and synthetic philosophy. The former, says Peirce,

is better entitled (except by usage) to being distinguished as philosophia prima than ontology, embraces all that positive science which rests upon familiar experience and does not search out occult or rare phenomena; while the other, which has been called philosophia ultima, embraces all that truth which is derivable by collating the results of different special sciences, but which is too broad to be established by any one of them.
— EP2:372

In other words, the philosophical inquiry here aims at both the primary (or primal?) and the ultimate – the alpha and the omega. Actually only the cenoscopic part should be called inquiry, or heuretic science as Peirce called it, since he placed synthetic philosophy ‘at the head of the Retrospective Sciences’ (EP2:373), i.e. those which systematize what has been learned by others rather than making new discoveries of their own. But for cenoscopy, the heuretic approach to ‘familiar experience’ does cause some problems:

The method of cenoscopic research presents a certain difficulty. In commencing it we are confronted with the fact that we already believe a great many things. These beliefs, or at least the more general of them, ought to be reconsidered with deliberation. This implies that it should be conducted according to a deliberate plan adopted only after the severest criticism. Indeed, nothing in cenoscopy should be embraced without criticism. Each criticism should wait to be planned, and each plan should wait for criticism. Clearly, if we are to get on at all, we must put up with imperfect procedure.
— EP2:373

This might help to explain (to its author at least) why this book has taken over ten years to write and revise – and may also suggest part of the reason why Peirce never managed to finish the definitive book on logic/semiotic which he hoped to write: for him, putting up with imperfect procedure was never easy.

We begin by returning to life.

To be alive is to be in the middle of a recursive process. (This is too simple, of course; actually to be alive is to inhabit a network of recursive processes.)

To begin is to actualize our presence in the process by taking the next step to carry it forward.

When we try to take conscious control of the whole living process, to view it from above and oversee it, we interrupt it. We interrupt it because we overlook the fact that such comprehension or taking control is another process.

The real beginning is not in the past, whether it's the origin of life or language or the Big Bang or the birth of God; nor is the real end in the future. The real beginning is where you actually begin, and the end is your arrival now.

The relation between thought and word is a living process; thought is born through words. A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow. The connection between them, however, is not a preformed and constant one. It emerges in the course of development, and itself evolves. To the Biblical ‘In the beginning was the Word’, Goethe makes Faust reply, ‘In the beginning was the deed.’ The intent here is to detract from the value of the word, but we can accept this version if we emphasise it differently: In the beginning was the deed. The word was not the beginning – action was there first; it is the end of development, crowning the deed.
— Vygotsky (1934, 153)

As the word goes, so goes the Way.

The Way, called now, does not precede activity; as activity is realized, it is called now.
— Dogen (Kim 1975, 75)

When i first conceived the notion of a book addressed to you (i.e. written mainly in the second person), and about your mission, it seemed to me a radical new idea. Yet within hours of completing the final(?) draft of the first chapter, i happened to dip into The Cloud of Unknowing (which dates from the 14th Century):

HERE BEGINNETH THE FIRST CHAPTER
Of four degrees of Christian men's living; and of the course of his calling that this book was made unto.

‘Your mission,’ dear reader, is obviously synonymous with ‘the course of his calling that this book was made unto.’ So much for originality; it seems you can find intimologies from as far back as you can read. We don't need new books, we need deeper readers.

Like any text (or any life), this one is woven out of path-crossings; and being a conscientious reader, i've done my best to point toward some of the paths i've crossed with other authors. Wherever i have drawn upon specific ‘sources’, i've documented them in the parenthetical way now standard in the sciences; but the more pervasive an idea becomes in one's thinking and reading, the less point there is in citing ‘sources’ for it. Some of my ‘sources’ may go uncited simply because their thoughts have sunk so deeply into mine that i can no longer trace them. However, all the sources of which i have been conscious during the writing are listed in the reference list at the back of the book. (The quote marks around ‘sources’ are reminders that a text like this one is not and cannot be assembled from others, any more than your body is assembled from preexisting parts. Rather, each quotation or reference marks a point where another line of thought has crossed paths with this one. (‘Strictly speaking, every word in the book should be in quotation marks’ (Gregory Bateson (1979, 108)).))

The writing process, for me at least, is an exploration and never a ‘straight path’. In this respect i empathize with Ludwig Wittgenstein:

The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination. – And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.
— Wittgenstein, Preface to the Philosophical Investigations

Nevertheless, in the first (obverse) part of this book i've tried to lay out a single track and keep the train of thought on it, hoping that once this train has reached its terminal, some parts of the ‘wide field’ will look more familiar when the reader rearrives at them from a different direction. No doubt for some the result will appear tediously repetitious, while others will find it a hopeless tangle. Well, such is life, as i can confirm from my own experience as a reader.

I have often written down some idea which i thought was new, only to find the same idea (differently expressed) the next day in some old book, or even in something i'd written myself, years before. Yet the same book in which i found ‘my own’ idea might seem tortuously tangled as a whole, because the logical structure which is obvious to the author is a mystery to me. Besides, every text addresses a different situation and therefore makes different choices about what to explicate and what to leave implicit. This alone can make all the difference.

A deep truth tends to be like a tautology: if it's not self-evident, nothing can make it evident.

The names of things are fixed by custom, habit and history. But symbols are subversive, always breaking what's fixed and fixing what's broken. Likewise the habit of living seems eternally intent on breaking itself.

Scripture: a text you can count on today to mean something new. (Provided you can meet the challenge of meaning.)

If one can begin, ever, there is nothing against beginning often; I mean developing new and further conceptual patterns that are not logically derivative from the earlier concepts alone. But neither is it necessary to have sheer gaps which don't enable one to think, except with either these or those concepts. The continuity between concepts is such, rather, that the new developments further inform and precision the earlier ones. Terms are definable and derivable in terms of each other.
— Gendlin (1998, note 15)

The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.
— Finnegans Wake (452)

Vico, of course, was the 18th-Century scholar whose theory of the origin of language fascinated Joyce, and whose cyclic model of history became the framework of Finnegans Wake. And by the way, one of the Wake's recurring episodes is the discovery by a hen of a mysterious letter buried in a midden-heap, riddled with holes and stains. Five years after the death of Joyce, the letter was dug up yet again: the Nag Hammadi Library.

Consciousness is a guard posing as a guide.

Conscious intentions are formed and sustained by habits. We can change our habits only by allowing something higher or deeper to override our conscious intentions. (One method is to read scripture, as opposed to conventional wisdom.)

Matthew 18:3 says that ‘Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ One conventional reading of this doctrine portrays heaven as a state of deference to a King, a Father, a Lord – in short, a top-down guidance system, which in traditional religious communities is embodied in persons appointed (or elected) to provide or interpret that guidance for the membership. But surely at least these persons, if not the membership at large, must sooner or later become responsible adults if they are to provide adequate guidance. If the guides themselves remain childlike, we have the situation referred to in the Gospels as ‘the blind leading the blind’. Perhaps the conversion process requires a childlike attitude, but mature participation in the community requires something more.

—But we could still say that the adults are children relative to a still higher authority, could we not?

Children do not choose their parents. If one's membership in a community is not an accident of birth, then it is a choice. A child who could choose parents wisely would not need parents. A learner who could choose a teacher wisely would not need a teacher, except perhaps as a figurehead for the ship of learning.

Merleau-Ponty offers one perspective on the injunction to become a child again:

… the unsophisticated thinking of our earliest years remains an indispensable acquisition underlying that of maturity, if there is to be for the adult one single intersubjective world.… all must necessarily have some common ground and be mindful of their peaceful co-existence in the world of childhood.
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 414)

As always, there are other ways to read the recovery of childhood. Consider Annie Dillard's reading of children:

An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn't the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he'll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can't learn why.
— Dillard (1974, 19)

Dillard's testament (leading into the passage above) is this: ‘I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood.’ What do scientists do then? They pretend to explain the neighborhood instead of exploring it – that is, they learn to play a social role. But maybe, in some cases, that's only a front that they use to finance their explorations. Maybe their question is neither where nor why but how. How does exploring happen, and learning, and pride? I suppose they have to specialize in order to offer some answers, and maybe some get so insulated in their specializing that they think they own their neighborhoods, but that's none of our business, and doesn't stop us reading their maps and models. We're all specialists in living a single life – but you, O beginner, O child who has somehow learned to read, are the sole heir of all that mapping, and all the specialists are working for you. It's your turn to begin.

‘Traditions are transmitted to us from the past, but they are our own interpretations of the past, at which we have arrived within the context of our own immediate problems’ (Polanyi 1962, 160).

In retrospect, perhaps your striving to transcend yourself is just your way of becoming yourself. But you don't earn the privilege of retrospection without paying the price of striving. A life spent entirely in contemplation would have nothing to contemplate.

(‘Strictly speaking, every word in the book should be in quotation marks’ (Gregory Bateson (1979, 108)).) I trust that you get the joke here, but i should also note that long after inserting this Bateson quote into my draft, i found what amounts to an explanation of it in Polanyi (1962). As he explains it, using quotation marks in this way calls the usage of the word thus marked into question.

We may place a word in quotation marks, while using language confidently through the rest of the sentence. But the questioning of each word in turn would never question all at the same time. Accordingly, it would never reveal a comprehensive error which underlies our entire descriptive idiom. We can of course write down a text and withdraw our confidence from all its words simultaneously, by putting each descriptive word between quotation marks. But then none of the words would mean anything and the whole text would be meaningless.
— Polanyi (1962, 251)

More generally: there is no belief that can't be questioned, but in practice you can only question one at a time, because the questioning process itself requires the rest of your belief system to function implicitly.

‘The dead’ are those hidebound by habits, and ‘resurrection’ means waking up to new possibilities, to a new way of life. The ‘afterlife’ is the transformed life which follows the turning point. The spiritual benefactor probes ‘the dead’ with his words, looking for signs that one is ready to turn.

When Jesus sent out his messengers to resurrect the dead, he would say to them: ‘Say this and that, and if you find a trembling and a tear, then at that point pray.’
— Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Khalidi 2001, #50)

Krishnamurti on discovery:

To discover reality or God, there can be no belief because acceptance or denial is a barrier to discovery. We all want to be secure both outwardly and inwardly, and the mind must understand that the search for security is an illusion. It is only the mind that is insecure, completely free from any form of possession, that can discover – and this is an arduous task. It does not mean retiring into the woods, or to a monastery, or isolating oneself in some peculiar belief; on the contrary, nothing can exist in isolation. To be is to be related; it is only in the midst of relationship that we can spontaneously discover ourselves as we are. It is this very discovery of ourselves as we are, without any sense of condemnation or justification, that brings about a fundamental transformation in what we are. And that is the beginning of wisdom.
— (Vardey 1996, 11)

Another term for discovery (also translated as recognition) is Aristotle's ἀναγνώρισις, which he identifies in his Poetics as the key event in a tragic plot, the one of highest significance for the audience. ‘The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal of the Situation’ – with a περιπέτεια, a surprising turn of the path, contrary to expectation and yet ‘arising from the incidents themselves’. It is a sudden realization which leads directly to κάθαρσις (purgation, purification) of the feelings aroused by the play. Tragedy is therefore structurally conducive to turning words. Apocalypse is also catharsis, clearing the stage to make space for a new heaven, a new earth.

In the beginning is the .

Of making many books there is no end.
— Ecclesiastes 12:12

And sometimes no beginning. Those with too much to say, it seems, do not write. Isaac Luria, when asked why he didn't put his teaching into a book, is said to have replied,

It is impossible, because all things are interrelated. I can hardly open my mouth to speak without feeling as though the sea burst its dams and overflowed. How then shall I express what my soul has received, and how can I put it down in a book?
— Scholem (1946, 254)

What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language.
What can be shown, cannot be said.
— Wittgenstein, Tractatus (4.121, 4.1212)

The specialist, on the other hand, has plenty to say. The precision of the expert depends on the limitation of his domain.

The expert is supposed to know the whole field, i.e. to know what views (theories, descriptions, methods, prescriptions, ..... ) are dominant, current or controversial in it. The busier the field, the harder it is to maintain such an overview. Clinging to expertise requires ever greater specialization: competition for that status produces an arms race in narrowness of focus. Tighten that beam, gentlemen, so you can do laser surgery on the mote in your neighbor's eye.

Can you specialize in living your life, when you are the one your whole world is here for? All the specialists who cross your path are working for you. If you have no use for their work, then who will?

The Compassionate One is impartial, no specialist, no expert: the eternal Beginner.

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)

In Varela's (1992) explication of Ethical Know-How, the ‘beginner’ is the one who has not yet mastered the skill and therefore has to rely on explicit rules, principles and guidance. But the truly virtuous person, the ‘expert’, has integrated the skill into her very being, so that it is spontaneously drawn forth when the situation arises. In this context, clinging to ‘beginner's mind’ would be disastrous! But the beginner's mind of Zen idiom has not even begun to master the skill, and in fact has no idea what skill to master. How to breathe, perhaps? how to be alive?

Variation on a theme of Rumi (Nicholson 1995, 49-50): Sleepers between dreams, and mystics even when awake, are free of sorrow and joy, fame and gain, personality and self-consciousness, decision and justice and judgement. The trumpet-blast of Resurrection calls them back from that state, calls souls back to their bodies and their world, calls the formless back to form.

How shabbily we treat our prophets! We would rather cast them as guidance specialists, or Messengers from God, than take responsibility for our own guidance. Rather than engage in dialog, we bow before them or fall at their feet, refusing to look them in the eye; and thus we condemn them to solitude even as we condemn ourselves to servitude. The renewal of guidance requires us to extricate ourselves from these sticky webs and begin again.

Jesus said, ‘Among those born of women, from Adam until John the Baptist, there is no one so superior to John the Baptist that his eyes should not be lowered (before him). Yet I have said whichever one of you comes to be a child will be acquainted with the Kingdom and will become superior to John.’
— Thomas 46 (Lambdin)

Here again is Thomas 18:

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.’

Compare now Analects 11.11:

Chi-lu asked about serving the spiritual beings. Confucius said, ‘If we are not yet able to serve man, how can we serve spiritual beings?’ ‘I venture to ask about death.’ Confucius said, ‘If we do not yet know about life, how can we know about death?’
— (Chan 1963, 36)

Vonnegut, or his narrator, would give a Bokononist answer to this in Cat's Cradle, at the end of the first chapter:

We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan, that brought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World Ended.

I can identify with that; i never finished this book either. But more to the point, Vonnegut (an atheist with an impeccable theology) shows that you can indeed serve spiritual beings (or do God's Will) without knowing anything about life or death, or about what you are doing. Such knowledge is not part of a complete guidance system.

Human vision clears up considerably when humans humbly drop all claims and all hopes of a god's-eye overview. The only ethical certainty is that our acts will have unintended consequences, and we (sentient beings) will have to live with them.

The core of philosophy is no longer an autonomous transcendental subjectivity, to be found everywhere and nowhere: it lies in the perpetual beginning of reflection, at the point where an individual life begins to reflect on itself. Reflection is truly reflection only if it is not carried outside itself, only if it knows itself as reflection-on-an-unreflective-experience, and consequently as a change in the structure of our existence.
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 72)

We begin in the middle, in the space between you and me, between meaning and sign. When we build relationships, or signify meanings, we do not begin with ‘fundamentals’ as if we were building with stone. The material of which meaning is made is alive, is life itself, the water of life. Living beings do not have foundations. Instead, they make default assumptions – apply principles which are acted on as if true, unless and until the consequences of acting call them into question. Often it is the failure of the default, or rather an unexpected consequence of applying it, which causes us to become conscious of it, and thence of the other options generated by the guidance system.

Annie Dillard (1999, 30) asks:

Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? – our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other.

She is right, of course. This is an ordinary apocalypse we are living through, and if we are appalled by our own ecocidal effeciency, it's only because we are ordinarily attached to the world as we have known it.

So when the curtain falls on all the struts and frets we call history, what does the 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, your present experience, 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 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 mean it. Even in contemplation, making sense takes time – time and a body. The readiness is all; the readiness to read. 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.
— Frye (1982, 135-6)

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
— Joyce (Ulysses, 42)

The aim of all great spiritual traditions is to offer us relief from the dramas of self and history, to remind us that we are part of much grander projects than these.
— Wes Nisker (1998, 15)

The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared.
— Frye (1982, 138)

As Dogen writes in the ‘Sokushin-zebutsu’ fascicle, ‘The mind correctly transmitted means that one mind is all dharmas and all dharmas are one mind. That is why a former master said, “When you attain the mind, the heavens come crashing down and the earth is torn asunder.”’
— Abe 1992, 155

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’, and the impermanence which according to Dogen is the buddha-nature.

The odd thing about enlightenment (redemption, salvation, ..... ) is that it can't have happened in the past. It happens either now or eternally, and when it happens, there's no difference between eternity and now. The beginning doesn't end.

And yet, ‘whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual’ (Blake, PPB 551).

Avatamsaka Sutra: ‘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’ (Cleary 1984, 1476-8).

Matthew 19:28:

ὁ δὲ ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτοῖς, ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι ὑμεῖς οἱ ἀκολουθήσαντές μοι, ἐν τῇ παλιγγενεσίᾳ, ὅταν καθίσῃ ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐπὶ θρόνου δόξης αὐτοῦ, καθήσεσθε καὶ ὑμεῖς ἐπὶ δώδεκα θρόνους κρίνοντες τὰς δώδεκα φυλὰς τοῦ ἰσραήλ.

παλιγγενεσία (literally, beginning again) translated in RSV as ‘in the new world’; KJV ‘in the regeneration’. KJV 19:28:

And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

A transforming experience brings on a radical phase shift in the brain, ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ – old patterns destroyed, new ones created. In cognitive terms this means a discrimination, which requires contrast – violent contrast, presented in symbols of Judgment and war – and resurrection of the dead.

The role of the Prophet who is also Savior is to provoke all this; he cannot play the paraclete or comforter until the patterns of the past have been broken. Simeon's prophecy about Jesus, spoken to Mary in Luke 2:34-5, foreshadows this:

Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel,
and for a sign that is spoken against
(and a sword will pierce through your own soul also),
that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.
— (RSV)

The living sign is set that he may be spoken against, for thus the contrast, the discrimination, is made. The Judgement is not imposed from the outside but is spoken from the heart; it is the heart which is, in the end, revealed by its actual response to the Word or sign.

Every actual judgement – that is, every judgement that is acted upon or embodied – is the last judgement that can be made at that point in spacetime, or indeed in the unending flow of experience: for it cannot be unmade or its consequences called back.

It's like life – a game whose purpose is to discover the rules, which rules are always changing and always undiscoverable.
— Gregory Bateson (1972, 19-20)

‘The story is not ended, it has not yet become history, and the secret life it holds can break out tomorrow in you or in me’ (Scholem 1946, 350). Tomorrow? Why not today?

… and you also are witnesses, because you have been with me from the beginning.
— John 15:27 (RSV)

In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
— John 1.1

Can you bear witness to that?

Why not? You've been here from the beginning.

And certainly you've heard this one before:

We shall not cease from exploration
And at the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’

The scroll is rolled up, and rolled out again: e-volution. The seed unfolds itself: de-velopment. These are time-lapse views of dis-covery, re-creation of original nature that was, and is, and will be, revealed and concealed in its implicit intricacy.

And the upshot of prophecy? The latter chapters of Isaiah presents a God who is full of surprises, ‘who works for those who wait for him’ (64:4, RSV). Drop all your little schemes, drop the self/other separation, and you drop historical time. Here comes apocalypse: Eternity now!

For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.
But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create: for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy.
— Isaiah 65:17-18 (KJV)

Likewise continue thou to ascend through one Revelation after another, knowing that thy progress in the Knowledge of God shall never come to an end, even as it can have no beginning.
— The Báb, c. 1850 (1976, 91)

To write something down is only to testify that at some point, in some situation, it meant something worthy of notice. To publish it is an expression of faith that it might mean as much to somebody somewhere else. But can anyone tell you how to hear it?

Dogen, in one of his Shobogenzo essays, tells the story of a Chinese poet who realized the intimate truth upon hearing the sounds of a valley stream flowing in the night. He wrote the following verse:

The sound of the valley stream is the Universal Tongue,
the colors of the mountains are all the Pure Body.
Another day how can I recite
the eighty-four thousand verses of last night?
— (tr. Cleary 1995, 116)

Who would presume to comment on this? I will close with a bit of Henry David Thoreau, from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck. We not unfrequently refer the interest which belongs to our own unwritten sequel to the written and comparatively lifeless body of the work. Of all books this sequel is the most indispensable part. It should be the author's aim to say once and emphatically, “He said,” εφη. This is the most the book-maker can attain to. If he make his volume a mole whereon the waves of Silence may break, it is well.
It were vain for me to endeavor to interpret the Silence. She cannot be done into English. For six thousand years men have translated her with what fidelity belonged to each, and still she is little better than a sealed book. A man may run on confidently for a time, thinking he has her under his thumb, and shall one day exhaust her, but he too must at last be silent, and men remark only how brave a beginning he made; for when he at length dives into her, so vast is the disproportion of the told to the untold, that the former will seem but the bubble on the surface where he disappeared. Nevertheless, we will go on, like those Chinese cliff swallows, feathering our nests with the froth, which may one day be bread of life to such as dwell by the sea-shore.
— (ed. Bode 1964, 226-7)