“The pure eye that sees the meaning of the teachings without attachment arose in the monk Kondañña; He realized that everything that is of the nature to arise is of the nature to cease.”
—– Samyutta Nikaya V, 420º
Preface
Just after the dawn of the 19th century, near the pinnacle of the Age of Reason, the renowned French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon LaPlace elucidated a doctrine of what has come to be known as causal determinism. To an intellect great enough, he wrote, “nothing would be uncertain, and the future, just like the past, would be present before its eyes.”[1] LaPlace’s demon, as the hypothetical omniscient being was called, was not the least bit demonic.[2] The Frenchman imagined a world wherein humanity was up to the bold task of answering the essential questions of the cosmos with confidence and grace. The movement his outlook inspired presented both a breakthrough and an end of the mechanical vision of the universe that has persisted as a dream of the Western mind from the time of Pythagoras. To understand the workings of time, LaPlace suggested, is to achieve mastery of the universe.
But what is this fickle beast called time LaPlace longed to arrest? How did it come to be the great commodity of our world— something capable of being bought, wasted, taken advantage of? How can we reckon with the end of time? What do we imagine it to be? This essay will explore these questions and their relation to the apocalyptic through the lenses of three very different oracles: the Judeo-Christian, the Buddhist, and the ‘quantum psychological model’ of our own day.[3] Despite their diverse mythologies, we shall discover that the point where these great traditions intersect is near to the heart of the human experience, and might just hold a key to door of the breathlessly awaited unveiling.[4] Let us break this seventh seal.
Part One: The Sacred Millennium
Stephen Jay Gould writes in Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist’s Guide to a Purely Arbitrary Countdown, “We need time’s arrow to assure us that sequences of events tell meaningful stories.” This apt summary of the concept of teleology, divinely ordained purpose, is a window onto the meaning and the history of the Christian calendar and its correspondent (and often fervent) anticipation of the End. The work of the world is a continual struggle towards perfecting itself—until it reaches a point where the task can be continued no longer, and “the map tears along its creases due to over-use, and the quiet becomes suddenly verbose.”[5] This moment marks the mythic ‘end’ of time, and will be heralded, according to Christian scripture, by a dark age of tribulation and the Earthly ascendance of a figure called the Anti-Christ, culminating in salvation of the Elect and 1,000 calendar years of Christ’s kingdom[6] before the Final Judgment.
As I have written before[7], the closing of the Book of Life is written into the very beginning of Genesis. With His Word God created the universe, and with His rest, he will end it.
The last day of Creation wherein the Father, his task complete, makes time for rest and appreciation of his work is transmuted in Revelation – the New Testament’s last and youngest book – into the thousand-year reign of Christ the King. Seven days of Creation are extrapolated into seven thousand human years typologically based on Moses’ lament of Psalm 90 before the burning bush:
A thousand years in your sight
Are like a day that has just gone by,
Or like a watch in the night.
John of Patmos, Revelation’s mysterious author, took the archetypal logic of that Old Testament exchange and made it the measuring stick for the emergent Christian story of time. Ever since, there has been an endless procession of theologians, cultists, seers and madmen claiming insight into the arrival of God’s chosen date. Their history is broad, colorful, and absolutely essential to the larger story of Western civilization in the Anno Domini— the year of our lord.[8]
The power of such misinformed (to this point, at least) predictors has been something to be reckoned with, for in a predetermined script it follows that if one was to possess knowledge of the coming end of time, the power to triangulate the truth about the present and past is firmly in one’s grasp. Just like LaPlace’s character who, given “the position and motion of every particle in the universe at any moment in the past” could “specify every detail of any future event, even the most capricious, most inconsequential, or most under the influence of human ‘free will,’”[9] those who deigned to know the date of Armageddon could retrace the steps of existence back to its very inception. The apocalypse was the ultra-logical end to an orderly cosmos. If we could only discover where we were headed, we would know from whence we came.
Many have tried concocting an always-elegant system of numerics scaled to whatever impending date of second coming suited their the mind of their times – whether it be 880, 1000, 1844[10], or 2012. Generation after generation of Christian thinkers adopted this quest for a sacred geometry and orderly divine logic from the philosophers of classical Greece, and them from peoples even more ancient. It seems as though John the Revelator’s invocation of “things that must shortly come to pass” is taken by readers of every generation to refer specifically to their own moment in history. This reflection of both the terror and the hope embodied in the coming of the Christ has been the impetus behind religious, social, and even military upheaval at countless intervals in the first two millennia following the nativity. In our day, the fundamentalist strain of Christianity that demands a literal reading of the Scripture (and thus the 6,000 year timeline of creation) is often the adversary of both science and universal faith, inculcating members to despise this sinful world and its corrupted insights, and prepare for the bloodbath that will inaugurate the new one.[11]
Their failure in anticipation is far from a refutation of the value of the lessons of the Bible, or the incredible story of the life of Christ (whether or not he is thought of as only-begotten Son of God). Rather, it reveals the limits of human wisdom— the Creator Has a Master Plan, but we’re not made to know it. Much like the Jewish people’s interminable wait for a messiah, the venerated tradition of search for an end-date has become an indispensable trait of the Christian tradition, and one of the foundational missions of the Western mindset. We scions of that world owe to it our calendar, many if not most of our effectual social movements, and the perennial hope that the world will improve, no matter the contemporary circumstance. Strangely enough, calendrics would also help to plant the seed of a very different kind of revolution, one that would take the seat of Earth’s stewardship from its heavenly throne and empower humanity like never before. Christianity is messianic: it requires that a person have heard the word in order to be saved. And as history progressed more and more did, and the growth propagated growth at a seemingly exponential rate. “All had originally one language, and one religion: this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus.” [12] Christ is the vessel for the Word of our world; it is called the ‘greatest story ever told’ — and what a story it has been. We have created, under the auspices of the Cross, a society that sometimes looks like heaven and other times like hell, and sought the wisdom of the world both inside and out with determination and vigor. If the Armageddon is to be read as a part of this Truth, then it too must be transfigured from a death collective to the one we know awaits us each. As with the Transubstantiation of Catholic mass and the doctrine of typology[13] that informed so much of ancient Christian scholarship, the story of the end is prefigured, and contained within every human.
The search to know the nature of time’s concluding phase would eventually lead us into the age of science, and come to reshape the human self-conception. The astronomer, astrologer, and mathematician Johannes Kepler played a pivotal role in the incredible burst of energy that created this modern self. Like many of his contemporaries, he felt divinely inspired in his discovery of what has proved to be, after eons of fruitless search, the shimmering of a true cosmic order. He wrote in his journal in the time of inspiration:
I desire frankly to confess that I have stolen the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle for my God far from the bounds of Egypt. If you pardon me, I shall rejoice; if you reproach me, I shall endure. The die is cast, and I am writing the book— to be read either now or by posterity, it matters not. It can wait a century for a reader, as God himself has waited six thousand years for a witness.[14]
Humanity’s relationship with the world was evolving, and we were at last becoming the co-creators we always had the potential to be. Subtly, the scales had shifted: no longer was it God alone who would know the fate of his creation.
Part Two: Dharma Brothers[15]
At the same time that the Pythagoreans were discoursing on the divine power embodied in geometric forms and harmonies abd unconsciously laying the groundwork for the chapel of Western thought that was to come, the ancient pantheistic tradition of India was being shaken to its foundation by a man born as a prince called Siddhartha and known to history as the Buddha Shakyamuni. As it is passed down in his Sutras – itself Sanskrit for ‘discourse’ – the very existence of an ideal, objective knowledge (and thereby an ideal, objective knower) is called into question. The work of measuring, labeling, quantifying the world of experience, so dear to our European forbearers, is concluded to be an illusory, fruitless pursuit. “All that has form is illusive and unreal,” says the Buddha in the legendary Diamond Sutra[16], and “anyone who seeks total Enlightenment should discard not only all conceptions of their own selfhood, of other selves, or of a universal self, but they should also discard all notions of the non-existence of such concepts.”
The Buddha’s revolution rested in the elimination of the Atman, the holy self and Godhead of Hindu belief. Without any immortal being to reckon its passage, time like all else can no longer lay claim to an existence independent from the creature who experiences it. The Vietnamese poet Thich Nhat Hanh writes: “We believe that the object of our perception is outside of the subject [to whom it appears], but that is not correct. When we perceive the moon, the moon is us. When we smile to our friend, our friend is also us, because she is the object of our perception.”[17] Gone the need for calendrics; gone is the fear of the end. If we can simply see clearly that one day we will die, that our empires will rise and fall, our Earth flower and decay, that even the awesome totem of the Sun will itself blink out into darkness, then we will recognize the apocalypse as intrinsic to our beings, our death inseparable from our life.
In the tradition of the Tantra[18], an esoteric principle found in many of the faiths of South and East Asia, time is understood as a cyclical procession of worlds through which one travels up or down in accordance with the attitudes and deeds of previous embodiments. This succession from live to live is referred to in Buddhist literature as ‘turning the wheel of Dharma.’ Linearity is wholly absent from this cosmic organization, and history as a perceptible, self-evident reality is eschewed: one moves back and forth through ages, up and down through worlds of diva, demon, animal and essence only in accordance with the karma accumulated in lives past. But it is only as a human being, suggests the Buddha, that salvation from the immeasurable suffering of the cycles of rebirth is possible. We alone can cognize our lives as crafted from the fabric of our suffering, and attain the liberation of a creature that bears its own pall.
If I may digress for a moment, I would like to muse on an illustration of the importance of art in communicating the spiritual wisdom so distorted by mere words. Whenever I strain to understand the meaning of the Four Noble Truths that the Buddha used as ‘vessels to carry the water of his insight— life as suffering, the causes of this suffering, the possibility of the cessation of suffering, and the practice of this peace— I hark back to one of the first records that grew close to my heart and that to this day I consider among my favorites, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Though Coltrane came to his love of the divine within and without by means wholly independent from the teachings of the Sutras, the titles of his album’s four tracks unlocked my understanding of the ancient Eastern doctrine. Even now, I hear the wails of that tenor saxophone each time I contemplate them anew: Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, and Psalm, the four noble truths of bop.
And so it seems that though Buddhist cosmology does require for a super-natural cataclysm awaiting humankind at a pre-ordained moment in the future, the destruction of the world still very much exists and animates the hearts and minds of the whole of our race. It is the purpose of the wheel of life; the simple and concise answer to the eternal question of why we begin and yet must come to an end. “There is nothing to do, nothing to realize, no program, no agenda. This is the Buddhist teaching about eschatology,” writes Hanh [151]. Salvation is achieved not through fortune and fervor, as millennialist Christendom has long proclaimed it to be, but through clear-eyed understanding that we make our home in nothingness. As goes the haiku about enlightenment actualized,
This is all there is;
the path comes to an end
among the parsley.[19]
It is actually quite difficult to track down English-language literature on the Buddhist conception of time. Perhaps this is because, from the very start, the Buddha denied it the corporeality we in the West reflexively assume, assaying it to be a function of the unique mode of human perception. As the Dharma wheel turns and turns on to infinity it becomes clear that each miniscule life stands in for all the innumerable lives, that not only is the end written into the beginning but they are one and the very same. The divides we imagine as so concrete and real – self and other, light and darkness, man and woman, good and evil – are definitions of nothing but each other, co-dependent and co-arising, interpenetrating like the yin and yang. The apocalypse is only the misrecognition of what exists inside us all, the sufferings of interminable birth and awful, painful death. It exists to grant you the chance to rise above it, just as the white lotus rises from the murky depths of the pond: unsoiled, radiant, and owing everything to that which it rests upon.
The lotus – that living symbol which graces so many Buddhist works – is an allusion to humanity: born in the murky depths of birth, decay, and death, it rises unblemished by the chaos below and blooms into a tranquil, radiant flower.
Part Three: Radical Entanglement
LaPlace’s dream of a super-computing humanity has come a long way since he first gave it voice nearly two centuries ago. With our newfound and ever-growing capacity to measure, estimate, and project our knowledge onto the world, the demon ought to be faring quite well in its quest towards probabilistic perfection. A strange thing happened on the way from here to there, though. A few great minds, using nothing but the most acute scientific methodologies, reached a space where events simply no longer conformed to the logic of pure causal determinism: Einstein, Schrödinger, Oppenheimer, and Bohr all stumbled up against it in their study of physics; Freud, Jung, and Lacan discovered it lurking inside the individual human psyche; Nietzsche, Joyce, Borges and Bob Dylan wrote opuses in its honor. Chaos, we have learned, exists as a fundamental force in our lives.
The astronomers of yore were forever baffled by the irregularities that surfaced in their calculations of time. Lunation – the cycle from one full moon to the next – was unreliable, and discarded as the principle measure of time’s passage; the 365.2424-day length of Earth’s revolution around the Sun was the source of so much confusion that in 1582 Pope Gregory instituted a calendrical reform that wiped out the days October 5th to October 14th of that year in order to keep the calendar in balance (and Easter close to the vernal equinox). “The day records a true astronomical cycle, but the date we affix to it is only a human convention” [Gould, p. 120]. The cycles of nature refuse to be placed into the neat boxes that humanity loves so well. There is always randomness, inertia, and unaccountable reactive force acting upon all objects from the minutest particle to the grandest galactic scheme. The legendary “golden ratio” is not 1:1, 2:1, 4:1, but an abstract, imaginary and irrational number essential to the lowliest life forms yet only approximated by the highest mathematics. Pure abstraction has sacred roots.
When Erwin Schrödinger announced the implications of his cat-in-the-box thought experiment, there was understandable uproar within the scientific community. Science has striven at objective truth since the days of Socrates, but here was a renowned atomic physicist proclaiming that the existence of an event is dependent upon the perspective of its observer and that no room is made for certainty. His theory, called quantum non-locality, initially pertained only to the machinations of sub-atomic particles, but in the decades since has been extrapolated to all layers of reality. The existence of quantum phenomena constitutes an assault on the very fabric of linear time that many of our grandparents took as a given. Though we still experience the cycles of time in a more-or-less orderly fashion, the knowledge that I am connected on an intrinsic, irreducible level with the rest of existence simmers just beneath the surface of my world, granting me solace, lending me strength.
The ramping-up of theoretical physics was correspondent to the emergence of a very different science, one that shifted scrutiny not to the world of quarks or black holes, but the other end of the entangled equation: the psyche itself. The revelations of psychological inquiry are far too plentiful to enumerate here, but suffice it to say that it has confirmed that range of human perception is vast to a point nearing endlessness. When it comes to the question of time, we can experience it as in utterly different modes day-to-day, hour-to-hour, and moment-to-moment. There is no ‘right way’ to classify the progression of time; there are simply standards and traditions that help us in our movement through its currents. Ultimately, if one is to truly apprehend time’s incredible power, one must have the courage to conceive of its absence. The story of apocalypse, present every mythology, is a means by which a person can gives context and meaning to the end of their own life— and in doing so make the time before it worth living. As goes the Eleusinian epitaph, quoted by Carl Jung[20]:
“Truly, the blessed gods have proclaimed a most beautiful secret:
Death comes not as a curse, but as a blessing to men.”
In recent weeks, I have been deeply inspired by the philosophical writings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. This is a man who, at a very young age, was anointed as the ‘world-soul’, prophet of the powerful Theosophist movement. Despite this proclamation, Krishnamurti donned no robes, claimed no titles, and ultimately renounced his status as anything more than a human being. “We come from no-thingness,” he writes in Freedom from the Known, “and to no-thingness we return.” This simple fact is written not in nihilism, but rather with deep understanding that life itself is the miracle, the Seventh Seal that forever waits to be broken. The greatest challenge in the universe – Tribulation transfigured, one could say – is what we do with the beautiful truth that we do indeed exist in this incredible, ever-changing, and seemingly boundless world. Our days are numbered; but if we can look inward without fear and recognize the apocalypse inside us, our time will become endless.
Bibliography
Caussade, Jean Pierre De. Abandonment to Divine Providence. Garden City, NY: Image, 1975. Print.
Gould, Stephen Jay. Questioning the Millennium: a Rationalist’s Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. Print.
Jung, C. G., and R. F. C. Hull. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print.
Kirsch, Jonathan. A History of the End of the World. New York: Harpercollins, 2007. Print.
Krishnamurti, Jiddu. Freedom from the Known. New York: HarperOne, 1969. Print.
Strozier, Charles B., David M. Terman, James William Jones, and Katharine Boyd. The Fundamentalist Mindset. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Tarnas, Richard. Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. New York, NY: Plume, 2007. Print.
Thich Nhát, Hạnh. The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching. New York: Broadway, 1999. Print.
Watts, Alan. In My Own Way: an Autobiography, 1915-1965. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Print.
[1] Laplace, Introduction to A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
[2] Here demon is a secular term meaning ‘enactor’ in the tradition of Maxwell’s or Descartes’.
[3] Which is just a terrible name for my way, the only experience of time I can know.
[4] Apocalypse, of course, is the Greek for ‘to unveil’; hence the Book of Revelation, though excluded from the official Eastern Orthodox canon, is the Biblio de Apokalypsos
[5] The Books, Smells Like Content, 2004
[6] Revelation 20:6, “Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death has no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.”
[7] Trials and Tribulations, November 29th
[8] The Anno Domini calendar was invented by the sixth century monk Dionysus Exiguus, an early instance of the great science of calendar keeping that the search for the millennium would inspire.
[9] Gould, Stephen Jay, Questioning the Millennium, page 14
[10] October 22nd, 1884 was the date given for the second coming by William Miller, leader of one of the first major apocalyptic religious movements in the United States. It transform into the Seventh-day Adventist Church after the day known as ‘the Great Disappointment.’
[11] Writes James W. Jones in his essay Eternal Warfare, “I can say right now that a whole generation of Christian adolescents is learning to kill non-Christians, UN peacekeepers, and Christians less evangelical than themselves in the name of this apocalyptic Jesus.” [Fundamentalist Mindset, p. 103]
[12] Blake, William, Descriptive Catalogue. Plate 39, 1809.
[13] Typology is the theory of relationships between the Old and New Testaments. The best-known instance is the equation between Jonah’s three-day journey in the belly of the whale to Jesus’ three days between passion and resurrection.
[14] Tarnas, Richard, Cosmos and Psyche, p. 6
[15] From the poem by Doan Van Kham, Tantric monk of the 11th century:
Dharma brothers, do not be attached to the sign.
The mountains and the rivers around us are our teacher.
.
[16] Johnson, Alex, Diamond Sutra, Chapter 6, www.diamond-sutra.com
[17] The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching. Broadway, 1999. p. 53
[18] Translated, Tantra equates roughly with ‘the weaving’: the warp-and-weft of a co-dependent reality. [Brahmacharini, A Brief Dictionary of Hinduism, p. 77]
[19] Watts, Alan, In My Own Way. Pantheon Books, 1972, p. 180
[20] The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p. 115
º Cover Illustration: Jung, C. G, The Red Book #12. 2009
Quotation sourced from Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings
