BACKWARDS AND ORTHOGONAL TIME STRUCTURES IN CONTEMPORARY GNOSTICISM
In the title of this essay, I deliberately elude to a fusion of the famous Jacob’s Ladder symbol with the type of eschatological and prophetic mythology we are familiar with from John of Patmos’ «Revelation». I suggest that this ladder stretches out, not between heaven and earth, but rather between past and future. I aim to explore gnostic teleology in the light of proposed Omega points which may be immanentized through ritual and contemplative practice. I understand immanentization as being a movement by which a goal of some sort may be manifested by being brought into the present. This has an analog to simple goal-setting, in that a final state is desired, actions are taken accordingly, and those actions bring about the goal. The esoteric method of achieving such a desired state of affairs differs from this exoteric example in that its final form is projected as already existing at a future point, so that it calls backwards to the present, which then is drawn into the present over the course of a gestation period. This method is also typically much larger in scale, opening the possibility of delineating goals centuries or millennia into the future. We consider this approach to be a heuristic of time travel, in which the present navigates a sea of possible futures, and if successful, eventually results in a goal achieved whose conditions of realization are actually discovered during the process itself.
If a praxis ends up successfully embodying or grounding a vision of a future, then it can be said that we have engaged a capacity to navigate time through gnosis. Time is not understood as a one-way, singular line, but rather a profuse variety of tracks across an immense surface, eternity. The routes that a given present takes through eternity are vectors with distinctive pasts and futures corresponding to them. The present, in its capacity to envision destinations elsewhere in eternity, is thus a time machine. It selects and works towards desired events. Carrying magic and gnosticism into the direction of a kind of temporal art, this idea means to portray trans-temporal gnoses as bewildering journeys which are at the same time possessed of a peculiar pragmatism. The esotericist is setting spiritual goals beyond his or her means, precisely in order to call up ordeals which end up providing those means. The end result then, is a harvest of innovative responses to crises which resolve when the Omega point actually enters the present. It is a psychological means of selecting for creative and fertile crises that will engage the practitioner, and to call the novel and unprecedented into being. It is a form of adventure.
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Philip K. Dick, an American science fiction writer who experienced a Christian Gnostic revelation in 1974, spent the latter part of his life penning a mammoth «Exegesis», parts of which have only recently seen publication. He asserted that the Holy Spirit was traveling backwards through time to assist the present in completing the Plan of the transcendental Logos. «Equilibrium is achieved by the Logos working in three directions: from behind us as causal-time-pressure, from above, then the final form, the very weak H. S. drawing toward perfection each form. But now equilibrium as we know it is being lost in favor of a growing ratio of retrograde teleology. This implies that we are entering, have entered a unique time: nearing completion of the manifold forms. Last pieces are going into place in the overall-all pattern. The task or mode of the H. S. is completing. Not beginning, not renewing or maintaining, but bringing to the end, to the close» [Dick 2011: 4].
Nema, or Margaret Ingalls is a Thelemic magician who in 1974 channeled a text from an entity which referred to itself as N’aton (or Homo Veritas). This text is entitled «Liber Pennae Penumbra» [Nema 1995: 93–100], and is conceived of as a Thelemic holy text. It presents a program that originates in the future Aeon, that of the Goddess Ma’at, and which interacts antidiachronically with Aleister Crowley’s Horus Aeon in such a way as to both temper, and quicken it.
José Argüelles, a Mexican art historian who helped found Earth Day, and organized the 1987 event «Harmonic Convergence» formulated an esoteric calendar called the «13 Moon calendar» [Argüelles 1990], which combined the proposal of a 13 Month/28 day calendar with the Mayan 260 sacred count, the Tzolkin. The latter is a heavily patterned matrix of symbolic elements. It was considered that lines of transmission could jump from similar sign to similar sign, both forwards, and backwards in time. Especially notable is a use of smaller cycles to present larger cycles in a compressed form, thus using a short cycle to rehearse a large cycle of time. This was termed «fractal time compression» [Argüelles 2002: 172]. The cycles are closely knit, and could be extended by this practice into a mnemotechnic of time that covers many thousands of years.
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Terrence McKenna was an American ethnobotanist and counterculture philosopher whose proposal that novelty would hit a critical spike of development in 2012, went as far as to say that this spike [McKenna 1994], already existed as a hyperspace object that created history by «ricocheting backwards» into space and time as we know it.
Dick picks up this theme in an explicitly Gnostic manner, reporting a variety of mystical states that disclose a Plan which is orthogonally adjacent to reality as we-know-it, and warps that reality in accordance with its pattern. He likens this Logos, or «Vast Active Living Information System» to his an immanent God, an intelligent, caring Tao, an active Nous, a dynamic Pymander, and even the Goddess Ma’at. «I conceive of this (immanent God) in Taoistic and Greek terms: Tao and Mind together; which is, I think Ma’at» [Dick 2011: 188].
For Dick, the Logos stands sideways to diachronous time, instantiating an eventual merger of the two. Since this has already occurred transtemporally, this culmination generates the Holy Spirit which is able to reach backwards weakly into the present, and if it can overcome the resistance of its forward moving counterpart, it will be able to achieve its own self-birth at the hands of its appointed agents. In traveling backwards, the anti-diachronic HS will be able to lightly manage the time flow and gently nudge it towards fusion with the Synchronic Logos. «The Logos is not a retrograde energetic life form, but the Holy Spirit, the Parakletos, is. If the Logos is outside time, imprinting, then the Holy Spirit stands at the right or far or completed end of time, toward which the field-flow moves (the time flow). It receives time: the negative terminal, so to speak. Related to the Logos in terms of embodying word directives and world-organizing powers, but at a very weak level, it can progressively to a greater degree overcome the time field and flow back against it, into it, impinging and penetrating. It moves in the opposite direction. It is the anti-time. So it is correct to distinguish it from the Logos which so to speak reaches down into the time flow from outside, from eternity or the real universe. The HS. is in time, and is moving: retrograde. Like tachyons, its motion is a temporal one; opposite to ours and the normal direction of universal causal motion» [Dick 2011: 4].
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This process is complicated however by the fact that there are several strata of orthogonal, synchronic time, the most objectionable (and closest) being the «Black Iron Prison», or Rome, understood by him as never having ended [Dick 1990:63]. The Logos thus has to sneak past this most immediate layer of orthogonal time to affect changes surreptitiously in the forwards flow, in order to eventually effect an escape from Rome and an experience of liberation. He posits agents within the «Black Iron Prison» that can «disinhibit» through various stimuli, the strict psychic regimen of material causation that keeps human souls trapped. For Dick, a loosening of forwards flowing time and our dependency upon it IS gnosis. He writes: «We seem to be confined within a metal prison, but something vital has secretly penetrated the enclosing ring around us and fires assistance and advice to us in the form of video and audio signals. Neither the prison ring is visible to us nor the signal system which fires nor the entity which has penetrated through us. The signals emerge as if from cores drilled through the metal: they’re in color. Thus, our prison was breached a long time ago. Help is here, but we still remain here within the prison; we aren’t yet free. I take it that the camouflaged invisibility of the signals is to keep the creator of the prison from knowing that help is here for us. The drilled out “tubes” through the prison wall to us can’t be discerned; they blend perfectly, as if alive (the signals too seem alive). It is like the penetrating roots of a plant (!!!) which over the centuries have grown through rock or concrete. These root tips come through and into here, the enclosed open space where we’re kept, and then they burst into coloured changing light patterns which register on us subliminally» [Dick 2011: 180].
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Contrast Dick’s perspective to Nema’s work on Ma’at magic, which was triggered by a ritual time travel operation in 1974. «The future is a different proposition. The events of the past have a type of solidity about them, while future events are chaotic. This chaos of the future is not an amorphous soup, but a sheaf of possibilities and probabilities of various degrees of likelihood. Your vortex can afford you the vision of what I call the Probability Universe. I see it as a combination of fractal froth and tinker-toys, extending round me beyond the limits of sight. As my instant of consciousness moves along its course in this curly maze, it creates a glowing strand. My contemporaries weave their glowing strands with mine until there’s a self-illumined fuzzy cable that wanders from node to node. The nodes represent survival decisions in times of crisis and impart to our history its characteristic shape. Our human cable weaves in and out of cables of other species, plant, animal, microbe and virus that form the web of life on earth. The Earth-that is, the geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere weaves the base/background for the cables of the fast-life species. Behind me glows the terrestrial line of mainstream reality. Fanning out from every node are countless if-worlds, worlds of the past not taken. It’s possible to visit them astrally, also. Before me lie the probability-worlds, also fanning out from future choice-nodes. Whatever collective choices we make, as a species, will be the major guides for our course of mainstream reality. As of the time of this writing, we are in the process of working through such a choice-node» [Nema 1995: 63].
The parallels between Dick and Nema are numerous, and yet the mode of realization differs. For Dick, the key is to listen, and to follow instructions emanated from the Logos, while for Nema and the HML, the optimal timeline must be actively and creatively forged.
An Omega point can be as much of a beginning as an ending. The best recent example of this is the much talked about Dec 21st, 2012 date. Both Argüelles and McKenna invested in this particular eschaton. Their respective cosmologies were certainly compatible with one another; McKenna describes a point in time where «novelty» became so progressively and exponentially rapid in its development that an infinite «wave» of novelty, termed «the singularity» is made immanent [McKenna 1994]. This consideration galvanized various preparatory measures in the participating community.
Argüelles’ proposal was similar: this same eschatological date was a flashpoint for a kind of chrono-metamorphosis, in which they key component would be an overthrow of «Roman Time», and its replacement with a new standard [Argüelles 2002: 5]. What do these millennial propositions mean if we consider the act of prophecy as a form of esoteric agency that targets a measurable point in the future which is considered to be as immutable as the past? Such a construction requires a synchronic and an anti-diachronic idea of time in addition to the common-sense, diachronic conception.
Was the millennialism that flared up around this date actually an attempt to creatively (and opportunistically) generate a time period in which the Demiurge could be successfully circumvented? Was it actually about setting us up for a plan of action that would blossom only AFTER the date had past? If it were successful in stimulating the production of new models of time, perhaps this is less nieve than it may at first appear. What IS the Demiurge in the context of these contemporary Gnosticisms? With Dick, it is Rome, or the Black Iron Prison. With Nema’s HML it is the dying Osirian Aeon, denoting passive values will-less complacency coupled with a life-negating table of values. McKenna refers to the consensus reality that is unconsciously adopted by culture, a fear-driven traditionalism that fortifies the advantage of an outmoded and demiurgic elitism [McKenna 1998]. Argüelles, however explains that the problem is actually the Gregorian Calendar. The Gregorian calendar powers what he referred to as the Technosphere; the domain of alienation and exploitation [Argüelles 2002: 5–6]. His own, novel calendrical synthesis is meant to project the telepathic «nöosphere», a concept drawn from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s «The Phenomenon of Man» [Teilhard de Chardin 2002: 71–73], and Vladimir Vernadsky [Vernadsky 1943].
In order for diachrony and anti-diachrony to be conceivable, synchrony is required. Dick points out that even linear time is not really linear. It is in fact circular, and the circle is very tight, and very closed. All linear time is in reality cyclical, and the cyclicality occurs within a circuit [Dick 2011: 79].
What he does not say, is that this circuit is in fact, the calendar.
Let us consider, for sake of argument, the calendar as Demiurge. Imagine it as a kind of spinning semiotic wheel. As experiences progress, they are continually mapped onto a loop of days, months, seasons, that effectively standardize the context of the progression, which becomes a cyclical repetition. If we argue further that the internal divisions of the calendar are akin to a mnemonic system for planning and organizing time, one that saturates our psyches, then we could make the argument that human psychic experience becomes the shape of its calendrical container. Though differing events make occur, they are drawn into a narrative that repeats the same signs over and over again. These signs ensconce social, economic, and religious ideologies and class divisions. In a real sense the entire foreseeable future of what «returns eternally» is mediated by the calendar’s architecture. Since any novelty introduced into time must manifest in the present, and the present is constructed from consensus reality vis-à-vis the calendar, it becomes almost impossible to conceive of a novel future without re-contextualizing the present. This must be done by re-framing the present’s relation to eternity. In other words, calendar creation.
Dick regressed time on an orthogonal axis and discovered that it was still 2nd century Rome. But there was something beyond that, trying to get through, to free (if only slightly) a few presents. Argüelles’ more forceful solution is explicit calendar reform. Nema strikes a balance between the rigidity of Argüelles’ plan for the future and Dick’s sense of helplessness, again without specifically mentioning the calendar. Speaking in terms of these ideas as Utopian, we can make a note also that the idea of a harmonically functioning social system is common to both Argüelles and Nema, and the idea of Ma’at is common to both Nema and Dick. Ultimately there is a sense in all three writers, that liberation from a false or degraded demiurgic time could lead to the transformation of society along strongly utopian lines, and these transformations could be catalyzed with experimentation in new calendars.
What would happen if the certainty with which we adhere to our customary calendars were challenged, if their grip on our lives were mollified in some way, or undermined by an existential doubt? It would indeed open up a vast and difficult rift in our psyches. The deepest ordering structures would be undermined. As a dis-integration of our naturalized systems, it could well be catastrophic. This is why Argüelles proposes his 13 moon calendar: as a re-organization or synthesis of the temporal order itself. A protective measure to catch the overflow, as well as a new standard to replace the old. It would seem that a massive social transformation is what is at stake in all these writings: that the closest orthogonal layer of time, which reifies the dis-synchrony of contemporary society, must be breached like an eggshell in order to access a synchrony that does not have these imprisoning effects.
I intuit that these elements of this contemporary gnostic discourse on time, eternity and spirituality, when unpacked, ultimately say this: a calendar is a time machine, and it is one that if we do not attend to it, will govern us in a debased form. Like any instrument, it has to be acknowledged, maintained, and periodically refurbished in order to function to our benefit. What these Science fiction gnostics have recognized, in different ways, is that we are trapped in a dysfunctional time, and that there could be an alternative. To this end, a weighted rope is cast, outside of our current dilemma, with the hope that it will find its anchor is a more comprehensive understanding of ourselves, somewhere in some potential future towards which we can climb. This is Omega’s Ladder.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Argüelles 2002 – Argüelles J. Time and the Technosphere: The Law of Time in Human Affairs. Rochester: Inner Traditions, Bear & Company, 2002.
Argüelles, Argüelles 1990 – Argüelles J., Argüelles L. Dreamspell: The Journey of Timeship Earth, 2013. [Self Published through] Chelsea Pacific. [© José and Lloydine Argüelles], 1990 (board game format).
Dick 1990 – Dick Ph. K. The Valis Trilogy. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1990.
Dick 2011 – Dick Ph. K. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick / Ed. by P. Jackson, J. Lethem. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
McKenna 1994 – McKenna T. Approaching Timewave Zero // Magical Blend. 1994. N 44.
McKenna 1998 – McKenna T. In the Valley of Novelty [Recorded Lecture. 1998] // Youtube (10.07.2011) // [URL]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8UMFMM 7pww (date accessed: July 16, 2014).
Nema1995– Nema Ma’at Magick: A Guide to Self-Initiation. Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1995.
Teilhard de Chardin 2002 – Teilhard de Chardin P. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Perennial, 2002.
Vernadsky 1943 – Vernadsky V. I. The Biosphere and the Noösphere / Tr. from Russian by G. Vernadsky // [URL]: http://vernadsky.name/the-biosphere-and-thenoosphere-by-w-i-vernadsky (date accessed: July 16, 2014).
N. Radulović
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