...the eternal breaking into time, each particular breakthrough of the numinous utterly extraordinary and utterly itself...
When has the eternal broken into time for you?
What practice(s) help you escape the prison of time and grant the hours their own life?
* * * * *
Numinous is open territory for the non-believer in specifically Christian "religious experience" (Wikipedia gives a nice summary of the various uses of the term, Christian and otherwise). I especially like Michael Pollan's description of his experience with DMT:
Here words fail. In truth, there were no flames, no blast, no thermonuclear storm; I'm grasping at metaphor in the hope of forming some stable and shareable concept of what was unfolding in my mind. In the event, there was no coherent thought, just pure and terrible sensation. Only afterward did I wonder if this is what the mystics call the mysterium tremendum—the blinding unendurable mystery (whether of God or some other Ultimate or Absolute) before which humans tremble in awe. (How To Change Your Mind pg 277)
...which seems to evoke the transcendental, what Rudolf Otto (usually cited as coiner of the term 'numinous') nailed as mysterium tremendum et fascinans. And Carl Jung adopted the term:
More frequently found in Jung's works is "numinosity." He used this term to refer to a quality inherent in archetypes, in complexes, in "curiosities which the logical mind cannot explain." Found in Western alchemy, and in cultural symbols, numinosity is that quality that gives religious ideas their "thrilling power." Much as with archetypes, we can't grasp the meaning of the word without personal experience. True understanding here comes from a lived encounter. (from Jungiancenter.org)
For me, the numinous is in our Minds, in our Imagination, and manifests pretty often via sight and sound. What it seems to require is my focused attention on what is AND what might be. I encounter the numinous often while photographing, and in music, and sometimes in text (le mot juste again).
Four bits of my numinous:
(perhaps it's obvious that music and dance are ALL about Time. So is the flow of speech.)
* * * * *
The support materials for my contribution to the Maine Photographers Showcase have been much on my mind lately, and the five photographs I have included are definitely in my zone of the numinous: they evoke mystery and a sort of magic that goes beyond the mundane rockishness of the material origins of the images.
* * * * *
"The prison of time" has never felt confining to me. I've generally thought of time as pulsing, as expanding and dilating around the pivot of my attention, and not as something to "escape". As for my 'practices' in the sense of what I do in the waking world: the lifelong habit of early rising, morning writing and reading, like Maria Popova (today's on George Sanders seems a fine and relevant example) and Heather Cox Richardson and whatever else the gods plant in my inboxes, and the trash picking up, and the photographing, and the music-playing, and the reading, and the cooking... All of those are joys, and none are prisons for me. And there's always stuff like this, numinosity maded flesh:
and gifts like this:
* * * * *
...and this just in from Andy Ilachinski: Self-Conscious Flow (Just In Time Delivery)
...What is an "hour"? Is it nothing more than a unit of time composed of 60 minutes? Is it measured by numbers or by impressions, feelings, moods? Like the seasons of the year, the seasons of the day differ by the way we experience them. Each hour we encounter has a character and a presence infinitely richer and more complex than clock time. As a messenger from another dimension — an angel as it were — an hour has its own unique significance. Here is your opportunity to meet the angels of the hours, to befriend them, and to allow them to befriend you...
I surely first learned of angels at my mother's knee (and other low joints...), Swedenborg being one of those who experienced angelic personages (and demonic ones too). (see The Lives of Angels Emanuel Swedenborg (pdf)... which may tip you over the edge)
Somehow (though I can't remember how or when) I got the (Swedenborg-heretical) idea that angels were metaphorical, not actual real palpable beings, and that the elaborate iconography was a way of dealing with the Ineffable. Which brings me to Ludwig Wittgenstein:
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann Darüber muss man schweigen
Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent
(the concluding sentence of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations) (which isn't bad advice) {M.A. Numminen is ...numinous, surely}
Sunday being St. Patrick's Day, I read a review by Fintan O'Toole of Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth Mark Williams 2017 in NYRB, and snagged the book on Kindle. My next challenge is to relate this rabbit hole to the numinous, and to tie in a tangential reference to The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries Walter Evans-Wentz 1912 (pdf). So how am I going to orchestrate that? We need to consider Túatha Dé Danann, and we may need to make a brisk pass through Theosophy and other wranglings with the numinous...
And then I went back to scratch another itch from the original Question, for which Wende linked a David Whyte post containing this passage:
In many traditional cultures, a particular hour of the day is seen to have a personal, almost angelic presence, something that might be named - though only in hushed tones, and only in ways that reinforce its unknowingness. The Benedictine, Brother David Steindl-Rast, defines an angel as the eternal breaking into time, each particular breakthrough of the numinous utterly extraordinary and utterly itself. Time and each hour of time is a season, almost a personality, with its own annunciation, its own song, its whispering of what is to be born in us. Its appearance like a new conversation in which we are privileged to overhear ourselves participating.
Hmmmmm, I thought, what does the eternal breaking into time MEAN? And where did the phrase come from? An hour following google's offerings has been an interesting tour of Appropriations, by persons as various as the Quaker Thomas Kelly, Pope Benedict XVI, Paul Tillich, maybe Søren Kierkegaard, Cardinal Jean Daniélou (the brother of the ethnomusicologist Alain Daniélou)... For context, scan these and note their dates:
There is an experience of the Eternal breaking into time, which transforms all life into a miracle of faith and action. Unspeakable, profound, and full of glory as an inward experience, it is the root of concern for all creation, the true ground of social endeavor. (pg 89)
...we can journey to distant places and get a different foreground of objects and events, but we cannot journey out of our time-now into a new historical location. The invading Love of the Eternal Now must break in through us into this time-now.
But what is the content and aim of this yearning Love, which is the Divine Love loving its way into and through us to others. It is that they too may make the great discovery, that they also may find God or, better, be found by Him, that they may know the Eternal breaking in upon them and making their lives moving images of the Eternal Life. (pg 100)
...I am persuaded that in the Quaker experience of Divine Presence there is a serious retention of both time and the timeless, with the final value and significance located in the Eternal, who is the creative root of time itself.
...we no longer live merely in time but we lie also in the Eternal. The world of time is no longer the sole reality of which we are aware. A second Reality hovers, quickens, quivers, stirs, energizes us, breaks in upon us and in love embraces us, together with all things, within (the Divine).
We live our lives at two levels simultaneously, the level of time and the level of Timeless. They form one sequence, with a fluctuating border between them. Sometimes the glorious Eternal is in the ascendancy, but still we are aware of our daily temporal routine. Sometimes the clouds settle low and we are chiefly in the world of time, yet we are haunted by a smaller sense of Presence, in the margin of consciousness.
We have seen that we can never reach the innermost center of
another being. We are always alone, each for himself. But we can
reach it in a movement that rises first to God and then returns from
Him to the other self. In this way man's aloneness is not removed,
but taken into the community with that in which the centers of all
beings rest, and so into community with all of them. Even love is
reborn in solitude. For only in solitude are those who are alone
able to reach those from whom they are separated. Only the
presence of the eternal can break through the walls that isolate the
temporal from the temporal. One hour of solitude may bring us
closer to those we love than many hours of communication. (Tillich
1956, pg 24).
Our entire sanctuary is concealed by the iconostasis: the icon screen; the tangible witness to the mystery we live in the Liturgy. It is a symbolic gateway into the kingdom of Heaven. The Church is not the result of human organization, law and order and uniformity. The Melkite mind sees the Church, not as a visible society headed by Christ, but as a Theophany, the eternal breaking into time and unfolding of the divine life through the deifying transformation of humanity in worship.
The hours and the seasons are sometimes a flowering, sometimes a disappearance, and often an indistinguishable transience
between the two, but all the hours of the day and the seasons of the
year enunciate some quality in the world that has its own time and
place. To make friends with the hours is to come to know all the
hidden correspondences inside our own bodies that match the richness and movement of life we see around us. The tragedy of constant scheduling in our work is its mechanical effect on the hours,
and subsequently on our bodies, reducing the spectrum of our individual character and color to a gray sameness. Every hour left to
itself has its mood and difference, a quality that should change us
and re-create us according to its effect upon us.
In many traditional cultures, a particular hour of the day is
seen to have a personal, almost angelic presence, something that
might be named—though only in hushed tones, and only in ways
that reinforce its unknowingness. The Benedictine, Brother David
Steindl-Rast, defines an angel as the eternal breaking into time,
each particular breakthrough of the numinous utterly extraordinary
and utterly itself. Time and each hour of time is a season, almost a
personality, with its own annunciation, its own song, its whispering
of what is to be born in us. Its appearance like a new conversation in
which we are privileged to overhear ourselves participating.
To escape from the prison of time is to grant the hours their
own life; to uncurl the iron grip of our hand on any given moment
while at the same time finding the ability to be more present, more
robust, more open to our own self-evident absurdities, while continuing the conversation. A healthy relationship with time is an
exact template of a healthy relationship between two human beings.
When we make a good marriage with time, we instantly apprentice
ourselves to the improvement of our character just as we do marry-
ing another person. Not because the other person is more virtuous
than we, or because we have a target personality we are trying to
hit, but because whatever sanity, patience, generosity and creative
genius we are able to achieve in life is not solely within our own
remit. It comes from a real conversation with something other than
ourselves. No matter what the New Age gurus may say, we do not
make our own reality. We have a modest part in it, depending on
how alive we are to the way the currents and eddies of time are running. Reality is the conversation between ourselves and the never
ending productions of time. The closer we are to the source of the
productions of time—that is, to the eternal—the more easily we
understand the particular currents we must navigate on any given
day. The river of time can suddenly turn, for instance, from a happy,
easy flow to turmoil when, in the midst of everything, the boss asks
us if we will take on a particular project that we know we cannot do
with any sanity given all our present commitments; bereft of spaciousness, we say yes, trying to establish our identity through doing,
afraid of the silence that might open in the presence of this figure of
authority. Hounded by time, we feel hounded by others, but open
to the spaciousness and silence, we can actually become fascinated
by the silence that ensues from a pleasant but firm refusal. From the
outside, our refusal looks like courage, but on the inside, it is simply
representative of a healthy relationship with time. With regard to
our marriage with time, to say yes would be the equivalent of
promiscuity, of faithlessness and betrayal. Stress means we have
committed adultery with regard to our marriage with time. If we
want to understand the particulars of our reality, we must under-
stand the way we conduct our daily relationship with the hours. In
the hours is the secret to the workday, and in every workday the
manner of our marriage to the hours and subsequently, our journey
through the day, is crucial to the happiness we desire. (pp 179-181)
Jean Daniélou in particular has shown this fact with great emphasis, stressing again and again that
Christianity "is essentially faith in an event", whereas the great non-Christian religions
maintain the existence of an eternal world "that stands in opposition to the world of time.
The fact of the eternal breaking into time, which gives it duration and turns it into history,
is unknown to them." (Daniélou, Vom Geheimnis der Geschichte, p. 128 (1955)
The "System" of historical unfolding of Reason had domesticated religious faith according to
the protestations of the proto-postmodern prophet, Søren Kierkegaard. Christendom had
neglected a more authentic faith of the 'singular individual' by reducing Christianity to the
History of a relentless unfolding of rationality in time. Conversely, according to Kierkegaard,
Christianity was to be understood as the suspension of time; not of time unfolding in an
'imaginative representation (Vorstellung) but of the Eternal breaking into time. If Hegel
offered a solution to what he called 'the unhappy consciousness' inherent in Romanticism's
reaction to modernity (through the immanent and continuous self-transcending of dialectic
Spirit), and if Kierkegaard offered a 'non-solution' through the intensification of
'unhappiness' — the leap of faith into the Absurd — then it was Martin Heidegger who
formalized this non-solution for philosophy. Caputo observes: "What Heidegger's 'existential
analytic' did with Kierkegaard in Being and Time can be variously described as secularizing
Kierkegaard's Christian-existential analysis by dropping the religious element, formalizing it
by dropping the Christian content and ontologizing it by turning existence or being-possible
into a feature or structure of our Being." (pg 117)
...all of which gets me no further toward grasping what eternal breaking through time means. Why did I spend most of the day trying to track that down?
* * * * *
My searches for material on 'numinous' introduced me to lots of people I hadn't previously encountered, one of them Dan Merkur (1952-2016), whose "Interpreting Numinous Experiences" appeared in Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology in 2006. I snagged it from JSTOR and put it aside to read later, and got to it on Monday evening. Here are some especially useful bits:
...as clinicians, we take interest in our patients' subjective experiences of religion. It is not religions as systems of rites, ethics, tales, doctrines, and social structures but rather individuals' emotion-laden experiences of their religions that clinicians seek to interpret... (205)
...In The Idea of the Holy, a classic contribution to the history of religions that was first published in German in 1917, Rudolf Otto (1950) invented the term 'numinous' to designate the specific quality of religious experiences... the neologism was very rapidly appropriated by theologians as an oblique way of speaking about God. Through van der Leeuw, Wach, Eliade, and many others, Otto's term gained wide employment as a vehicle for smuggling covert theology into the academic study of religion. In the process, the concept that Otto intended lapsed into obscurity. (205, 206)
...Otto remarked that the holy, like the beautiful and the moral, has an aspect or dimension that can be understood only on its own terms. Its experiences can be approached and explained theoretically from sociological, psychological, theological, and other points of view, but the latter do not exhaust its study. Just as it is both possible and meaningful to study beauty as beauty and morality as morality, it is appropriate to study numinosity as numinosity. (206)
Otto described numinosity as "non-rational," but Pruyser (1983) drew attention to the cognitive dimension of numinous experiences. He suggested that numinous experiences always involve a "limit situation," a topic that has finality, beyond which it is not possible to think. "Limit situations" become numinous when attempts to exceed their limits precipitate experiences of "transcendence and mystery ... charged with cognitive, ontological, epistemological, and emotional implications" (ibid.: 155-156). "Limit experiences ... when man encounters the Holy or Sacred" provoke "the experience of man's contingency on powers beyond his grasp or control" (ibid.: 157). Examples of limit situations include life, death, moral decision, and other decisive moments of unchangeable truth. They may include the sunrise and sunset, starry nights, and other wonders of the environment. (206)
...A mysterium tremendum is numinous because numinosity is the most awesome, majestic, urgent, and mysterious quality that can be experienced... (208)
...A numinous experience occurs when a sense perception, a fantasy, a concept, or another mental content that concerns a limit situation acquires significance as a metaphor that signifies something more, something intrinsically transcendent of the limit situation. (2014)
...Numinous experience, as Otto conceptualized it, differs significantly. It can be neither made nor unmade. Its circumstance is instead comparable to aesthetic experience. Numinosity is in the eye of the beholder. Anything can be numinous. Nothing is numinous necessarily. When a thing is experienced as numinous, it has been found or discovered to be numinous. A thing that is experienced as numinous on one occasion may not be experienced in the same way on others. One can cultivate an aptitude for experiencing things as numinous, but numinous experience cannot be produced on demand. It is not meaningful to speak of the numinous as having an opposite any more than the aesthetic has one. Just as the category of the aesthetic can be differentiated into a spectrum that ranges from the beautiful to the ugly, so the numinous can be resolved into a spectrum that includes the divine, angelic, miraculous, ghostly, and demonic. The concept of the profane does not belong on the spectrum and is irrelevant to it. (217)
Numinosity is found; sacrality is made. Numinosity is a naturally occurring category of human values. It consists of awe and wonderment—that is, it consists of wonderment with or without the addition of anxiety. Numinosity can be mystical; everything can be seen as numinous. Sacrality, by contrast, never occurs alone. It is always implicitly conceptualized as one term of an implicit pair. The sacred is always opposed to the profane. (217)
I also happened upon this, and sent it along to John McIlwain:
The Social Location of Psychedelic Mysticism: Dan Merkur
* * * * *
And this, just in from NYRB, is pretty damned numinous, don't you think?
Here he [Charles Lamb] is thinking unmethodically about food in a letter of 1805, thrilling over the unexpected gift of a hunk of brawn (a terrine made from pigs' heads) from a friend in the kitchens of Trinity Hall, Cambridge:
He might have sent...the tops of asparagus, fugitive livers, runaway gizzards of fowls, the eyes of martyred Pigs, tender effusions of laxative woodcocks, the red spawn of lobsters, leverets' ears, and such pretty filchings common to cooks: but these had been ordinary presents, the every-day courtesies of Dish-washers to their sweethearts. Brawn was a noble thought. It is not every common Gullet-fancier that can properly esteem of it. It is like a picture of one of the choice old Italian masters. Its gusto is of that hidden sort... It will be wooed & not unsought be won. Now, ham-essence, lobsters, turtle, such popular minions absolute court you, lay themselves out to strike you at first smack, like one of David's Pictures (they call him Darveed) compared with the plain russet-coated wealth of a Titian or a Corregio.
This is Lamb cogitating. First, there is the list of kitchen "filchings," which spirals outward from unadorned asparagus tops to increasingly bizarre personifications: the thought of "fugitive," or miscellaneous, livers leads to "runaway" fowl gizzards, imagined scampering headless from their bodies; pigs, revolving stoically on a spit, are pictured as "martyred"; woodcocks are "laxative" and their droppings "tender," the profusion of adjectives comically overcooked. Then there is the imaginative leap to Titian and Correggio, the "choice old Italian masters," by dint of an association no "common Gullet-fancier," surely, could have made: fine foods, Lamb says, "ham-essence, lobsters, turtle," are flirtatious, too obvious by half, just like David's paintings (here the spoken voice butts in to remind us it's "Darveed"); what you want is the hidden "gusto," the coyly "plain" riches, of Titian and brawn...
(Claire Bucknell, August 18 2022 NYRB)
and if that's not enough, with this I rest my case:
