immanence

As agreed to with my publisher (Punctum), the e-book version of Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times is now available for free download (or pay what you can). To celebrate this, I’m sharing a couple of snippets from the book here.

As related in my Reader’s Guide, the book consists of three sections: first, an introduction to process-relational ontology (in general, and in the specific version I develop); second, an application of that ontology to understanding the possibilities for genuine action in the moment (any and every moment); and third, an application of it to the images and meanings that make up our increasingly post-secular, global, “iconoclashic,” and culturally and ecologically challenged world.

The following comes at roughly the book’s conceptual mid-point, in Part Two, at the point where we enter the Red Room of “dark flow” that is at the heart of the Rubik’s Cube of experience. That Rubik’s Cube consists of three rows, three columns, and three levels that correspond to (1) modes of sensory perception (encompassed within Shinzen Young’s categories of seeing, hearing, and feeling), (2) relational categories (drawn from C. S. Peirce’s categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, or, roughly, what’s there, how we respond to and act upon it, and what is realized in that encounter), and (3) directional orientations (internally generated, externally generated, and the blurred internal-external category of “flow,” which ultimately constitutes everything at its heart).

Entering the Red Room means twisting the entire cube inside out, so that instead of seeing our experience of the world in positive terms — as things to be observed, acted upon, and “realized” — we see it in terms of the apophatic negation that precedes, surrounds, subsumes, and follows all positivity.

1. Behind all appearance — all sound, all image, all feeling — there is the void: the Emptiness beyond feeling, the Silence beyond hearing, the Darkness beyond seeing. There is that which withdraws from appearance, which is the place from which all appearances arise and to which they return. It is dark matter, the ocean of being, the zero state of appearance.

2. Behind all action — all touching, sounding, and showing — is the rippling tenderness felt by the heart, from which action arises and to which it returns: the palpitating Tremor of flesh at the origin of feeling and touching; the tremulous Murmur of sound at the origin of hearing, sounding, and speaking; the radiant Flicker of light at the origin of sight and of showing. It is unbounded feeling, the ocean of becoming, the zero state of relationality.

3. And behind all realization — all movement, all communication, all mapped understanding — there is the unfathomable Mystery, the “cloud of unknowing” that precedes knowing and that engulfs it in the end: the Immovable, the Unspeakable, and the Invisible and utterly Unknowable. It is the shadowy presence that withdraws from realization, from which all realization arises and to which it returns, realization in its zero state, the realization that is non-realization.

What does this have to do with the ecological crisis, you ask? Everything. (And nothing.)

The book’s Postlude describes the times of Chronos, of Aion, and of Kairos.

If Chronos measures the time of “one thing after another,” the time of determining but blind secondness, Aion is the time of qualitative thirdness, the time of significance that may or may not be determined in advance.

But before and between them, there is the time of Kairos. Kairotic time is the time of possibility, a time we can only intuit when we engage with the timeliness of the moment. What action can we take right now? What action is appropriate to this moment? This is the time of firstness, in which we must forget ourselves in order to hear the call of the kairoi, the gods who beckon us toward a new creative advance.

The book builds on the philosophies of Whitehead, Peirce, Deleuze, Zhiyi, and others to propose a philosophical basis for experiencing our time as open to the changes it calls for. There are exercises to make the propositions tangible. But, mostly, the book is a detailed proposal for learning to see things differently so as to feel that change is, indeed, possible. And that change can come not so much through stopping time (in a world that seems to be unfolding so quickly around us, and out of our control) as through learning to perceive the potentialities of every moment, and therefore to better inhabit time.

Happy May Day. Happy Beltane.