Angelic Dispersal

On the struggles of being a bridge between unmanifest potentiality and concrete actuality.

Rarely do we ponder the miraculous potency we possess as creative agents.

Time carries us through a flowing cascade of choice points. With each pulse of temporal duration, we find ourselves situated as co-shapers of vast clouds of unmanifest potential. Every choice we make introduces limits into this field of potentiality, foreclosing upon countless possibilities in service of granting actuality to those lucky few that become real events.

If we reflect deeply upon our condition as creative agents, as participants in the ever-unfolding process whereby indeterminate potentials collapse into concrete actualities moment-by-moment, we are inevitably brought to the boundary conditions of finitude and infinity, being and nonbeing.

Potentiality bridges between being (existence as entity) and nonbeing (existence as nonentity). Potentiality arises in vast waveforms of indeterminate possibilities, billowing clouds composed of everything that is not and yet could be.

The cloud of the possible contains an array of infinite potential, even while the sum total of all that has, up-to-now, been actual places real constraints upon the possibilities that we may co-actualize from-here-onward. As Bonnitta Roy puts it, “What is possible is infinite, but not exhaustive.”¹

Potentiality, then, partakes of a mode of existence strewn in-between finitude and infinity.

Potentiality—Actuality
Nonentity—entity
Infinity—Finitude

Juxtaposing our finite existence with the infinite, as an exercise in thought, may induce wonder or terror.

Yet, there are rare moments when, by some unknown grace, we may be carried to an experience of the borders of the boundless, where we almost begin to taste the edge of divinity that dissolves the tongue along with the tasting. This domain of Being can’t be spoken of or represented because speech and representation, by their very nature, scar the infinite by imposing boundaries.

It is here, at this edge, that we may be flooded with a profound longing. We may wish to voice this longing, to somehow get a hold of it by naming it—as if this could achieve some first step toward resolving the yearning. And yet, not even one adequate syllable manages to leap from the tip of the tongue. Longing paradoxically intensifies in this borderland where successfully crossing to the other side would necessitate that all longing be extinguished.

“Yearning hurts,” said Heraclitus, “and what release may come of it feels like death.”²

It is here that we stumble into the terrain of mysticism.

A.H. Almaas situates our curious condition upon its Absolute and groundless foundations:

“The ultimate nature of things is sometimes called the Absolute, sometimes called the Void. Some theistic traditions call it the Godhead; in Sufism it is called the Divine Essence. The ultimate essence of everything, including the human being, is a complete absence of all that can be experienced and the absence of knowing that there is nothing to experience. It is a complete lack of self-consciousness, and an absence of consciousness of anything. That is the ultimate source—the Origin.³

Almaas’ description rings out with echoes from the Tattiriya Upanishad (II, 7):

“In the beginning all this was the Non-Being. It was thence that Being was born.”

We might attempt to think the Absolute in terms of emptiness or voidness, or otherwise as an overflowing fullness, as in the Christian-Gnostic conception of the Plêrôma.

In his book The Intrareligious Dialogue, philosopher and theologian Raimon Panikkar opens one of his chapters⁴ with an epigraph consisting of two passages:

“From his fullness we have all received.”

“The interdependence of all things is emptiness.”

The first comes from John 1:16 of the New Testament. The second, from Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā (XXIV, 18).

In this case, the notion of “emptiness” (Śūnyatā) deconstructs the notion that any finite entities have self-existence or stable and intrinsic qualities, whereas uses of the term in other streams Buddhism more closely resemble the road of the Plêrôma, which ends (without ending) in the non-quality of qualitylessness. Jung captures (without capturing) this in his Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead):

“Harken: I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full. As well might ye say anything else of nothingness, as for instance, white is it, or black, or again, it is not, or it is. A thing that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities.

This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA.”⁵

“This does not mean that there is nothing there,” Almaas insists. He goes on:

“You are, you exist, but you are aware of it only when you come out of it, when there is some consciousness . . . The Absolute is sometimes called the “unmanifest.” Consciousness, awareness, is a development or manifestation out of the Absolute. The first level that arises from the Absolute is the capacity to be conscious or aware. Ontologically prior to this arising, this capacity does not exist. There is existence without awareness of that existence. The Absolute is what most fundamentally exists. But it does not exist in the usual sense, in the sense that we can experience it, or touch or feel or see it. It exists without any quality; it is ‘qualityless.’”⁶

So, existentially speaking, we find ourselves thrown into a most curious situation: “standing” (without standing) upon abyssal foundations (without foundation) that can’t be mentally cognized in any particular way. For as soon as any particularity that we can “grasp” enters the picture, we are no longer dealing with the Absolute. To return to Jung’s Septem Sermones, “It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution.”⁷

Sri Aurobindo, in his own fashion, finds agreement here:

“When we ponder on these things, we begin to perceive how feeble in their self-assertive violence and how confusing in their misleading distinctness are the words that we use . . . We tend always to translate too rigidly what we conceive or know of the Absolute into the terms of our own particular relativity.”⁸

Thinking together about the Plêrôma as we are here, then, reveals that we have already “fallen” into consciousness.

Could we have “chosen” this, given there was no one there to choose? To assume responsibility for such a “choice” is to attempt instantiating ourselves as the “chooser,” and yet our very being is presumably predicated upon this Event; we are, supposedly, its effect or consequence.

Are we therefore the product of a choice made by the Absolute? Or is our being a mere consequence, a necessity following from its character (i.e., beyond the ken of any “choosing” whatsoever)?

Whatever the case, here we are: finite, choosing agents. Our existence as creative agents is predicated on a creative Event that both precedes and exceeds us.⁹

And in some ways, our ability to creatively choose appears to recapitulate the primordial Event—the primordial leap¹⁰ from infinity to finitude, from pure potentiality into actuality. With every choiceful act we, too, perpetually partake in the collapsing of infinitudes of potentiality (albeit, non-exhaustive infinities) into finite actualities.

Of Essence and Existence

If we think along the same lines as Sartre, for whom “existence precedes essence,” then we would best conceive of ourselves as a singularity of pure freedom in this great void, lacking any essence until such time as we make ourselves real in and through our choices.

In response to this, I am called to turn to Schelling. Well before Sartre, he championed the reality and necessity of human Freedom. Unlike Sartre, however, Schelling was deeply influenced by mystical theology (most notably that of Jakob Böhme).

He was deeply concerned with the paradoxical riddle of freedom and necessity concerning the primordial Event—that is, the question as to whether the primordial leap from nonbeing into being can be understood as the result of a freely chosen creative act made by the Absolute.

Thinking along with Schelling’s Ages of the World is an exercise in the brilliant madness of attempting to think the unprethinkable. Indeed, he spoke of “The Unprethinkable Decision in the Nature of God.”¹¹ He ultimately conceives of a primordial existence internally at war with itself (not unlike Jung’s conception of “terrible Abraxas”¹²), which resolves the necessities following from its maddening paradoxes into freedom.¹³

And, following from this, flows the creative unfolding of nature.

Indeed, while Schelling did invoke the image of a descent from the Absolute into multiplicity and matter resulting from the overflowing fullness of the Godhead, he also painted the counterbalancing picture of a spiritually-organic process of creative ascent surging forth from an abyssal Absolute, unfurling through and as nature’s evolution.¹⁴

“Nature is an abyss of the past. This is what is oldest in nature, the deepest of what remains if everything accidental and everything that has become is removed.¹⁵

Yet, his conception of nature included “an attracting force . . . which, when set forth, is seen in the works of creation.”

The true primordial and fundamental force of all things corporeal is the attracting being that grants a thing form, that delimits it in a place, that incarnates that which in itself is spiritual and incomprehensible . . . In accord with its ground, therefore, nature comes out of what is blind, dark, and unspeakable in God.”¹⁶

The attracting being that grants a thing form.

Here, we are led into terrain that is deeply resonant with the Islamic mystical orientation that Corbin called angelology, of which I sketched a basic definition in my first post.

The Angel is an attracting being that grants us form. It is understood to be an essence (or, in light of more contemporary interpretations, a field of essences) that ontologically precedes who we take ourselves to be. Yet, from the standpoint of time, it emits an alluring effect to influence our shaping of the future, persuading our creative choices by informing the shapes and preferential leanings of our most authentic desires. It is who we truly are, and at the same time it is a numinous otherness to whom we relate.

The Angel dwells in a place of great paradox. It lives in the gap between ourselves and our Origin, between finitude and infinity, between actuality and potentiality. This place in-between is filled by our longings. For the Sufi traditions, it is synonymous with the imaginal.

The Angel gives a face to the mystery that whispers: your longing to return home to your Origin is the same longing that calls you to realize your innate potential.

The Angel, above all, demands from us a maturation of desire. “To desire and to see through desire,” wrote Hillman, “this is the courage that the heart requires.”¹⁷

Schelling envisioned the “attracting force,” his closest counterpart to the Angel, as having been born through a transmutation in the originary desire that existed internally to the Absolute prior to the primordial Event that sparked the surging forth of nature, of creation. Its transformed condition appears to reach toward this sort of transparent desire.

“The obsession [Sucht] abates into yearning [Sehnsucht], wild desire turns into a yearning to ally itself, as if it were its own true or highest self, with the will that wills nothing, with eternal freedom.”¹⁸

A yearning toward alliance with a will that wills nothing. Sri Aurobindo, while taking as his starting point the other side of that threshold toward which yearning reaches, but across which desire cannot survive, makes a pronouncement to very much the same effect:

“For we find that this Nirvana, this self-extinction, while it gives an absolute peace and freedom to the soul within is yet consistent in practice with a desireless but effective action without.”¹⁹

Longing toward the death of longing, striving toward action free from striving.

I can think of no other instance where our beautifully agonizing conundrum has been more powerfully captured than in this prayer written in 1914 by The Mother (Mirra Alfassa), who had been the spiritual consort of Sri Aurobindo:

What would be the use of man if he were not created to throw a bridge between That which is eternally but is unmanifested and that which is manifested, between all the transcendences and splendours of the divine life and all the dark and sorrowful ignorance of the material world? Man is a link between What must be and what is; he is a footbridge thrown across the abyss, he is the great cross-shaped X, the quaternary connecting link. His true domicile, the effective seat of his consciousness should be in the intermediary world at the meeting-point of the four arms of the cross, just where all the infinitude of the Unthinkable comes to take a precise form so that it may be projected into the innumerable manifestation....²⁰

To learn to listen to, to feel, the Angel—what some Sufis called the Gabriel of your being—is to attempt to walk that impossible bridge, to be that impossible bridge. The work is never complete, and approximating this ideal forever remains a tribulation.

Struggle for the Angel

Angelology, then, places our freedom in conversation with a personal-yet-other essence, invisibly feeding our visible being from “upstream” while at the same time waiting “downstream” for us, calling upon us from out ahead. And yet, we may or may not listen to its call; we may answer to the Angel’s loving persuasion, or we may deny it.

Tending this relationship, from an angelological perspective, is a matter of ultimate concern, and it is not easy. We must struggle for it. As Tom Cheetham puts it:

“Becoming yourself is a task. We are born with the potential to become who we truly are—to engage and struggle for the Angel who is our celestial counterpart. Jung called this process individuation . . . But we are subject to the forces of humanity and of nature that limit our actions, and to the powers of the psyche that take the form of compulsions . . . We begin the battle for our most intimate lives.²¹

This is the alignment problem of the soul. I call it Angelic Dispersal.

It comes with the challenge of gathering-in the soul-denying dispersions of our desires, of safeguarding the mind from its vulnerability toward decoherence—a tendency all-too-readily exacerbated by the design of our contemporary media ecologies.

While the struggle for the Angel entails collecting the scattered noise of our many impulses into devotional focus, it does not mean unfolding with linearity. Nor does it mean suppressing the multiplicity of authentic desires endemic to the soul.

It does mean learning to identify and follow “golden threads,”²² sensing with discernment which encounters and currents of experience awaken authentic Eros within us. It means developing the subtle discipline of safeguarding our devotional attention to these currents to the best of our ability while releasing the desires and compulsions, the pockets of distraction and lapses into numbness, that do disservice to our devotion to the Angels.

The dynamic intercourse between ourselves and the Angel taking place upon the stage of the soul is demanding. The existential struggle this entails is the reason why Corbin opted for the metaphor of spiritual “combat” to convey it.

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The shrieking future howls Through my mænad constellation
Gorging on longing’s diffusion Dispersed in tragiconfusion
Cacophonies of siren calls Rend the fragile Orphic heart
From where sings my Gabriel His call to divine duty
Rebuking every sinew Composed of vows halfhearted
Gathering the seething static unseen Into a sustained chord
Harmoniously composed To send a winged nimbus’d love
Blooming from a flameseed furious Into pristine devotion wrangling time
And decrypting the tentacular hieroglyph Medusa, mirrored
Catching sight Of her eternal Sophia leading ever onward
Angel, Angel Grant me one Idea
To suffer this duration Through a gesture unbroken
In service to your Fathomless beyond
Fulfilled to unfulfill You perpetually

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What countervails Angelic Dispersal?

Shepherding Inspiration.

How, exactly, does one shepherd inspiration, counteracting compulsions while learning to recognize and tend to golden threads?

I am no guru here, and am very much living this question. There are, however, three elements I’d like to point to, which I suspect are helpful starting places.

This will be the subject of my next post. It is already written, but I think it best to give pause here, and send another dispatch soon…

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Clearly, I’d been thinking in naively linear terms with my original plan to complete the series on moving Beyond Imaginal Privatism in one unbroken swoop.

I could lament this…. Or, I could take some solace and inspiration, considering that soul-led creativity is often better nurtured by a labyrinthine unfolding through graceful nonlinear productivity….

I am also feeling a tug to transpose some of the conversation between Corbin and Whitehead included in my dissertation into this Substack… Rough sketches of a sort of Process Angelology, or Angelology of Organism…

As the wind bloweth…

1. https://thesideview.co/journal/complex-potential-states/

2. Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, Tanslated by Brooks Haxton, p. 69.

3. https://www.diamondapproach.org/glossary/refinery_phrases/unmanifest

4. The chapter is entitled “Śūnyatā and Plêrôma: The Buddhist and Christian Response to the Human Predicament” (p. 119-138).

5. C.G. Jung & Aniela Jaffé, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 379.

Compare with Schelling: “The Godhead is nothing because nothing can come toward it in a way distinct from its being [Wesen] and, again, it is above all nothingness because it itself is everything” (The Ages of the World, p.24).

6. https://www.diamondapproach.org/glossary/refinery_phrases/unmanifest

7. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 379.

8. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 33

9. Of course, speaking of an Event at all, we are ensared in the same conceptual impossiblities as with all attempts conceptualizing the Absolute. Surely, from the our standpoint of temporality as construed according to our own finitiude, an originating Event appears as a necessity. Yet, Aurobindo reminds us: “And when we say that out of Non-Being Being appeared, we perceive that we are speaking in terms of Time about that which is beyond Time” (The Life Divine, p. 32).

10. "Ursprung means ‘origin’ but, as Gebser points out, it literally signifies a primordial leap (Ur, ‘primordial’ + Sprung, ‘leap, spring’).”

http://www.aaroncheak.com/achronon-on-the-principle-of-timefreedom

11. The Ages of the World, p. 12.

12. “It is improbable probability, unreal reality. Had the pleroma a being, Abraxas would be its manifestation” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 383).

13. Aurobindo likewise settled on the necessity of the Absolute Freedom behind the originary Event: “For we cannot suppose the sole Entity is compelled by something outside or other than Itself, since no such thing exists” (The Life Divine, p. 36).

14. This lies behind his remark that “the true method of philosophizing is ascending, not descending” (quote in M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 186).

15. The Ages of the World, p. 31.

16. The Ages of the World, p. 31.

17. James Hillman, The Captive Heart, p. 8.

18. The Ages of the World, p. 28.

19. The Life Divine, p. 34.

20. The Mother, Prayers and Meditations, p. 232.

21. Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon, p. 101-102.

22. I borrow this phrase from the late Stephen Harrod Buhner, himself standing in a lineage of borrowers. The following passage comes from chapter 12 of his book Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, titled “Following Golden Threads” (I lack the physical copy, and therefore the precise page).