Those Superior Significances
Imaginal Causality and the Roots of Time
“Transiency everywhere plunges into a deep being. And so all the configurations of the here and now are to be used not in a time-bound way only, but, as far as we are able, to be placed in those superior significances in which we have a share.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Witold von Hulewicz (Nov. 13, 1925)1
There may be more radical ways of looking at time’s significance.
Rilke at the Wellspring
The letter from which the above epigraph is taken feels bottomless. Like much of Rilke’s poetry, it continually baffles me, and still it calls me back time and time and again. Yet, however many times I read it, its shades of meaning continually elude my conscious comprehension.
It is precisely at these fringes of comprehensibility that Rilke’s words exert their greatest pull, as if speaking directly to a deeper Self within—one who silently urges the waking mind to remember its buried roots, to feel from them with all possible intensity, and then read again.
Of course, it bears noting that Rilke produced works that were bottomless even to himself. The aforementioned letter, apparently a response to an inquiry from his Polish translator regarding the meaning of his pinnacle poetic achievement, the Duino Elegies, begins:
“… And am I the one to give the Elegies their proper explanation? They reach out infinitely beyond me.”
Rilke was a rare individual, one who seemed to draw directly from the wellspring of that “deep being” to which he alludes. Indeed, when Jean Gebser first encountered the Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus,2 he sensed that the poems signaled “a personal breakthrough to a new disposition.”3 This new disposition corresponds with what Gebser later described as the emerging integral structure of consciousness—an intensified consciousness radically transparent to the spiritual roots of its being, growing beyond the rationally-determined ordering of mutual exclusivity between the realms of waking and dreaming, life and death.
Taking Rilke’s words to heart, it may be equally futile to grope in search of a “proper explanation” for his enigmatic letter. Even so, I will leap here into a meditation on the radical vantage point Rilke cryptically hints at—recalling that the root word from which “radical” is derived (Latin: radix) means just that: “root.”
Plunging into a Deep Being
Let us imagine that Rilke—for what reason, and by what means, we can’t be sure—broke through into what Peter Kingsley aptly calls “the roots of existence.”4
These roots lie at the originary fount into which the Mediterranean mystics of ancient Velia and Phocaea, reclining on their backs for days at a time in lightless subterranean caves, plunged for the sake of attaining Gnosis.5
Kingsley suggests that these mystics ultimately found their place “beside the roots of all existence, beyond even life and death.” Rilke, along similar lines, writes in his letter that “Affirmation of life-AND-death appears as one in the ‘Elegies.’”
He goes on:
To grant one without the other is, so it is here learned and celebrated, a limitation which in the end shuts out all that is infinite. Death is the side of life averted from us, unshone upon by us: we must try to achieve the greatest consciousness of our existence which is at home in both unbounded realms, inexhaustibly the great unity in which the beings that surpass us, the “angels”, are at home.
This realm beyond, where the duality between life and death is superseded, is the dwelling place of the angels—those “superior significances” partaking of a mode of existence beyond the bounds of birth and death, sub specie aeternitatis. Seen through the eyes of the angels, mortality’s rhythmically pulsing contours—birth-from-beyond-into-life-toward-death-into-beyond-toward-birth—weave in meaningful patterns throughout the tapestry of the Whole.
A view of radical time breaks forth.
Configurations of the Here and Now
Nowhere has this view of radical time been more beautifully rendered than in the opening lines of Kathleen Raine’s poem, The Hyacinth.
Time opens in a flower of bells
The mysteries of its hidden bed,
The altar of the ageless cells
Whose generations have never been dead.
So flower angels on the holy head,
So on the wand of darkness bright worlds hang.
Love laid the elements at the vital root,
Unhindered out of love these flowers spring.
Contrary to the way the modern mind has construed time, as a unidirectional unfolding that can be meted out and quantified mechanically (i.e., clock time), radical time does not unfold in linear progression and is already whole. Radical time perpetually blooms, like a flower of bells, amid a radial field of interacting resonances. Events surge forth in meaningfully arranged configurations, like constellations singing from the void.
I have elsewhere called this Rhiziconic Time:
From the ordinary point of view, disparate events lie dispersed across a spatialized temporal fabric, inhabiting “other times.” From the vantage point of radical time, these distant events harmonically resonate, dynamically inter-subsuming and interpenetrating each other to form an unbroken totality. Past and future are forever latent as co-shapers of the present. This reciprocal enfoldment between what is, what has been, and what will be conspires to arrange the “configurations of the here and now.”
The body of radical time is shaped in accordance with shared meanings. Arrayed events sing together through metaphoric isomorphism. Metaphoric resonances gesture to an archetypal substratum—the hidden bed from which radical time draws sustenance as it blossoms into form. This hidden bed is the convocation of angels, the plenum of superior significances.
Christian contemplative and mystic Cynthia Bourgeault links this nonordinary modality of time with a nonordinary modality of causality—what she calls “imaginal causality.”
In imaginal causality the meaning is generated in the richness of the interplay. One can speak, properly, about a “tapestry of meaning,” or in a scientific metaphor, one can say that the meaning is “an emergent property of the whole.” It does not lie in any single part no matter how powerfully configured but in the way the bits and pieces speak to each other, calling each other into resonance. It is detected in the subtlety of the weave and in the energy released in the interplay among the various strands. From the center things flow out and toward each other, creating combinations sometimes surprising but recognized by the heart as meaningfully congruent.6
Rosa Lewis, in a Twitter post, shared two diagrams contrasting the mechanistic and imaginal modes of causality:
The notion of imaginal causality effects a radical inversion upon Freud’s conception of the “dream work” (Traumarbeit). For Freud, many dream images can be understood as something akin to psychic “zip files” produced by means of a process he called “condensation” (Verdichtung). Condensation gathers memories of numerous discrete events (“day residues”), compressing them into images symbolizing the sum total of consolidated memories in the most efficient way possible through multiply apt metaphors.
Whereas this Freudian view gives ontological priority to the discrete events of daytime, imaginal causality suggests that dreams, when approached at sufficient level of depth, reveal disbursements from a symbolic realm that has ontological primacy in relation to the waking world. The events of the day world often appear downstream of the time-free archetypes in which dreams have their roots.
From this perspective, it appears as if the events of ordinary time have been refracted, scattering like light rays into disparate temporal positions from a shared vertex and origin point.
This is revealed in moments of “thick” time. There are times when events in the present trigger cascading associations, flowing into reverie. Memories, dream fragments, and images cluster in resonance with a thematic pattern. It is as if mycelial interconnections, stretching through the fabric of time, are pulled into view. The whole composition reveals a field of meaning relying on the specific interplay of all the vitally interlinked parts.7 Jeremy Johnson therefore speaks of rhizome time and relational time (see the timestamped video below):
The root systems unifying the interconnected events of radical time trace back from their distribution across the field of clock time “toward the center of that realm whose depth and influence we share, everywhere unboundaried, with the dead and those to come,” as Rilke says in his letter.
Bourgeault, attempting to describe the revelation of imaginal causality, invokes the metaphor of being immersed in a city and traveling from one place to another. Moving about at ground level, separate spatial locations are encountered sequentially at different times. Then, upon hiking to the summit of a nearby mountain, the whole cityscape and its organization suddenly springs into view all at once.
Glimpses of imaginal causality would be the temporal equivalent of this spatial experience—and as such, it means not only seeing the city as a whole, but seeing the time flow of the whole previous journey, which means perceiving yourself in all the locations in which you exist for a time, including the way those times meaningfully cohere.
Such disclosures of concretized time occur for the soul—or what Bourgeault calls “the eye of the heart”—and when they transpire with sufficient intensity there can be an overriding sense that “this wholeness of time already existed, only I haven’t been able see it because I have been immersed in the sectored perspectives I’ve inhabited.”
For most of us, passing glances of “those superior significances” appear in discrete bursts—we tend not to be able to remain on the mountaintop for long before descending again.
Rosa, who has herself sojourned through moments of profound intensity, lends her own language to radical time in the timestamped video below:
Let us now continue with Rilke’s letter. The following passage carries resonances with Rosa’s reflections:
We of the here and now are not for a moment hedged in the time-world, nor confined within it; we are incessantly flowing over and over to those who preceded us, to our origins and to those who seemingly come after us. In that greatest “open” world all are, one cannot say “simultaneous,” for the very falling away of time determines that they all are.
Rilke’s Third Elegy contains powerful suggestions of this time-free existence. We join an infant child, still stationed upon the border of the unbounded world from which the diurnal events of ordinary time surge forth, embroidered with pattern, from their unseen origin:
And he himself, as he lay there, relieved, with the sweetness
of the gentle world you had made for him dissolving beneath
his drowsy eyelids, into the foretaste of sleep—:
he seemed protected . . . But inside: who could ward off,
who could divert, the floods of origin inside him?
Ah, there was no trace of caution in that sleeper; sleeping,
yes but dreaming, but flushed with what fevers: how he threw himself in.
All at once new, trembling, how he was caught up
and entangled in the spreading tendrils of inner event
already twined into patterns, into strangling undergrowth, prowling
bestial shapes. How he submitted—. Loved.
Loved his interior world, his interior wilderness,
that primal forest inside him, where among decayed treetrunks
his heart stood, light-green. Loved. Left it, went through
his own roots and out, into the powerful source
where his little birth had already been outlived.8
It may well be that, in the lingering twilight of life’s earliest years, we remain close to the fullness of time and its archetypal radiance. Jung strikingly observed that the symbolism shining through in individuals’ earliest recollected dreams often prefigure, with uncanny precision, the thematic contours of their lives as a whole.9
Is this to say the events of life are predetermined? There are those who believe that, at last in some cases, they are. Vine Deloria Jr., reflecting upon multiple instances where premonitory visions among Sioux individuals were ultimately fulfilled, remarks: “It would appear that at least some human lives are determined in outline and have certain inviolable destinies.”10
I tend think of radical time as a process of flow along kairotic channels. As opposed to kronos—time as a neutral medium divisible into quantifiable units inside of which things happen—kairos is qualitative time, saturated with significance. While kairos is typically framed as a distinct moment in time appropriate for some congruent action, in a broader sense it also implies the fascial tissue of time-meaning by which distant events are interconnected.
There is, however, no hard determinism here. Mythopoetic constraint is anything but rigid. The life of symbols is better conceived in organic rather than mechanistic terms. There are innumerable ways any given archetypal pattern may coagulate into concrete manifestation, each being equally faithful to the essential core of meaning as any of the others. Archetypal motifs are not monochrome, they are radically iridescent.
Aaron Cheak, drawing on Gebser, lends a beautiful metaphor to the process whereby originary patterns take concrete form, instantiating themselves in space-time:
Much as salt crystalises into being from a super-saturated solution, the visible, tangible, time-bound forms of reality congeal out of the invisible, intangible, and time-free ambience of origin . . . this crystallisation (Auskristallisierung) occurs through an intensification of the originary ambience.11
These are the movements of natura naturans. And, crucially, this opens space for the possibility of participation in the warp and weft of Kairotic time.
“Those superior significances in which we have a share.”
Corbin, for instance, notes that the biography of Ibn ‘Arabī, the Sufi master, has for the keen observer both an exoteric and esoteric dimension.12 Because Ibn ‘Arabī continuously worked, in persistent devotion, with his “invisible master” (i.e. the suprapersonal patterns governing his soul), the diurnal events of his life crystallized around the corresponding motifs, sub specie aeternitatis. The time-bound history of his life became a stained-glass window through which the “history of the dateless” could shine, for those with eyes to see.
Ibn ‘Arabī’s approach to participating in the flow of time—as well as his capacity to recognize the fruits of such participation—requires cultivating perceptual capacities linked with the subtle body. Without this, Ibn ‘Arabī would not have been sensitized to the erotic and imaginal channels linking him to the archetypal origin of his own being, allowing him to continuously tend to it and virtuously honor its demands.
Yet, even if he had he not participated in this way, the symbolic undercurrents of his life energy would have nonetheless persisted. They may well have shown up in the contours of his life, regardless. But they would not have been nearly as perfected, and more likely would have appeared dim, marred, or unrecognizable.
Indeed, we all move inexorably through kairotic channels whether or not we are aware of it. The crucial question is: does heightened perceptual sensitivity to the metaphoric undercurrents of our waking lives open ways of deepening our participation in those superior significances that trace and impel the contours of our unfolding through time?
The Infinite Ground of Your Inmost Vibration
The “angel” of the elegies has nothing to do with the angel of the Christian heaven (rather with the angel figures of Islam) … The angel of the Elegies is that being who vouches for the recognition in the invisible of a higher order of reality.
Rilke gestures here to the angels of Islam: those superior significances, belonging to an invisible and higher order of reality. I have already written of Sufistic angelology elsewhere, drawing from Corbin.
There is yet another way of thinking about the angels and their archetypal influences, the underpinnings of imaginal causality. This leads us back to the theme of resonance, of vibration. Archetypal influence registers as a felt energetic resonance in the body. This resonance elaborates itself into eros, into a spiritual appetite, an upwelling aliveness signalling authentic desire. From an angelological view, the deepest currents of desire are not arbitrary. Eros has its roots in that “deep being,” and its demands are bound to matters of ultimate concern.
Viewed in this way, these inflections of longing are ennobled into factors acting as barometers for communicating when we are moving through relevant kairotic channels. When we are so aligned, we act in cooperation with the originary patterns seeking expression through us. We likewise act in cooperation with the current imperatives cosmogenesis. (This is where Corbin’s angelology requires an update, as it lacks an evolutionary frame. I suspect that process philosophy will make a worthy consort for angelology in service to this end).13
River Kenna, quite effectively, elaborates upon this vibratory way imagining archetypal influx, introducing the notion of infranarrative.
And, here, River finds himself in good company….
From the thirteenth poem in the Second Part of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (as translated by Edward Snow):
Be—and know as well the terms of nonbeing,
the infinite ground of your inmost vibration,
so that, this once, you may wholly fulfill them.
Rilke’s injunction is impossible. We can never wholly fulfill the terms of nonbeing through our time-bound finitude. Yet, this is the ideal aim the angels perpetually beckon us to approximate.
The angel, again, is the impossible bridge linking our mortal and time-bound finitude with our infinite, time-free origin. The superior significances teeming amid the roots of our being sing out to us, imploring that we hearken to them and take part in their ingresssion into actuality—for without our assent through enactment, the angels have no means of inscribing their likenesses in the fabric of space-time.
Angelic signals communicate through the resonances of felt sense, where intuitions of latent potential blooms into nascent impulse. Our most faithful means for getting a handle on and naming these resonances come through enactment—the bold leaps we take in service to our becoming. This is individuation.
Individuation, however, is inconceivable—not to mention meaningless—if conceived in abstraction from the world, from connection with and participation in the wider whole.
This brings us to Rilke’s following stanza:
To the used, as well as the mute and muffled
stock of nature’s fullness, to the inexpressible sums,
add yourself jubilantly, and erase the score.
The used, mute and muffled stock of nature’s fullness. This is the world as construed by modernity, the spiritual alienation effected by the Cartesianization of consciousness, speciously sundering body from mind, cosmos from psyche. We belong to a time that has rendered the world mute, divesting nature of its symbolic resonances, framing the world as a dead machine and passive resource.
Add yourself jubilantly.
Rilke enjoins us to live enthusiastically (derived from the Greek en “in” and theos “god”—to be “divinely inspired, possessed by a god”). Dare we let ourselves imagine that this infusion of aliveness does not play out upon the stage of a mute, muffled, and indifferent world? Dare we imagine, even cautiously, that kairotic channels connect us with the whole, such that accessing and honoring our own deepest enlivenment entrains us with the life of the world and the movements of its hidden intelligences?
And so all the configurations of the here and now are to be used not in a time-bound way only, but, as far as we are able, to be placed in those superior significances in which we have a share. But not in the Christian sense (from which I am more and more passionately moving away), but, in a purely earthly, deeply earthly, blissfully earthly consciousness, we must introduce what is here seen and touched into the wider, into the widest orbit. Not into a beyond whose shadow darkens the earth, but into a whole, into the whole.
How radical are we willing to be with the notion of the anima mundi, the world soul? How far are we ready to take the dictum esse in anima: being in soul? How prepared are we to conceive of an archetypal structure nondually pervading the whole of this reality of which we are an expression, such that we are not only composed of, but co-composing, the archetypal orderings we discern, rather than merely projecting them out upon the world from within an isolated interior?
This conviction can only be strengthened by gradually learning to feel into and honor the archetypal resonances infusing the subtle flows that thread us into the wider whole, laying down the patterns of the kairotic channels in which we participate.
Jung used the word acausal to describe this ordering—but he was really attempting to reacquaint the modern mind to that other causality, long neglected. Not mechanical, but imaginal.
This opens the possibility that archetypal factors not only give shape to our latent individuality… but that their influences can and do extend into the whole arena in which our unfolding takes place.
In the timestamped clip below (22:32-25:25), Jonathan Rowson beautifully transmits this sensibility, and the lovingly trusting leap it requires, leading beyond the sole dominion of the rational mind, even as we resolve not to altogether abandon our hard-won critical faculties:
This gestures to the participation with the whole that individuation always implies—related to what Richard Tarnas has rightly called a mature participation mystique.14 If the late flower of the mental-rational consciousness can learn again to sense from its roots—and, from them, draw upon the far deeper sustenance of archetypal currents that continually whisper to us, seeking to persuade and influence the creative arcs of our unfolding—then the waywardly drifting and alienated sense of freedom endemic to our postmodern condition may yet resolve into voluntary alignment with a deeper order that communicates from our contiguity with the whole, striving to sustain and create more life.
Deepest down: the age-old,
gnarled root
of all erected things,
hidden source they’ve never seen.15
**
And though the pool’s reflection
often blurs before us:
Know the image.16
From the Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1910-1926.
Rilke experienced the Elegies and Sonnets as artist siblings surging forth from the same gust of creative inspiration.
As he writes in his letter:
“…the new elegies and their conclusion were preceded, in a few days, by the Sonnets to Orpheus, which imposed themselves tempestuously (and which had not been in my plan). They are, as could not have been otherwise, of the same ‘birth’ as the Elegies, and their springing up, without my willing it, in connection with a girl who had died young, moves them even closer to the source of their origin…”
Georg Feuerstein, Structures of Consciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser, p. 24
Peter Kingsley, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity, p. 43.
These figures were known, alternatively, as the kouros (κοῦρος, “boy, youth”) or iatromantis (ἰατρόμαντις, “healer-seer”). See Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm, digital copy (no page number).
What should persuade us to take such associative musings as anything more than psychological events that, while perhaps beautiful and even quite personally meaningful, are also undeniably private? Why wildly reify projections—or worse, flirt with the near psychotic hubris of ascribing deeper ontological significance to the psyche’s free associations?
Indeed, we should be cautious here and hold these things lightly, refraining from reification and restraining ourselves from the Icarus flight of inflation. These are legitimate dangers.
Yet, we also have every reason to question the modern assumption that all archetypal meaning is unequivocally confined to human “interiority.” Jung, late in his life, followed the call to publicly write about synchronicity, stemming from a recognition that archetypal patterns have a wily tendency to appear in meaningfully interrelated clusters of both mental and phsysical events in ways that cannot be accounted or explained through efficient causality. His conception of archetypes as psychoid factors acknowledges this capacity for symbolic patterns to radically transgress against the modern dualism between subject and object.
This is all to say that psychological processes, while certainly being capable of distorting reality and alienating through projection, also carry the potential to entrain themselves with impersonal archetypal processes that problematize the apparent disjunciton between psyche and world.
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, p. 165.
C.G. Jung, Children’s Dreams: Notes on the seminar given in 1928-1930.
Vine Deloria Jr., C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions, p. 91.
http://www.aaroncheak.com/achronon-on-the-principle-of-timefreedom
Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi.
Future writing on this topic is latently present, incubating.
See the Epilogue to Richard Tarnas’s The Passion on the Western Mind.
Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, First Part, Poem 9 (Edward Snow’s translation).
Sonnets to Oprheus, First Part, Poem 17.