role. The world of individuals and individual things is also the world in which each of these individuals remains subject to the ravages of time. It is a world in which our engagements and connections function as the most important clocks by which we measure the passage of our lives.
Time and distinction are internally related in experience. If different parts of the world, or states of affairs, did not change differently, there would be no time. The reality of time presupposes a world made up of distinct elements that fail to change in lockstep.
On the other hand, if time did not exist, there could no causal interaction among parts of the world. There could be only a timeless grid or manifold (as represented, for example, by the philosophy of Leibniz). Different kinds of being might continue to be distinguished from one another in such a world, as nodes in a grid. Nevertheless, the sense in which things are distinct from one another and identical to themselves would be very different from what it is in the world that we actually inhabit. Their natures would be hidden, at least to us.
We understand a state of affairs by grasping what it can become in a range of circumstances: the understanding of the actual is inseparable from the imagination of the possible—of the adjacent possible, of what can next happen or of what we can make happen next. So if there were no time, we would be unable to understand the grid by appreciating how its different parts work. In a sense, all we could do is stare at it, not even to see it, if seeing connotes a measure of understanding.
The intimate relation between time and distinction is further shown by our ability to put both of them aside in our mathematical and logical reasoning. Such reasoning takes place in time (if indeed time is real). We can use our mathematical and logical discoveries or inventions to represent time-bound events. Newton and Leibniz developed the calculus, for example, for just that purpose.
Nevertheless, the relation among logical and mathematical propositions is not itself time bound. A conclusion is simultaneous with its premise, but an effect must come after its cause. In mathematics and logic we explore a simulacrum of the world, from which time and phenomenal difference (the distinctions among kinds of being) have been sucked out. We consider the world under the aspect of bundles of relations, unrelated to the time-bound particulars that we experience.
We can readily recognize the evolutionary advantages that such a power affords us: thanks to its exercise, we vastly expand our repertory of ways of understanding and of representing how parts of the world can interact with another. We do so, however, at the cost of letting into the inner citadel of the mind a Trojan Horse built against the recognition of distinction and time.
No wonder the qualified versions of the metaphysic of the overcoming of the world—the versions that represent the phenomena as less real than their hidden archetypes—have so often been expressed in the language of mathematics. There is a sense in which our mathematical and logical reasoning gives us a foretaste of the overcoming of the world. The adherents to the overcoming of the world treat this foretaste as a revelation of the nature of ultimate reality. We who resist both this metaphysics and the moral project it helps inspire may prefer to understand mathematics and logic as inquiries into a simplified proxy for the one real world, a proxy reduced to the most general features of reality and therefore robbed of individual difference and of time.
Incitements to overcoming the world
The direction in the religious experience of humanity that I am calling the overcoming of the world is, like the other two directions to which I next turn, more than a long moment in the religious history of mankind. Viewed as a mode of consciousness rather than as systematic doctrine, it is not confined to particular philosophical or theological traditions. It presents itself under different disguises as a way of thinking and of feeling that will forever be persuasive. Two forces, each deeply rooted in our experience, perennially renew its life.
The first force is our experience of mind and of access to other minds. Viewed from a certain perspective, all that we ever have direct access to is a mental state now, in the augmented present allowing for an experience of the passage of what has been to what is beginning to be. Our past and future mind states, which we are accustomed to regard as expressions of our embodied and continuous selves, are fabrications or representations of the mind caught in that augmented present.
In each such moment, our view of what came before and of what is to come later changes. Whether our past and future mind states deserve to be regarded as the mental experience of the same self, like the photographs that make up a moving film, is a conventional belief that may be supported by a wide range of theoretical justifications. It is not an immediate and indubitable experience.
On the other hand, despite the hiddenness of other people, of their fears and longings, impressions and perceptions, we regularly feel that we do have some access to other minds: to the present mind states of those around us and to the past mind states that are recorded or remembered. All our spoken or silent dealings with them presuppose such an access. All our conduct is a perpetual testing of the rightness of our conjectures about them.
No nation is so distant in historical time or in cultural remoteness that we cannot hope to penetrate something of its sensibility and consciousness. Our ability to imagine alien experience finds nourishment in an understanding of ourselves, enlarged by an education that gives us access to the subjective life of humanity in times and places distant from our own. If the unity and the continuity of our own mental experience are in doubt, so may the otherness of the mental experience of other people seem to be only relative.
The baffling character of our relation to our own as well to other people’s conscious life has suggested to many, in the course of the history of thought and of feeling, that there is only one mind or that mind is one. The unity of mind would be the true basis for our power to imagine the alien. It would be the material that appears to us broken up in the present moment—the simultaneous dying away of what has just been and coming to be of what is to become—that is the only experience we ever have in the world. It is distributed in different mind states only as light is refracted in rays. It is nevertheless always the same thing, like light itself.
This unified being or mind is the ultimate reality; everything else is either unreal or less real. Its site of revelation is the present, the now; the past and future are mental constructions rather than mental experiences. The exigencies of our embodiment are what lead us to them. Once we begin to doubt the reliability of those constructions, we begin to doubt as well that time is what we habitually take it to be. We start to take as the cornerstone of our view of the world the present mindedness that is not only the most reliable form of experience but, strictly speaking, the sole form.
The second force inspiring the effort to overcome the world is a paradoxical feature of our experience. We must face the ineradicable defects in our circumstance: the terror of death, the vertigo of groundlessness, and the treadmill of desire and frustration, aggravated by our susceptibility to the insult of belittlement. Of these defects, we many succeed temporarily in suppressing our awareness of the first two and of resigning ourselves to the fourth by lowering our expectations of life. From the third, however—the relative emptiness of our desires, our tendency to fill them up under the pressure of the ideas of and behaviors of those surrounding us, our struggle to demand the unlimited from the limited, the relentless move from privation to frustration or satiation and in either event to disappointment and boredom—from this ordeal we can never escape.
On the other hand, the world seduces us at every turn. The possession of life is the gateway through which we move toward its irresistible glories. The radiance of being, of its unity and diversity, threatens to dazzle, blind, and paralyze us if we fail to turn away from it to the business at hand.
The doctrinal expressions of the overcoming of the world offer an account of the sources and meaning of this contradictory character of our experience. The sensibility and consciousness expressed and enhanced by these doctrines promise relief from this rift within us. They propose to show how we can see and live in such a way that the charms of the world may prevail over the flaws in existence. The quest for invulnerability to change and suffering, as well as for benevolence given from on high, provides a practical route by which to achieve this goal.
It is thus a mistaken prejudice to associate the overcoming of