Dreams within Streams (and vice versa)

 Yada yada flip flip, here's a thought:

The great stream of being, in which he flows while it flows through him, is the same stream to which belongs everything else that drifts into his perspective (Voegelin).

In other words, the world -- or cosmos -- is obviously not static, it's a movement, a process, a riverrun. Out of this stream emerges another stream, Life, which is much like an eddy in a river. It is at once distinct from the larger stream, but obviously inconceivable in its absence.

At the moment we're in the middle of a stream of thought, and where does this fit in?  We have no idea where it's going, nor do we really know where it's coming from. All we know is that Bob is yada-yada-flip-flipping, as usual.

Is it streams all the way down?

Hold that thought. We'll flow back to it, but I am reminded of a later chapter called The Beginning of the Beginning, which begins as follows, except I'm going to substitute Bob and his computer for Eric and his paper:

As I am putting down these words on a blank computer screen I have begun to write a sentence that, when it is finished, will be the beginning of a post on certain problems of the Beginning.

The sentence is finished. But is it true? 

We can't know unless and until we go through the yada yada. Assuming a wall of text below -- which hasn't yet been written -- it looks like we may have made some progress, but who knows? I certainly don't, but it feels like a potentially fruitful area of enquiry. 

The reader does not know whether it is true before he has finished reading the post and can judge whether it is indeed a sermon on the sentence as its text. Nor do I know at this time, for the post is as yet unwritten; and although I have a general idea of its construction [note: I don't], I know from experience that new ideas have a habit of emerging while the writing is going on...

That I do know, since these posts do have a way of writing themselves, albeit with my cooperation. 

In author words, -- and this is something I discovered about a month into blogging, when the Gagdad melon reached the last of its own meager resources -- it seems I am a necessary but insufficient cause of my own damn blog. 

Which suggests -- or at least the thought just popped into my noggin -- that perhaps we're tapping into another stream of some sort; that it's not only streams all the way down, but all the way up, too. 

Gosh, maybe even God himselves is a kind of riverrun of extream being, and this in turn opens a whole can of wormholes -- back to Joyce in particular.

Why Joyce, and must you, Bob? Do you really want to alienate your last three readers?

First of all, it's not me. In fact, I'm not myself at all, I'm whoever I am with at the moment. This is at once trivially true, being that the very foundation of human consciousness is intersubjective, but it seems that this intersubjectivity -- like the streams -- proceeds both up and down (and horizontally).

I have something inside of me talking to myself.

I'm not meself at all (FW).

When does a dream begin? No one knows, since the bestwecando is recall it from the middle of a dream already in progress. It reaches down into the unknown and unknowable, and "how the deepings did it all begin?"

Like I-AMnesia or something. Or general amesthesia. Indeed, where does being begin? The answer may surprise me! For not only are we "circumveiloped by obscuritads," but "we foregot at wiking when the bleakfrost chilled our ravery." 

I could go on, but I want to flipflip back to a previous chapter in which Voegelin talks about man's earliest efforts to give symbolic expression to the great mystery, 

where everything that meets us has a force and a will and feelings, where animals and plants can be men and gods, where men can be divine and gods are kings, where the feathery morning sky is the falcon of Horus and the sun and moon are his eyes, where the underground sameness of being is a conductor for magic currents of good or evil force that will subterraneously reach the superficially unreachable partner, where things are the same and not the same, and can can change into each other.

Some things never change, and that's one of them. In other words, for Voegelin, we live and move and have our being in this same "space," it's just that it is less compact and more differentiated over time. But we still have no idea when the dream begins or how it ends. Unless. But that's a different post. Let's try to stay in this one. 

The monkey in the middle. 

Thaaat's right, Petey, that's what we are.  

We are thrown into and out of existence without knowing the Why or the How...

We are forever trying to symbolize this abyss of WTF?!, to render

the essentially unknowable order of being intelligible as far as possible through the creation of symbols that interpret the unknown by analogy with the really, or supposedly, known.

Put it this way: everyone in the past, and everyone in the future, finds himself in the middle of this ongoing dream of being; all points at any time are equidistant from the timeless. Unless my myth is off, but I think it adds up:

the past and future of mankind is a horizon that surrounds every present.... we neither know why mankind has a past, nor do we know anything about its goal in the future.

Come now, Bob, isn't that just giving up?

Why yes, come to think of it. But only giving up those deformations of being we call ideology. For

Only when the constancy of human nature and the sameness of its problems of order in every present is theoretically secured against ideological misconstructions will the problem of a mankind that advances in history toward higher levels of truth reveal its formidable proportions.

Not only is this problem of order "the same for all men at all times," but "nothing less is at stake than the existence in truth under God." Yes, it is One Cosmos Under God before & afterfall, and we are always in between the two:

history is not a stream of human beings and their actions in time, but the process of man's participation in a flux of divine presence that has an eschatological direction. 

So, we got that going for us. 

The post is finished. But is it true?

We’ll end with an aphorism:

Everything in history begins before where we think it begins and ends after where we think it ends.