Kairos - the synchronicity

So, this is rather odd. After I read Unseen Beings, I turned to Mark Vernon's Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps. I have many positive things to say about this book, notably that I believe Vernon has put his finger on the real yearning that humans feel for meaning. He draws upon some fascinating ideas from the likes of Owen Barfield and William Blake, which had me nodding and smiling.

For example, he explains how "subjective" used to mean existing in itself, drawing directly from the ground of being, thus, alive, having an inner life, interior vitality. "Objective" in contrast meant merely an object, and so, as evidence, unreliable and empty. Nowadays, the definitions have switched. That which is subjective is deemed to be idiosyncratic, biased and unreliable; while the objective is impartial and cool and thus reliable.

Vernon also goes through Blake's four levels of mind. I can't recall the first three, but the final one is eternity. In this space, we do not attach ourselves to experience or cling to the moment.

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy

He who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise 

In the discussion of this, Vernon, who'd just been writing about acceptance of death and the idea of "dying before you die", suggests that "every kindness to another is a little death, kind acts are sacrificial, experienced by the giver as moments to realise that they never possess life to start with, so the life we have can constantly be given away. We live because life pours itself into us, and the best response to that is to pour it back out, as an offering or gift. When people do this together the nature of being alive is revealed as a co-mingling, a mutual self-sacrifice. The giving and receiving precipitates fountains of living waters which flow…" Anyway, I loved this... we live because life pours itself into us and the best response is to pour it out as an offering. Wonderful. And that idea of co-mingling, the mutual self-sacrifice is beautiful. Though I think I would not describe it as sacrificial... maybe generous or generative.

In any event, I was enjoying all this and then Vernon got to the seventh step. And the seventh step was... KAIROS. I KNOW, right? I mean... How truly weird. I didn't know the word before the tree put it into my head, but think of what the tree has been saying - especially on the occasion when I had to hold up my hands and look through my arms - as you read this section of an essay written by Vernon.

The word ‘kairos’ comes from the ancient Greek practice of manual weaving. It describes the right moment to throw the shuttle cleanly through the loom. It was an art possessed by Penelope, in Homer’s Odyssey, which is to say that she not only knew how to spin quality cloth, but also how psychologically to stay in the moment awaiting Odysseus’s return, as the calendar years of his wandering around the Mediterranean mounted. In other words, kairos time is closer to eternity, partly because it is in instances of kairos that eternity is detected, such as when William Blake knew eternity in an hour as he held infinity in the palm of his hand; and partly because kairos time transcends clock-time, which left to itself would consume life, much as the god, Chronos, was said to eat his children.

With kairos, time is not experienced as a continuum of hellish repetitions, or a progress of growth and accumulation interrupted by occasional crises, but instead as a continuous, alive presence. The moment becomes the moving image of eternity, to use Plato’s expression, and the day can be experienced as a portal rather than a prison. The adepts of spiritual intelligence testify to this in various ways: the present can be known as boundless, which means that life can be known as abundant with novelty and freshness always breaking in, not marked by scarcity and the grim attempt to consume, manage and possess it.

Moreover, kairos asks us to be active in the reception of life, as opposed to being bound to hedonic and commercial treadmills. We must cultivate the right qualities of attention to appreciate it, and a readiness to participate in its alternative rhythms, lest its irruptions are either not noticed or are left as unintegrated peak experiences. ‘The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding’, observed Murdoch, with the implication that as our intelligence broadens, so the things to which we are attached become deeper and more stable. Asking yourself how you experience time is a seminal question. It offers a direct path to re-establishing spiritual intelligence, and it can be done in each and every moment.

-Mark Vernon

I should mention that there were things I didn't like about the book. It seemed to me to be stuck in an anthropocentric world-view with the human, Homo spiritualis, as a pinnacle of creation. I rather felt that much of what Vernon feels we grew into discovering (as hominids evolved toward the great US) and much of what he feels we have lost sight of, is actually simply there in the vitality of, say, an oak tree or a robin. I guess I believe that our type of consciousness leads us toward certain new, exciting, and often valuable insights but is ill-suited for the situated, embodied, kairotic experience of earthly-being that just is inhabited by more-than-humans. It's like we have evolved away from pure spirituality and now realise we have to work or practice to get back.