19
time, be my very own. So in killing or saving them, in abandoning or loving them, I kill, save,
abandon, or love what is outside of time—that is, what is eternal—in myself.”
44
Observations and Reflections.
My first impulse in these reflections is to point to the stories of the three ordinary people—
Rebecca, David James Duncan, and Loren Eiseley—told above and ask: where do these experiences
come from? What do we make of them? Can we account for them in terms of Voegelin's structures of
consciousness and the realities in which these structures participate? What if we begin with these
experiences as given, like Voegelin accepts as given the experience of “another human being, as a
consciousness of the other?”
45
Where will it lead us? Will it lead us to anthropomorphic
symbolizations that finitize
46
an experience of the mythic gods of the intracosmic world? When
experiences symbolized by noesis differentiate the cosmos into transcendent and immanent indices can
the immanent index of reality not still sustain experiences of the It-reality as transparent through the
thing-reality? And if this is possible are there modes of consciousness that permit us to experience the
It-reality through the thing-reality non-cognitively?
In this paper I have tried to look at both Voegelin's theory of consciousness and human
participation in the community of being, as well as at several instances of encounters between human
beings and non-human animate beings. In Voegelin's explication, exploration and symbolization of
human participation in “all the realms of being that is assured to . . . [man] because his own nature is
their epitome” we have encountered his extension of the noetic exegesis begun by the Greeks. This
exegesis relied upon the ratio of noesis and has uncovered two paradoxical structures of consciousness
44
David James Duncan. My Story as told by Water, 46.
45
Voegelin, “The Theory of Consciousness,” Anamnesis, 71.
46
In “The Theory of Consciousness” Voegelin says that a “mythical symbol is a finite symbol intended to provide
‘transparence’ for a transfinite process: for example, a myth of creation, which renders transparent the problem of the
beginning of a transfinite process of the world; an immaculate conception, which mediates the experience of a transfinite
spiritual beginning; an anthropomorphic image of God, which finitizes an experience of transcendence; . . . and so on.”
Ibid., 71-72.
Convention