From the Notebook: Citta & Aion
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yogas citta vritti nirodhah
- Patanjali's Yoga Sutras
Citta-moments or alaya-vijnana have a flow to them and they are the basis of the All, the six consciousnesses (which are in turn the basis of the defiled consciousness, that which we commonly consider to be self-consciousness). One of the aspects of citta is primary sensibility — we can say citta is immanent in the six consciousnesses — from contact of sense object and sense base to an unfolding of citta which takes one of six forms. Now, when we speak of Difference, we speak of it in terms of the difference between citta-moments. We'll also see the second aspect, the vertical component of difference with regards to the terms comprising the series underneath each moment.
We cannot speak of the arising and ceasing of individual citta-moments. We must speak of the stream as a whole: the Unfolding or the Evolution, the Event. (There is an argument for why unfolding cannot be of something but must be unfolding itself, but I will save its exposition for a later date.) Citta is only represented, although at the same time it is the condition for representation; the unfolding of citta-moments as moments is only in representation, but citta as unfolding itself is a transcendental fact, it is the only transcendental fact.
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The pure and empty form of time is not in time, it is not temporal itself (or else how could it constitute the production of time?) It is a table which organizes series, so it lies flat, and instead of being temporal it lies Across, this is its direction; but it is not spatial, it is even less spatial than it is temporal, but in our inability to represent anything nonspatially, we can only say that it is spatialis or spatiesque.
The pure and empty form of time is the Unfolding, the surface or table spatialis all series organize themselves upon — the series of series, the moment-series, the events of the Event. The pure and empty form of time is Aion.
Adam can sin, Adam can refrain; both of these are possible. Can we say that, in the moment-series, only one occurred and the other didn't? Leibniz says Adam sinned in my world, in another possible world he didn't, and each of these worlds encircles itself in a horizon of compossibility. In a world of events over essences, however, incompossibility must instead come to the forefront. The event of sinning is bidirectional; it is a coexistence of incompossibles.
Each citta-moment is an event. The actual moment is the caesura of the non-moment. All past moment-events, thus, must be taken together; we cannot separate them. (Note that the empty form of time does not concern moments represented as past, but rather, only concerns the unfolding of representation itself.)
If each moment is bidirectional and incompossible with itself, it must point towards two new terms (this is making sense of sense through other sense). Each moment therefore implicates the whole depths, the depths being divergence itself. It would be easy here to reinstate Leibniz by making the depths a convergent series. They are not. They are only expressible in their problematic form.
A moment-event is an intensity, the most contracted form of the depths. It may be asked: how can the depths continually return if they are not founded on a convergent principle? I would reply: it is the divergence of the depths that makes movement possible in the first place. A convergent abyss is the mark of an unchanging world. (I need to flesh this argument out more precisely.)
A further question: are the vertical depths the same as the past, the coexistence of events? I reply: no. The horizontal is the surface. The depths are what return, each and every time. The surface is the organization or distribution of events. But then: was it not said that the depths are implicated events? Reply: the depths are intensive, an intensity being an expression or a maximal contraction of the entire abyss. Intensive depth is not reducible to an event or even to an arrangement of events. It is instead all arrangements, all orders, all pasts (coefficients f'(x), f''(x), etc. of the Taylor series are not other events, but rather orders of eventhood). Objection: if the depths are the virtual coexistence of all pasts, how are you allowed to privilege just one past in the Aion? To which I reply: the past accords with the present; nevertheless, it is an infinite series. While each actual event which composes the past is unidirectional, thus allowing for a certain arrangement or order, its intensive or virtual side is bidirectional.
Thus the two directions, the vertical and the horizontal, are shown.
