The Future in Boding

Does time only travel in the direction from past to future? It is certainly the only direction we ordinarily ever think about time. It's an endless string of present moments arising and falling away into the past. Yet, within the life of the soul, there are clear indications that there is something of the nature of time that approaches us from the future in that we have fear of what might happen, hope that it won't, interest in what will happen, and devotion to that which emerge in time in those little beings we call our grandchildren. All that we long for, all that we desire has something suggestive that there may, in fact, be not only one direction in which time flows, but two.

The idea living in the word ahnung, or boding, certainly suggests this as well.

Karl Konig writes: "'Ahnung' ('boding') is a strange word. It expresses an elusive feeling, which in certain--usually rather special--moments of life, touches our daytime consciousness. This feeling is sometimes so powerful it condenses into a mood in which anxiety and fear may be mixed. It is then a boding of an approaching ill, the boding of a sickness and much else."

Let us remember from our last post A.C. Harwood's wish for this boding, that it recover its neutral meaning and--these are my words--overcome its common association with "an approaching ill," and so forth.

Konig continues: "But a foreboding may also flit quickly by, overpowered by the daily rush of thoughts and impressions, and reappear in the soul only when that which was foreseen has happened. What is this 'boding' in the realm of the soul? Is it feeling, willing, mental image? Is it an emotion like anger or fear?"

"'Boding' is also 'an awareness of conditions and circumstances that are not clearly apprehended. As well as misleading, mood-dependent self-deceptions, there are bodings which bring intuitively-senses objective realities into consciousness.' One may also have a boding of the solution of a task or a problem, and yet still not reach the answer."

"Thus the awareness of boding belongs in a region of our experience which may be characterized as a kind of pre-consciousness. Boding is not an unconscious experience, yet it is not conscious either, nor is it similar to dreaming. It is a condition which indicates to us something which is already present, but which we cannot yet apprehend with clear consciousness. It is an activity which indicates to the soul something that nevertheless remains hidden from it."

Here we come closer to the inspiration and impulse to adopt The Bode Well as our blog name. We are interested in that which lies just on the edge of consciousness, that which is listening in to the stream of meaning that approaches from out of the future, and specifically in the context of the human encounter. I'm interested in the inner activity of trying to bring that which we call boding into clearer consciousness, and in doing so, in a kind of reversal of the will, seek access to the well or wellspring from which boding arises in service of the human encounter.

There we've taken a further step...into that which is seeking to be spoken, toward that which wants to be made visible, into the approaching stream.