The Apocalypse every moment?

September 15, 2006 12:06 PM

I am looking for a story/anecdote/philsophical bit from either Qabala or Sufism...

I remember reading something that described the idea that God utterly destroys and recreates all of existence a thousand times a second (I do not know if the number is right or even significant). The piece I was reading mentioned that this idea is floating around in Sufism and Qabala, but I have forgotten where I heard it, and cannot find any references. So the question would be, has anybody any leads?

posted by sonofsamiam to religion & philosophy (4 comments total)

You might look under "Tikkun Olam" (Repair the World) ignoring results for Tikkun Magazine. Dr. Abner Weiss is a well-known Qabala scholar who has answered many of my questions. His e-mail is on the page and he is quick to answer, but given that it is Friday, you'll probably have to wait til Sunday for an answer.
posted by parmanparman at 1:26 PM on September 15, 2006

Itis present in an almost throwaway line in Borges' essay "A New Refutation of Time" (page 331 of penguin classics "the total library"):

"Other Buddist texts say that thw world is annihilated and resurges six billion five hundred million times a day and that every man is an illusion, vertiginously wrought by a series of solitary and momentary men."

So he claims it is Buddist. I will have a scan of the rest of the book, as I think he has used this more than once.
posted by scodger at 4:57 PM on September 15, 2006

The western philosopher Malebranche also thought this. Look in section 4 (Occasionalism), in the fourth paragraph, for a discussion of his view.
posted by LobsterMitten at 5:52 PM on September 15, 2006

Or, I should say, he thought something close to this. He believed that what looks to us like causation is really God re-creating the world anew at each moment. It's the strobe-light or flip-book picture of causation, each moment in time is a distinct still picture.
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:39 PM on September 15, 2006