“Under, and back of, the Universe of Time, Space and Change, is ever to be found The Substantial Reality — the Fundamental Truth.” — The Kybalion.
~#~
Hermes : 3 x (g)
It’s strange how we do not really notice the back of things. Things in general. Perhaps the bilateral symmetry of our form and front-facing eyes has something to do with it. If I try to ‘reMember’ Joe, it’s primarily his face and upper body I see in my mind’s eye. I do not remember him ‘from behind’, and the idea that I might appears a strange taste in the mouth of my speculation. I do not remember him ‘from within’, nor do I remember him ‘from underneath’ or ‘above’. My memory matches whatever my ‘most commonly reScribed’ impression is. It matches nothing more or less than my position of common focus. Interesting and useful toy, this ‘memory’. It has some unexpected dangers in common use, however. Without knowing about them, we cannot avoid them — and this causes them to multiply geometrically in terrain held, size, speed of multiplication, difficulty of detection — too many simultaneous ‘places’ to classify, especially because, while we are classifying them, their classes and members are growing.
Now, just behind you, right is left, and left is right. Whatever is ‘bright’ before you, is ‘dim’ behind you. There’s evidence of a fundamental dimensional polarity here. But how does one get behind oneself, presuming of course that one could? Must we not go around, over, or beneath — perhaps in some combination?
I mean, where precisely, does behind you become above you, or below you?
What is the relationShip of ‘with(in) you’ to these questions?
o:O:o
My experience leads me to the realization that underneath, within, and behind — lie the thriving gardens of everything we are seeking ‘somewhere else’, somehow. In the bible there is a passage which may be paraphrased as God telling a prophet that none shall see his face and live — but instead he will hide them in a cave and reveal only his backside. If we cannot see the backside of things — how could our models of God be accurate, should they in fact refer to a real transentity?
All that we encounter as ‘education’ and knowledge tries ceaselessly to sell us, affirm to us, or enforce upon us some system or organized idea about the nature of ourselves, relation — the universe, god — metaphysics, logic, &c. We have no experience of the realm of where knowledge is sourced because we don’t go there together. Instead, we shop together — and we spend a lot of time celebrating and embellishing what we buy.
But behind all those faces and tokens lies something we already have more of than any of them could ever offer. We are living connectivity flowers of a psybiocognitive nature. And in that, we are like cells, planets, and vast systems of distributed sentience for which we have no name. Most of what we are falls into that category. Something for which our names fail. We are not machines, our minds are not ‘computers’ and our personalities are not numbers. Simulation isn’t organism — unless it’s done within organism — and that isn’t simulation — it’s cognition. It doesn’t happen in a cognitive vacuum anymore than you can breathe in a physical vacuum. We don’t ‘act like network nodes’ we invent such things by recapitulating in mechanistic model a tiny aspect of something far vaster. Ourselves & each other — the many scales and rings of co-emergent organism in and around our world.
The tokens and systems we embody, trade, and shop for are inherently dangerous unless they are properly and actively connective with their sources. A token is not an organism — but all such tokens have living hosts and transports — and thus, outside of theory and right here in reality, our tokens come to life in their host(s). Then they come to life at the scale of animals — sometimes as the polar opposite of animals: machines. The term conserves what it refers to: mock eyes in energy systems. Mach EyeNes. Mock-eye-ness. Phony eyes. A child would see this feature of language more easily than an adult — for an adult would not believe (or not in the right way, which is more playful than logical) there is a direct relation betwixt phonemes and letters and arrangements — and the poetic gardens in which they are formed. In fact, the child is more accurate. There is a central poetics to language. But it isn’t a system — it’s a sentience. An adult will refuse to credential this, while a child will instead experience and express it, directly.
A metaphor, term, symbol or letter is a seed-package that may incite cognitive relation, or not. If it does, it either incites this relation with artifacts of itself, or it delivers relation with its sources. The former is cognitively and biospherically deadly. The latter is fundamentally psybiopositive. Having intercourse with such packages may give birth to many kinds of children, as transports of relation are activated and commun-ion is achieved. But the token is never what it represents. Whatever a table is, it is never under any circumstances a table. It is real, and not the token by which we may attempt to refer to its reality and connectivities.
Yet how can I offer you a glimpse of this that will empower you to experience it rather than recapitulate my own understandings? I don’t want you to learn something — I want you to ride yourself into your sources. Very different things indeed. We could talk about principles (and have) for thousands of years without accomplishing anything commonly accessible in this domain. And strangely, nothing is more commonly accessible.
Since we are all familiar with the elaboration and relation of principles, I will attempt this, in part because people request a condensation of the toyKeys in an accessible form and I wish to comply. But the problem is that I have to use the tools that comprise the barrier to express the egress...a very difficult thing. Perhaps as difficult as any possible thing — especially alone. The toys are alive, not principles. We will only find them in the most intimate contact with each other, and our circumstances and environments. They are always better passed between teacher and passionate student, as in the ancient way of Life itself. Should such an opportunity arise, I will always accept. Until then, I will try to encode what I have witnessed so that it may not be lost, and may be of use to those like me who want not knowledge of sources — but access to them.In selecting an existing paradigm upon which I can paint some hopefully uncommon noticings and experiences, I must be careful. If there is even a hint of dogma — it will destroy my intention to unlock doors. The toys are designed to eat systems and thus establish contact with their sources. This is a form of information-compression. Touch the living source of information, and you will see this compression everywhere, alive, flowing — beyond all systems of knowing – faster by many factors of scale, and more accurate each time they are touched these potentials in our psybiocognitive heritage are truly the gifts of the unityBeing and our celestial progenitors.
My own experience, as well as what I was taught, discriminates between formal connectivity, and general connectivity. The former is expressed in our experience as systemizations, theologies, crafts of ritual-relation, and many other forms. The latter is ‘merely’ heartful, and seeks to effect cognitive unifications at the scale of roots and sources. It is the latter I believe in. The former, is too tokenized to play with before we have experienced hypercognition.In glancing over extant paradigms — I find one that is general enough, and accurate enough to present it as the bottom rung of a ladder that should lead well beyond ideas and systems into direct experience. Whether or not we can accomplish this remains to be tested, but I feel certain it is easily accomplished, by those whose hearts and minds are so inclined – or those whose experience has already led them in similar directions.
My selection of a skeleton upon which to drape the gifts I was offered and hope to share is from the lineage of alchemical arts and hermetic philosophies. The reason is not because I am already familiar with these domains, but instead that they bear the mark of the messengers who brought my experience to light within me. They contain what I refer to as the signal of recognition. Any two with eyes can see each other.
I believe them similar in intention to the toys my translation-work is concerned with, and an exploration of the principles of this philosophy, perhaps with an expansion, is a useful starting place to talk formally about something which should be touched directly, rather than eulogized about. I do not endorse this philosophy personally or cognitively. The principles however are an excellent toybox with which we may familiarize ourselves with some aspects of cognition that are neither physical nor metaphysical. In reality, they are ideas (tokens) which refer to ‘how things are’ — down near the roots of what we may explore or examine. Anything we may craft or become should (and must, in fact) attend its active connectivity with these roots in a real way — otherwise we should seek better versions. For the tokens to aid anyone properly, they must be unfrozen in playful and communal personal experience. When they are unfrozen for the general people — they will grant our species access to potentials simply to vast to imagine or portray. They are ‘one way of presenting’ the holophores we must understand to truly experience the realities of the biocognitive sentience that is our birthright.
The Principles and quotes here are taken from a manuscript called The Kybalion which is in the public domain. Though they are from a specific and modern document, they represent a unified underlying signature which has been available in many other faces and forms for at least 4000 years. Their usefulness is as guides to what they represent, which is always and everywhere unified and diversely embodied. Underneath and behind these principles is what we must explore directly, without systems entirely — except those we can bring to the service of our general and specific illuminations. Let them be shared and explored openly, and for the common good — for the time of secrets has long since passed.Here is the most generally important thing I can say about them as ‘individual perspectives’ — they aren’t. In order to be valuable, you must ‘make them into a ring’ and follow not only the membrane of the ring as you grow to understand (through firsthand exploration) their characters — but also follow each one from its place at the edge of the ring — to the center of the ring. Thus they are at once ‘members of a family’ and also ‘transunified at their center’. Like singers following signals from with(in) a conductor in an invisible dimension with(in) the ‘point’ of the circle — they comprise a core-us. A chorus.
Additionally, there is much I disagree with in this philosophy, and many of the ancient perspectives on the universe — vastly wiser than our common perspectives — were still orbiting ideas which were not yet in full flower, perhaps especially as relates to the domains of the very tiny and the very large. These two universes have been radically altered by the various implementations of a single invention: the x-Scope. The tool that allows us to change the scale of our visual perspective. We think it acts upon sizes of things (micro/macro). Instead, it acts upon time, light and position. Essentially — this is the domain of velocities of relation.
Consider that to focus such an instrument is to lens time and light. Now, find the sources of these inventions in yourself, contact and experience them directly, and you will one day realize that, indeed, no machine was ever necessary — and none could compare to the powers we already inhabit and embody, nor shall they ever do so. All machines are shavings of something we already have, and what we have is geometrically magnified when we join in playful cognitive unity for the purposes of mutual uplift, rescue, protection, and celebration.
Amphitheatrum Aeternae Sapientiae
— Heinrich Khunrath, Hanau 1609
The Seven Principles of Hermetic Philosophy as encoded in the Kybalion:The principles & overviews
II: Correspondence
III: Vibration
IV: Polarity
V: Rhythm
VI: Causation & Effect
VII: Gender
II: Relation, synthesis and applicationa != a: synthesis
b: unityFeatures
c: toys of opening the way
d: hypersentience
Mentalism
“THE ALL IS MIND; The Universe is Mental.”
— The Kybalion
There is no universe except one perceivedat a given scale of assembly, relation and definition. Without internal or external perceivers, no universe as such is present for there is no container of metaphor, sense, or relation.
The question that is being addressed here is one about cognition, rather than mentalism. We must decide whether there is a penultimate universal (or functionally universal at our scale) sentience. If we decide there is not, we must believe our own sentience the artifact of accident, and so too with our emotions, senses, language, systems of knowing, characters, faith, hope, dreams, &c. We must also decide that it is not possible that we participate in any entity that is a superset of any single human being. In other words, to deny ‘gods’ — we must first establish that human sentience is an accident that exists only in individuals, and only at their scale. Superficially, this is absurd. Two human minds in contact are not the same animal as two isolated individuals — except that each bears a general resemblance to the template-definition of ‘individual’.
Yet all of what we know and much of what we have forgotten makes it exceptionally difficult to believe (even rationally) that a living world (or a living system of any scale at all) produces sentience at only one scale — and doesn’t assemble distributed entities.
We ourselves could not exist as we are in such a universe. We don’t need experts to understand that a body of organs and cells becomes a psybiocognitive celestium of relation at another scale — we ourselves are thus — and geometrically moreso in community.
So if we decide there is no cosmologically penultimate sentience, we are deciding that humans are the top of the scale of universal and collective biocognition. Rationally, this is absurd. As a collective, we form something we can barely discuss. We certainly rarely experience it directly — and what of the collective of a living planet? Of all scales and moments of Life in endless universes within universes?
The hermeticists are positing here that matter itself is Mind, and this may well bear out, but we needn’t move to that scale to see the Life in the Universe is connectively cognitive, and likely forms a unified being in scales and assemblies of collective cognition. It requires neither science nor religion — and unless either can grant us direct access to their own sources we should never authorize them to rule over such questions.This principle refers to the 2nd, that of correspondence — in that you will not experience at your scale what is not represented above and below you (as well as at scales within and without any entity of focus one might select).
I would reframe this: the universe is cognition, and cognition is as alive in connectivity and assemblies as it is in members — as much in a specific temporal location as it is in the entirety of temporality. Forgetting this single key is enough to cripple any individual or group, forgetting it generally, as a species — or pretending it is not as it is — is a very deadly game for living things of any sort to play. When played, its consequences are at once local, universal and rapid in arising.It is essential to locate and inhabit the place between reality and our tokens and ways of knowing. A system, theory or language is always missing many dimensions and features of that which it refers to.
The very waters upon which the heavens heave and gyrate are the waters of the sentience that is at once source and momentum, polarity and unity, paradox and resolution, one in many in one...for all.
Correspondence
“As above, so below; as below, so above.”
We believe in little things being in cyclic relation to larger things. Larger things emerge as the identity of the cyclic relations of the small. In unities, diversity — complex arises from simple. All of these ideas are generally second nature to us, even if we do not reflect upon them directly very often. But the truth of what they portend is hidden from the first glance, it is only in intimacy with something we ‘already know’ that liberty is truly catalyzed.
We use the concept-metaphor of orbit in domains large and small — and the root implication is that the small orbits the large — yet the reverse is also true — inwardly the large is changing in relation to its family of orbitals. Neither is ascendant — but our metaphors do not notice this in their formation, preferring the surface, from a single perspective when at least three are required.
In our spheres, velocities, sizes, and scales of experience what we encounter is an ascendantly stabilizing medium, one in which every sort of imaginable complexity and diversity of relation is being crafted, activated, and expressed across every possible domain and participant. Instead of many participants, we find many scales and locations of assemblies of participants. The many in the every, and the all amongst the one. Again, this does not seem like news to our ears. But we’ve lost access to its actual meaning. It refers to the experience that the entirety of the physical, biological, psychic and poetic universe is complete from any possible position, velocity, participant-perspective or scale. The essential signature, media, participants and cogniscium are unified instant-to-microinstant across every gap.
Which is in turn to say that reality is a the inward song of the unityBeing. It is joyful, playful, and bright with the noblest of possible nobilities and heroisms. Our stories have mislead us. The problems we encounter and objectify are cognitive problems, and their source is the enthroning of a limited scale of purview as ascendant or progenitor of all others. They misauthorize system over source. We set snake above that from and within which a snake arises as a character-feature of...
This song is the ultimate medium — the penultimedium. It connects every position in time, space, perspective, character, velocity, scale and assembly. Sentient, alive, and beyond all possible codification, it must be touched and attended to be participated in consciously. To do less than this, will never qualify as liberty, for anything less is servitude to a token — be it physical or cognitive.Thus correspondence, is related to the third principle, Vibration. The unified song of the penultimate hyperstructure is everywhere unified. Never frozen, it is a song of sentient expression, adoration, and inclusive co-dominion. Any participant, assembly, or scale — uniquely and completely reflects the psybiocognitive and physio-energetic moment of every other scale and assembly in simultaneity.
To this principle we can bring four related toys to expose important elements:• Phi, pi, factors, the fibonacci series, exponential (scalar) geometries.
These grant us access to the idea of scalarity, and also of congruent emergence across many seemingly discrete scales of simultaneous size, or identity — including temporal identity. These are each unique and poetically powerful toys – unless we decide them to be without content except as dead noticings. Centrally, they offer us a holophoric precursor from which we may discern something of the most essential character of our sources — and that character is one that is always expressed across many scales and domains.
The crux is this. Something essential is everywhere sentiently moving, but it is not moving in time. Time is a product of perspective. This is a feature of the underneath of systems — and systems will abhor it.
• As above so below, and within, as without. This reCognizes the various scales of perspective, activity and assembly as essentially co-emergent, and representative of a unified expression/experience of connectivity. This essential connectivity crosses every possible barrier, gap, category or quality. It is suprageneral.
• All embodiments are uniquely charactered (all genesis-events partake of the source, itself unique in every moment or perspective). Thus, local identity is always a unique embodiment of distributed identity. The infinitesimally small is the domain where the uncontainably large is actually ‘always right next door’ — scales and distance are not what we think. Size and speed are not what we think.
• The signature of the unityBeing is the single most obvious thing alive with(in) every moment of perception and consciousness — dreaming and crisis. If we fall low — follow the unitySources, we will find what they lead to, in every instance. No general science or tactic can be more useful or accurate, no unified endeavor more productive.
Vibration
“Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”
All that is — is neither song nor thing — but more like the song of an active adoration than any other song or thing. Your mind, expression and activity are similar, though in consciousness they may follow varied labyrinths — many of which lead into positions of active opposition with their sources.
An endless sea of endless seas of participants, scales, relativity and positions — all ringing as though the entire universe were a single bell whose tone is undivided by time and space. All that is, is a single song, always in motion at every scale in every scale. All of this occurs against the backdrop of stillness — which is always and everywhere energy in potential form — as yet unexpressed, but more powerful than any expression. There is an essential connectivity far simpler than all our models, and whether or not it is instantaneous, it is functionally expressed as being thus.
The way in which each of these principles is embodied around us is the most important aspect of what we must reach to realize and explore. In this case, everything is vibrating at different relative velocities at many different scales. This has profound implications in our understandings and cognitive synchrony with Time.
This essential vibration is sentient, and disorderly. It does not submit itself to flat or common models. It is self referencing across many if not all simultaneous domains, participants and scales of assembly. Yet in each moment or position it is uniquely experienced and expressed. So there is an inflorescence of infolding complexity, and the vibration is alike with this. There is nowhere which is generally or specifically disconnected.As an analogy we may, as many do, view the states of matter as velocities of essential vibration in the unityMedium, such that fast velocities in the domain of the tiny result in energy, and slow velocities in matter.
Perhaps more cogently, everything local is singing the song of relation with Sol, our Sun, and Earth, our world, at every scale — but particularly as we go to smaller and smaller scales. The singing of the star, is singing in the Earth, and the songs and thus the character of the Solar-Terrestrial union rings in all local moments and phenomenon. What is local sings in the distance, and the song of the distance is the source of the local. The snake with its tail in its mouth.
Now, what is the velocity of cognition — especially when it is accruing in parallel across every possible domain, scale, moment, participant and transport within this medium?
Polarity
“Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.”
From my perspective, this is the most fundamental of the principles, because it implies semantic generalism as the antidote to the gremlins of logic, and also because without an experiential and connective relation with this principle, many baffling riddles will be too perplexing to even approach adequately, much less resolve a following pattern into.
This is a literal metaphor of two ‘opposites‘ (such as hot an cold) connected by a pole — as on a magnet. This principle recapitulates the understanding that transformation tends to happen across a specific relational linkage — cold becomes hot. They are one thing, which we might call the speed of local energy from a perspective. A pole may be a circle, however — viewed from the side – and thus the unity of opposites may extend into dimensions we cannot easily apprehend from some perspectives.Here an analogy which arises from the next principle, Rhythm, will serve us well.
By day there is a single nearby glory up above, beclouded or not, a unified source of light and life. The Golden light appears against Blue and White. Since it penetrates everything — within its purview all is essentially unified.
By day, alike with the Sun, we ourselves are of a single mind; its many facets experienced and expressed as a unity. The Source is One, and our sElf is One. The many, are ‘rePresented’ in the One.
At twilight the worlds of night and day are briefly united, before the Sun departs.
When it is gone, the unity that was before apparent is replaced by myriads of patterns of distant Suns. Each star is unique in every way, forming traceries and geometries against a suddenly apparent background of Black. At night, we dream, and the unity of our mind is no longer a single identity — but many identities. What was before a facet is now an individual universe. The laws of our daylife dissolve into something like their opposites. The mythopoetic sources of cognition are free to create and inhabit many simultaneous universes. The One is rePresented in the Many.
So the dayMind is like a single glorious source, and the nightMind is like the families and lineages and connectivities of that source. Even so is the foreground and background of Mind itself, and this is an embodiment of polarity.Though each of the seven principles is unique, they are of a single substance in experience and source. Do not be misled to believe any of them is anything at all. They are merely 7 vantages of perspective on what must always be experienced as a penultimate unity, and they refer to what we may generally actively notice and apply in our explorations and participation of and with(in) this unity.
As we can see in the simple diagram below, all possible polarities are unified in the sphere, if we understand the living nature and characters of this construct. The polarities listed are arbitrarily chosen, but represent what I feel are important rootForms active in the creation and embodiments of our most elemental tokens.
The diagram is flat, and static, but we may observe that by creating ‘trinities‘ across the dual poles — by following a line from an end to the core, and then splitting it — a fascinating effect is accrues. If we were to form our trinities in 120-degree angles, we would obtain the following results, bearing in mind that the polarities were arbitrarily chosen:
future-minute-coming (minute = small, not the time tag)near-one-female
vast-going-past
many-male-distant
I agree it appears a birdwalk, but these triune-meaning keys are a lot more interesting that we commonly surmise. Imagine 12 unique instances of something alike with this in synchronous response to previous accruals, common and unique connectivities across scale and domains — and current circumstance. A primitive (read: mechanical) mind can be built with little more than an algorithmic representation of such a toy. And by merely imagining its workings, we gain a unique and useful perspective on a general model of organismal parsing.
But let us return from speculation to the simple. All polarities are actually unities, and where one pole becomes another is subject to perspective, size, velocity, relation and position. They merge into singularity at the center of the sphere, the circle, or the cross.
Linear perspectives should just as easily translate their momenta to perspectives that fold inward scalarly. The folding doesn’t cease at any scale, and thus there is no ‘linear‘ map or handHold. All positions are connected in weblike patters of scalarly recombinant attraction-fields. Vortices, we call them.We might imagine a universe (perhaps like our own) in which the entirety of all that is ...is arising and dissolving many thousands of billions of times per second — or perhaps much faster. Imagine that all that we see as expansion and physics is actually just an artifact of this invisible (at our scale of temporal relation) feature of the universe. Not only is this happening as though the universes is a ball — it is happening uniquely and yet according to rhythm at every possible scale and position simultaneously. The product of this is what we call time, which is actually not at all what we metaphy it as being.
So, countless factors of n times per second, everything that ever was (and will be) dissolves into singularity. What we call gravity is actually of form of liquid memory in the transunified container-medium itself. And then this process reverses.
Ponder this matter deeply, and whether you consider it accurate or not, it will lead you to a power over metaphor. It is the same matter we ponder when we meditate upon our breath, its poetics, sources, connectivities and meanings.
Rhythm
“Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.”
Our own hearts have their rhythms and songs, and those echo the structure and function of organs and energetic transports which exist outside of physical bodies altogether, as the animations of neutron stars revealed to us by wave-based telescopes reveals. The brain and body and environment all have their rhythms, and each is expressed across many scalar domains of connective emergence.For animalian organisms, the beating of our heart, and the cycles of our lungs provide the most obvious transports to the principle of rhythm, which is not mechanical in any way, but instead uniquely, connectively, and sentiently expressed in all possible manifestations. Sages and meditators draw our attention back to the breath, which arises from and returns to the sing-u-larity at the beginning of timeSpace, and mind. The apex of the breath is alike with the complete inflation of timeSpace, and the beginning alike with the source. The process of respiration is occurring at many scales however, even within the lungs. “As above, so below (and within)” is conserved.
All that is, is being itself in cycles of arisal and departure, in rings, across scales we consider to be barriers at the roots of most of our knowing systems. Time itself is breathing, everything is breathing. When the speed or perspective of our cognitive connection changes dramatically enough, we can experience this directly, rather than making stories and codicils about it.
From the beginning to the end, the universe is recapitulatively elaborated in countless universes per-instant. So rapid is the expansion and resolution that all we see appears solid. It is actually as transparent in Time, as it is at the scale of the infinitesimal. Cycles of rhythm within polar cycles of vibration. It is as if, factors of trillions of times per second, all of time and space is being recapitulated in a rhythm so rapid we cannot detect it, yet our own bodies and minds recapitulate and participate in this at our own scales of time, size and perspective.Many have proposed, and indeed a unified theorem would perhaps confirm, that matter and energy are the same thing viewed from different perspectives of velocity. That which is solid, is slower. That which is energetic is quickened. A single medium, in scalar expression at many simultaneous velocities of rhythmic and aperiodic vibration. A unified song, ever modulant within and from all participants. The 7 principles transunified.
Causation & Effect
“Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is but a name for Law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the Law.”
We cannot discuss this topic while we ignore the glorious obviousness of its root: Time.
Asking about beginnings is the same as asking about endings, would be one way of compressing this concept. The colloquial question of chicken and egg is resolved in such a perspective — but this view defies Time, so we do not endow it with sufficient authorization, because we cannot imagine future Time as already existing, given the shapes and character of our common models. Certainly for us personally, as humans, future time does not appear cognitively accessible. Our models do not suppose it to already exist, and linear models will in general apply themselves to logics and forms that will deny this potential.
And yet again the answers are essentially clearly before us in the modern moment, yet just as in ancient times, neither experts nor systems are required to reveal it, for it cannot be missing from what you attend, experience, and express. In fact, whatever is important to you — that must be linked to its source. So the hand, fingers, eyes, tongue — the ears and nose, the mind — each of this things we treasure are ‘answers’ not only to the chicken/egg conundrum, but to any possible question. The answer, is to actively seek. Instead of ceasing at a token, continue in waves to ride answers to new questions — about, for example, the shape, numerisms and features of lineage conserved in your hand...or eye. By examining directly, we leap past all experts, all systems. We are the living fact of the embodiment of a single and unified principle — and that principle is sentient.
Linear time, nonlinear time, hyperTime, and many other models are simultaneously real. Time doesn’t exist merely in the way we experience it, and it is an expression of a unified field — which is what Einstein was really on about seeking. The specific ways Time differs from our models and measures is exceptionally difficult to express unless the one you are expressing it to has also had a similar experience. With two observers, the potential for accuracy is always geometrically magnified, when they are in real unity.
Time is like a single body, already accomplished in all positions and potentials – and yet uniquely unfolding from every perspective. Noplace is it static — yet the future is, in fact, inscribed in the present — and to be able to know at all is to be able to know the future. Somehow, our ideas about how we might know the future got confused with the tools we use to speak about things. This was a very dangerous mistake, and we must rectify it if our species is to survive, and rapidly.
There is linear cause and effect, to an obvious degree, but there is also hyperconnectivity — which by its nature will abhor and vanquish any category, participant, or gap. Across the many moments and places of sentience and even physical process — there is a unity stranger and more unique than our common models — and it is this that cognition itself recapitulating in the symmetry and scalarity of its conservations. As it is said: The one who is half-wise believes that once the underside is seen clearly — reality is no longer solid. This ends in tragedy. Reality is solid, what we can do within it is liquid. And there are exceptions and reversals available as well.
We might say that cognition is the cause, and reality the manifestation, but such a maxim, while generally accurate perhaps, is too frozen to serve. Something must lead us to a question that keeps changing as we ride it — precisely like the skill applied in lucid dreaming, but carried over into wakeful awareness and expression. Such an event is staged inwardly, in a ‘special place’ within...like a place underneath and above one’s imagination. In this place there is a personal entity, who is at once a guide and local representative of the body of the assemblies of the unityBeing. To understand (literally ‘stand under’) Cause and Effect one must drink at the source of the fountain in person. This is more easily accomplished than we might imagine, for we are known there, and drank often as infants and children.Cause and Effect are in a sense polarities, and refer also to vibration. We understand a single logic and linear models — we must reach beyond those into their scalarly emergent sources. The term self-reference simultaneously means source reference and observation reference: three ‘eyes’ in one.
Gender
“Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles; Gender manifests on all planes.”
It is said that the unityBeing is gendered within, but not without, and that the first beings were bi-gendered, which corresponds to what we understand of prokaryotic cells. Later, came the organismal genders we understand and base our societies and ways of knowing at least partly within, in every observable case. The leap from un-or-multi gendered organisms to gendered organisms is dramatic — and it rePresents the phases of enfoldment that arose in the unityBeing’s origin and universal character — from unified. to gendered. Within the unified, the gendered was immanent— always present as a potential that would everywhere remain either as immanence or find embodiment.
Within gender itself, each gender is a polar opposite — meaning not absolutely opposed, but instead co-connectively emergent in a special way, which is illustrated in analog below:
This diagram reveals the unity of the genders and also how in growing out from a unification in which both were immanent, they share a common source — one represented in every possible connectivity and domain.
Locally, the Sun and Earth are pre-eminent examples of this principle. The Sun is explosively expressive, and the Earth is implosively attractive — each at opposite scales and in differing domains. The Sun represents the masculine principle, and the Earth the feminine — or so we say — but in reality the Sun is the celestial embodiment of the masculine principle, and Earth the celestial and terrestrial feminine embodiment. On her surface, as the children of their marriage, we ourselves arise. Beyond them, the planets, stars and other celestial entities express principles on scales very vast indeed. And these are recapitulated within every form, perhaps especially our own, since we are fundamentally enjoined with matter, energy and cognition.
But this recapitulation of gender is never mechanical as science suggests, it is instead always and in every position poetic. It is, in fact a romance. If we touch only the mechanism — things are reduced to symbols — (+ or -) — and thus lack the poetics necessary to link us directly to their sources, a purpose that lies at the very heart of any symbol whatsoever.The masculine principle is an actual identity — represented uniquely and congruently in every scale or instance. So too is the universal feminine. There is, in fact, a family — such that there is a Mother, Father, Son, Daughter, Spirit, &c of such principles, each participating in every unity of any form whatever — for they emanate from a single timeless source, and that source is sentient as well as all-pervasive. Where our models deny this, they cripple us cognitively, intellectually, and certainly spiritually. Yet experience even one instant of real connectivity with such a source and systems of every kind will be seen in a new light. Each of us is born at once expressing gender and changing it. We are gendered, and beyond gender — just as our containers and sources are.
Those human languages that by their nature conserve gender in nouns and grammars are conserving an experience the creators and first users of these languages were consistently immersed in. They were not merely representing superstition or nonsense — instead the directly biocognitive relation-root of gender had to be accounted for as a primary foundation for the genesis of any metaphor at all.
In the way of the ancients we might craft a key that, playfully explored, could unlock these domains to our experience. Such a toy cannot be crafted arbitrarily, for it must uniquely reActivate an experiential linkage with something lost. Perhaps all of the most amazing toys aspire to this. In this case, we will examine two toys which are powerful not because of what they represent, but instead what they embody. Both are implementations of a single and unified. thing, yet they rePresent and embody the cognitive as well as active principles of gender in such a unique way that to understand them deeply is to understand an important part of the basis of cognition, biology and physics — these two toys are the roots of knowing, in a way that is as magical as it is real. They are the ball and the stick. The Zero and The One. The Crook and The Flail of Ancient Egypt, The Rattle and the Rod.
The rod is the masculine element. It is the eye which ’travels’ to touch what it seeks. Mind, is a cognitive Staff. We use it to touch things, and along its length travel the signals of sentience whose ‘unique jingling’ us of what was encountered.
If we spin it in random vectors around a central point, we get a ball, and at the center of that ball is the feminine element. The scales of movement along the staff are all crossing different distances in the same amount of time, so the staff is a metaphor of velocity itself — the expressive seeking of the rod.
The center, however, and source of its motion is the feminine — not ‘traveling’ at all, she is instead dancing in place, and generating with her momentous inspiration all the hyperbolic activity of the rod. Both genders are One. At the edge of the ball made by the spinning rod, the feminine is again there — encompassing herself and the masculine. And on and on, in and in, at every scale we might observe or imagine.
Without at least a cognitive rod, there is no triangulation — and without triangulation — in general as well as in geometry — it is exceptionally difficult to understand positions and relations. But the rod must refer to a core or position— or else the triangulation would not arise. The trinity is essential, but it too has its source and relations.
The Zero is the source — all as attractive potential. The rattle is the feminine version of the rod — an eye that touches the many (very generally) by vibrating, where the rod is a foot-eye, going out to touch what it seeks very specifically.
Each represents a different polarity of knowing: The Rattle (or ball) synthesizes the One from the Many, the Rod infers the Many from touching the one. In the parlance of infants (which carries more magic than we imagine) ‘I go’ (masculine) and ‘here’ (feminine) might be expressions of this essential and poetic polarity.The I Am is movement itself, and its inspiration is the endless potential energy of Immanence.
We may consider an analogy that conserves the ironic and poetic elements of this principle, which is also sometimes referred to as that of generation. If we consider the Sun and Earth from a perspective of Time and Light, we can reveal some features of the presence and interplay of gender merely by looking at the features of Sol and Earth.
Sol and Earth are married. Without her, or one like her — the Star would be as barren of organismal sentience as its planets. In their marriage, the children are born inwardly in the female — in this case, on her skin, so to speak. They are the result of the penetration of the Solar suitor into the terrestrial Mother. The Sun is extremely expressive — and has an explosive personality — which speaks across vast ether in ways we have no metaphor for. A shout of charactered expression and luminous sovereignty is the song of Sol.
Earth, seemingly innocuous, is actually at least as glorious in her relatively quiet fertility and creativity. Sometime around 3000 million years ago Earth’s sky turned blue as a result of her first children with Sol. At that moment the Solar light reflected from her changed color. She is the center and jewel of a sphere of blue light 3000 million light-years in diameter. Anything in that sphere that can read light — finds her very attractive. Her glory may not be as explosive, but it is no less majestic than that of her celestial suitor. In their children, both are alive — as organismal sentiences — a trinity which is more than the sum of their unity.~#~
Five diagrams of the inflorescence of flowers. L-R: Cyme, Corymb, Umbel, Compound Umbel, and Panicle. The numbers represent the typical pattern of expression. From a deep examination of the poetics and structural relations of these forms we may infer much about universal sources and connectivities — if properly relieved of our common logical armors. (Diagrams from J. B. Hill, H.W. Popp and A. R. Grove, Botany, 4th Ed. 1967)
SynthesisTo understand the source of things, to achieve communion with our sources — we must become extremely intimate with innocence. Forgetting all we know, we must experience a deep cognitive resonance with the real, until we are drawn into the essential and eternal power of its ebbs and tides. Here we can achieve still further intimacy. Take a single natural organism and examine it from every possible perspective until you are released from your human models and metaphors into the place where such have their genesis. In this moment you will know the essence of stories, and your own place in that essence is at once sublime and anciently adored. You are empowered to achieve any possible miracle, to redefine the term itself. Empowered? You came to do this very thing.
Look for the root. The Stem. The Tail. When we believe for an instant that our tokens, language, or any sort of rePresentation could compare to a living organism we have made precisely the sort of mistake which leads us away from the infolded connectivity and essentially eternal wisdom of the realities our ways of knowing merely refer to. We should never enthrone anything more aggressive than a flower — nor anything more mechanized — above the sacred and indeed holy embodiment of organism and cognition that a living planet nurtures, sustains and expresses.
I do not wish to say this is ensymbolized by the flower — a real flower and this thing are one and the same. We ourselves are no different. Behind the principles and instances is that which transcends their every possible synthesis, for never in any place or moment are they truly separate. In experiencing and exploring their synthesis we will, just as our eye follows the outward expression of the flower to its source — become at first suspicious of a central unity, and then in awesome and constant contact, directly and personally, with the source from which all principles proceed.
All is Cognition • As above so below, as within so without • All is unitySong • Polarities • Causation & Effect • Gender & Genesis
The Flower unifies and exceeds all principles — being an instance of their source, rather than a symbol of reference, yet in its organization, poetics, relations and form it is a perfect embodiment of the principles — which any actual flower absolutely exceeds. Using the flower as a window, however, we can find all of the principles of Hermetic philosophy as presented thus far alive in the synthesis of the flower’s form, purposes and activities.As a collective sentience the Flower is sublimely cognitive — however simplistic its assemblies and expressions may appear at our scale. We must bear in mind that the complexity of any instance is rarely less than the complexity of its myriad sources and lineages. The floral symmetries rePresent the marriage of Earth and Star, male and female — and the relation-character of Light in their marriage is embodied in the Pollinators — especially the Bee.
A perfect metaphor of local and distributed unity, the flower is an inflorescent jewel that illustrates how many scales and forms combine to exceed their individual complexity — rePresenting the character-features of the unities above, below, within and without. The core and petals show the true nature of polarity, rather than linear models on a line, and everywhere in the flower we find further example of the embodied unification of various poles: leaf and stem, flower and root — top and bottom, inside & outside, as well as many examples of chromatic and geometric polarity.
In the seed, and phases of growth leading to the flower, as well as the flower itself we find the truth of causation and effect writ largely and simply: The ancient in the present, the future in the past, the past in the future, the first will be the last. The flower is nothing but the unified expression of causal polarities and effects — its form, beauty and activity consistently reflect not a principle — but their sources, and the specific characters of local and distributed circumstance — such as eyes, for example. Arising in perfect and unique symmetry, the flower offers not a symbol but direct access to our sources and their unified yet diverse expressions of character. The flower is source and character just as it is cause and effect.
Of gender and genesis we need say little, for the flower has said it all long before our words. Male, female, and messenger(s), all perfectly represented. The Zero and the One, the One in the Zero, and the many dances of the in-between.
~#~
