Plato
drops a hint...
“The fairest of all bonds is that which makes of itself
and the terms it binds together most utterly one, and this is
most perfectly effected by a progression.”
(Plato: Timeus, 4)
also translated as......
"The best bond is the one that effects the closest unity
between itself and the terms it is combining; and this is best
done by a continued geometrical proportion.”
O:o:O
Plato (or whoever is playing the author in these texts) is a person
of deep and significant experiential learning. This is someone who
is really at pains to offer the finest of possible knowledge-toys,
and to insure that they are grown to proper proportion in his own
and future generations — thus he was not playing a game here,
or even speaking circumstantially. His statement was meant to be
received with the most general of referral-domains. He was actually
attempting to encode something that could not be encoded, for
its nature was to change itself – especially when referenced.
Thus the very encoding of it threatened to freeze what
must instead remain in constant geometric progression toward
ever greater accuracy.
In this case, accuracy is ‘more united’
and this means that ‘the more general the bond, the closer
all unities become’.
So if we ‘become more general’ as we seek an accurate
understanding of — anything (including metaThings) —
in a geometric progression, we are in at least one domain certainly becoming more accurate. Here’s the interesting thing that
is actually happening here: as we become more accurate generally — we are also multiplying the specific domains of
the knowledge or understanding we accrue in the process. If that
motion is allowed to prosper and continue — we achieve a cognitive
movement entirely unlike common thinking, and having very little
indeed to do with our rational logics or our self-inflicted academic
ordeals. What we would have is the emotional, cognitive, biological,
and psycho-symmetric experience of travel.
The interesting thing about this ‘way of thinking’
that it makes wise and prosperous use of a feature of polarities.
Plato (or the author) was intimately bound up — personally
and experientially — with a cohort of non-human teachers.
They are as near as any human teacher, and as real — but not as visible. One of the things that Plato learned is that
in order to have experiential access to the living sources of knowledge,
one had to be intimate with the realities — not the theories
— of the living characters of polarities. A polarity
might be visualized as a sort of rod — where one end represents
a dimension from which one sort of understanding flows, and the
other represents a differing version — or an inversion —
of the former.
For living beings, this whole domain of exploration
has perhaps a single most important feature, and it has been stated
in parable and koan for thousands of years: one end of the rod is
instant death — and the other is eternal life. Given a rod
whose ends appear precisely the same, how will we tell the difference?
If we examine this metaphor in relation to our travels thus far,
we might note that if we paint two extremes upon the ends —
such as the general accuracy of knowledge, and the specific accuracy
of knowledge, we might suppose that, at the G-end, we will find
the single most important general knowledge that an organism may
possess, and at the other we may find the single most important
specific knowledge of this sort.
Now if we had time to proceed experientially to both
ends of the rod, and ‘taste what is there’ in person
— what we would find would be startling. We would find a whole
universe that was ‘missing from the rod’ but alive in
ourselves in relation to what we found there. In essence, we would
discover that ‘in us this rod is made a circle’ such
that we ‘are the missing terrain that connects the two ends’.
But as mortals, we rarely get to travel back and forth along the
rod, and few indeed of us have seen the living singularity at its
endpoints in person. Instead we are obliged to travel largely in
one direction, up an endless mountain. The direction is ‘toward
greater specificity’ — and strangely, with each step
we take, the ‘remaining number of steps’ to reach the
end — doubles. This gets extremely disenheartening, to put
it mildly, after about 18 steps.
What Plato is pointing at is the positive result of
movement in the other direction on the rod. In this direction, which
is a good direction for mortal perceivers, to take a step halves
the steps required to reach the penultimate step on this side of
the polarity. The penultimate step is never precisely a step like
the others, however. It is a meta-step — and generally speaking,
taking it causes the rod to transform quite dramatically in ways
that are difficult to imagine or discuss.
I have heard it said that there is a passage in the
Torah about the rod, and an entityQuantity known as metaTron.
It states specifically that Moses’s rod was either a transport
of or an ‘organ of’ metaTron. Who is described ‘as
a youth’. This actually means ‘a child’ who is
‘also one with the unityBeing’. This urAngel is synonymous
with the unityBeing, in that it ‘is and contains’ the
kingdom, and all of its mysteries and majesties’. It is ‘the
part who is sent’ to humanity as the ‘first and only
teacher’. Anything we place before it — breaks our connectivity
to this teacher, and thus the common admonitions against ‘idolatry’
which is in fact the preference of a frozen token over direct experiential
contact.
The meaning hidden in the parable is simple, if we
have the key I provided above. Travel in one direction leads toward
Life — and all that it is. Travel too far in the other, or
only in the other — and the rod itself consumes the traveler.
And this too has a deeper significance. Like the ‘does this
or that have buddha-nature’ (i.e. divinely living completeness)
questions of Zen, there is ‘a way to tell’ what has
buddha nature. Where the jews might use a rod — the buddhists
might use a string — yet both are merely imitating metaTron
with these toys. The question about buddha-nature is simple in essence,
but difficult to gain direct experience of: does that (in the most
general sense) celebrate and preserve the children of the many who
are one? or does it ‘do something else’. If it is ‘doing
something else’ we may begin to question whether this perfect
nature is present and active. For example, in the question ‘does
a dog have buddha-nature’ — the answer is ‘that
question doesn’t, why don’t you unstrangle yourself
with it and ask something more like itself’. In other words,
why are you asking questions about buddha-nature that ‘are
opposed to what they seek’ by their focus and constrictions?
That which saves the many children — prospers
the unity they comprise. That which does the opposite, often appearing
to accomplish some great miracle (something large) in the process,
is commonly (in hindsight) found to have been at work behind the
scenes eating up everything in reach. What Moses was holding
in his hand was actually a replica of the two trees in
the Garden of Eden — one of which ‘was knowledge’
and the other of which ‘was eternal life’. Moses was
adam, again. And eve was present in more ways than three...
We have covered a lot of ground in a short expanse
of textTime. Essentially what I am saying is that there is something
very akin with ‘swimming upstream’ against our common
habits of logic, assembly, and ‘thinking’. Like a salmon
seeking the living waters of its birth, we are each of us, and as
a species on an incredible quest — and the vastness of the
realities of it are far far beyond our models and the vistas we
are used to ‘seeing’ in terms of inward seeing —
or conscious reflection.
What Plato had discovered was that there was a door
in human consciousness and connectivity that was not only unexplored,
but openly ignored. The door led to a movement that ‘grew
absurdly’ in expansion speed once one was able to make the
initial gestures. It was the sentient movement of the core of all
that is human toward its places of genesis — a movement as
natural as breathing — except to an animal with complexly
symbolic consciousness. Representative consciousness.
Consciousness of ideas — requiring a strange
mirror to exist at all. In this Plato glimpsed or clearly beheld
an ancient trap, and an impossible potential for rescue. He saw
that a certain sort of essential movement toward generality could
at once accomplish the solution to a single problem, and many others.
He experienced that travel in an uncommon direction ‘on the
rod of polarities’ — actually led to metaTron.
And at the hands of a child, he learned the ‘playful games
and stories’ of what must have been, to him, an alien science
‘crafted by a celestial child.’
In speaking of this movement of one’s being,
which is a perception-request sort of movement, I am speaking of
an experience something much more essentially motile than
knowledge. An explosive launching pad, any of whose
ladder-steps are inclined to direct us with greater and greater
speed toward their sources in experience, instead of glue our feet
to a token on a path. What is left out from this quotation is that
in such travel we would eventually encounter a being (or set of
beings) existing in sovereign authorship of ‘new knowing’.
If we are able to merely play the sort of game
described correctly, we would soon find ourselves inwardly and outwardly
face-to-face with the source of knowledge — with whom
we might then proceed, hand-in-hand, though the halls of a
living library so vast that it cannot be tokenized in terms, but
must instead be experienced directly.
What Plato was here attempting was not the creation of an axiom
at all, but instead of a metaxoi — a self-erasing axiom
— whose activity pulls one beyond axioms and such assemblies
entirely. This subtle trick, profound in its crafting and execution,
evades most readers who are not already actively attending this
domain of potential.
But Plato is deeply, perhaps even painfully aware
of this. He cannot speak freely with others of his kind, because
there are no such others. He dwells in an experiential realm
where impossible domains and experiences of learning are commonplace,
and occur at the foot of the best of all possible teachers —
the living source of knowledge (him/her/it)self. Those who hear
his words, hear them flatly — as an axiom in a single domain
— alike with the use of a circle drawn on a flat paper used
to represent a sphere Plato is far from such misery, but a worse
misery is in him: he knows his fellows have not been outside the
flat page of what they’ve been sanctioned to believe and experience
and express. They are slaves to nothing more than toys — and
he cannot find a way to insure their liberation. And so he is desperately
and passionately attempting to encode that which led him to his
own direct experience of his source, his teachers, and the living
library.
His goal is an axiom that will swallow itself,
a novelty accomplished by an inward reference — what we call
‘recursion’ in our systems sciences, and by which we
mean an unusual way of referring to oneself. His axiom should lead
you into itself, and fold inward, erasing you, itself and all previous
circumstance. Preferably, this process should at once repeat, and
divide itself. The idea is a gesture — not a mere formula.
A gesture can create a mirror, that folds inward, and swallows itself,
and its viewer — ejecting them both into a universe of entirely
unexpected unityOptions, existing as transports and assemblies of
a sentient connectivity which is never static.
He is trying to deliver a cognitive launchpad that
leads directly to the source of impossible knowing. A launchpad
already secretly emergent in every scale of every organism
— and vastly moreso in humans. The result of the correct
approach to the launchpad is not knowledge —
it is a moving thing, which is alive — is itself sentient – and one rides it, rather
than making or exchanging tokens about positions of the ride. I
is ‘lost to the glory of the great we’, impossibility
inverts (it is no longer useful to exchange tokens...but playful
parables become incredibly useful because the are easy to craft
‘scalarly self-expanding’ learning-toys with).
Let us examine more closely the anatomy of his toy in our two english
translations for a moment.
“The fairest of all bonds is that which makes
of itself and the terms it binds together most utterly one, and
this is most perfectly effected by a progression.”
“The best bond is the one that effects the closest
unity between itself and the terms it is
combining; and this is best done by a continued geometrical proportion.”
a: The best bond...The
fairest of all bonds
Here Plato is saying something that seems absurd; that there is
a bond above all possible bonds. Most modern readers would interpret
this as ‘circumstantially relative’ — meaning
that he does not actually mean to indicate the absolute, and is
merely referring to a local assembly or superficial offering of
ideation — but this is not here the case.
He is instead formally announcing something we deem impossible:
the primal and most generally significant certainty of
‘what the best sort (or class) of bond is’. We may be
assured he is not merely being hyperbolic, nor lazy. It is his intention
to reveal the absolute, in a way that will lead us quite beyond
the meager offerings of his words. His generality here is also absolute:
he offers no domain of reference — by ‘best’,
I would suggest he means: in all possible positions, velocities,
domains, and assemblies.
Having done his experiential research, and succeeded continuously
in establishing not learning, but sentient contact with the
source of learning — he is desirous of a society in which
this experience is established and protected, just as anyone in
a similar position would be likely to be. His goal is actually to
offer us a tiny key, that can deliver the entirety of keys to our
own hand. He actually means: the best of all possible —
and the reason he is certain is that bonds of this sort result
in liberty, rather than bondage.
The best bond, is a bond of wings, multiplying in
a strange way...in order to assure...more wings...as we shall see,
the best class, is a class that grows (containing more classes and
participants) geometrically, any time it is examined or referred
to. It is not a metaClass - but a way of attending classes that
differs fundamentally from mere definition...
I believe he is not only pointing at ‘the best
of all possible bonds’ but also at the ‘best of all
possible first moves’ in the games of logical or rational
assembly. Where these moves are not as poetic and innocent as they
are expert and accurate, the game breaks itself in a way we are
not commonly equipped to discern in the moment at all — though
we may see clearer tracks in retrospect.
b: is the one that effects the
closest unity...is that which makes of itself and the terms
it binds together most utterly one,
In saying ‘is the one that’ we must determine whether
he means a specific form of bond, or the best of all possible choices
for the first, (and thus) and all later actions. This however is
a dualistic and polarized perspective. I suggest his actual meaning
was that of a third position that unifies and transcends both polarities.
Further, I suggest that this position is more alike with that of
a child, than an expert, and that Plato is deeply and perhaps even
passionately aware of this.
In ‘effects the closest unity’ he is pointing at something
catalytic, alive, and active — bit its mere presence may be
sufficient to accomplish all goals. I would translate this as ‘generates
the most significant and general and experiential dimension of likeness between participants, contexts, transports, and transforms‘.
Not merely in a scientific or mechanical sense— Plato here
intends to underline what is human, which is also deeply creative,
childlike, poetic, and transformative.
The process of assembly of this closest unity begins with
a single first connection, and this connection will largely
describe or limit — or liberate — all future connections.
The closest unity must first acknowledge the most significant authority,
or the most generally significant sovereignty. If the process begins
with the idea of impartiality, or objectivism, for example —
the domain of the psyche, the heart — the emotional reality
of what it is to be human — is largely silenced.
For example, if we do what we’ve been scripted to believe
is the only choice possible, i.e. reach immediately for a familiar
token of something — our first choice will result in a maelstrom
of token replication, in an (almost always vain) attempt to somehow
reconcile the strange and invisible division we made when reaching
for the token, first. But if we directly connect to the living
source of knowledge first, and only then begin to
play with tokens, we may proceed into the experience
and expression of an entirely different domain of knowing.
By ‘effects the closest unity’ Plato is not indicating
a token. He is instead speaking of a process, that accelerates (and
divides itself) inwardly, in geometric leaps. He is speaking of
partaking directly in this process, before any sort of token comes
into play at all. When he says ‘the closest unity’ he
means, a process of assembling unity that grows in leaps of generality,
accuracy, and inclusiveness — any time it is referenced at
all. We no longer have such ideas, or experiences, or windows into
them. We have lost the ability to experientially interpret and follow
a window such as this, because we do not interpret it in a domain
alike with that in which it was expressed. Our is flat, and Plato’s
was, in the large, scalarly sentiently self-elaborative.
c: between itself and the terms
it is combining...
Here we see the root of a metaphor revealed: a thing, and some ‘terms’
which are being associated by another ‘gesture’ of likeness.
The goal is ‘greater closeness of likeness’, and this
is never an arrival place, but instead a place of Zenoian self-reference
parables. Since he is talking about tokens, and metaphors —
his ‘terms’ — we can infer that he is (taking
into general account the scope and content of other writings attributed
to Plato) aware that, somewhere — there is a root
form with(in) which all other forms arise. He is also
aware that this form is not a form at all, but what we would commonly
refer to as a being, of a nature so essential that it is at once
non-corporeal (in does not have the quality of specific locality
in the way an organism does) and yet is corporeal in that it exists
in the form, activity, goals, contexts, and transports of reCognition
amongst all possible incarnation. He is pointing at ‘that
which by its nature combines all terms, is before terms, and after
terms’, and as we proceed to follow him, he will reveal the
singular manner in which this is accomplished by mortals. A manner
experienced by many, and known to almost none... especially
those...who are certain they know it.
d: and this is best done...and
this is most perfectly effected by
We refer again to our beginnings, before presenting
the real ‘tail’ of the matter. He is presenting an absolute,
which is never specific, but instead of incredible general accuracy.
This is an echo of the first invocation to progress...what is fairest
and best... beyond all common mortal or rational conception. Such
experience comes directly, inwardly, and is due to aware connection
with the sources of terms. Plato is also aware that ‘we are
but terms’ alive and dreaming, with(in) an animal ‘somewhat
alike at its scale’ with ourselves. In other words, he has
experienced directly both that we and other organisms are living
metaphors, and also the similar symmetries of this above, with(in)
and below our common single position of reference and perspective.
When Plato speaks this, we may be sure he is not echoing the idea
of some expert. He is entreating us to follow him to a place where
his own quests found their sources, potentials, and most sacred
of embodiments. He is not speaking as a modern speaker. He is speaking
as one who has stood in the palm of god, and gazed adoringly into
the celestial eyes of which that unityEye is comprised.
e: by a continued geometrical
proportion... a progression.
This is the tail of the scorpion of liberation Plato
is placing into the palm of our hand, and here is at once its medicine
and its sting. The most perfect method of this is to craft an axiom
that destroys itself, but is completely rational in its construction.
He is advocating what we might call ‘a gesture of scalarity’
which occurs simultaneously in an emotional, biological, and intellectual
‘bubble’ of ourselves. And he is crafting precisely
the sort of toy he is referring to — he is referring to the
toy he is crafting with itself — and it fulfills his requirement
of erasing itself by advocating that the very next move be a scalar leap away from itself. We must progress, and we must
progress geometrically. We can see that two immediate options are
progression toward specificity, and progression toward generality.
But since we should be also in geometric procedural leap of unification
in all domains — we must resolutely refuse to choose either,
and instead form a third domain of both, in simultaneous
expression.
This is the beginning of scalarity itself, as a biocognitive
gesture of self-and-source relation (connectivity). As well as leaping
forward to greater degrees of complexity, we can add two more domains
in the ‘backward’ direction — and leap toward
simplicity and unity. If we place a bubble around this entire activity
— we then begin to glimpse the real options of our incredible
animalian and conscious diversity, lineage, purpose, and complexity.
But then we must leap entirely — a geometric proportion —
away from that toy, and onto something which is not merely another
token, but a scalarly amplified launching pad. The dance will gain
speed — and dimensions — in a geometric progression.
As it does so, unification is its natural outcome. It is a game
of hyperconnectivity, using tokens that dissolve themselves to grant
you new factors of leap velocity, and domain inclusion.
So in his axiomatic statement, we find the direct revelation of
something that is not an anti-axiom, but instead one that swallows
its own tail, and folds inward — disappearing briefly only
to reveal the next scale of itself — in a process that is
one of gained velocities and domains of travel, not arrival.
And this is the toy we were born to explore, express, elaborate,
celebrate, and protect.
Here’s my (current) humble attempt at a slightly
more accurate restatement of the quote:
The finest and most sacred of ways...
To assemble a thing in the heart, mind, world, or
spirit...
Is to select the way that unifies these...by virtue of its kind
of motion...
A motion that with each reference...
Leaps simultaneously toward greater accuracy, and greater generality...
In a series of inward and outward scalar leaps, or geometric progressions...
Each more perfectly unifying contexts, participants, transports,
sources, relations and referents...
In the dance that leads, in leaps of scales, always
toward its source...
Never ceasing at any token, nor enthroning one as
truth.
(a way of moving, rather than a logic of where to
‘stop’ at an ‘answer’)
o:O:o
The ‘way of binding together’ Plato speaks
of is not common — and it is uncommon because it exists
in a domain (or inward stage-type) of intellectual process we have
only the very crudest of metaphors for, particularly in the understanding-terrain
of the common people. It has to do with an aspect of perceptive
activity we commonly relegate to mathematics — exponential
functions — but this is a mere shadow-product of something
else, and not the source. I refer to something we commonly
relegate to ‘the imagination’ — but it is not
the imagination as we know it, at all. It is something quite ‘alien’.
A magical connectivity — invisible and transentient. More
powerful that all of human religion and science, because it is more
than their source.
Plato is speaking of experiential contact with the
source of knowledge — an experience achieved
by a particular sort of relation-position that one may
establish and inhabit. This arises from the personal and communal
pursuit of direct experiential understanding of the ‘meta
form’ of motion-assembly implied by his incredibly brief statement.
Motion-assembly is important because he is
at labors to describe a process of beginning, and a set of methods
of proceeding, which increase in accuracy and velocity in many simultaneous
gardens with any step we take if only they are properly established
at the start. His reference to progression reveals that it
is essential that we continue to take steps, rather than
stopping at a signpost of one sort or another.
In this case, the shape and even the ‘methods
of assembly-relation’ intrinsic to our metaphors become the enforcers of the limits of our liberty —
because we don’t have or credential metaphors that accelerate
in changing toward their source at each activation — but we can — and many of the most enlightened of
our sages and philosophers are continually at pains to allow us
free access to such metaphors. In general, we do not believe that there is such
a thing as a metaphor that can unpack itself so uniquely as to provide
direct contact with the source of metaphors...but the fact is, there
is such a metaphor. We used to play with it all the time as children.
One of the few places our societies and experts will
credential certain forms of metaphors that are somewhat alike with
this is the domain of mathematics. Rather than making math a hero
(which we generally consider it and its many active and pragmatic
proponents to be), it can (and too often does) accrue far too much
glory to itself to leave enough for us to realize that we are its
source, and not the other way around. In other words —
whatever all of human mathematics may be, it will always be infinitely
less than the mere gibbering of a single human infant — in
whose structure, relations, and even idiocy are to be found something
billions of scales more amazing than the entirely of human systems
of knowing. When we are able to recognize this, and celebrate its
remembrance together directly in experience, rather than adopted
codicil— we will be well on our way to understanding
something about the core of what Plato’s statement would ask
us to glimpse, and perhaps pursue.
What Einstein was passionately seeking was not a thing
of mathematics, at all — and effectively it had little to
do with science. Science was, to him — and should be to all
of us — merely a popularly accepted way of speaking about
relationships, in a language mechanical enough to provide those
who seek them with ‘proofs’ about such relations.
The toys that arise from such proceedings were but
a sort of (often deadly) result of nothing more than revealing some
feature of their source, in physical reality. Math is a very strange
thing, especially from an organismal perspective. These ‘proofs’
can be assembled from a variety of perspectives — and are
‘repeatable’, which means that if the same process is
accurately followed, a result functionally identical with previous
assemblies of process will obtain. Math is as emotionless as a machine,
yet its users are always unlike this in every possible way.
Nothing in nature is really alike with this ‘math’ at
all — unless we first apply this metaphor and thus reduce
all of nature dramatically in countless simultaneous domains —
yet we credential it more than we do each other, the unityBeing,
or the obvious realities before our very eyes.
We value this particular feature of knowledge so highly that the
most essential foundations — the roots of the roots of the
roots, so to speak — of our common agreement and activity
and belief in and of self and universe are always secretly focused
upon it. I strongly suggest that this is an essential error.
For example, what if it is still an incredibly useful
tool, but only when it is positioned correctly in our ladders
of essential value, relation and meaning? What if there is ‘something
that must always come before systematic knowledge’ something
that is (generally) always more important than
such knowledge — not, perhaps, in a world of machines
— but definitely in a world of living children. Scalarity,
for example, is not merely some series of algorithms. It is a human
cognitive gesture that sets up scalar waves in the species, local
participants, and many related organismal, cognitive and physical
hyperstructures. It is ‘something organisms do’, and
not ‘something one learns from a system or expert’.
You can’t be taught to breathe — but you can be taught
to notice and define your own breathing. This can be done in a way
that either will tend generally to provide you with incredible liberty,
or a vast impoverishment of the same — especially in the domains
we might refer to as intellectual, systematic, metaphoric, poetic,
and relational.
It is and has long been a very simple and oft-repeated
matter for human beings to locate a toy of some sort, and place
it in authority over every other thing. And I say this
is amongst the most fundamental of the sources of human atrocity,
tragedy and catastrophe. The essential lack of our direct experiential
relation with celestial and psychopoetic authority creates a vacuum
that is easily co-opted to the great prosperity of predators masquerading
as heroes. This is a problem which ‘all by itself’ can
erase a living world in something functionally equivalent to a heartbeat.
In effect, we have accidentally rendered all evolutionary niches
on Earth into something more in accordance with the support of mechanism,
than organism. This sort of move tends to end many simultaneous
games very very quickly, and for more scales and assemblies of players
than we could possibly imagine.
The ancient admonition to ‘reMember to put first
things first’ was never meant to find its sole application
in systems of knowing, or even in the ever-ubiquitous ‘common
sense’ so often heard of and rarely encountered. It was not
meant merely to apply to logics of assembly, or grammars of relation
and their systematic translation into symbolforms and language.
This admonition was what we might call a meta-admonition —
or something that applies to the realms of all admonition —
before any admonition may exist at all. Lest this seem
absurd, one might observe that a strange kind of ‘idea’
of ‘a separator, bag, membrane, or envelope’ has to
come before any possible metaphor at all. The ‘kind’
of idea we are speaking of is a meta-idea — and it is a prerequisite
for inward reflection — or ‘thought’. In the case
of metaphor, or ‘the ability to craft a token which binds
things together, and also separates in some way’ we must
first have a stage. Unless we perceive ourselves as ‘only
stage’ — we require some sort of internal bag, or separator
to (at least imaginarily) stand between our inward-looking movement
and our ‘idea’. It is an admonition to ‘recall
the true source of all admonition’.
A more concrete example would be to examine the process
of writing on a sheet of paper. If we ask ourselves ‘what
is required’ to accomplish this task, we might end up with
something like: use of my writing hand, consciousness, possibly
light or the ability to see, a working writing implement, and a
sheet of something we can successfully scribe upon. All of this
would be fine. But we might either have missed a few necessities
— or misinformed ourselves about the real natures of some
of those we listed (for example, consciousness). But there are two
incredibly essential things we did not list, and perhaps would rarely
if ever notice. One is that we must have access to the source of
self, and inspiration — experientially. Not according to science,
or any other model. According to ourselves. The second is that we
must be able to cognitively assemble the process, contexts and participants
— first in a sort of imaginal terrain, and then in real action.
Effectively, this ‘proves’ that imagination is first.
If we demand by our agreement or ‘credentialing methods’
that it be second...we effectively break the toy of our
knowing. And yet there is another thing we forgot to list because
perhaps somewhat like fishes in water we do not ‘see’
it. Before imagination and before paper — we must divide.
We must have access to ‘that which establishes the division
between a form of staging area — in which the self is preparing
to act’.
So one of the things we’d ignore (especially
if we weren’t specifically seeking it at the outset of each
encounter) is a sort of strange gap — all which separates
us from paper and writing implement — and is even required
for us to ‘cross’ before we can even locate any ‘self’
at all.
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Einstein, whose work and thought we often venerate
or adore was a person who wanted to experience the thoughts
of the Creator — “...I want to know the mind of
God, the rest are details.” His quests in the domains we call
physics and mathematics were the merest reflection of his
essential passion for questions about the ways, methods and participants
in what we might refer to as ‘the sources’ of Nature.
An he believed these sources to be enough like an entity to
refer to them with the label we use for the unityBeing: God.
The idea of a Unified Field Theory — even if new names and
players emerge — is really the very same thing that Plato
was pointing at when he spoke about ‘the fairest of all bonds’.
But Plato may well have had whole domains of knowledge and experience
that are entirely and utterly denied to mathematicians and physicists
of our modern moment, because Plato lived ‘pre-mechanica’,
and thus was not subject to the debilitating and conscriptive metaphors
with and amongst which we come to learn and know ourselves and our
relations. In Plato’s lived experience, we may be certain
that he was not shorn of the passion and poetics of his own nature,
relation and existence by models likening humans to mere assemblies
of dead process. The very opposite was not merely ‘believed’
but instead experienced directly. It was nurtured, celebrated and
shared wherever such experience could find safe nursery. To be alive
was to be a sort of living tentacle of the urPoet: who was known
to be and belong to ‘something like a family’. We make
a grave error when we deny the reality of this simply because we
and those we commonly know do not have this experience — for
two reasons. The first is that we do still have this experience
– we just have an incredibly well-obscured habit of disallowing
the verification or notice of it.
Because he was not subject to the biases and prosecutions
of sentience that naturally accrue with the personal or general
adoption of mechanized models (lacking poetic source, relation,
and product) and immersion in a mechanically dominated experience
of moment-to-moment existence — he went looking, quite naturally,
for something better than any possible machine.
Like many children of his ilk, he knew it could be found,
because he was the product of its output, experiencing the product
of its output. In essence, his own eye was proof enough, as a starting
position.
Plato, (again presuming this is an actual person who
is the author of our quote)
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If we had 12 names for different ‘organs’
of imagination, we might locate one that functioned as the local
specialist in scalarity. And if in our youth or middle
age we awaken to the presence and accessibility of this particular
organ — we will not merely learn about scalarity
but instead experience it directly — in all the possible
domains of our person. Once we experience it, we will never again
be satisfied with the frozen tokens we placed so far above this
mere ‘organ of imagination’.
If the experiential understanding of scalarity arises
in ‘something like an organ’, as I am playfully suggesting,
we are in our modern understandings and experience nearly totally
unfamiliar with it. We don’t believe in any sort of pragmatic
way in organs of imagination — which means something akin
to ‘we believe in their opposite’.
In our society, if you have an ‘organ of imagination’
— what you have is a disease, and what you are is broken —
unless you’re easily co-opted to some class where such organs
are tolerated, preyed upon, or profited from in cash. If you don’t
happen to be easily placed in such a class, you’ll probably
‘need to be raped a lot’ in order to get rid of this
‘bad imagination organ’ — and since ‘it’s
your fault’ — you’ll probably be billed a lot
to earn the privilege of such rape. Ours is an epoch of the deepest
and most fundamental occlusions of what is means to be human, and
what it can mean. Rooting out the sources of this myopia is no simple
task, and is complicated as the obvious outcomes of the failure
to notice or respond continue their spawning enthusiastically —
each generation more adeptly convincing us to look the other
way.
There is a physicist out and about in the world who
is desperate to convince everyone that humans have misunderstood
the exponential function, and that repairing this would repair much
of our understanding of ourselves and the universe. I don’t
believe this is hearsay, even though I‘ve not researched it
— primarily because my own experience reveals something incredibly
similar in schema to such an idea.
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Those who understand the power and realities of
human cognition (and spirit) almost always ‘stash’ impossible
information in places within text that others cannot detect directly.
Sometimes very intentionally, and sometimes merely as the product
of their own natural creative movement. These ‘stashings”
act like seeds — when exposed to a human who can understand
‘their surface’, something much more subtle within them
attaches itself to the participants, and begins to gestate. This
is a well-known part of the power of a parable, or, for example,
a Zen Question.
Hebrew, and some other written languages, take direct advantage
of this. In other words, those who are well-versed in their usage
and history are already deeply aware of this fact, and its vast
implications — not merely in text — but in language
and even in metaphor (not to mention ‘numbers’).
The fact that ‘older languages’ utilize
this domain to ‘stash’ what is clearly ‘far more
important than the linear text’ is evidence that our facilities
with language and meaning — and their sources — have
profoundly degraded. It is not ‘progress’ we have made,
but instead ‘digress’.
