Taking stock

"Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory
but that it is institutional." ~ Terry Eagleton


On its face, "parasimplicity" looks a lot like an excuse to make things that are really simple a lot more complex. But, as I hope you've picked up by now, what parasimplicity - or anything else - looks like isn't close to being what it really is. For instance - and this is just a 'for instance' - it also serves as a handy tool for making things that are really complex a lot more simple. The Law of Fives is extremely simple, and as good a shorthand for the very complex things it actually references (which this collection of blogs to date has similarly referenced but at more length, including the obligatory self-similar discussions of the Law of Fives itself). The reduction of all paradoxes to the twin paradigms of All-in-One and One-in-All is another parasimplistic operation (actually the final operation in a chain that begins with the appreciation of all statements as interactions of paradoxes, but we'll get to that).

So, how do we apply parasimplicity? How do mountains become not-mountains, and then not-rivers become rivers? If you've been paying attention, you may already know. What you know may even be what I was trying to say; equally, what you know may be more than what I know. We can't know what we don't know, but we'll get to that, too.

Let's tie in the koan to our five-layer reality cake.

Mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers - this we can consider to be referring to the objective mountains and rivers. Bear in mind that these are not mountains and rivers we can ever directly know: we form subjective impressions of the relations of properties we intuit as belonging to the objective realm, and that is as close as we can get to knowing them.

Mountains are not-mountains and rivers are not-rivers - these not-mountains and not-rivers are not, as you might be forgiven for thinking, equivalent in our model to the subjective mountain- and river-impressions. The not-mountain is the intersubjective mountain: the mountain that emerges from discourse, from interrogation of our subjective mountain-impressions. IF the objective mountain is real, and IF our impressions of it are accurate, and IF we share our impressions truthfully, and IF we don't later edit or filter our consensus to fit some concept of 'truth' - and those are all very big 'ifs' indeed, which we'll review when we turn to Baconian Idols in the near future - then the not-mountain may be apparently identical with the mountain (this is one of the cruder approaches to paradox resolution, in fact - the rejection of the paradox as presented on the grounds that the presentation is corrupted by one or more of these factors). But not-mountains are, well, not mountains..

Mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers - these 'again' mountains and rivers are the transcendental mountains and rivers, which we have said are immanent upon the subjective (we might, with a sly wink at Dali, say they are immanent upon the objective as well; in fact Dali's paranoiac-critical method is another rewarding subject for study). We have already said that we can't directly know the objectively real mountain - so how can we possibly hope to know the transcendental mountain beyond? We cannot cross the same river twice (so claims Heraclitus), so how can we know the transcendental river that is beyond all those once-crossed iterations?

The answer is that we need to work against our brilliant knowledge-building engines, our glorious rational Big Brains. We are hardwired to recognize patterns, and we are hardwired to filter and sort the data our brains receive to make it a coherent conscious experience (a trivial example with which you're probably familiar: optics being what it is, the visual data we receive on our retinae is inverted; our brains flip the image over during processing to restore it to its putative objective orientation). However, if we seek the transcendental, that which is equally remote from all things, that in which mountains are again mountains is equivalent to mountains are not mountains or even mountains are rivers - we won't find it after our brains are through processing the data.

Recall that objective entities are entirely separate from subjective ones. Yet our brains, in processing the data from the objective, produce impressions that are subjective and are qualitatively the same as Humean ideas that have no relation to empirical data whatsoever. What this tells us is that the process of rational cognition is capable of bridging the divide that separates objective and subjective - and what that is really telling us is that, somewhere in there, we are working in the transcendental. Each and every one of us, it turns out, is also a Gateless Gate.

The transcendental Universe is self-similar, not only with the objective, but with the myriad subjective Universe-impressions. We could, perhaps, approach some rational understanding of the transcendental if we could somehow simultaneously apperceive all of those possible subjective information-states; but the self-similarity of the Universe, embodied in the Gateless Gate of each self-aware consciousness, makes this unnecessary.

How do you pass through a Gateless Gate? Begin with a gate, and take the gate away so it becomes gateless. Then pass through. 'Get OUT,' as Crowley had it.

Creatio ex nihilo

“Abstraction is everybody’s zero but nobody’s nought.”
~ Robert Smithson

 

Zero is believed to have been invented as a number like other numbers by the Indians, somewhere between the fifth and ninth centuries. The idea of ‘null space’ or the ‘void’ was known and used by earlier cultures, but the Indians were the first to produce a symbol that could be utilized in mathematical calculations to represent the void. When we consider numbers today, it is appropriate for us to begin with zero as the unique numerical symbol for nothingness – indeed, when we derive mathematical operations from set theory this is exactly how we do start, with zero as the symbol for the empty set.

If the first number is zero, denoting nothingness, then the second number – one – denotes identity. In set-theoretic terms, it is the set which can have only one possible element (the set of the empty set, in fact). This set-theoretic interrelation between nothingness and oneness is mirrored in the symbolism of the taijitu, and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo – something out of nothing.

The existence of zero and of one as numbers generates the concept of category; a unitary entity having more than one component subentities. The simplest structure of category is duality – the category that has exactly two elements, as ‘one and zero.’ The numerical symbol for duality is two.

Three elaborates this concept of category further into the more general plurality. Where twoness denotes a paradigm of either/or, a binary system within which ‘one’ may acceptably and completely be defined as ‘not-zero,’ threeness opens a doorway – a Gateless Gate, indeed – onto countable infinities of paradigm in which each element is uniquely itself and cannot be defined in terms of any other element (although it can be defined in terms of all other elements, with reference to the established concepts of nothingness, identity, and duality).

Four, being both the sum and the product and the power of two twos, embodies divisibility. This is a further elaboration upon plurality – with the addition of fourness, we now find that there exist some plural entities which are both entities in themselves and unions of lesser entities. We can, of course, derive numbers along the real number line by defining mathematical operators that utilize this principle more generally – indeed, we could do that when we had only zeros and ones to play with – but fourness is the philosophical symbol that uniquely develops this concept.

These, then, are the numbers which symbolize the essential concepts of being: nothingness, identity, duality, plurality, and divisibility. You probably already realized this, but we have just derived another expression for the Law of Fives.

The unforgettable fire

“Unity can only be manifested by the Binary.
Unity and the idea of Unity are already two.”
 ~ Siddharta Gautama

 

A word, before we delve into the very simplest sort of numerology, about my avatar. I fell in love with this design many years ago because of its symbolism. It may not be immediately apparent, but the avatar depicts a fiery phoenix, wings outspread, against a backdrop of flame. To me, at least, with the eye of faith, it also depicts the taijitu of the Taoists. These are both symbols of unity and opposition; Cusanus would recognize his coincidentia oppositorum and be glad. That the symbols are themselves the products of wholly different cultures, using wholly different representations, yet conveying the same meaning, makes this synthesis of the phoenix and the taijitu especially pleasing to me: a coincidence of coincidences, and therefore a Gateless Gate.

For me, the expression ‘Gateless Gate’ has a particular meaning associated with transcendence as I defined it before. I’d suggested that the subjective realm is essentially ‘walled off’ from the objective realm, but that two subjectives can be connected by an intersubjective ‘bridge’ – it follows, although this was not stated, that the intersubjective entity makes not only a bridge but a doorway at both ends: it opens the mind it reaches, but only in a limited fashion and only into the objective realm. Nevertheless, such doorways in this model afford us an analogy to the qualitatively different doorways that must connect all realms within the transcendent, which relates to the ideal in the same way as the objective relates to the subjective. The Gateless Gate is the opening of the ideal – of the extrapolation of the intersubjective appreciation of the property-relation matrix – upon the transcendent.

It is very important to understand that Gateless Gates, in this model, are the only links to the transcendent. It is impossible to pass into transcendence save through a Gateless Gate. We should also note that the Gateless Gate is strictly abstracted from either property or relation – our idea of the Gateless Gate, necessarily tethered to property and relation and so to the world, cannot be the Gateless Gate itself. Indeed, the Gateless Gate cannot in any way partake of any property of Gate as we understand that term, neither can it bear any relation to Gate as we understand it: this is why the Gate is Gateless, and why we cannot approach it from within the edifice of our Reason. Nevertheless, the Gateless Gate is universal: the transcendent is perpetually immanent upon the subjective.

The Phoenix recounted in legends by Herodotus and Ovid was a mythical firebird: a creature born in flames that lived 500 years and then immolated itself only to re-emerge from the flame. Herodotus tells us that the newborn Phoenix conveyed the ashes of its father to Heliopolis; Ovid remarks that the newborn Phoenix, uniquely among all the Earth’s creatures, is its father remade. It can be seen from these expressions of the Phoenix that it represents both the unity of Life and Death, and the unity of Self with Other.

The Taijitu (which, roughly translated into English, means “diagram of ultimate power”) originated in China, and represents the twin forces of Yin and Yang. Formed by the exact division of a circle into equal parts black and white, entwined around one another like two fishes, the taijitu shows us that there is light in darkness; and, in darkness, light. The complementary elements are necessary and essential to the whole, but inviolate. Yin is never yang, and never without yang; yin without yang would be a mirror without reflection. From the interactions of yin and yang emerge the Five Phases of qi: fire, earth, water, wood, and metal.

Within the context of a symbol that unites the Phoenix and the Taijitu, it may or may not be interesting to observe that there exists within Chinese mythology a bird analogous to the Phoenix: the Fenghuang is itself a unity of the male Feng bird, and the female Huang bird. Moreover, it Is a union of all birds in one bird, and so a representative restatement of Borges’ Argumentum Ornithologicum. It is considered the feminine counterpart to the masculine Dragon in Chinese mythology: the All-in-One, as opposed to the One-in-All.