The Great I AM

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

~ Albert Einstein

 

 

 

I had said earlier that all paradoxes are either paradoxes of the All-in-One, or of the One-in-All. I will restate that here: Identity and Persistency are the twin illusions that shape our world. It may not be clear how that is a restatement; today's discussion will begin an attempt to build that bridge.

 

We talked at some length a while back about what being means. We had said that something is in several senses, potentially several senses at once. The implication of this is that identity can mean several things simultaneously, as well.

 

Let's consider something with a fairly stable identity, as we'd naively consider it: Mount Rushmore. Chances are pretty good that you recognize that name, and that as you read it, your Cartesian Theater obligingly summoned up an image of it. You probably thought about the Presidents' heads carved into it. You probably feel pretty confident that you know how many Presidents there are up there... which ones... how they're arranged... what the rest of the mountain looks like...

 

Getting less confident, right? In fact, even people who've seen Mount Rushmore with their own eyes would probably be less than certain about those details. Even though most of the people who read this understand what 'Mount Rushmore' is, I'd venture a guess that every one of you has a subtly distinct, individual, subjective impression of 'Mount Rushmore.' So, while we can maybe agree that there exists an objective Mount Rushmore, it isn't as real to us as our subjective version. And the intersubjective Mount Rushmore is a strange beast indeed - it encompasses all these subjective versions, and the objective Mount Rushmore, under an umbrella that lets all of us recognize the same mountain (even though it's not the same mountain). What's more, without summoning that shorthand, I could offer you a vague description that nevertheless incorporated the necessary details for you to recognize the idealized Mount Rushmore. And that's before we get into Mount Rushmore as a symbol or an association for each of you personally.

 

The point is that, even with something that all of us think we know as an objectively real entity, it exists in many different ways, as many different things. Everything is both itself, and other than itself: this is the Parasimplicity Principle. The self-similarity Mandelbrot described in Nature's curves is another aspect of this: identity as a pattern of infinite recursion, Self as both self and self-concept and concepts of Self beyond the self, as many unique iterations as there are possible perspectives. Paradoxes of self-reference arise because of the essential dichotomy between the Self we are being and the Self of which we are aware in the process of Being. Russell's famous paradox - "this sentence is false" - arises because we erroneously view it as equivalent to "the sentence 'this sentence is false' is true." Truth, in this context, denotes positive Being - Being in a state of awareness. The truth that Self alters itself in the course of becoming aware of itself qua self makes it paradoxically impossible for Self ever to be truly self-aware; despite the inescapable truth that self-awareness is the hallmark, the necessary condition, of Self-being or Sein-in-der-Welt.

 

Persistency, it turns out, is just Identity viewed from another dimension - the dimension of Time - and that will be the subject of our next discussion.

The womb of truth

“Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute,
and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself
and yet never escapes itself.” ~ T. S. Eliot

 

Over the last couple of posts, we’ve looked at paradoxes – statements that seem to be understandable in our representative system, but produce confounding results. Mandelbrot’s statement that a coastline gets longer the shorter the scale of measurement becomes is an example of a paradox of infinite recursion; Godel’s statement that any logical system must be inconsistent or incomplete exemplifies a paradox of self-referentiality. I will hereby gift you another of my unsubstantiated assertions: all paradoxes are either paradoxes of infinite recursion, and so statements about the One-in-All; or they are paradoxes of self-referentiality, and so statements about the All-in-One.

These concepts of One-in-All and All-in-One, to which we briefly alluded some time ago in a discussion of the Phoenix, are important in theology, where they provide analogies for the Divine. Within the pentapartite model of reality outlined early in the life of this blog, these concepts are transcendental – they derive meaning only as relations with ideals, or metarelations.

Systems constructed by our rational faculty cannot grasp these metarelations, because they are bound to the objective and subjective realms. Even though I am providing you the raw material for a scheme that describes metarelations, it necessarily falls short of being properly descriptive – my assertion that there exists something beyond our understanding is not at all the same thing as an assertion that this specific entity here is understandable as being beyond our understanding (in fact, you might be able to recognize this second construction as a restatement of the paradox of self-referentiality). Nevertheless, an examination of paradoxes has value – not only as an intellectual exercise, but also as a spiritual one.

Nicolas of Cusa, known also as Cusanus, elaborated a sophisticated philosophy around this notion of paradox as a womb of truth in the transcendental sense. He posited a cosmology in which God was both within and beyond the All of Creation and the Nothingness of Void; he described God as the non aliud, the ‘not-other,’ that is, the thing which is neither One nor the Other (this can be seen as a challenge to the Aristotelian Law of the Excluded Middle, an anticipation of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, or yet another restatement of the paradox of self-referentiality). For Cusanus, God was the unimaginable union of All and Nothing in One.

(A quick aside: note that Cusanus here introduces a third element to our earlier picture of One-in-All and All-in-One. In fact, we can now talk of One-in-Nothing, All-in-Nothing, One-in-All, Nothing-in-All, and All-in-One. We could talk of Nothing-in-One, but that would actually be Two, harking back to our earlier discussion of essential numerology. The cosmology of One, Nothing, and All is another restatement of the Law of Fives.)

Cusanus accepted that God was unknowable, in accordance with Church teaching (he was a Bishop of Rome in the Catholic Church). He nevertheless felt that we could understand something of the Divine, seeing perhaps “as through a glass darkly” but seeing nonetheless. Cusanus believed this could be accomplished by meditation upon the coincidentia oppositorum, the “marriage of opposites” – in the sense that paradoxes simultaneously defy and unify the opposites of True and False in a bivalent logic, they are ripe for Cusanian study.