An article of faith

"Doubt is a pain too lonely
to know faith is his brother."
~ Khalil Gibran

 

 

 

 

 

The Fifth Key of the Tarot, known variously as the Pope or, more commonly, the Hierophant (the word literally means 'teacher of holy things'), is the sixth card along the journey of the Fool. The Law of Fives, that false teacher, suggests it should be significant (not only is it the fifth key, but the prime factors of six sum to... five).

 

We've intimated previously that knowledge is bound by unsurmountable limitations, and that transcendental truth cannot be gained through the application of reason alone. What is left is what necessarily underpins any edifice of reason: faith.

 

Faith is what the Hierophant offers - faith, the "substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," as the Book of Hebrews relates. Faith is often derided in our materialist culture; but the truth is revealed when we consider the foundation of that culture - for it rests on certain axioms of ontology, of epistemology, which in their nature are not and cannot be proven from earlier principles. Faith is the bedrock of rational consciousness: faith, which appears to admit none of the character of reason, turns out to be essential to reason; just as reason, appearing to ridicule faith, depends upon it. This is an intimate paradox, whose nature I shall leave it to the reader to decide.

 

It is tempting to assert that enlightenment, that cannot be accomplished through Reason alone, can be accomplished through Faith. There are even examples that seem to corroborate this assertion; but, in truth, Faith alone fails too. The reason for this is in fact rather subtle; it has to do with the relative plasticity of Reason.

 

Suppose you hold some view derived logically from certain agreed axioms - as a trivial example, suppose you are of the opinion that there are no black swans, based on the empirical observation that you have never seen anything but white swans and the meta-empirical observation that empirical observations are reliable arbiters of actual fact. Suppose you then encounter a black swan. This new datum contradicts a predicate of your hypothesis, and, as a rational thinker, you revise your hypothesis: you accept the existence of black swans (this possibility is why Hume had a Problem with Induction).

 

Now, suppose your belief that all swans were white stemmed from a pure faith, unsullied by Reason. Suppose you encountered a black swan: your faith would not admit its existence. You would rationalize that it was not a swan, or that it was a white swan painted black, or that you imagined it, or any of a hundred other counterfactuals to avoid having to assail your article of faith.

 

Faith in the transcendent is a precursor to enlightenment; faith in the merely subjective is a barrier to enlightenment. And neither Faith, nor Reason, will enable us to tell the difference...

 

This then, is both the power and the peril of the Heirophant: that he offers a reality more permanent than the one we can apprehend through Reason, yet less certainly true.

Poker face

"Creativity is the ability to introduce order
into the randomness of nature." ~ Eric Hoffer

 

 

 

 

Quantum theory concerns the very smallest particles in the universe; particles so very small that they form the building blocks of subatomic particles like the electron. At the quantum level, matter behaves very strangely - what we think of as particles act more like waves, and what we think of as immutable physical properties become much more mutable. Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle tells us that the more precisely we measure one property at this level, the more imprecise other properties become - for example, we might be able to exactly determine a particle's position at a moment in time, but only at the cost of being entirely unable to divine anything about its velocity. This result is commonly conflated with the 'observer effect,' but is distinct from it - randomness, it turns out, is 'baked in' to the observed world. The validity of scientific laws, that make the world around us a relatively predictable and orderly place, depend upon a substrate which is fundamentally unpredictable and chaotic. This is an iteration of the Paradox of Self-Reference, of course.

 

If we think of the subjective realm as being infinitesimally close to, and yet inevitably distant from, the transcendental, it makes a degree of sense for the subjective, at the limits of measurable perception, to approach closest to the transcendental. If we think of the transcendental as the fundament from which all possible energy-states spring, it makes sense for randomness - probability; potential - to be the recognizable characteristic of transcendence as it immanesces upon the subjective.

 

Happily, we don't have to supercool an atom and bombard it with radiation countless times to identify this kind of randomness in operation. At the macro level we have plenty of analogues to choose from: rolling dice, shuffling decks of cards, throwing yarrow stalks into the air and seeing how they land (incidentally, one of the fundamental constants, pi, emerges from the latter if you look at it right). The first of these is not well-known as a form of divination, although Luke Rhinehart can attest to its power; the latter two, however, certainly are. My knowledge of the I Ching is very limited in this metanow; but I know a thing or two about cartomancy, and my own experiences with the Tarot deck have reinforced my belief in a parasimplistic universe. In essence, all forms of divination have this character: that they combine a certain degree of conscious analysis with a certain degree of deliberate randomness. Successful diviners demonstrate the ability to associate elements freely, without imposing a pattern on what they see - the better to clarify the pattern that exists within them already. FIAT applies: everything is connected, because everything is everything. The Tarot cards can tell us anything we want to know about anything at all, because they embody the characteristic randomness of the transcendental. Insofar as we can avoid rationalizing and pre-empting the judgement of the cards, we can access the transcendental in our own consciousness and let the cards speak through us. It is to the cards of the Major Arcana, and their symbolic significance, that we turn next.

Reflections

"The whole purpose of education is
to turn mirrors into windows." ~ Sidney J. Harris

 

 

 

 

I tapped myself on the shoulder before I wrote this, the better to remind myself that I need to talk about Shannon sometime and why information and entropy are linked; but this is not the time for that discussion.

 

This is the time to talk about mirrors. Mirrors are a form of parasimplex: you can look into any mirror in the world, and see the same face you would see in any other mirror (although that face would not be your own, exactly - not least because of its lateral inversion) - and yet any other person could look into that same mirror and see a different same face in each one. There is an echo of both the paradox of identity and the paradox of persistency here, if you're listening for it (remember Lord Ravenhurst's warning on that, though).

 

The transcendental mirror, though - what would that show you when you looked into it? One way of answering this question is by considering the transcendental mirror to be simultaneously immanent upon all subjective mirrors. The transcendent is not bound by limitations of time or space; it is omnipresent (if only in a surreal fashion) and eternal (if only because it is untouched by Time, which after all dates from a mere Planck second after the Big Bang - and is destined to be extinguished along with everything else in the maximum-entropy state). Thus, this transcendental mirror would show you, not only your face when you looked in it, but also your face when you looked into any other mirror, and also any other face when it looked into this mirror, and also any other face when it looked into any other mirror. It would show you the perfectibilized relation of mirror and observer; it would show you the observed universe of mirrors in a single mirror. It would show you the All-in-One: the Aleph. Both Borges and Leibniz have worthy reflections upon the Aleph, which in turn naturally reflects upon them in their full manifestations; within the Aleph, as all things must be, we are already discussing these aspects.

 

Insofar as parasimplicity makes a virtue of anything, it is this ethical principle: speculum ego; I am a mirror. According to the parasimplicity principle, we should strive to be all that we can be - everything exists in order to exist more. More than this (remember: the Parasimplicity Principle is itself a parasimplex, so there is always more), we should strive to be all that we have been - the parasimplex does not abandon past instars, because it is no more itself at one time than at another. Neither does it recoil from contradictions: indeed, these are the spoor of paradox, within which we glimpse the transcendental in the unresolved processes of Reason. Thus we should accept all that we have been, and all that we might be, as equally essential reflections of what we truly are. To be a parasimplex is to embrace identity in the abandonment of identity - to become a Gateless Gate.

 

This seemingly impossible task, as with all tasks, begins with a self-similar task - for all action is self-similar to the transcendental action of wei wuwei. In this case, we seek to become mirrors of mirrors by first becoming mirrors of our world: this is why the enlightened man goes to eat rice when the bell sounds, and goes to his bedchamber when the bell sounds again, and rises from his slumber when the bell sounds the third time. The enlightened man recognizes himself in every stranger, and he accepts the stranger as he accepts himself. We say of those renowned for conviviality - "he never meets a stranger." Verily I say unto you: the enlightened man never meets anybody but strangers.

 

Borges, again, that invaluable vademecum, describes this process in a lovely fable entitled "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." In it, the fictional Menard embarks upon an appropriately Quixotic quest: to rewrite Cervantes' classic. Not satisfied with merely translating it, and abhorring the notion that he might improve upon it, Menard sets about experiencing the Quixote as Cervantes himself did - after an abortive attempt which he himself bitterly rejects before completion, he immerses himself in the lifestyle of the 17th century Spaniard and eventually succeeds in reproducing a Quixote that is line for line identical with the original - but, as Borges' abstracted fictitious reviewer of Menard's Quixote notes, so much richer than the original for having been written by a 20th century Parisian. This should not be understood as presenting Menard as a parasimplex; however, in the illustrated shortcomings of Menard from that perspective, it provides a template for the initiate to follow.

 

 



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.

Zenophilia

"Never confuse motion with action."

~ Benjamin Franklin

 

 

 

 

Zeno of Elea anticipated many of the points I've touched upon over the preceding few posts in formulating what Bertrand Russell described as "immeasurably subtle and profound" paradoxes. Zeno was a Parmenidean philosopher, who shared Parmenides' belief that "All is One;" his paradoxes challenge the notions of Time and Space and the existence of entitites within them.

 

His 'Paradox of Place,' for example, is both a Platonic Form of the self-reference paradox and, paradoxically enough, a refutation of the Platonic Theory of Forms:

 

"If everything has a place, then place itself has a place, and so on ad infinitum."

 

He similarly challenges Time in the Fletcher's Paradox:

 

"If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless."

 

In fact, elsewhere in his writings, Zeno demonstrates that not only is it impossible to move, it is impossible to start a journey or to reach a destination. Yet it is even more clearly demonstrable that motion occurs and that physical entities undergo motion travelling from place to place.

 

Intriguingly, advances in quantum physics suggest that apparent motion - and even more importantly, apparent lack of motion - are both not as straightforward as they seem. A famous experimental result, Young's Double-Slit Experiment, proves that light operates as a wave; Einstein's Nobel-Prizewinning verification of the photoelectric effect proves that it operates as a particle. The fundamentally paradoxical notion of wave-particle duality, which follows from these two results and leads to a bizarre conception of matter as a measure of quantum interference patterns and mass as a byproduct of collisions with Higgs bosons - all of this is just another paradigmatic way of representing the Parasimplicity Principle.

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.