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.

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.