Magical thinking

"Has the world ever been changed by anything
save by thought and its magic vehicle the Word?"
~ Thomas Mann

 

 

 

 

The Fool is numbered 0; he is nothing, a blank slate, a tabula rasa, ignorant even of his own ignorance. The Magician, second of the Major Arcana, and numbered 1, is the Fool within the Abyss, knowing himself and his ignorance and the transformative power of that ignorance. The Magician is the Fool enabled, energized, created; he is the Trickster God made manifest.

 

Where the Fool represents the seeker after wisdom, the Magician represents the awareness of things unseen. He is not the apotheosis of wisdom - that comes later - but he is on the path, because he is no longer seeking. What we are seeking, we cannot have found, or else we would not be seeking it. The Magician understands that it is more efficient to stop looking and instead focus on seeing. In Rider-Waite, the Magician is crowned with infinity, and girdled with Ourobouros: all things begin and end in this moment of awareness, this consciousness, this satori. The staff of the Fool has transformed into the wand of the Magician; the wand is raised to the heavens, while his other hand points to the earth.

 

The Magician is the bridge between the subjectively real and the transcendentally surreal; he is the Gateless Gate. He is the potential in Man, the aptitude, the capacity. Self-aware, self-possessed, self-sufficient, he is the catalyst: unchanging himself, he changes all. This is the mystery beyond reason. This is the maker and unmaker of mountains and rivers. This is the beguiler of the senses, the deceiver of the mind, the keyholder to the doors of perception. Should we trust him? That doubt is the manifestation of the Unknown; fear of the Abyss keeps us from him, but acceptance of the Abyss - Foolishness - encourages us to take the leap of faith. We take nothing in there with us; we are only ourselves, but fortunately ourselves are more than our selves, since we are parasimplices. The Magician knows this, knows us, intimately; the Magician is us, any of us, when we accept all of what we are - fearlessly, foolishly, fully.

 

The Magician represents, above all, the mystical process by which the unknowable objective is transcended to become subjectively real. This most crucial mystery is the beginning of all magic: it is the creatio ex nihilo, the divine spark without which the world remains meaningless and void.

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.

The whole world in His hands

"In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe;
therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe." ~ David Bohm

 

 

 

 

So yesterday we talked, not especially transparently, about how one goes about deconstructing oneself in order to mirror the world around one. We didn't really get into the why of it - curiosity about the transcendental seems both an incongruously casual aim for such an all-encompassing task, and to some extent a mismatch of concepts (how can one be curious about a subject one cannot intellectually grasp?) - and we aren't going to today, either. Why is a very important question; in fact, it may be the only question, but it's off-topic (is it?).

 

We're going to dodge 'why' for the moment because the transcendent doesn't truck with why. The question denotes purpose - which can have meaning only in the context of an outcome state different from the present state (that's actually too simple; conservatism is a legitimate purpose if its viewed as opposing an organic trend in the current metastate towards transformation, although the subtle difference between the two may only be apparent to a sufficiently Zenoic examination). The transcendental, which is always everywhere equally immanent upon the subjective, has no purpose - all possibilities are equally within and beyond the transcendental.

 

We're instead going to look at what, which is to say we're going to consider identity again. Specifically, we're going to consider identity from the perspective of the transcendental, which means we're going to indulge again in vague analogies. We'd mentioned the Aleph, the point that contains the whole universe; that represents one extreme of the possibility space (if we suspend for a moment our bourgeois notions about particles sharing space and time coordinates - think of it as a Paulian conversion). But for a probability space to exist, it has to contain all the possibilities. The mirrors we talked about yesterday clearly lie some way along a continuum from the universally accessible max-local Aleph to the locally accessible universal mirror (the parasimplex). There should, indeed, be a far limit to that continuum: the point which doesn't partake of the universe at all, the transcendent immanent upon the void. We call this singularity, and it's another terrifically useful and important concept that we'll hit up in another metanow.

 

We could advance the hypothesis that every entity in the apparently objective universe around us lies somewhere upon this continuum - but then the transcendental would be immanent upon the objective as well as the subjective, which would mean that objective and subjective map perfectly across the transcendental (it has to be across the transcendental, because objective and subjective are necessarily estranged). It is certainly possible that such a perfect mapping exists, but there is no reason why it must; accordingly, the transcendental may indeed be immanent upon such perfectly-mapped objectives and subjectives, but should also be immanent upon the conceivable subjective which maps to nothing objectively real - to rephrase, the transcendent immanesces upon impression and idea alike.

 

And this means that there can conceivably exist in the world objects which are merely objective; objects which are merely subjective; and objects which partake of the character of the Aleph, and in some fashion bridge the divide between the two. And that means that what we talked about before, about making ourselves a mirror, might really be overcomplicating things. It might be simpler to find a thing, or a system of things, that offer us a different sort of mirror. And the reason it might be simpler is that the transcendental is right there in all of us, in the process by which we interrogate the world.

 

But we'll get to that, in the next cycle. 23, skidoo!

 



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.

 

 



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.