(A full PDF of this article can be had here.)
George Spencer Brown (in his spirit, I would like to say: “Let George Spencer Brown = GSB”), a logician, engineer, and teacher, wrote a curious little book called Laws of Form, that inspired countless interesting people of widely varying backgrounds. The book is not a book of mathematics, nor is it a book of logic, although if you were to read it this is likely what you’d say. It is, rather, an attempt to enact something prior to both. Indeed, GSB feels that his work actually forms (meaning both “is” and “shapes”) “the basic forms [same double-meaning] underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science” (p. v of the 1972 edition).
If you haven’t read Laws of Form (LoF), I quite recommend it, and it is actually quite short. Even if you don’t want to follow along with the meaty theorems and proofs, the prose and context is definitely worth chewing on. What is fascinating to me is that the work can also be read with an esoteric eye, which is to say, with a sensitivity to the form and nature of spiritual experiences. This is not at all a departure from what GSB intended: in his other works he quite openly discusses this connection (see Only Two Can Play This Game published under his pen name, James Keys). Even in LoF he prefaces the preface with this quote from Blake:
“Tho’ obscur’d, this is the form of the Angelic land.”
So what I would like to do is to show that within the LoF are a number of coherent relations to principles that are rightly considered esoteric: they are (more…)