It's Elemental

Tag: Token

  • An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #6

    An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #6

    (New readers will want to start with the first installment.)

    We ended the last installment by discussing the esoteric nature of the injunction.  We continue this exploration, and bring this series to a close.

    LoF p. 81

    • In the command “let the crossing be to the state indicated by the token” we at once make the token doubly meaningful, first as an instruction to cross, secondly as an indicator (and thus a name) of where the crossing has taken us. It was an open question, before obeying this command, whether the token would carry an indication at all. But the command determines without ambiguity the state to which the crossing is made and thus, without ambiguity, the indication which the token will henceforth carry.

    This re-affirms that the mark has both a first and second-order character: it names the state of its content (its indication), and it is an instruction (its injunction) to mark that name, to make that distinction which yields that state. Thus every mark is both an indication and an injunction.  It is an indication of a content and an injunction on how to get there.

    LoF p. 82

    • We may consider how far, in ordinary life, we must observe the spirit rather than the letter of an injunction, and must develop the habitual capacity to interpret any injunction we receive by screening it against other indications of what we ought to do. In mathematics we have to unlearn this habit in favour of accepting an injunction literally and at once. This is why an author of mathematics must take such great pains to make his injunctions mutually permissive. Otherwise these pains, which rightly rest with the author, will fall with sickening import upon the reader, who, by virtue of his relationship with respect to the author, may be in no position to accept them.)

    All this actually relates to the task of the esoteric teacher, who (more…)

  • An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #4

    An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #4

    (New readers will want to start with the first installment.)

    We ended the last installment having come to realize something of the esoteric significance of the taijitu, or yin-yang, form, in something of an extended tangent. We return now to the text.

    GSB himself seemed to understand the importance of the Laws of Form, even if there were some of these more subtle specifics which were not apparent to him (or at least which he did not explicitly recognize).  Having reached this point (literally we are still on page 1 of LoF), the vast majority of the rest of the work in LoF is seen to be secondary.  Yet there are many valuable indications which deserve connection to esoteric principles, and the point of this exploration is to show that such connections are not arbitrary. So, to return to the actual content of LoF now, after this long but foundational detour, we can note that he says:

    LoF p. 5

    • Let any token [of the mark] be intended as an instruction to cross the boundary of the first distinction.

    That is, every mark is an invitation to cross it; every distinction is a call to make that distinction, not to simply point it out, but also to DO it, to MAKE the distinction.  In other words, the whole thing is ACTIVE, not passive, it is not descriptive but PRESCRIPTIVE.  Of course, the esoteric significance of this should be obvious, because precisely what distinguishes esoteric work from, say, philosophy or other disciplines, is (more…)