It's Elemental

Tag: Unity

  • An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #5

    An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #5

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

    We ended the last installment with a recognition that the Laws of Form naturally led GSB to an understanding of both the necessity and importance of the realm of imaginary numbers.  We will continue this elaboration.

    You are likely familiar with the paradoxical sentence: “This sentence is false.”  Is it false or true?  The answer is yes, and it depends on when you ask me.  It was this kind of paradox that drove Russell and Whitehead into creating their Theory of Logical Types, which was designed specifically to prevent this kind of thing from simply ever coming up in the first place.  GSB is not so limited, and understands the importance of formally including paradox in his calculus.  So how does he deal with this?

    He points out that we are driven to a higher order of logic, one that includes re-entry. In the first Esalen lecture, GSB states that (more…)

  • Notes on the roots of epistemology in recursion

    Notes on the roots of epistemology in recursion

    threefold recursive spiral of knowing
    Unity in distinction, distinction in unity.

    There is a necessary recursion at the very heart of epistemology. Epistemology can never be founded upon a principle of linearity, where thinking traces its origin to something that lies before thinking, and somehow emerges or grows out of it, because the very existence of this “before”, whatever its nature, must always be assumed BY THINKING itself, as a distinction within thinking.

    Therefore, the only proper starting point for an epistemology is the fundamental distinction OF distinction itself, by thinking FOR thinking, which constitutes the basis of all further distinction, and is implicit in it. The fundament of epistemology must be the recursive distinction of distinction. The nature of this self-distinction (distinction of distinction by distiction) is implicitly infinitely recursive, and identifies the very nature of thinking to be at its root one of distinction. Its implicit infinitude is a key aspect of thinking’s foundation, with definite consequences. It means that thinking is fundamentally (not secondarily) FREE: its potential to distinguish is unlimited. There is nothing that lies outside of thinking’s potential.

    The consequences of this are more than epistemological, they are ontological. Thinking, infinite in its potential, is (more…)

  • on destruction

    The role of destruction, and of the working out of polarities, is a subject that has been dealt with an the alchemical tradition for a very long time.  Alchemically, it is understood that the issue you are dealing with, in which you find yourself (the prima materia) MUST go through a process of putrefaction, of fermentation… the individual elements cannot by themselves produce a work of lasting value (a Great Work), but must be destroyed in order to be refined.  The refined elements then have the capacity to ‘marry’ the other elements to form a higher, more integrated, more complex and simple unity which ennobles and embodies the transformation of the worst parts of ‘the matter’.

    All diagnoses are misdiagnoses because they stay at the level of the overt fact, and do not take into account the necessary inclusion of relationship, reversal, and the whole.  The image of the fireweed and the pinecone are examples in nature of the aspect of the Fire element in which destruction is required for new life.  In this sense, the destruction is viewed not as a negative process but as a transformative one, in which the potentials of the lower state are realizable only through their passing away, and indeed, it is their very passing away which creates the space (Air element) into which the potential new state can flow, because room is made for it.

    The same pattern occurs in the human being all the time – we do not transform without the heat of the Fire, also known as the Will – but not a will directed towards a specific absolute (an Earth), but what is known as an ‘open will’, which is just the part which maintains itself by transforming itself through its own death into a new state…

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