LOGOS

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Void

Immanence

Evocation

Energy

All laws are geometrical in nature. Before the Universe spewed out of the dimensionless point of the Cosmic Egg, there was only a nothingness without moment or place. Creativity, creator and creation each undifferentiated from the other by virtue of ‘being’ in potential rather than in reality. Then the Word of God gave rise to its utterance. Out of the primal burst of energy came forth form, life and consciousness.

Euclidian geometry describes dimensional increase as a bootstrap process of point to line to plane to solid. An intangible amount of nothingness conceived as a dimensionless point, an infinite number of these points found within any given line …. and onwards, up to the three dimensional reality of a solid derived from an infinite stack of planes of no thickness. Each dimensional stage being the sum of an infinitude of the previous, perhaps culminating in a infinitude of the third dimension giving rise to the possibility of a fourth, matter taking on the attributes of temporal existance?

This sections attempts to visualise the process by which this absence of an anything tangible can become endowed with the potentialities for space and time.

n the search for the infinitissimal it was once thought that there could be nothing smaller, by definition, than the atom particle. Unfortunately in the course of their research a plethora of elements became apparent, the logic of which indicated a sub-atomic order of ever smaller or smallest of entities. Finally an atom was successfully split to reveal the sub-elemental world of protons, electrons and neutrons. The bedrock of physical reality, it was now confirmed, comprised little more than positive, negative or neutral electrical charges.

Then the neutron too was split and out poured a veritable cornucopia of ‘events’; the improbableness of which obliged a tactical retreat to the drawing board. The solution, when it came, was the neutrino. A particle with neither mass nor charge, possessing a path that spiralled and little else that could be sensibly described as the stuff of matter. And that should have been the end – or root – of it, what possibly could there be that was even smaller? The very thought of which seemed evasive and beyond the ability to think it.

Once a critical mass of physicists had become convinced of the reality of this smallest and fundamental atom of reality the search for neutrinos miraculously started turning them up. And the chain reaction didn’t stop there. Further exotic, evermore ephemeral entities were speculated and again, once given a satisfactory rationale for their existance, these started turning up in the experimental data too. The almost supernatural nature of this process caused at least one Nobel laureate Physicist to call for these phenonema to be refered to not as particles but more correctly, as “manifestations”.

“In purely physical terms they have little reality. Only in the poetry of mathematical symbolism is any kind of consistency apparent. Perhaps they only exist in consciousness, and can be made manifest only in retrospect, like the memory of a dream. Perhaps too, as in dream interpretation, we should be paying more attention to the image and wasting less time on the words.”
Lifetide Lyall Watson

or put another way:

“There are good grounds for the awesome theory that scientific discovery is the projection into matter of the exploration of the human mind.”
Rhythms of Vision Lawrence Blair

or maybe

“Subjectivity is the only truth.
Kiekegaard

Today, for want of more precise terminology, we are asked to consider such theoretical concepts as ‘charm’ and ‘color’. Added to this leap of faith is the notion of particles being both discrete entities and wave fronts that, on the quantum level, are instantaneously connected to everything else. And that’s not the end of it; wavelengths aren’t digital but analogue, they are not nouns or things but more akin to verbs or actions, and their values range from the infinitissimal to the infinite. On calculating the energies this implies it has been computed that within every point of the universe there must exist an infinitude of energy. And, as Einstein taught us, energy means matter, implying a universe within every point of the universe primed for release. In fact many experimental observations support this speculation by virtue of the regular intervention of virtual particles, particles of variable mass but of no duration, leaping the barrier between this reality and others that are unspecifiable. Existing and interacting in contravention of the fourth dimension of time or within a slice of time the equivalent of a dimensionless point, time compressed to a timeless moment.

Furthermore, the thinking now encompasses the inclusion of more dimensions than just the four. On the macro level the universe makes more sense in terms of a ‘unified theory’ if the calculations include a fifth, akin to time flowing across a plane rather than along a vector. On the micro level, within the realm of the ‘manifestations’, there may be eleven dimensions or more, as if the process of dimensional increase precipitated by the Big Bang is still in the process of being brought into tangible existance.

“In the beginning when the will of the King began to take effect, he engraved signs into the heavenly sphere that surrounded him. Within the most hidden recess a dark flame issued from the mystery of eyn sof, the Infinite, like a fog forming in the unformed – enclosed in the ring of that sphere, neither white nor black, neither red nor green, of no color whatever. Only after this flame began to assume size and dimension, did it produce radiant colors. From the innermost center of the flame sprang forth a well out of which colors issued and spread upon everything beneath, hidden in the mysterious of eyn sof.

The well broke through and yet did not break through the ether of the sphere. It could not be recognised at all until a hidden, supernal point shone forth under the impact of the final breaking through,*

“Beyond this point nothing can be known. Therefore it is called resbit, beginning – the first word out of the ten by means of which the universe has been created.”
Zohar – The Book of Splendour C13th text of Jewish mysticism

* This primordial point is identified by the Zohar with the wisdom of God – hokmah the second of the ten sephiroth of the Holy Cabbalah or Tree of Life, the ideal thought of Creation.

What a load of tosh I hear you think but is this any more unreasonable than the assumptions of quantum mechanics, or geometry come to that? Consider the following quote from an interview given to Rolling Stone magazine on his 90th birthday ……

“We came to geometry. The teacher made a point on the blackboard, she erased it and said ‘That doesn’t exist.’ She made a row of points and said, ‘That’s a line and it doesn’t exist either.’ She made a number of parallel lines and put them together to form a plane and said it didn’t exist. And then she stacked the planes one on top of the other so that they made a cube, and she said that existed.

“I wondered how you could get existance out of non-existance to the third power. It seemed unreasonable. So I asked her, ‘How old is it?’ The teacher said I was just being facetious. I asked her what it weighed and I asked how hot it was and she got angry. The cube just didn’t have anything that I thought was existance.”
Buckminster Fuller

Later on Buckminster Fuller was to develop a geometrical system that answered his queries, that had less to do with overthrowing his teacher’s explanation as with re-investing it with a degree of scientific rigour that, incidentally, would have been familiar to the cabbalists.

The basic premises of co-ordinate geometry predate even Euclid. He got them from Pythagoras who in turn was taught these by Chaldean priest/scientists under whom he had studied in Thebes and Babylon. According to Pythagoras the Chaldeans were the guardians of ancient wisdom dating back to the dawn of civilisation, from a time when the Gods were thought to have walked amongst us.

Likewise, the esoteric knowledge of the Cabbalists was traditionally spoken of as the laws of God, given expression in the snaking energy spiralling around the Trees’ of Life and Knowledge. Handed down to that other well known initiate into the ancient wisdom, the Great Trickster and messenger of the gods, the Egyption High Priest Moses on Mount Sinai …. on the first engraved tablet, engraved on both sides, subsequently smashed in anger because the chosen ones were already taking the – as yet to be received – sacred gift of immortality as granted. Being a consummate political manipulator Moses entrusted his “forbidden” secret knowledge of the Cabbalah with the priests of the tribe of Levites and then, to placate the “evil” thinking Yahweh and source of divine sin of knowledge, they were sent armed into the festivities to perform a ritual blood-letting. The day of revelation postponed finally arrived sometime in the 13th Century when, together with Islamists and Christians, a new transcendant religion was attempted within the melting pot of Spain. Mathematics based upon the inclusion of the zero and the Chivalric Code being the contributions to the “Trismagestis” of the other two. The embryonic movement was subsequently put down – in the usual manner – by the Inquisition, prompting, amongst other terrible consequences, a second diaspora of the Jews and a renewal of the crusade against the Moslem ‘Infidels’. The spread of Occultism was the residual consequence.

Those first tablets on Mt Sinai supposedly revealed the means by which humanity could once again return to the Garden, eat of the Tree of Life and become as equals in communion with the ‘Gods’. The plural referring to either two Gods or one God in his two forms, a point I’ll come to later in the second section , both male and female, a zero and a one, circle and line – a communion of polarities symbolised through the image of a spiral.

Scholastic research of the origins of the Bible reveals otherwise of course. Although based on a mythology predating even Abraham’s flight from the Sumerian city of Ur, much of the Book of Exodus can be attributed to the theology of the Mithraic Persians following their defeat of the Assyrians and the return of Daniel and his fellow Israelites to their homeland.

Nevertheless, the prior attempt of the Assyrians to remove all evidence of a history that predated their own civilisation notwithstanding, we can be fairly sure that there was a direct continuum of knowledge, exchanged between the priesthoods of all the high cultures of the Middle East, going back to at least the first, if not the greatest, of the ancient civilisations, the Sumerian. In an ironic way it could be that the Assyrian mission to act as a force for the end of history opened the door for a return to the true mission of the Sumerian Priesthood, purified and re-invigorated.

The common understanding reinforced by the Persians, who not only recovered the sacred lost books of the Bible but rebuilt the Temple, was that beneath the seperate and distinct belief systems of the many peoples of the region, there existed a common thread that linked each to the other through truthes commonly held by all, irrespective of the forms taken in their presentation to the uninitiated.

For Pythagoras – and I’ll be coming back to him later too – the truth behind all truthes lay in the relationships between number and harmonic vibration. In what Herman Hesse likened to a ‘Glass-Bead Game’.

“What it lacked in those days was the capacity for universality, for rising above all the disciplines. It was the achievement of one individual which brought the Glass-Bead Game almost in one leap to an awareness of its potentialities and thus to the verge of its capacity for universal elaboration. He invented for the Glass-Bead Game the principles of a new language, a language of symbols and formulae, in which mathematics and music played an equal part, so that it became possible to combine astronomical and musical formulae, to reduce mathematics and music to a common denominator, as it were.”

“This language, like the ancient Chinese script, should be able to express the most complex matters graphically, without excluding individual imagination and inventiveness, in such a way as to be understandable to all scholars of the world.”

For Hesse’s friend, the artist Paul Klee, this language should allow one to find the …

“distant point at the origin of creation; where I sense a single formula for man, animal, plant, fire, water, air and all the forces surrounding us.”

a unified theory of everything made comprehensible through

“a device that comprises the complete contents and values of our culture.”

The term ‘culture’ should not be confused with the more prosaic use of the term, as in ‘pop’ culture or cultural ‘differences’. By ‘our’ culture Klee is refering to a universal culture, a meta-culture if you like, whose influence is felt by all. But where is the evidence for this none too obvious premise of a meta-culture, the foundation and origin of all the others?

Within the field of Comparative Mythology there exists a profound enigma. For running through seemingly unconnected and isolated belief systems, scattered throughout history and across all continents, there flows one universal theme, common to all times and locations – the motif of a sacred Tree. For Carl Jung it was one of the great archetypes of the human psyche. The Tree is our common, collective image of the link between heaven and earth, the profane and the sacred, a cypher for the source of life, transfiguration and the transcendance of death through rebirth. It is both a symbol of knowledge, of how the something emerged from a nothing, and a representation of the animation of matter, of consciousness and the genesis of gods. It is Ysgrill of the ‘Hanged Man’ tarot card, the crucifix of the New Testament, the Axis Mundi, the Christmas Tree, the source of immortality sought by Gilgamesh and the forbidden fruit that led Prometheus to steal fire.

For the ‘Star Wars’ screenplay advisor and comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell, writing in the revised introduction to his seminal, four volume text “The Masks of God”,
“My studies have brought me to the realisation that there is a unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony, with its themes announced, developed, amplified and turned about, distorted, reasserted, and, today, in agrand fortissimo of all sections sounding together, irresistibly advancing to the same kind of mighty climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge.”

To return to my opening thoughts. Now try to imagine an impossibly small dimensionless point. A point so insubstantial that it could be thought of as even less substantial than even the thought of it. How can we distinguish this virtual thought of a point from one posited in reality? The answer, in terms of these drawings, is when the non-dimensional point has taken on the attributes of a four-dimensional entity, and as a consequence has became capable of materialising.

From this base premise I progress the dynamic forward. If a point needs to be endowed with all the properties of dimensional increase to attain a potential for existance then why not the line, plane and solid? With each stage the invocation of existance draws closer to becoming a tangible fact of reality. If a line is an infinitude of points, a plane an infinitude of lines and so forth, then a point is an infinitude of nothingness, a dimensionless point containing the potential for existance. A dimensionless point may not be anything that can be thought of as real. Is the existance of one more real than the mere thought of it?

And once upon a time, in a moment before the beginning, the nothingness took on the attributes of spacial existance and time, and out spewed our universe. Is this any less wondrous than the alternative speculation of a divine agency exterior to rather than implicit within the process of creation?

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
The Gospel according to St John – The King James’ authorised translation

And so God uttered the Word that gave birth to Himself.

The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.
Tao te Ching – Lao Tzu