Author: SRA

‘Whatever gets you through the night; It’s all right, it’s all right

Whatever gets you through your life; It’s all right, it’s all right

Do it wrong, or do it right;
It’s all right, it’s all right

Whatever gets you to the light;
It’s all right, it’s all right’

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The story goes that John Lennon [1974] first heard these lines, which he later put to song, on the radio while listening to a brilliantly expressive deep-south Black Preacher.

‘To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.–Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.’

Hamlet: 3;1.

Today, the subject of ‘Immortality’ is never raised in respectable circles [‘Can’t we stick to Football and the Sitcoms?’]. Especially so in the West. But the subject of ‘Immortality’ is in fact at the very heart of the Christian West.

Apostolic authority from Deacon to Pope has its legitimizing root in one event. The event of Jesus rising from the grave not just in spirit, but ‘In Flesh and Blood’, his meeting with the apostles, and his choosing of Peter as the first Pope, the rock [Petra] on which the Church was to be built. Christianity as we know it begins here.

Jesus’ ‘Resurrection in Eternal Life’ as testified to by the apostles was the Miracle that begat the formal Church. In the much cited line from Romans: ‘If you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved‘.

The Resurrection of Jesus in ‘Flesh and Blood’ was the affirming seal that legitimized the new apostolic Church. If you question the apostles and their authority the entire spool unwinds [and Magus and Mark and Mary Magdalene did some serious unwinding ].

When you kneel at the pew, you kneel to this, the central Christian affirmation: Rebirth [Re-natus] into Eternal Life.

If the ‘Subject-Object’ Divide was the opening binary, the one on which all other binaries mount, the ‘Binary of Birth and Death’ is the closing binary, the ‘Point of No-Return’.

In the Dharmic Tradition, for those like Yājñavalkya who began the search all those many years ago, the finale, the ultimate crown, was to be more than trophy-wives and a yacht docked off Cannes.

They were looking for something much bigger. The grandest prize of all. Something called: ‘The Other Shore’.

‘Death’, as the Poets have written about for a thousand years, is the primal fear that fronts all mundane fright. The pivotal verses in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad are in fact a response by Yājñavalkya to his wife Maitreyi’s query on Death. It’s the opening throw.

In this Tradition there is no consoling advise proffered that you will ‘Live Forever’-a thoroughly terrifying idea. No ‘All Day Golf’ in some heavenly Golf-Course; no ’72 Virgins’ at night.

Rather, things get a mite confusing. It no longer is clear what ‘Death’ means if you can’t find the file documenting your ‘Birth’.

The Unborn [Ajatham]. The Unarisen [Abhutam].

In the celebrated lines of a Satori [‘Enlightenment’] verse: 

‘How wondrous! How wondrous! There is no Birth and Death from which one has to escape; nor is there any supreme knowledge [Bodhi]after which one has to strive…all the complications [Koans] numbering 1700 are not even worth the trouble of describing.’

If you can say: ‘I am asleep!’, that’s convincing evidence that you are awake. [Is that a Self-Eating Expression?]

The distinction of ‘Awake’ and ‘Asleep’ is always and only made in a wakeful state. 

I tell you about my dream when, and only when, both of us are awake. We know nothing about ‘Dream’ and ‘Sleep’ except as very wakeful ideas. [Doctors reassuringly measure sleep-meters only when they are awake, thank you very much.]

None of this hair-splitting lessens the veracity of my pronouncement today that I slept like a baby last night.

We can give the Divide some more Gravitas.

All talk of ‘Death’ is always and only done when ‘Alive’. You just can’t wink your way out of this one.

You really know nothing about ‘Death’ except as gossip from some very alive people.

All this is in effect a sleight-of-hand, a fast wave of the hand by the Divide-Magician who hopes you are not looking too closely.

But this slip when carried forward in sprees of grand abstract elaborations [as in the University] can get seriously misleading. If you start telescoping such situations, soon enough you will have totally lost the thread.

Yet no amount of double-talk will convince me otherwise that my dear great-aunt, bless her good soul, is resolutely dead.

Dhukkha-The First Truth of the Buddha-Dharma. The word Dhukkha commonly translated as ‘Suffering’ seems to have originated in the mis-aligned wheels of a riding-carriage. The invariant element of the Human Condition.

While the lower Sūtras meant for a mass audience emphasized the promised ‘End of Suffering’, the higher Sūtras mock the claim.

This is the Tradition of Upakausalya, ‘Skillful Means’: ‘To Speak at the Speed of Listening of the Listener’. [As one early text explains: ‘As a learned grammarian would even teach the alphabet to a beginner’.’]

When Socrates asks Parmenides to relate his own long journey, he first goes silent. Then: ‘I feel like the old race horse at Ibycus, who trembles at the start of the chariot race knowing from long experience what is in store for him.’

‘Hey! 30 years on the Mat and not even a spot of shamanic-power? A short bolt of ecstasy? A minor miracle or two?’

This Trek is not for the intellectual tourist or the levitating mystic. It doesn’t come easy and it doesn’t come quick. Hold-on to your day-job if you are not sure.

Truth is an imperative for those who seek it. And it is not compromised by payoffs and penalties. But in this regressed Age plan, purpose, penalty and prize are self-evident implacable verities to the to the modern graduate who moves proudly to a Pavlovian shimmy.

But there is a payoff. And a pretty good one at that.

‘I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.’

 

From the Vajracchedikā [‘Diamond-Cutter’] Sūtra [See Front Page]:

‘Subhuti, what do you think? Let no one say the Tathagata cherishes the idea: I must liberate all living beings. Allow no such thought, Subhuti.

Wherefore? Because in reality there are no living beings to be liberated by the Tathagata. If there were living beings for the Tathagata to liberate, He would partake in the idea of selfhood, personality entity, and separate individuality.’

A millennia later here is Gaudapada, the founder of Advaitha Vedantha, from his Karika:

‘Uttama Satya [the highest truth]  is …[the realization] that there is neither dissolution nor creation, neither bondage nor liberation, no one seeking liberation, no one attaining liberation.‘

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Absolute Freedom is absolutely absurd. For to be unfree is part of the prerogative of being free. ‘Freedom’ in opposition to ‘Bondage’ originates in Modeled binary construction. ‘Divine Reason’: the old-fashioned term.

Do you smell the presence of the Self-Eating Expression hereabouts?

I am free to be unfree. To be Liberated is to be freed of trying to be free. ‘Liberation’ [Mukthi, Moksha] unlike the expression ‘Freedom’ has an intentional connotation of release.

And Liberation cohabits with no one. You cannot seek ‘Happiness’ and ‘Liberation’ at the same time [in spite of Thomas Jefferson’s silver prose].

‘Happiness’ is a particularly dotty chase. The assured way to miss it is to seek it. Take your happiness when it comes; but don’t compromise on your freedom to be unhappy.

The auditory Expression ‘AUM’, as was the expression ‘Brahman‘, was a Mantric term meant for Yagnic formalities before it took on conventional meaning.

‘AUM’ is made up of three pronounced terms, the beginning vowel ‘A’, the ending consonant ‘M’, and the middle ‘oo!’. And a terminal component ‘Silence’, the necessary binary complement that makes audible the sonant expressions. They, between their stretch capture all of spoken sound and symbolically mark all ‘Expression’ [The ‘Whole’].

In time ‘Silence’, in the hands of the Pious takes on a new meaning. It is now the mystic ‘Immaculately Pure’ [Turiya].

This ‘Immaculately Pure’ now gets foisted with aspects and characteristics and overlaid with inscrutable connotations. As with all other such reifications it takes on a life of its own.

The same parallel regression occurs much later in the evolution of the Symbol ‘0’ when it is reduced to the Concept of Nothing, the Idea of Absence. Instead of the assignment of ‘Purity’, the Symbol ‘0’ is given ‘Properties’ by the Mathematicians. See later Posts.

The Press Release from the venerable Bodleian Library at Oxford was put-out just as I had decided on publishing this Site. A coincidence demanding acknowledgment.

Carbon dating reveals earliest origins of zero symbol

‘Reading from right to left the small dot zero is the seventh character at the bottom right of the manuscript.

Carbon dating shows an ancient Indian manuscript has the earliest recorded origin of the zero symbol. The Bakhshali manuscript is now believed to date from the 3rd or 4th Century, making it hundreds of years older than previously thought…‘

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London, Glorious London. The weather is damp as ever, but the food has markedly improved. And I still get lost in its streets and parks and pubs and museums, happily so.

The original print of: The
‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra is at the British Museum in London.

The original document [The Bakhshali Manuscript] is an hour away at the Bodleian at Oxford.

An hours bus-ride will connect Dot and Text.

By the 10 Century CE, its meanings lost in the land of its birth, the Symbol ‘0’ headed West. The Symbol stops for a tour of Baghdad and Moorish Spain before finally docking in Venice.

The Clergy, users of the Abacus, were unimpressed. The Roman script at that time didn’t have a symbol for Absence. But the economy was booming. Zero-Balance Bookkeeping had just been discovered. And this new symbol just fit the bill of the emerging mercantile classes.

[It was not the fierce love for esoteric truth from the mysterious East. The Symbol helped make money. A refreshingly sensible reason. That’s why the Symbol ‘0’ came West.]

If the early philosophical links with the West were Greek, the first mathematical links were Italian. It begins with ‘Fibonacci’ and his book: Modus Indorum. [‘The Greatest Western Mathematician of the Middle Period’]

The trend to conceptualization accelerates with Guiseppe Peano [1858-1932] and the first of his five celebrated postulates: ‘Zero is a natural number’. The Symbol now is definitionally a Concept.

The Peano Postulates have a long reach. Russell and Whitehead’s encyclopedic Principia Mathematica began as an attempt to extend Peano’s work. Kurt Gödel’s celebrated Theorem was in response to it. And it finally lead to the question: ‘What is Mathematical Truth?’ See Posts.

A Turing Machine is a device that uses a set of rules to work a list of symbols on a length of tape. And it was the progenitor of the idea that became the modern computer. Or more accurately, what we call ‘Software’.

Kurt Gödel‘s paper was published in 1930. Alan Turing applied Gödel‘s work to solve issues fundamental in the birthing of Modern Software [‘Undecidability’; The ‘Halting Problem’, et al]. And Academic Departments went about marveling at the quirkiness of ‘Strange Loops’.

Within a decade of Gödel’s Theorem, pioneering Mathematicians had laid down the blueprint for what would emerge as the Digital-Age and the celebration of binary-truths. Today’s: ‘Age of Information’.

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What is wrong with the Binary-Gods? What is it with brilliant Logicians who see too far? Why are the deities of Consistency and Rule so indifferent to their pioneering children? Godel died from self-imposed starvation, according to the coroner; Turing, from cyanide poisoning.]

From an earlier Post: ‘There is no binary-ground to be found that can be settled-in, no ground that you can alight on as foundational truth. There is nothing to cling to nor is there a need to cling to anything.’

If you do find a ground to alight on, something to cling to, you have stopped short of Not-Two.

The settled conviction of this absence needed to be expressed in summary form. This was the intent of the original construct, the Symbol ‘0’. Here is its very brief history.

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The Symbol ‘0’ originates as an intuition with Yājñavalkya’s Algorithm a millennia earlier and finds its completion in the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra.

Yājñavalkya’s original formula was as a verb [Neti!; ‘Not-This’], an Act that must scuttle [‘Eat’] itself in the rounding before its convergence as True Nothing, Absolute Absence. And this convergence finds its completion in the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra [See front page].

But if the rounding is incomplete, instead of finding ‘True Nothing’ you will in its place, find a ‘Something’.

The Verb [Neti] becomes a Noun and ‘True Nothing’ becomes simply: ‘Nothing’, a late-stage binary-expression: ‘Nothing; Something’; ‘Absence; Presence’, et al. A Noun to which you then assign dimensions and properties. This is the Concept of Nothing, the Idea of Absence, an altogether different-animal [as in: -1<0+1].

To use the illustration by the Scholar-Monk Chandrakirti [around 600 CE]: ‘It is as if I ask a shopkeeper: ’What do you have to sell?’. And he replies: ‘I have nothing to sell’. And I say: ‘That will do. Sell me this nothing then.‘

There is no such thing as ‘True Nothing’, as Absolute Absence. Or in the earlier language, there is no binary that can be alighted on as the terminus. This is the original intent and meaning of the Symbol ‘0’.

Any proper sighting of Not-Two is incomplete until you yourself arrive at this conviction. In this sense, Not-Two and the Symbol ‘0’ are firmly related, as Head to the other as Tail. Miss one, miss the other.

The Decimal System of Number Representation [Sanskrit ‘Das‘, for Ten] births within 200 years of the oral-rendering of the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra. The core infrastructure that holds together the modern world of Model and Multiplicity.

Its first expression left the 10th place blank. It was later followed by the insertion of a dot and in time enlarged to the present Circle. Outside it were the cardinal integers 1 to 9, likely the planetary count, from Astrology/Astronomy, the parent-disciplines of Mathematics.

Importantly, there is no ‘Error’ [‘Accuracy and Error’ being themselves binary-constructions] in the present use of the Decimal System and the use of the Symbol as Concept. The problem arises only when the results are not limited to the assumptions, context and conditions of the analysis [which is often].

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The schools of Śūnyathā [‘That-ness’] were the first to take this route [Śūnya-‘Nothing’ in its contemporary meaning]. The term Śūnyathā itself originates in the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra and the various ‘Doctrines of Codependence’ that define it all have their roots in ‘This Unformulated Principle'[ See front page]. The laying out of Its evolution and later regression will take a full post. I’ll get to it.

The Gödel Iceberg is common knowledge among the mathematically-inclined and there is a large readable literature out there on Gödel, Russell’s Paradox and the rest. I’ll limit myself to the outlines.

Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead wanted to produce a founding Bible that built up the rules of Mathematics from the ground-up.

So they began with Peano’s work and titled their opus Principia Mathematica. [1910; Latin titles are always dangerous, vide Wittgenstein and his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus.]

The celebrated 3-volume opus, the Titanic, was among other much grander ambitions, an attempt to resolve the conflicts between the observing Subject and his inclusion or exclusion in a Set. The issue never found a resolution until Kurt Gödel came along [Russell and Whitehead had to use a variety of sequenced exceptions to hold the logic together].

In 1952, Harvard University honored the Logician Kurt Gödel with an award that read: [For] ‘The discovery of the most significant mathematical truth of the century.’

The award was for Gödel‘s seminal paper: ‘On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems.’

Gödel proved that the consistency of any Formal System cannot be proven using the methods of that System without simultaneously violating the basis of consistency of that System itself [There were other issues such as ‘Completeness’. But this will do for now.] Can you sniff the Self-Loop? 

In a footnote to his paper Gödel notes: ‘Any Epistemological Antinomy, such as the ‘Liar’s Paradox’ could be used for a similar proof’. Gödel is referring to a famously curious shout by Epimenides the Cretan who declared: ‘All Cretans are liars!’

‘All Cretans are liars’ is close. It would be closer if, unless you happen to be a Cretan yourself, it read: ‘All men and women are liars’, for then it would include you, the observer, in any interpretation of this claim. Better still: ‘All Words Lie!’ A full-blooded Self-Eating Expression.

[The most transparent Self-Eating Expressions tend to include words like: Always; Never; Everybody; Nobody; Nothing; Everything, and so on. Nice slippery words that can drown you if you don’t watch out.]

A Self-Eating Expression is meant to be unwound sequentially in the ‘Backward Step’. It is not to be stared at as a static logical complexity which is the way it has been treated in the professional literature. That just sinks you deeper into the swamp. The only way to get to its root is to buy yourself a Meditation Mat.

Are Logico-Mathematical Truths intrinsic, hard-wired into Nature? Or are they a man-made convenience, a modeled-understanding of Self and World?

Following Gödel‘s Theorem a professor of mathematics solemnly intoned: ‘[Gödel’s Theorem] requires that the ultimate foundations of Mathematics and all its derivative truths remain a mystery’.

Less kindly, it suggests that all Mathematical Modeling cannot be differentiated in any provable way from a manufactured reality in indeterminate Self-Loop.

Mathematician’s hurry to defend their work by drawing lines around terms like ‘Axiomatic’ and ‘Formal’. They are red-herrings. The issues with Self-Reference go deep; the repeatedly exploding contradictions and paradoxes in Logic and Mathematics cannot be band-aided.

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There is a 125 page book by Nagel and Newman [2008] called ‘Gödel’s Proof’ [dedicated to Bertrand Russell] which tries to explain it to the lay-reader. Like my shelved copy of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ [which ran 1225 pages in its first edition], I have yet to finish it.

‘What’s this?’ I asked the young lady, a curator-assistant,
walking alongside me.

‘Oh, that!’ She said, ‘That’s Pollock. It’s painting about Painting.’

In old Athens, they were giving Aristotle, the founder of Classical Logic, a hard time.

The philosophers in the generation before Aristotle, more alert to the Self-Loop, were bickering about the Principle of Contradiction. And this, Aristotle thought was just not fair.

Modern Scientists and Philosophers are made of tougher stuff. They don’t wait for approval from any Village-Elder.

In Metaphysics, Aristotle complains:

‘Those who are genuinely perplexed believe…[the] co-presence of contraries is an elementary fact..

So Anaxagoras declares everything to be mingled in everything else.. Democritus too says that the Void and the Plenum are alike present in any part..

Empedocles say’s: ‘As men themselves changed, so came a corresponding change of mind.’ Homer too is said apparently to have held the same opinion.

Parmenides declares himself..in the same way: ‘What fills [Man’s] body fills his thought.’

Xenophanes [who was the teacher of Parmenides] seems not to have understood..material or formal explanation, but gazing at the whole sky says: ‘Unity is God!’.

And from this conviction there blossomed the most extreme of their doctrines, the philosophy of Heraclitus as held by Cratylus, who finally thought one ought not to speak at all, but simply pointed his finger and censured Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step into the same river twice–for he himself believed that one could not do so even once.’

This subject called Mathematics, in fact it’s larger family, the complex of Analytics that fall under the banner of Logico-Mathematical Method, is erected on multiple pillars.

If they shake an inch the entire structure will swing by a mile. So it’s a good idea to step down with a flashlight and take a look at these foundations every now and then.

The first and most important is the pillar labeled with the little word ‘ Is’ [See the Posts on ‘Being’]. The second of the pillars is the Principle of Contradiction. A third, often ignored, is the concept of the Tautology.

Here is Professor Bertrand Russell:

‘It is clear that the definition of ‘Logic’ or ‘Mathematics’ must be [newly] sought..[we must] no longer be satisfied [defining] logical propositions as those that follow from the Law of Contradiction..[but] must admit a wholly different class of propositions..[that] all have the characteristic which we
agree..to call Tautology.

For the moment, I do not know how to define ‘Tautology’..I know of none that I feel to be satisfactory, in spite of feeling thoroughly familiar with the characteristic of which a definition is wanted.

At this point, therefore, for the moment, we reach the frontier of knowledge on our backward journey into the logical foundations of Mathematics.’

Honest and finely crafted lines from the co-author of Principia Mathematica. In English: ‘The  ‘[Foundational] Principles of Mathematics’.

Aristotle’s definition of the Principle, which he extolled as: ‘The Surest Principle..itself not an assumption…but a beginning for all other axioms’…the one Principle] which one must have to understand anything whatsoever’, is as follows:

‘It is impossible for the same thing at the same time to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same respect.’

Here is Aristotle in Metaphysics:

‘The possibility of a middle between contraries is excluded: for it is necessary to assert or deny one thing or another. This is clear from the definition of Truth and Falsity: either what is, is affirmed or denied, or else what is not, is affirmed or denied, there can be no middle ground..

Similarly, every thought and concept is expressed as an affirmation or a negation, this is clear from the definition of Truth and Falsity.

Hence also, the frequent saying befalls all such arguments, that they destroy themselves. For he who says that all things are true presents even the statement contrary to his own as true, and therefore his own as not true: whereas he who says that all things are false presents also himself as false.’

Aristotle called such an appeal a ‘Self-Destroying Argument’. A perfect and precise phrase, vintage Aristotle. Does it ring a loud bell?

And here is Immanuel Kant 2,000 years later, from his ‘Critique Of Pure Reason’ [and whose own work was an extension of Aristotle]:

‘The proposition: ‘No subject can have a predicate that contradicts it’ is called the Principle of Contradiction..and we must hold [this Principle] to be the universal and fully sufficient principle of all analytic cognition..and the fact that no cognition can be at variance with this Principle without nullifying itself, constitutes the Principle Sine Qua Non..’

‘No cognition can be at variance with this Principle without nullifying itself’. Can you sense the Self-Loop?

The Principle of Contradiction, the criterion for Logico-Mathematical ‘Proof’, itself has no proof, cannot be proven in a rational framework.

The Self-Destroying Argument: If ‘All things are False’-so is the claim: ‘All things are False!’ If ‘Nothing is True’- so is the declaration: ‘Nothing is True!‘.

But hold on just a second. To say; ‘Nothing is True!’ is not a lie. In fact, I have no idea what it is. For I am firmly in the grip of the Self-Loop. The principal defense of the Principal Principle, Aristotle’s ‘Self-Destroying Argument’ is contained in a Self-Eating Expression.

Why should you not violate the Principle of Contradiction? You should not violate the Principle of Contradiction because if you violate the Principle of Contradiction you thereby contradict yourself and thereby violate the Principle of Contradiction.

Never-Never Land.

The Principal Principle of Logico-Mathematical model, in fact of all ‘Analytical Cognition’ to use Immanuel Kant’s expansive phrase, is the Principle of Contradiction. [In delightful irony, also called ‘ The Principle of Non-Contradiction’.]

Contradiction, from the Latin: Contra Dicere, ‘to speak at-odds, against’. Anytime we use the word ‘Consistency’ [‘Of Course! That makes sense!’] in Mathematics or Language, we are drawing on the Non-Contradiction Principle.

Much of what is called ‘Proof’, a word that makes every kid wet his pants in high-school, is a demonstration of the Internal Consistency of a set of Logico-Mathematical assertions. In other words, that you were not contradicting yourself somewhere in the fine-print.

It is ‘Aristotle’s Principle’; for it was he who had the courage of conviction to place it on center stage. He called it: ‘The First Principle of Rational Knowledge’.

This dominant Principle [Virodha in Sanskrit, literally: ‘conflicted, to be countered’] had been known for centuries but no philosopher before him made as brilliant and forceful a case for what, in his words: ‘one must have to understand anything whatsoever.’

Aristotle’s Principle is the pillar behind the most celebrated claims of High Intellection, of Rationality itself. If you question it, you question everything.

Aristotle’s founding of Classical Logic began as an extension of its truth. And Philosophy and Logic, Language and Mathematics, indeed every subject claiming to be rational has had to make peace with its diktats.

And his defense of this pivotal principle, as laid-out in the next few Posts, is the first application of the Self-Eating Expression in the Western Tradition that I am aware of.

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‘Once one accepts a Logical Contradiction’ observes an eminent and anxious contemporary Physicist ‘one can prove anything one likes. It is the end of Rational-Thought’.

‘The Higgs Boson [a.k.a: ‘God-Particle’] is certain to be found’ assures a high scientist working with CERN in Geneva. ‘It is required to be there by the laws of [theoretical] consistency‘.

The Principle of Non-Contradiction is burdened with not only keeping all Rational-Thought alive but also providing a proper ‘God-Particle’ for the denied scientists.

God-Sighting was indeed confirmed this year, but annoyingly a smaller new techno-particle also showed-up. But the Scientists are on the chase.

The English word ‘Truth’, derives from the Old-English Treiewo, [German Treuwaz], with roots in the Sanskrit Dre and Dhr [as in Dharma].

It originally connoted something firm, immovable, the rock of trust, what later regressed to what Academic Philosophers called ‘Certainty’. It was what was approached with Zen’s: ‘Immovable Wisdom’ and so on.

As late as the 19th Century Academic philosophers were coming up with ‘Theories of Truth’ which by that very fact vitiates its end [‘Theory’ begins in Assumption]. The Consistency Theory of Truth; the Coherence Theory of Truth; the Correspondence Theory of Truth and so on..

If you look up modern dictionary definitions you will find explanations in keeping with the times: Actuality, Certainty, Conformance with Facts, Accord with Reality and so on. Each of these terms [‘Fact’] of course would itself require a lengthy elaboration. It keeps the Professors in business.

‘Logic is to Philosophy what Mathematics is to Nature’. So goes the line. For me the distinction has always been fuzzy.

The problem-zone is the point of intersection between Mathematics and Philosophy. Or more precisely, the Mathematician’s application of philosophical notions, the noble intent to come to terms with issues better dealt with if the researcher was familiar with the evolution of philosophical presumptions over the millennia.

There are two central issues. First, the Mathematician’s interpretation of the idea of ‘Unity’ and secondly, his application of the idea of ‘Truth’. Philosophers have racked their heads for a very long time over these two words.

‘Truth’ is largely captured in Logic in the concept of ‘Proof. There are various levels of ‘Proof’ and numerous interpretations of what exactly the word means.

When mounted on the Principle of Contradiction we saw where the Self-Loop does its dance in the previous Posts. So now we’ll take a look at where it plays in the notion of ‘Unity’ [‘One-ness’] in Mathematics, the struggle to define Sets and Classes and Groupings [Cantor, Von Neumann et al].

The inquiry into Unity taken to its limit required immersion into Set Theory [again, Peano pioneered its early application]. And in Set Theory they hit head-on into the Self-Loop.

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There are others. The notion of Finiteness [Hilbert et al]; the notion of the Observer: the emergence of Metamathematics; the blithe takes on the notion of ‘Isness’ or Ontological Presence: ‘There is an X such that…’ and so on.

Georg Cantor famously accused Immanuel Kant of being a ‘Mathematical Ignoramus’. This is beyond funny. It was Kant who in his Critique of Pure Reason warns the reader that he may not use his Principles of Knowing’ in analyzing ‘The Principles of Knowing’; See the Posts.

For Martin Heidegger, Truth has not to do with logical propositions but rather:

‘The essence of Truth is Freedom and the essence of Freedom …is the resolutely open bearing that does not close up on itself…

‘Philosophical Thinking’ is the stern and resolute openness that does not disrupt the concealing but entreats its open essence
into the open regions of the understanding and thus into its own Truth.’

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Heidegger is articulating what is the template of Formal Meditation Practice. He himself was not familiar with it, its centrality, until late in his career when he was done with his books.

The Synod of Nicaea was the first Ecumenical meeting of the Catholic Church, under Constantine, whose own conversion elevated an heretofore obscure persecuted cult to an empire-spanning faith propagated under a Pax Romana.

Opening the First Synod of Nicaea in 325 A.D. Athanasius declared: ‘God became man in order that man becomes God’.

Jesus is not just a historical [Yeshua, Lesus, Joshua] or mythical [Mashiah, Kristos, Christ] figure. Jesus is not even a simple idea. Jesus in fact, is a defiant contradiction. For ‘Jesus’, it said: ‘is both God and Man.’

Athanasius’ proclamation was a provocatively incorrect stance for a man of the Church. A charged debate ensued and it was finally [but not unanimously] agreed that a new major doctrine that ironed out various conflicting minor anomalies was indeed needed.

And the new doctrine said:‘Christ was of one substance with the Father’. To be a True Christian is to be able to ride that contradiction and allow it to take you where it will.

The Eastern Church insightfully saw greater danger in the ready consumption of reassuring sensibility than in the absurd and in the cryptic. ‘Scripture shorn of antinomy’, it voiced, ‘is Scripture suspect’. Authentic Scripture was marked by Silence and Paradox.

But contrary to popular belief, the Western Church held no different. The difference is more in the speed of memory-loss. The Creed of Nicaea was the first uniform statement of doctrine for the Catholic Church.

Much of the mountainous pile of later theological writing focused on making sensible this and other irritating antinomies that kept erupting, sneaking their way past the stern guards stationed at the door of orderly Church interpretation.

Naturally, this leads to even greater absurdity: ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’

Here is Ludwig Wittgenstein in an earlier avatar when he was still a True Believer. From his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, a seminal text on the Philosophy of Logic:

‘The Tautology is unconditionally true; the Contradiction is in no condition true…the Truth of Tautology is certain, of Proposition possible, of Contradiction impossible.

‘Tautology and Contradiction are without sense..Tautology leaves to Reality the whole infinite logical space; Contradiction fills the whole logical space and leaves no point to Reality.

Neither one of them therefore can in any way determine Reality..(They) are the limiting case of the combination of symbols, namely their dissolution.‘

So what is a ‘Tautology’? I’m glad you asked. For strictly speaking, we don’t know. What is a Contradiction? We are not too sure either. But here are examples of what we think they mean:

‘It is raining’ is a proposition. You can verify its truth by looking out the window.

‘It is raining or not raining’ is a Tautology: it’s truth, a Logician would say, is certain.

‘It is both raining and not raining’ is a Contradiction: it’s truth, a Logician would say, is impossible.

‘It is neither raining nor not-raining’ however is Sweet Nonsense. The Logician does not see the need to dignify it with a comment.

Tautology and Contradiction are the Logico-linguistic limits of the legitimate expression. They mark the boundary of the sensible. Go past, and you are in absurdist territory.

Respectable folks largely live in the zone between Tautology and Contradiction, the mapped terrain of Model.

Worthwhile Teaching however [and there is not much of it around], begins at this border and moves outward into zones of ever-increasing Absurdity.

To search within the limits of the familiar and the sensible is to look for your lost keys under the lamp-post, ‘because that’s where the light shines’.

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[The metaphor of the light which originates in Mystic Literature is now called the ‘Streetlight Effect’ in contemporary Philosophy.]

In the vibrant salons of Voltaire’s Paris they phrased it right: ‘The First Divine was the First Rogue who met the First Fool’.

‘The Veda is tainted by the three faults of Untruth, Self-Contradiction and Tautology..[it is] the incoherent rhapsody of knaves..‘

So began the Carvaka Philosopher [around 100 BCE]. Building steam the Carvaka texts continue:

‘Only the perceived exists..there is no world other than this..no heaven and no hell..happiness and misery arise in the laws of Nature; who paints the peacocks? [Why is] water cold, fire hot?..From its own nature was it born..

Charity is ordinanced by the indigent, Chastity by the impotent..‘

The Carvaka Philosophers were of course right. The Vedas are nothing if not in-your-face Contradictions and subversive Tautologies.

The Dharmic texts are verses to be heard by Man and written by Men. They are not revelations and injunctions from Prophets with a special relationship with, God.

Siddhartha Gautama, later The Buddha, famously insisted that that he was very much a man no different from his listener. The Vedic Brahman was an abstract Principle before it’s meaning degenerated to a Man-Made ‘God’.

Upanishad is Rahasya: a ‘Secret Transmission’, not to be passed-on to the unprepared. Sanskrit sacred text expands from a center of ferociously absurd verse in concentric circles of increasing sensibility. 

The center is unsaid and ambiguous; the interpreted periphery, explicit and sensible. The core texts are Sruti, unfiltered; at the periphery are the Smritis, Slokas and Sastras, the qualifiers and footnotes, the rules and rituals of orthopraxy.

At the peak of Vedic intent, Brahman is Nirguna Brahman (without attributes). As Sahguna Brahman, (with attributes) all names are in absurd phrase: Being-Becoming; Sonant-Silent; Eternal-Temporal; Explicit-Implicit.

Lower still and in increasing familiarity are the Myths, the Epics, the Folk-Tales, the Proverbs, the learned Bon-Mots. You can drop the bar as low as you like. It is up to you.

In a consequential verse in the  [‘Heart’] Sūtra, Śūnyathā [translated as: Emptiness] is ‘defined’ as equivalent to Nāmarūpa [translated as ‘Form’], or more precisely, as :’not-different from Form’. This orientation is helpful and saves you from thrashing around too much.

While the intrepid Translators did find a likely equivalent for the terms Śūnyathā in the Logician’s construct of ‘Emptiness’, they were flailing around for an equivalent choice for the term Nāmarūpa [or simply Rupa; by this time its interpretation in the Sanskrit itself had become entirely flaccid.]

Then the Translators noticed the English word ‘Form’ which happened to be part of the extended vocabulary of Classical Logic and its meaning appeared very close to the word Nāmarūpa. And so they went with ‘Form’, a palliative compromise.

The word ‘Form’ first appears in Plato’s ‘Theory of Forms’ which is probably where it was noticed. [The English word ‘Idea’ originates here.]

‘Form’ as commonly used in Classical Logic is: ‘Something that is marked, has taken shape’. A line, a curve, a color, a smell, a melody, a scratch. Logic comes alive, is operative, only in the abstract, only in the world of Form.

But Nāmarūpa does not exactly overlap with the objective ‘Form’ as defined by the Logician. Nāmarūpa like Form, is ‘Something that is marked, has taken shape’.

But Nāmarūpa, unlike the Logician’s Form, an ‘Objective’ presence, includes within its domain all ‘Subjective’ presence’ as well. Feeling is Nāmarūpa, a mental-image is Nāmarūpa, internal-dialogue is Nāmarūpa. All that you see with your eyes closed or hear with your ears plugged are just as much a part of Nāmarūpa.

If you can name it, mark it, express it, put a metaphorical finger on it, it is part of Nāmarūpa. And importantly, all references to Nāmarūpa are already contained in Nāmarūpa as are all thoughts you have in response to it. [Smell the Loop?].

If you slip on its self-referential feature you will confound Nāmarūpa with Awareness, Consciousness [the most common short-stop], Presence, ‘Everything’, ‘Higher-Power’ and other such heavy concepts, and find yourself thrashing around on the tails of the Self-Loop.

Why does the modern Logician not include the ‘Subjective’ presence so integral to Nāmarūpa within his own definition of ‘Form’? He doesn’t because the rules of Logic say that what happens in his Mental-Space belongs to him. In fact it is him.

The Logician recognizes himself, has modeled himself from just that very mix of elements that stand in counter-point to the abstraction he has defined as ‘Form’.

Mental-Space is not in his field-of-vision because it is one with his field-of-vision. It is what makes him who he is. Its elements are part of his organic contact lenses and without them he will not be able to see as he see’s. [See Post: Ahankára: ‘Sum, ergo cogito, sentio‘]

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The Logician’s ‘Form’ as used here is not to be conflated with ‘Logical Form’, a different and very useful concept.

The material can be expanded substantially if one were to go into the later evolution of Platonic Form and the Academic Philosopher’s love of ‘Universals’. But I shall stop here.

Logic, fondly referred to by Logicians as the ‘Laws of Thought’ [the title to an early text], deals exclusively with abstract things.

But first Classical Logic needs to lay down some ground rules. And the Classes of Logic are part of the ground rules. If you want to apply the rules of Logic, you must agree to abide by the ground rules.

Logic begins with naming three classes: the Universe Class, the Unit Class and the Null [or Empty ] Class. This roughly corresponds to what the rest of us call: Everything, One, and Nothing.

So where did these Classes come from? We’ll were not too sure. They are sort of like the ‘Conservation Principles’ of Physics that are not themselves derivations from Physics but then get to arbiter what falls under ‘Physics’.

So what’s so special about the Empty Class of Logic? Unlike the more respectable Universe or Unit Classes, the Empty Class is a bit of a shady character. It is the sole depository, the designated dumping-ground for all things absurd.

In other words, the designated dumping ground for all Self-Eating Expressions. It is the ugly-duckling, the black-sheep, the squint-eyed baby Mama tries to hide from the neighbors. All absurd expressions, words and phrases that don’t make any sense get to see the inside of the Null Class of Logic.

[The Rinzai Tradition of Zen draws on this central feature of Emptiness; ‘The sound of one hand clapping’, and so on].]

For the Logician such absurd expressions do not apply to the ‘Real World’. The abstracted, doubled, referential world where logical operators are designed to function. There really are no such things.

If you say ‘Round Squares’, it gets put in the Null Class. And if you say, ‘There is no ‘Me”!’ it gets put in the Null Class. And a Doctor is called to the house to check your mental stability.

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The English translation of the term Śūnyathā as ‘Emptiness’ and most widely used in todays Sanghas originates here although no Guru I have met has the vaguest idea of its origins.

It is around 450 BCE. And the groves of Rājagṛiha are alive with the gatherings of the learned and the wise, the charlatans and the hustlers.

Far to the West, Socrates’ is explaining his new ‘Theory of Forms’. Here he is sitting alongside the aging Parmenides.

Rightness, Beauty, Goodness. These high and noble things all have their essence in an intangible ideal ‘Form’, the theory said. Behind the veil of everyday blandness lay this epiphany waiting to be had.

Perhaps, acknowledges Parmenides. But then what about the ugly, the depraved, the execrable? What about, asks Parmenides, ‘The Hair..the Mud..the Dirt‘.

‘Oh, No!’ Socrates quickly replies, ‘They are just the things we see. It would be too absurd to suppose that they have a Form‘.

And why not? Why turn back at the Cliff’s Edge? ‘When I have reached that point’ replies Socrates, ‘I am driven to retreat, for fear of tumbling into a bottomless pit of nonsense’.

‘That’ replied Parmenides, ‘is because you are still young and Philosophy has not taken hold of you so firmly as I believe it will someday’.

The vicinity of Not-Two is where: ‘Philosophy…takes hold of you’.

The C’han-Zen Teacher Deshan Xuanjian [780-865 CE] would stride the Zendo with a big stick:

‘If you utter a word I give you thirty blows’, he would bellow, ‘and if you utter not a word, just the same, thirty blows’ [The original Mumonkan had sixty blows, if I recall. I’ll settle for thirty].

Absurdity: ‘From Surdus-Deaf, Insensible, Untrue, Ridiculously inconsistent with Reason, Logically Contradictory, Foolish, Irrational, Preposterous.’

Absurdity in all its layers encases Two-ness. And each layer needs to be peeled away with pincers. And all pointers it are equally, unabashedly, in-your-face absurd.

And the source? It’s always the same. Self-Reference, being asleep to the Self-Loop, getting lost in its entrails.

If the Trek beckons, you begin by cultivating a high-tolerance for all things foolish, an appreciation for sheer nonsense, an acquired facility with the flagrantly absurd.

In the next few Posts we shall wade into Logic and Mathematics, two subjects that passionately abhor all things absurd.

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We see magic in the distant vision and miss the miracle of our next breath.

‘Miracle’ [from the Latin, Mira for ‘Wonder’], is the manifestly inexplicable event, one in violation of accepted, credible laws. Absurdity manifest in three-dimensions. There is no religion still around that does not have the miracle and the magical act as the main feature of attraction.

‘Scientific-Law’ is a forgivable exaggeration by the scientific-community. They are in fact generalizations from limited observations, tentatively affirmed hypothesis leading a precarious existence. 

The Mother Principle of Experimental-Science is the Principle of Induction. And along with the Contradiction Principle, it holds up much of what we know as Modern Science.

Induction’s ‘Rejection-Machine’ becomes functional, takes life, because of the word ‘Not’. And its sidekicks, ‘Always’ and ‘Never’.

The Principle says: ‘Like tomorrow’s sunrise, what is happening will continue happening until it doesn’t happen.’

The Induction Rule is formalized in the Mathematics of ‘Probability Theory’. And the First Affirmation of Experimental Science is that a hypothesis is never proved. It only stands unrejected. Via Negativa.

It is impossible to prove that a man always speaks the truth. But easy to test if he never lies. One lie is proof.

‘What we observe is not Nature in itself but Nature exposed to our method of questioning’ noted Werner Heisenberg [who was very familiar with the old Gaussian or ‘Normal’ Curve].

The visible part of the Electromagnetic Spectrum is about a third of one percent. Is what we observe the Real and Only ‘World’? Or is it just us painting with a palette limited to the colors we can see. And then claiming we’ve caught the ghost in our picture.

The golden child of Probability Theory is the construct of the perfectly symmetric Normal Distribution of Statistical Probability [Diagram above].

It is arguably the most widely used tool in Applied Mathematics. Various theorems prove that all things sampled in sufficiently large quantities converge to the Gaussian Curve.

If you are taking a daily pill for blood-pressure, a vaccine for Covid, you can be certain that somewhere in the process of being approved, the Gaussian Curve had to stamp its approval.

The Curve is conceived on a binary platform and mounted on the critical assumption [among others] of ‘Independent, Separate Observations’, a fairly dodgy idea but embraced in the Scientific community as perfectly realistic and sensible.

Is this the way Nature really curves? Or is this the only way Nature knows to curve given how we’ve rigged the rules?

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You know, ‘Normal’ is a loaded word. It is not the same as ‘Average’, although used synonymously and very profitably] by your friendly Drug company executive who can explain how it works.

As with the Principle of Contradiction, the early Greeks refused to give the Induction-Rule the status of ‘Law’. It was a helpful rule, an informed conjecture, but no, it was not ‘Law’. Irascible party-poopers, those early Greeks.

With Induction, there is no requirement for consistency between derivations. Multiple Gods each have their own fenced fiefdoms. There is no burden, no insistence that there be a unified, consistent whole.

Thermodynamics does not have to jive with Molecular Biology. Each worships its own deity. [Where’d the Rep. from the Non-Contradiction side go?]

Things work, but not for the reasons you think they do. And they could stop working, again not for the reasons you think they might.

For a conjecture to become law it is required that it ‘Always Work’. The Laws of Motion cannot turn off at night, nor stop working when you are not looking.

Or do they?

Bohr, at a meeting of eminent scientists famously quipped: ‘We are all agreed that your theory is crazy..the question is whether it is crazy enough to…be true‘

Scientific Inquiry today, cut loose from the monastic disciplines that were a requirement in the first houses of Learning, ignorant of the simplest Meditative and Mindfulness Practices, severs the observer from that which is observed.

The perch of the contemporary Scientist, the post from which he views, is located at an arbitrary point, a point no Scientist would accept as legitimate if it were within his own domain of investigation.

Instead of stepping back and becoming ‘Subdued to the material at hand’ [Russell], the modern Scientist sits on a mountain of venerated paradigms, inherited conventions, embedded preferences and respectable presumptions.

What is it about this word ‘Objective’? Why does everybody and his aunt want to be ‘Objective’?

It’s like if you weren’t objective, you believed in Santa Claus [whose hard to locate these days, fearing gender and race discrimination lawsuits]. Even Art Critics hint at objective criteria for high-art, known of course only to the Critic. The confusion is palpable in the wrenching obscurantism of today’s Art Dialogues.

There is no a priori reason why ‘Objectivity’ is any better than ‘Subjectivity’. It simply reflects the muted suspicion that Truth is independent of me and my views.

Truth is quite indifferent, happily so, to the Subject and its pretenses. Including its divide of the World into ‘Subject and Object’.

The way out is well-mapped. The Observer must be investigated first before inquiry on the Observed. The lens must turn inwards. Self-Mortification must go the full distance.

‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’ wrote Alexander Pope in praise of Science, ‘Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring’

‘Science’, from the Latin Scire, related to the words ‘Cognition’ and ‘Consciousness’, is a form of Knowledge, a type of Knowing.

There are many ways to cut this. One way is to see Science as having three definable parts:

First, the codified ‘Scientific Method’ itself. Repeatable, measurable tests; consistent, cumulative theory; verifiable data and documentation; informed peer review, and so on.

Secondly, its central principles, the Principle of Contradiction and the Principle of Induction [there are others but these are the big ones].

And finally, very importantly, the ‘Scientific-Stance’. See the next Post.

The ‘Scientific Stance’ is Self-Mortification [Lite] [See Posts on Detachment, Self-Mortification and ‘Dying To Myself’.] Since you probably won’t take my word for it, here are three very distinguished members of the extended Scientific Community on the core what is meant by the ‘Scientific Stance’.

Bertrand Russell, co-author of the Principia Mathematica:

‘The kernel of the scientific outlook is the refusal to regard our own desires, tastes and interests as affording a key to the understanding of the Universe..

[It] involves a suppression of hope and fear, love and hate..the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material at hand, able to see it frankly without misconception and without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is..’

Albert Einstein:

‘Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free human beings..we enter the realm of Art and Science.

If [it is] communicated in the language of Logic we are engaged in Science.. common to both is the loving devotion to that which transcends personal concerns and volition’.

Michael Faraday:

‘I will simply express my strong belief, that that point of self-education which consists in teaching the mind to resist its desires and inclinations, until they are proved to be right, is the most important of all, not only in things of natural philosophy, but in every department of dally life.’

[Einstein famously had Faraday’s Photograph on his desk at Princeton.]

I cannot seem to find a ‘Me’. But there clearly has to be a ‘Subject’, No? So If I am convinced that I cannot be what I thought I was, I have to be something else. I have to be..er,, ‘God’.

Deux Factus Sum. ‘I am become Divinity’; you can’t get any higher than that.

In today’s India the phrase ‘I am Brahman’ [‘Ahaṁ Brahmāsmi‘] said with enough gravity and vigor will get you a supplicant crowd by lunchtime and by sunset you will be settled in the Wisdom-Business. Though unlike in Jerusalem or Baghdad, nobody got killed for saying it.

[The original meaning of Brahman was never as ‘God’ but that’s its present regressed meaning. See Post.]

‘Ana’l-Ḥaqq‘: ‘I am God Itself!’. These famous words deeply entrenched in the psyche of every pious Sufi Muslim were uttered in Baghdad by Mansur al-Halláj [922 CE] a Persian Mystic. He was was summarily arrested following his public declaration and later executed. [Impaled they say, meriting the full wrath of God.]

Al-Halláj himself pointed to a celebrated Rabbi for his inspiration. One crucified a millennia earlier for saying something very similar:

‘Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life‘ [John 14:6

‘No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known‘ [John 1:18].

If your pulse doesn’t race, you should be seeing a Doctor
Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Fellini’s: ‘La Dolce Vita’

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Self-Denial is the first order of Moral Code. All Virtue aligns with it. All Vanity scoffs at it. Religions offer their denouement at the limit of self-denial, the perfection of self-mortification.

‘Civilization is self-restraint’ declared Rajagopalachari, once a distant neighbor, a man of scholarship and of God. The same was a favored maxim of Sigmund Freud, an acute observer of the Human Condition; and an Atheist.

My entire school education on Dharmic Discipline was summarized in the travesty of insight: ‘Desire is the cause of all suffering’. A literal take on the Buddhist ‘Second Noble Truth’, if you are curious as to where this beam of light came from.

So how does one: ‘Desire to Not-Desire’?

‘Detachment’ is arguably the single most emphasized injunction in the Dharma. So how do you intend to detach if you are attached to ‘Detachment’?

How do you play ‘Hide And Seek’ with yourself?

What denatured Elysium do these pilgrims seek sans wine, women and earthly-folly?

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See: ‘The Scientific Stance’.

For you and me this ‘Dying to Myself’ can be a very tricky business. Unless we stay alert to the final turn of Yājñavalkya’s Algorithm, the negating of the Act and Agent of Negation, a fatal loop awaits those of us who want end it all.

Trying to negate myself is like taking on Uncle Remus’ ‘Tar-Baby’. The harder I try to negate myself the firmer I reinforce myself as Me.

Any attempt to nullify the ‘I’ using the ‘I’, befuddles, stupefies and ultimately immobilizes the ‘I’.

A state taken by the devout as further confirmation of divine oversight. I am happy to die as long as I can be alive to watch myself doing it.

The English word ‘God’, the scholars say, derives from the German gott, from the Proto-Indo-European ǵʰu-tó-m, itself sourced in the Sanskrit huta; ‘to pour’ [as in libation to the fire-altar] and its related word hotr [the reciter of the ritual-invocation].

[Or if you prefer a less severe term, ‘Divinity’, from the Latin: dyēus, later as Deus, Deity; from the Sanskrit: devam, ‘The Exalted Effulgent’.]

From the Vedic Yagñá to the Hebrew Altar, Sacrifice is the central religious act. Both words derive from Hu: ‘Of the Sacrifice’ [from the Latin, sacer: ‘to make sacred’] as used in the verses of the Rig Veda.

It’s not a good idea to be a goat on the Islamic Eid. Nor a buffalo at a Bengali Durga Pūjā. Nor a turkey at American Thanksgiving. But you cannot sacrifice by proxy. That is cheating. So what is the Sacrifice?

‘When he is brought to nothing, the highest degree of humility, the spiritual union between his soul and God will be effected‘.

So wrote St. John of the Cross, the Spanish Mystic. It is what the literature called: ‘Dying To Myself’.

You can find the same injunction expressed in every literate religious tradition, as word, as symbol, in metaphor, as folk-tale.

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St. John and his close collaborator Teresa of Ávila, have influenced every famous modern Western Mystic [Merton, Dali, et al]. The roots of St. John’s Mysticism, as that of Teresa, go back to medieval Neo-Platonism, the ‘One’ of Plotinus [Enneads], itself linking to Greek and Sanskrit text.

Any linguistic discussion on Language must be introduced with the cautionary note that you are diving headlong into the swirl of the Self-Loop. So watch your step. And try not to take long leaps.

‘So how did Language originate?’ That’s language. A ‘Cause and Effect’ Aficionado.

‘And when did it begin?’ More language. The Temporal Man.

‘Any idea where?’ Still more language. The Spatial Man,

‘We all know that ‘Why?’ never has an answer, right?’
Deep language, but still language.

‘The questions are in Language. So they are invalid?’
Skeptical language, but still language.

‘So the answers are in Language. That does not make them wrong.’ Righteous language, but still language.

‘I think the Gene-Idea makes perfect sense. It’s all DNA and stuff.’ Faith language, but still language.

‘I don’t think you know the whole story. Something slippery here.’ Suspicious language, but still language.

‘As Wittgenstein claimed, is language itself the vehicle of thought?’ Thinking language, but still language.

‘None of this is very convincing. You might be right. But so what?’ Defiant language, but still language.

‘This is Bullshit!’ Angry language, but still language.

‘@&*(!!>?””*^}’ The most expressive language so far.

The number of theories floating around about Language are prodigious, even by the grant-induced profligacy of modern academic opinion.

Well, it all started by us imitating birds and animals, says one theory. It really started when men began living in groups, says another. Might be, but Man didn’t learn to speak until he discovered God and ritual, adds a third. That’s not it, it has to do with mother-child bonding, says a fourth. Of course not, it’s all neuro-muscular; it began with the facial muscles and the tongue.

The more widely followed of the newer theories posit some sort of gene, a patch, a point, in mind-brain space. We are not sure where it is, when or how this center came alive, or why on earth it did. But this mysterious center is where it all started. [Only a Professor lost in language would not see the deeply religious origin of such views.]

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You can’t get to the ‘Origin’ of Language, an idea deeply embedded in a linguistic-understanding of Self and World, using Language.

If you do, you will build fine elegant models of the ‘Origin of Language’ and write expansive tomes [the most recent one I saw in a bookstore clipped 600 pages]. But it has nothing at all to do with the origin of Language. 

If you try and not let your sophistication-gene get reflexively activated, you’ll see that the above penetrating review of language is itself entirely in language.

All in language, including this line about it being all in language. The Self-Loop, all over again.

Neils Bohr [Nobel, Physics, 1922] wrote: ‘We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words’.

A primary service of a modern university is training in the ability to build advanced models. And great math-verbal skills, the ability to take-apart and put-together using signs and symbols is the most desirable raw-material for training in advanced model-building.

As the level of intricacy and sophistication of subjects increase as in Academic Philosophy or Theoretical Science [my favorite though remains ‘Post-Modernism’] their content becomes a complex mix of abstraction and reification, an intricate cross-referencing play of sign upon sign.

Signs that refer exclusively to other signs. Thoughts that refer exclusively to other thoughts. Words defined entirely using other words. Every untied knot revealing a new knot.

Sign-world. A hall of mirrors. A closed, contained world of abstraction and analogic expression, layer upon layer, in a self-referential interweaving of sign and symbol [See Post: ‘How To Use A DIctionary’]

It can take a lifetime of observation to appreciate how much of our World is based on Language. It fits us like a snug set of contact lenses. We view the World through them. And we don’t remember that we have them on until something hits us smack in the eye.

‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment
of our intelligence by language’, wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein,‘the limits of my Language are the limits of my World’

‘In the beginning was the Word’. The World begins in Vac [Sanskrit]; Vox [Latin; Voice].

The two favored children of Sign, the riotous pair, are Language and Logic.

Your irrepressibly cute English Teacher would have drilled this into you as a kid: Language begins in a division of ‘Subject’ and Object’. Once that is established everything else follows. Noun and Verb; Present and Past; SIngular and Plural; Gender and Tense.

Words like ‘of’ and ‘for’, ‘to’ and ‘from’, ‘and’ and ‘or’, create a sanctioned and structured web of associations and divisions. And we are to be forgiven if we take this synthetic structure as intrinsic to the way the World is, the way the World works.

Language maps the World in it’s own image. It draws the boundaries, shades the colors. And it is a self-sufficient mapped World that is very good at explaining itself to itself.

The language you ‘think-in’ is the unexamined repository of a millennia of influences. What ideas and things did the culture see as worth labeling? What distinctions did the culture see as worth marking? [Eskimos famously have a dozen names for Snow and the modern Investment-Banker, a dozen names for Money.]

Language creates the convention of legitimate distinctions that allow discourse. It draws the lines in the socio-linguistic matrix. Reality carved in familiar ways is ceaselessly reinforced. A self-created line, repeated, entrenched, is now seen as a self-evident divide.

‘Sign’, from the Latin Signum, is a mark, an indication, a point, a reference.

What’s so special about this sign with the pointing arrow that reads: ‘New York’?

A proper Sign always does a two-step jingle. It both stands for itself and refers to something else. A perfected playground for the Self-Loop.

The sign ‘New York’ is both a sign that says ‘New York’ and a pointer to the State of New York. You read the sign ‘New York’ and follow it’s directions to the State of New York. [Check with a Professor of Semiotics, though.]

Language and Logic are expressed in Signs. The Alphabet and the Number System are structures of made-up of signs. As is most of your expensive college education.

But the most important, intractable signs are those that bounce around in our head [See ‘Monologue As Dialogue’].

Sign, like the Meta-Trinity: Thought, Mind and Consciousness, has this extraordinary ability to multiply and divide, while all the time remaining itself.

Signs double while remaining single. Signs, in other words, are fecund mediums to ‘Give Birth To Themselves’.

‘Empty Logical Classes. Ontological Assumptions. Teleological Fulfillment.

Which planet are you from? This is pretentious bunk. Male testosterone rutted in a linear groove.

I pine for Rumi’s ‘Beloved’; not Heidegger’s ‘Being’. I am a woman. I move  with my Heart. I dance with the Gopis, I too am in love with Krishna.

All this is ‘Man-Stuff’. Where are the women?. The Dharma, like everything else, has been hijacked by men who then get to write the Manual’.

Do men genuflect to stern high abstractions more readily? And do women love: ‘Love’ a little too much? Ask the Poets; this is just Philosophy drone.

The expression Advaya (अद्वय) literally translates as ‘Not-Two’ and dates back to the first texts. When attached to a particular school it typically takes on a suffix as in the Advaitha of Hinduism or the Advayadharma of the school of Śūnyathā.

[Advaitha] Vedantha is arguably the most influential school within the vast campus of the ‘Mother-Tradition’ [Hinduism] going back 1,500 years. There are others, but none with such an illustrious, lengthy lineage.

Vedantha’s formal origins are in the Ajātivāda of Gaudapada itself drawn from the Prajna-Paramitha texts in which Gaudapada was schooled [See Post: ‘Oldest Printed Text’]. And its determining influence is evident in his opus, the Gaudapada Karika:

‘Uttama Satya [the highest truth]  is …[the realization] that there is neither dissolution nor creation, neither bondage nor liberation, no one seeking liberation, no one attaining liberation.‘

Following Gaudapada, it was Śaṅkarācārya [around 700 CE] who in his famously lucid Sanskrit reformulated the Teaching for the then modern ear.

Śaṅkarā’s age saw a sharp rise in the popularity of the Buddha Dharma. And to anyone familiar with the Texts, it is certain that Śaṅkarā‘s division of Brahman into Sahguna and Nirguna-Brahman [‘Form and Formless’] had its roots in the Śūnyathā of the [‘Diamond-Cutter’] Sūtra. [Advaitha] Vedantha was in many ways the re-appropriation of a truant back into the orthodox fold of Vedic exegesis.

So it is that Śaṅkarācārya would declare in his seminal Gita Bhashya: ‘Atman is the ‘Knower of the Field’ [Kshetragnana]: the Witness of the three states of Waking, Dreaming and Sleep.’

And in his Vivekachudamani: ‘A liberated Being is one who sees himself as single and the witness…of the world of things…the substratum of all‘.

And in his: Upadesasahasri [11.7]: ‘I am other than name, form and action. My nature is ever free! I am Self, the supreme unconditioned Brahman. I am pure Awareness, always non-dual’

In the layout of Vedantha, this ‘Original Inner, Immaculate ‘Self”, this ‘Witnessing Being’, is over-laid in multiple obscuring illusory sheaths [Koshas]. And in Vendathic Teaching, to unveil this ‘True Self’ is the fulfillment of the purpose of life and the gaining of liberation.

The intuition is compelling: get rid of the Modeled-Self and awake to ‘True Self’. The problem is that this kind of interpretation still spins in the Self-Loop.

There is much that the trekker gains from Śaṅkarācārya‘s insights. But as a Schola-Monk raised in orthodoxy, he couldn’t at the final turn resist the installing of an Absolute, a Primal ‘Being’ at the sanctum sanctorum of his opus. The clean-up is incomplete.

I wince when I  visit a Śaṅkarā Monastery, 1,500 years after its founding, and find bright, earnest Brahmin boys, whose role is to search for and express Brahman, perfecting instead the rounding of the rolled rice-ball.

Friedrich Hegel: ‘It is a natural assumption in philosophy, before we start to deal with its proper subject matter, viz. the actual cognition of what really is, one must first of all come to an understanding about cognition..a certain uneasiness seems justified..

For if cognition is the instrument, [it] sets out to reshape and alter it. If [it] is not an instrument but a passive medium through which the light of Truth reaches us, then again we do not receive this Truth as it is, but only..through this medium.

Either way we employ a means which immediately brings about the opposite of its own end..what is really absurd is that we should make use of a means at all…‘

Hegel was acutely aware of this coasting close to the Self-Loop. There is a literature which argues that much of his later work was a recoil from this threat of outright chaos. But Hegel, like Immanuel Kant, succumbed, stopped short, found Religion and turned back at the cliff’s edge.

Hegel rewrote his intuition of the Self-Eating Expression into the more manageable trinity: ‘Thesis, Anti-Thesis, Synthesis’ and its variants [a structure that Hegel actually credited to Kant]. From Marx and Mao to Derrida and ‘Deconstructionism’, intellectuals saw explanation here. The rest as they say is history.

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Martin Heidegger’s roots were in Phenomenology, from Phainomenon, ‘what shows itself in itself’.

And he was a dominant influence on Academic Philosophy and high cafe- speculation for most of the last century. [I’ll take Les Deux Magots over a library any sunny day.]

Here is Martin Heidegger:

‘The indefinability of Being does not dispense with the question of its meaning but forces it upon us. Being..is the self-evident concept..in all our knowing and predicating.

Everyone understands ‘The sky is blue’, ‘I am happy’.. but this average comprehensibility only demonstrates the incomprehensibility. An enigma lies a-priori..

We do not know what Being means but already when we ask: ‘What is Being?’, we stand in an understanding of the ‘is’ without being able to determine conceptually what the ‘is’ means..‘

Heidegger circled in the vicinity and was increasingly alert to the issues of Two-ness. But in this new unfamiliar terrain he had to invent a whole new terminology which looped Language to its limits [‘the possibility whose probability it is solely to be possible’].

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I knew an artist once in New York’s Greenwich Village who disliked books and was utterly dismissive of all philosophical rant. But he always kept a hard-cover edition of Heidegger’s 600 Page tome :‘Being and Time’, prominently displayed on his Naguchi coffee-table. The Language, and with it Heidegger, had taken on their own mystique.

Aristotle and the Lyceum philosophers proposed ten categories among which Substance was ontologically primary.

In other words, Substance is; and the world with its million features revolved around it.

The  idea had been around awhile in most early literate cultures. Earth [Prithvi] was the primary substance, the grounding element alongside Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Space [or ‘Sky’] and so on.

Get to ‘Substance’ and you get to the heart of the matter. It was the locus to which all attributes attach. ‘Matter’ remained unchanged as ‘Form’ evolved from Acorn to Oak, from Embryo to Man, in natural teleological fulfillment.

The material world matched the propositions of the propounded Logic. And Aristotle’s Logic in turn reflected the lines and contours of the propounded, modeled material world.

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Here is Albert Einstein [1879-1955] on: ‘What is Science?’

‘Science is the endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought, the perceptible phenomena of the world, into as thoroughgoing an association as possible.

To put it boldly, it is the attempt at the posterior reconstruction of Existence [see Post] by the process of conceptualization…‘ [See Post. Immanuel Kant on the nature of ‘Concept’.

Later, in a less declarative, more reflective moment, he modified it. ‘There is neither Evolution…nor Destiny: only Being’.

‘Being’ is the single most common short-stop among the intellectuals: ‘Men of The Mind.’ And the first Intellectuals were the Men and Women of Religion. Those who have gone further stop at the Self-Eating Expression [See Post].

From the Chandogya Upanishad: ‘In the beginning there was ‘Being’ alone; the One without a second’.

In Exodus, Moses asks The Presence Its name and The Presence replies: Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh: ‘I am that I am…thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I AM has sent me to you‘. The first of the Ten Mosaic Commandments is a claim to ‘Being’: ‘I AM the Lord your God..’

‘Being’, like ‘Thought’ and ‘Voice’ and ‘Consciousness’ is very, very close to our skin. But precisely because of its nearness to our skin it is that much more difficult to give workable examples.

The best that can be done is to give a list of excerpts from famous fellow-travelers that may convince you of what I am talking about. And get you back on the Meditation Mat.

Just as Epistemology studies ‘Knowing’ while already in a state of Knowing, Ontology studies ‘Being’ while firmly resident in a state of Being.

It is the Elephant in the Room, the one we all agree to ignore.

Existence, from the Latin ‘ex-sistere‘: ‘to stand forward, manifest’.

We are making an implicit ontological assignment, granting the status of ‘Being’ [Existence, ‘Is-ness’] anytime and every time we use the little word ‘Is’. ‘Is’ is arguably the most used grammatical link in the English Language.

Try it. Try and speak on your cell-phone for 10 minutes without using the word ‘Is’. Try and write a page in English without using any of its variants [was, will be, etc].

Its hard; but here is the strangest thing. This ubiquitous word, this word we use a hundred times a day in all its variations, has no formal definition, is in fact undefinable. Very wise men have been trying to define it for a few thousand years and no one has scored anything more than a Gentleman’s ‘C’.

But that has not daunted our brave Academics nor our enterprising Universities. In the same way that not having an honest definition for ‘Know’ did not discourage them from starting a Subject called Epistemology. they now founded a Subject called Ontology. The new Department of ‘Is’.

What Moral Precept did Reshma disavow?
What Divine Plan are we missing here?

The Pioneer 10 Spacecraft launched in 1972 was the first object ever built that could achieve escape-velocity to exit the Solar System.

A ‘Pioneer Plaque’ was installed on it that included examples of what the designers felt were representative of the ‘Human’ and of ‘Planet Earth’.

It had Digital-Codes, equations from Chemical interactions and Astrophysical elements. And it had an [almost naked] figure of a Man and a Woman.

A stretched hand in greetings to all out there. But  it is unlikely that the designers actually thought that any of this would be understood by an alien intelligence. 

For this whole notion of ‘Understanding’ and ‘Communication’ as we understand it and communicate it is itself a very man-made, very human idea.

We have no reason to believe [perhaps they do] that aliens exist as anything we can understand or communicate with, whether these images and words have any meaning at all in this context.

Perhaps the Aliens are blips of erratic light that laugh a great deal more than we humans do [‘light’ and ‘laugh’ still being very human points of recognition].

But the biggest controversy over this plaque arose because the human figures were drawn near-naked. The blips of light might get aroused and that would not be a good thing [they were redrawn].

Only in America…

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What is it about eating of the fruit of the famed Binary, the ‘Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’, of having your eyes opened, of having to die, and then ‘Living Forever’?

The ‘Testimony of Truth’, a Gnostic Gospel, stands the story of Adam and Eve and Genesis [and its parallel Koranic version] on its head:

‘From every tree you may eat [but] from the tree [of the knowledge of Good and Evil, that Gd planted in a garden eastward of Eden, after dividing the light from the darkness] which is in the midst of paradise do not eat, for on the day that you eat you will surely die‘.

But the serpent was wise… and persuaded Zoe [‘Life’], the daughter of Sophia [‘Wisdom’], also called Eve: ‘On the day that you eat from that tree, the eyes of your mind will be opened‘.

Eve ate and shared it with her husband. Their eyes were opened and the Jealous God said: ‘Behold, Adam has become like one of us, knowing evil and good…let us cast him out of paradise, lest he take from the tree of life and live forever.‘

I cannot find the meaning to the phrase ‘Minimum-Knowledge of English’, within the pages of the Dictionary to which, in order to use, I must bring this ‘Minimum-Knowledge’.

But what happens when I seek for the definition of ‘Minimum-Knowledge of English’ inside a Dictionary without being aware that I am already using this ‘Minimum-Knowledge of English’ when I seek it?

In Socratic speak: ‘To tell us to get hold of something we already have in order to know something we are already thinking of…‘.

With Language, it is possible to work backwards. In other words, it is possible, with due care and diligence, to identify your beginning inventory of English, the ‘Minimum-Knowledge’ that you bring with you in order to use a Dictionary. With ‘Knowledge’, it is impossible.

If you can understand this line you are reading you are already well into a state of advanced ‘Knowing’. Much more so when you seek for a definition of the word ‘Know’. 

In Primal Forgetting, I build my entire vocabulary using words that define other words in a closed self-referential loop with no appreciation of the preemptive and prior ‘Minimum-Knowledge of English’ that I have brought with me.

This is the original state of ‘Delusion’[Avidya, Agnana].

If you can’t claim to know what ‘Know’ means, you have a great deal of annoying explanations to give. And this can get very tiresome. As with subjects claiming ‘Knowledge’. Subjects like Philosophy and Religion; Science and History; Logic and Law.

If you are not sure what ‘Know’ and ‘Not-Know’ mean, what do you about: ‘True and False’? Or: Real and Unreal. Or the meaning of the words: ‘Meaning’ and ‘Word’.

Did you make sense of this morning’s Newspaper? Have you really understood a single word on this Page? Including this very sentence about understanding a single word on this Page? [Yo! Is that a Self-Eating Expression?]

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Do not to confound ‘Delusion’ with its Post-Vedanthic interpretation as ‘Error’. You are well into ‘Knowledge’ when you start binary classifications such as ‘Accuracy and Error’.

We understand [and create] the new only in reference to the old, only in counterpoint to that which is not-new.

Your most imaginative construction of distant galaxy and strange alien is little more than a rearrangement of decidedly familiar idea and image. ‘R2-D2’ not-withstanding, a true alien must remain alien to your known world.

New learning begins in an extension of what is already learnt. The unfamiliar originates in the conversant and the familiar. The Unknown begins in the Known.

I start with what I know in order to know something new. I teach a child the meaning of the word ‘Cat’ by pointing to a picture of a cat. I do not read her the dictionary definition of Cat: ‘A species of carnivorous quadrupeds, of genus Felis.’

I speak American-English and I wish to learn Tibetan. I go to a teacher who speaks Tibetan and American-English. I don’t go to a teacher who speaks Tibetan and German, nor to a teacher who speaks American-English and Japanese.

A Dictionary defines new and unfamiliar words in terms of old and familiar ones.

In order to use a Dictionary I must enter with a ‘Minimum-Knowledge of English’.

And this ‘Minimum-Knowledge of English’ must itself be sourced outside the Dictionary.

I must already possess this ‘Minimum-Knowledge of English’ before using a Dictionary and without it the Dictionary is of no use to me.

I search Webster’s for the meaning of the word ‘Metropolis’.

Metropolis: ‘The main city, often the capital, of a country, state or region’. But what is a City?

City: ‘A large important town’. But what is a Town?

Town: ‘A place enclosed or fenced in; a collection of houses enclosed within walls; a hamlet; a village’. But what is a Village?

Village: ‘A group of houses in the country, smaller than a town or city and larger than a hamlet’.

We have come full circle. This is all a Dictionary is meant to do. We can go no further. A Hamlet is defined in terms of ‘Village’; a Village in terms of ‘Hamlet’.

In order to use the Dictionary, I must enter with knowledge of what is a ‘Hamlet’ or a ‘Village’. If I do not, I will find myself in a permanent loop within the Dictionary with no exit.

If I am alert to that, I close the Dictionary and find a ‘Hamlet’, take a trip and visit  a ‘Village’.

If I am not alert to it, I keep turning the pages and look for new definitions without ever leaving the Dictionary. And enter the boudoir of the Loop.

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Literati say a Dictionary spirals down in terms of ‘simpler’ words. The simplest word in Language is ‘is’ and men have been struggling to define it for 2 millennia. So watch out.

Immanuel Kant defined the borders of Academic Philosophy for two centuries. And his work had much to do with the ideas of Knowledge and ‘Knowing’.

Kant tried to identify the ‘First Principles of Knowing’ itself, reaching back to Aristotle’s Principle of [Non] Contradiction and Categories [Cause, Necessity, Contingency, etc]. Along with ‘Space’ and ‘Time’, the ground conditions of Sensibility, they made up the Kantian Grid.

You cannot but view the World through these fundamental constructions, said Kant. They are organic contact lenses, hard-wired processors, the immutable framework within which must arise all Knowing and Understanding.

But what about these conditions themselves? How did you locate them? How does one see one’s own organic contact lenses? How does one ‘Know the Knowing’?

From Kant’s: ‘Critique of Pure Reason’:

‘If deduction of these conceptions is necessary, it must always be Transcendent. All attempts at an empirical deduction in regard to pure and a priori conceptions are in vain, and can only be done by one who does not understand the altogether peculiar nature of these conceptions.’

If you don’t see the significance of that qualification you will elaborate learnedly on the nature of Kant’s organic lenses while wearing them securely atop your nose.

And find yourself willy-nilly in the center of the vortex. Which is exactly where Universities are today.

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Unlike most philosophers, Kant was alert to the Loop although he never took his own understanding to its necessary, implosive limit. He was perhaps the first modern philosopher to use the word ‘Transcendent’ widely in his work. So what is Transcendent to ‘Transcendent and Not-Transcendent’?

Socrates asks Theaetetus, the meaning of the word ‘Knowledge’. Theaetetus proceeds to list the known disciplines, Geometry and Cobblery, the Sciences, et al.

Socrates stops him short: ‘But the question Theaetetus, was not what are the objects of knowledge..or sorts of knowledge..but the thing itself, knowledge, is,..do you fancy it is a small matter to discover the nature of knowledge? Is it not..the hardest?’

After a lengthy and labored discussion of various definitions, ‘Justified True Belief’ is proposed, the one felt least presumptive of those explored.

Socrates himself does not propose an answer, staying instead with the negation. He offers Theaetetus his celebrated analogy of the barren midwife who can only help another give birth. Socrates continues:

‘Doesn’t it strike you as shameless to explain what knowing is like, when we don’t know what knowledge is?

The truth is, Theaetetus, that for some time past there has been a vicious taint in our discussion. Times out of numbers we have said ‘we know’, ‘we do not know’, ‘we have knowledge’, ‘we have no knowledge’, as if we could understand each other while we still know nothing about knowledge…

All that we have brought to birth..today about knowledge..our midwives skill pronounces to be mere wind eggs and not worth the rearing..

To tell us to get hold of something we already have in order to know something we are already thinking of suggests a state of the most absolute darkness..the most vicious of circles will be nothing compared to this injunction..

Having the good sense not to fancy you know what you do not know, for that and no more is all that my art can effect..’

‘Having the good sense not to fancy you know what you do not know’. This is the limit of honest Epistemological insight.

The Good Professors could not come to terms with Socrates’ negation, this descent into infinite regress. So they declared victory and retreated.

But they needed some legitimizing link to Plato’s Dialogues in order to attest classical origins. So they took with them this ‘Least Presumptive’ definition of Knowledge and started a new Subject called Epistemology.

The study of Knowing while firmly resident in the Know. The absurdity had been winked away. It was back to business as usual.

You are a restless seeker, a Philosophy-Junkie. And you want to know all about ‘Know’. You want to know what ‘Knowledge’ means.

Not to worry. There is such a subject. And it is called Epistemology. You’ve come to the right department. Epistemology is the scholarly study of ‘Knowing’ while firmly resident in the Know. It is knowing all about ‘Knowing’ and ‘Knowledge’. Can you smell the Loop?

So you ask a Professor of Epistemology for the definition of the word ‘Knowledge’.

He might give you list [a safe response] but odds are that on that list is the phrase ‘Justified True Belief’ or something very close. [The original translated phrase from the Classical Greek is ‘True Belief with an Account’].

What’s so special about ‘Justified True Belief? It is the closest thing we have to an original definition for the word ‘Knowledge’. And it first emerges in the Theaetetus, in Plato’s Dialogues. Hence it is the ‘Classic’ definition.

The Theaetetus is where it all began. It is the source, the Mother-Lode for this subject called Epistemology, the founding source for the classic definition of the word: ‘Knowledge’.

[Empistemology [‘Know’] and Ontology [‘Be’] are foundational pillars of Academic Philosophical discourse. Wether you know it or not, you are always talking from a certain, often implicit, platform of ‘Know’ and ‘Be’.]

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‘There was a young man who said: ‘Though, It seems that I know that I know, What I would like to see, is the ‘I’ that knows ‘Me’, When I know that I know that I know.’

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As for the limerick, I’m pretty sure I got that in a basement book-shop somewhere in Sausalito. A long time ago.

Step into my old Porche Convertible for a long drive south to Hanover, Germany, 1,000 kilometers and a 100 years away. Let’s go meet Dr. Wilhelm Leibniz.

If you want someone to blame for the big zero you got on your beginning Calculus course, here’s the man.

Dr. Leibniz on his celebrated ‘Twin Truths’:

‘The immediate awareness of our existence and our thoughts furnishes us with the first a posteriori truths, or truths of Fact, the first experiences, while identical propositions embody the first a priori truths, or truths of Reason, the first illuminations.

Neither admits of proof and each may be called immediate.’

‘Transcendental Unity of Self-Consciousness’? ‘The immediate awareness of our existence and our thoughts’?

I am aware; I am immediately aware of being aware; I am immediately aware of being immediately aware…

It’s time to put-out the Meditation Mat.

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No. We are not in the Himalayas amidst a mystical mountain-sect. Nor the corner of Haight and Ashbury. We are in Hanover, at the Study of Dr. Wilhelm von Leibniz, a founder of Modern Logic and the Mathematical Calculus.

The idea of Consciousness, its centrality in the minds of the most influential modern thinkers, has never been fully appreciated. Nor their short-stops.

So come with me now to Königsberg, Prussia, circa 1750 CE.

Immanuel Kant from his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, a volume that helped mark the domain of Academic Philosophy for several generations:

‘The ‘I Think’ must accompany all my representations..I call it pure apperception..because it is a Self-Consciousness..it is in all acts of Consciousness one and the same and unaccompanied by it no representation can exist for me.

The unity of this apperception I call the Transcendental Unity of Self- Consciousness..and this principle..is the highest principle in all human cognition.’

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Immanuel Kant, unlike most philosophers, was alert to the Loop but turned back at the Cliff’s Edge. He was a University Professor and a devoutly religious one at that.

Prajñānam Brahma: Aitreya Upaniṣad [3,3]. It is a principal Mahāvākya [Summary Assertion], a stepping-stone, popularly translated as: ‘Consciousness is Brahman‘.

‘Consciousness’, along with ‘Being’, is the most common short-stop among the analytically-minded [see later Posts with illustrations].

‘Consciousness’: from the Latin ‘Con Scire‘: ‘to be awake; to know’; and related to Cognitionem, as in the words ‘Cognition’ and ‘Science’.

The First Law of Consciousness states that you may not investigate your consciousness while being in an actively conscious state.

You cannot, however hard you blink, wiggle or scheme, stand outside Consciousness to orate upon it. If you feel hemmed in, that is the idea.

If you can consciously point to something as your ‘Consciousness’, by that very fact, what you have pointed to cannot be your consciousness.

You cannot be conscious of being ‘Conscious’, an instant double. You can be conscious, that’s it.

To be conscious of being ‘Conscious’ is the high road to fatal self-contradictions. An unwarranted, illegitimate doubling that makes what is simple and unclouded into a belligerent complexity.

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If you can convincingly hold-forth on the conscious ‘Unconscious’ in addition to the merits of mentating about Mind, your talent should not go unnoticed. Train as a Freudian Couch Therapist. It’s never too late.

‘Explanation’ is from the Latin Ex-planationem: ‘to make plain, to flatten [planus].

Everyone wants one, feels obliged to ask for one and acts deprived if denied on.

An ‘Explanation’ flattens things out so that they fit within a Modeled-View. Just like plaining a piece of irregular wood.

In this tripped age where Reason is confounded with the Rational, the most insistent and socially-sanctified demand is for an ‘Explanation’.

‘Oh! That makes sense!’. In other words, an explanation falls in line, takes its assigned slot within the broad mix of paradigms, preferences, prejudices, conveniences and cultural cues that grant a view acceptance, and when tightly in conformance, applause.

When you say: ‘That explanation makes sense!’, it means it tucks nicely into your backpack, logically fits [i.e.,’is consistent’] within the umbrella of convention, views widely accepted as valid.

And the base of this umbrella is the presumption of an Independent [hence, separated] ‘Self’. The ‘Subject-Object’ Divide.

What happens if you skip out on investigating the first presumption of Inquiry and proceed with the Inquiry?

The word ‘Model’ is etymologically related to the Sanskrit Māyā, from the root Ma: To Build’. And less directly to ‘Man’ [Manushya] and ‘Mind’ [Manas].

A ‘Model’ is a ‘Double’, a construct deep in the belly of ‘Two-ness’ [‘Double: from the Latin: Duo: two; Plus: extended; multiplied].

A toy-car is a model. So is a doll’s-house. A ‘Model’ is a creation, a re-construction of the original, a re-presentation, not the Real McCoy.

But the most important models are mental-models, the ones we build inside our heads using things that ‘double’.

Sign and symbol that refer and come alive in such building blocks as the Alphabet and the Number System. All mediums in fact conducive to referential traffic.

An understanding mounted on assumptions, extended in corresponding beliefs, then conceptualized in binary structures [True: False; Up: Down] and expressed in the vocabulary of signs and symbols, typically language and logic, is called a ‘Model’.

Model begins in assumption. So what is my first assumption? That there is such a thing as a ‘Me’ with such things called ‘assumptions’ stuffed inside my head, sort of like socks in a drawer.

Watch out. To elaborate breezily on Model as an ‘Interpretation’ and equate a Modeled-Reality to an ‘Interpreted Reality’ is to miss the point. The notion of ‘Interpretation’ is itself a modeled-idea, as is the very notion of ‘Model’. Fresh Academics and Deconstructionists are the most susceptible to this take.

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Importantly, there is nothing ‘Wrong’ with Model. ‘Right and Wrong’ themselves are divisions made in the context of Model.

Homer’s Odyssey begins with the word ‘Man’ [Andra, from the Attic-Greek Aner, as in the English Anthropo].

‘Man’ [as in the Sanskrit Manush, Manas] is: ‘That which has Mind’.

How is ‘Man’ different say, from a Mattress? Man is different because Man alone has Mind. This has been the traditional answer since antiquity.

Man is different because Man alone ‘Thinks’. The defining attribute of Man is his Mind. And with this Mind, Man constructs his World as Model. And its central character is his model of himself as ‘Man’.

So what is ‘Mind’?

I don’t know what Mind is. But I do know this. Every time I say: ‘Gotcha!’, every time I use Mind to hold forth on the Nature of Mind, I am back in my circular whirl.

Very wise-men have been trying to get a handle on this thing called ‘Mind’ for a few millennia and have gotten nowhere. Divine origin? The center of cognition, emotion and volition? The firing of synapse on brain tissue?

But this ‘Mind’ of mine [which of course I know exists] keeps giving me the slip. And to further confuse matters, Folks Who Know say that Mind is also the depository of ‘Thought’, the dodgy character we just met.

I can’t see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, touch it. And yet, darn it all, it feels awfully real to me. This ghost behind my nose and between my ears.

And anything I pick and label as ‘Mind’ using this Mind of mine cannot be Mind, can be anything but Mind.

So. ‘What is ‘Mind’? As I said, that’s about where the wise-men left it.

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‘If you use your Mind to study Reality’, quipped the famously laconic Bodhidharman, the first Patriarch of Zen, ‘you won’t understand either your Mind or Reality’

You are in the white toyota in the back of the middle row
and desperately need to pee.

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: ‘When I think in Language there are not meanings going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought’.

Professors have made a nice living arguing about what a ‘Thought’ and a ‘Concept’ is for centuries [using Thought and Concept, of course.]

But here was Wittgenstein saying it’s all mostly words. This mysterious thing we called ‘Thinking’ is made up of just plain old words. Games we play with words.

Don’t believe him of course. Get back on the Meditation Mat and Sit.

What is the ‘Orangeness’ in an Orange?

What is common between a sliced and a peeled Orange? A ripe and a rotten Orange? A nibbled Orange and a fresh one?

A picture of an Orange, the sound ‘Orange Juice’, the taste of Orange pop, the smell of Orange peel, the touch of Orange pip, the letters ‘O R A N G E’, on a page. The negation: ‘Not-Orange’.

Orangeness is an idea, a concept. A thought.

‘I don’t exactly know what an Orange is Professor, but I sure know how to pick one’. Or do I?

When Thaetetus asks Socrates to describe ‘ Thinking’, Socrates replies:

‘As a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering.

You must take this explanation as coming from an ignoramus. but I have a notion that, when the mind is thinking, it is simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes or no.

When it reaches a decision-which may come slowly or in a sudden rush-when doubt is over and the two voices affirm the same thing, then we call that its ‘judgment.’

So I should describe thinking as discourse, and judgment as a statement pronounced, not aloud to someone else but silently to oneself.‘

I can silently unfold the phrase: ‘Elvis Lives!’ in my mind syllable by syllable in complete comprehension of its meaning.

Mental Verbalization is ‘I’ talking to ‘Me’. Monologue as Dialogue. A particular, often paralyzing bain of the Reflective Man.

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Importantly, there is nothing ‘wrong’ with Thought. The various Mantric Formulas that evolved in the Dharmic Tradition play multiple roles, one of them being the reigning in of ‘Dispersed Thoughts’.

Immanuel Kant whose roots go back directly to Aristotle, defined the domain of Academic Philosophy for over two centuries.

‘Thought’ proffered Immanuel Kant ‘is cognition by means of conception’. [See the later Posts on his: ‘Critique Of Pure Reason’]

What’s a ‘Conception’? That sounds like a difficult idea. Let’s start with ‘Concept’.

A ‘Concept’ says the Dictionary, is a: ‘a General Notion or Idea; a Conception’.

Great. So what’s an ‘Idea’? The Dictionary says it’s a: ‘Thought, Conception or Notion.’

We’ll, OK. So what’s a ‘Conception’? The Dictionary says it’s a: ‘Notion, Idea, Concept’.

Cognition is a concept. A Concept is that which is ‘conceptually differentiable’. But ‘conceptually differentiable’ is itself a concept.

A concept has a public understanding while ‘conception’ is just a private view. Yet concept is for you a conception and conception becomes a concept in the dictionary, unchanged regardless of who looks at it.

Concept; Conception; Concept of Conception; Conception of Concept. All Concepts. Or are they Conceptions?

Here is the remarkable Horace Hayman Wilson [1786-1860], first European translator of the Rig Veda and the first occupant of the Boden chair for Sanskrit at Oxford.

Here he explains the Sanskrit term: Ahankára, which in its current use roughly translates to ‘Hubris, Conceit, Pride’.’

‘The sense of Ahankára cannot be very well rendered by any European term. It means the principle of individual existence, that which appropriates perceptions, and on which depend the notions, I think, I feel, I am.

It might be expressed by the proposition of Descartes reversed; ‘Sum, ergo cogito, sentio,’.

The moon-landing was faked in Utah. Cream Doughnuts widen arteries. My mother really loves me. Perhaps, perhaps not.

But I don’t have these insidious doubts about whose thoughts are bouncing around in my head.

The thoughts in my head are my thoughts. What happens in my mind is mine! mine! mine!

There is nothing else on the planet that is so taken for granted as belonging to ‘Me’ as ‘My Thoughts’. That’s why it is so real. As long as I have my thoughts, I have me.

I can wear your cuff-links and you can borrow my cologne but my thought is my thought and your thought is your thought. I might own a Bentley and only leg into silk underwear. But my thoughts are closer to me than both.

‘Thought’ and Voice [Vac] are the two things most closely associated with a ‘Me’, with the notion of Authorship. The better religious literature marks this out repeatedly. When I think, I think. When I speak, I speak. See the later Posts on Language.

So it was that Rene Descartes, founder of Cartesian method and Father of Western Academic Philosophy exclaimed: ‘Thinking. At last I have discovered it- Thought. This alone is inseparable from me.’

‘I am Thinking. Therefore I am’: Cogito ergo sum.

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René Descartes, like Aristotle before him and Kant and Leibniz after, and in sharp contrast to most other philosophers, knew when he was edging the territory of the absurd. His rationale was more nuanced than the  standard academic bumper-sticker interpretation. I’ll get to it later in his less-known letters.

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There is nothing I understand less than this thing called ‘Thought’.

Yet nothing is more real to me than this which I understand the least.

Dodgy Fellow, this ‘Thought’. So try and not think a thought for the next sixty seconds.

Do you know what a ‘Thought’ is?

I don’t. [But then, nor do Universities which do a fine trade in refining it.]

The problem is that every time I work up a thought to nail this buzzing fly called ‘Thought’, I’ve stuck myself in a very unpleasant Loop.

This thing I have nailed as ‘Thought’ by thinking about it, by that very fact, cannot be ‘Thought’.

It’s origin is unknown [grab that next thought please, and ask it where it came from].

It’s stage can’t be located. [Inside my head? Beneath the sink? In Kiev?] It’s terminus is not found. [Where do all those thoughts go, like stairs in an escalator?]. I can’t see it. I can’t hear it. I can’t smell it. And any thinking about it, muddles it more.

No self-respecting scientist would take seriously something to which he cannot give the simplest of coordinates.

At least one noted Philosopher majisterially defines a Philosopher as one who: ‘Thinks about Thinking’. It is roundly celebrated in academic circles as marking a penetrating summary insight.

The Meta-Trio: Thought, Mind and Consciousness.

‘Meta’, from the Greek, originally meant ‘Beyond’ as in Aristotle’s ‘Metaphysics’. Lately though it is a prefix assigned to reflective, self-referential states. Metadata is ‘Data about data’; Metatext is ‘Text about text’.

There are two aspects which define the Meta-Trio:

First, their self-referential nature. And second, their intimate, inviolable relationship to ‘Me’.

Any trek requires extensive time spent in intimate [and not always pleasant] proximity with these three fellows. So let’s take a few Posts to get to know them.

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Wouldn’t you know, now there is a new word, sophisticated and mysterious, heard in Academic corridors called ‘Metacognition’. I’ll leave you to figure it out once you’ve read these Posts.

The Israeli Bombing of Civilian Lebanon: 1982

‘This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?’ wrote Leo Tolstoy [I’ve tried to finish: ‘War and Peace’. Twice.]

This idea of ‘I’ cuts a wide swath. It is not just for Vegans. It is the original question. And the final fault line.

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‘Let me get this straight.

Your asking me if there is a ‘Me’? You want me to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to: ‘Do I exist?’ What sort of a dumbassed question is that?

Of Course I exist. Of Course there is a ‘Me’. Jeez! Everybody knows that!

Says so right here on my application. Plain as daylight. Take a look.’

1. Name [Family]
2. Name [First]
3. Sex
4. Height
5. Weight
6. Ethnicity
7. Religious Affiliation [If any]
8. Cell Phone Number and Email Address
9. Residential Address
10. Drivers License State-of-Issue and Number
11. Date of Birth
12. Place of Birth [ City, Country]
13. Current Nationality
14. Marital Status
15. Spouse’s Name [If any]
16. Names of Children [if any]
17. Education [High School, College]
18. Occupation
19. Annual Income
20. Have you ever been convicted of a felony
21. Have you ever written Websites on ridiculous themes?

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Here is Dr. Samuel Huntington from his: ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, that sits on every Foreign Ministers bookshelf:

‘A Civilization is the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity… Civilizations are the biggest ‘We’. [and] cultural identity is the central factor shaping a country’s associations and antagonisms…

The question: ‘Which side are you on? has been replaced by the much more fundamental one: ‘Who are you?’ Every state has to have an answer. That answer, its cultural identity, defines the state’s place in world politics, its friends and its enemies.’

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The late Dr. Huntington was the Albert J. Weatherhead University Professor and Director of Harvard’s ‘Center For International Affairs’. Of interest, the above book came out [1996] shortly after Fukuyama’s modestly titled: ‘The End Of History’.

Is there a Little Fellow behind your nose and between your ears? A Teddy Bear behind your heart and beneath your ribs?

A Viewing Voyeur inside your eye and beneath your brow, that sees and thinks and feels and acts and makes you laugh and makes you cry?

If you find this language flip, I shall give it some gravitas.

Is there to be found, either by observation or by inference, and outside of an unexamined, inherited authority and unquestioned convention an ‘Independent and Separated Observer, ‘Self’, Subject’ in the guise of:

A Physical Body, a Cell, a DNA Code, an Awareness, a Totality, a Nullity, an Unity, an Ego, an Energy, a Life-Force, an Intelligence, an Existence, an ‘Organizing Principle’, an ‘Inner Being’, a Spirit, a ‘Soul’…

An ‘Independent and Separate Knowing Ontological Presence as Entity, Process or Abstraction’?

Go ahead and add any I may have missed. Don’t be shy.

Perhaps there is a Teddy Bear behind your heart and beneath your ribs. We are going to hunt the critter down.

Perhaps one of the strongest convictions of this, our strange Age, is: ‘I am my Body’.

The excerpt below is from the findings of Dr. Paul Aebersold’s [Smithsonian: 1953-54] radioisotope experiments. Earlier he had helped build the first Cyclotron at Berkeley.

‘Studies at the Oak Ridge Atomic Research Center have revealed that about 98 percent of all the atoms in a human body are replaced every year.

Experts..have concluded that there is a complete, 100 percent turnover of atoms in the body at least every five years. In other words, not one single atom present in your body today was there five years ago.

You get a new suit of skin every month and a new liver every six weeks. [Stomach] lining lasts five days…bones are not the solid, stable, concrete-like things you [thought]…the bones you have today are different from the bones you had a year ago.

This revelation brought great excitement to the New-Age community which claimed it confirmed their long-held belief in out-of-body experiences.

It was vigorously attacked by more sober scientists who after diligent research showed that the number was not 98% as claimed, but in fact only 91%.

Later findings on neural-cell DNA and Tooth-Enamel further brought down the number.

Perhaps you are your Tooth-Enamel.

Cut once; get two. A pair is the first and minimal unit of division, the elemental DNA, the fundamental building block of every Man-Made Model.

Any wedge of cheese that I can cut once, I can cut twice. Or thrice. In fact I can cut it as fine as I want. I just need sharper and stronger knives.

I can if I am in the mood, cut it a trillion times. Then another trillion. And just keep going. But this can get tedious. And what I am cutting no longer tastes like cheese. So where should I stop?

[Now make sure to do all this in broad daylight. And do not nick the Higgs-Boson, a.k.a. the ‘God-Particle’, else the scientists at CERN will get very upset.]

What applies for cheese, applies for carrots and broccoli. At some point they get tossed into the salad.

The Atom in Physics, the Element in Chemistry, the Axiom in Logic, the Point in Mathematics, the Word in Language, the Morpheme in Linguistics..

‘Individual’: from the Latin, In-dividuus: that which is ‘Indivisible-Further’. As in a-tomous, for ‘atom’.

Do you remember where you stopped before climbing into your salad?

‘This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?’ wrote Leo Tolstoy [I’ve tried to finish: ‘War and Peace’. Twice.]

You will have more luck getting a roomful of Biologists agreeing on a definition for the word ‘Alive’, or Logicians for the word ‘Reason’, than you will with a roomful of Psychologists defining ‘Self’. 

This young man, a Bio-Engineer with doctorates from both MIT and CalTech, knows it is a silicon-chip atop the neurons and between the firing synapses.

The Geneticist sneers at this simplification at what is  clearly a Gene [imminent in its discovery].

We won’t even broach the Mystics for now. But a particularly famous Mystic’s definition from India is: ‘The sense of ‘I-ness”, which means whatever you want it to mean.

We go low-tech. We ask the Grammarian.

‘The Subject of a sentence is the person, place, thing, or idea that is doing or being something. It is what acts or is acted upon.’

Ego is Latin for ‘I’. The Cambridge definition reads: ‘Your idea or opinion of yourself’.

Note the Loop.

Aurora, the Roman ‘Goddess of the Dawn’
Guercino, 1621 CE, Ludovisi, Rome

The Rig Vedic Ushas, ‘Goddess of the Dawn’, parallel to the Latin Aurora and the Greek Eos, born of Sky [Dyaus, cognate with Zeus] and Earth [Prithvi] and sister to Night. The progeny of the divine dual, the first divide.

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Humans were to Gods, Shakespeare noted, ‘as flies to wanton boys’. Self-absorbed, rank-obsessed, occasionally generous, frequently malevolent, they would throw you a crumb if in the right mood. But most of the time they just ignored you.

So one of the Wise-Men finally spoke-up:

‘You know, I’ve been thinking’. We’ve been doing this for over a thousand years and we’ve gotten nowhere. We’ve tried everything; made the Gods look like us, look different from us, tolerated their tantrums, their strange ways. Even allowed them to go immortal on us. And we are still exactly where we started.

And it struck me that in all these years we have never really sat down and said: ‘O.K. Let’s pause just for a second and ask ourselves: ‘So who or what is the Subject in search of this Object?”

Where is the ‘Man’ in search of the ‘God’?

The word Nirvāṇa in its proper definition has nothing at all to do with any empyrean ecstasy, cosmic peace or any of that later rubbish advertised in the Guru-Culture of today.

The word Nirvāṇa, literally an ‘Exhausting’, has its etymological roots in a fire that has ‘Come to Rest’. The Madhima Nikaya, the source most often cited, says it is like asking the direction taken by a dead fire: ‘To ask: ‘In which direction has [the dead] fire gone?’, is a question that: ‘does not fit the case’.

The answer to the question: ‘What is Nirvāṇa?’ lies in an understanding of the misunderstanding that underlies the question itself.

The self-scuttling has to be completed at the level of the questioner. Hence the early definition of Nirvāṇa as ‘The Exhaustion Of Philosophic Views’ [Is that a ‘Philosophic View’? A ‘Self-Eating Expression’?].

In Nirvāṇa the question: ‘What Is?’ is no longer your question. It’s not that answers are now miraculously revealed. Rather, the questions, having arisen from a false platform, simply dissolve.

Nirvāṇa enters the Dharmic dialogue at every level. It parallels the later construct of: ‘This Unformulate Principle’ and the The Mantra Of The Prajñā-Pāramithā, the core verse in the Hridaya [‘Heart’]Sūtra, and its approach-line: Śūnyathā.

It is markedly unwise, dangerously facile, to explain the nature of Nirvāṇa to one who can interpret it only from the platform of a Binary, as for instance that of a presumed independent [hence, separated] ‘Self’. [In other words, don’t write Sites like this one.]

It’s sort of like the situation at the counter at the Rolls-Royce dealership. If you need to ask the price you probably can’t afford it. If you need to have Nirvāṇa explained, you won’t understand it.

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Six hundred years following the release of the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra, here is the Scholar-Monk Nāgārjuna:

‘There is not a whit of difference between Nirvāṇa and Saṃsāra [a disoriented search]’. And in case you find that ambiguous, he adds: ‘And there is not a whit of difference between Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa.’ [Mūlamadhyamakakārikā]

Eight hundred years following Nāgārjuna, here is the Chinese-Monk Ch’ing-yüan Wei-hsin [circa 850 CE]

‘Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters.

But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.‘

The idea of ‘Infinity’ has long attracted the mathematically adventurous. And the philosophically credulous.

Have you ever had the compelling desire to fly faster than Light? We’ll, you can’t do it. And why can’t you do it?

The folks who worked out the Theory of Relativity found that as you approach the speed of Light, the amount of energy needed to move you an inch [or for that matter, a single electron] ‘Tends to Infinity’.

The symbol ‘0’ has been around for a long time. But the symbol ‘∞’ for ‘Infinity’ however is less than two centuries old making its appearance following the birth of Science and its need for abstract measurements [the Universe is ‘Finite but Unbounded’?].

The grizzled Dharmic monks and the geezers around the fountain-square in old Athens didn’t like the word very much. Told the young’uns to try and avoid using it.

It parallels their reluctance to grant the ‘Principle of Induction’ the status of ‘Law’. A Conjecture, yes; but not Law. Party-Poopers. What was their problem?

‘Infinity’ is from the Latin In-finitas, for ‘Unbounded, Unbordered’. The bells should go off right there. To give definition is to mark a boundary. And here we begin by defining something as the ‘Unbounded‘.

Any ‘Infinity’ you can point to includes the pointer, the pointed, and the label ‘Infinity’. It is an idea, a concept, best relegated to conversations over coffee in French cafe’s and university philosophy departments.

From the Isavasya Upanishad: ‘When taken away from the Infinite Whole [Purnam], the Infinite Whole remains the Infinite Whole’.

Infinity minus ten trillion is still Infinity. That’s the definition for this formally ‘Undefined Concept’. ‘Infinity’ is that which doesn’t budge when you take something away from it. Or add something to it.

We don’t quite know what Infinity is. But we are quite sure that ‘Infinity plus one’ is the same as it.

While you snuggle into the empty space of a vacuum tube [‘Tends to Zero’], enthusiastic Scientists are vigorously seeking a ‘Theory of Everything’. Any such theory, by that very fact, invalidates itself. The folks don’t understand Self-Reference.

The understanding of the symbols: 0 [Zero], ∞ [Infinity], and I [‘Self’] are mutually inseparable. In other words, I understand all three. Or I understand none.

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Wilhelm Leibniz [along with Isaac Newton] is credited with founding the Calculus. Lots of ‘Tending to Zero’ and ‘Tending to Infinity’ in it. Leibniz was alert to the Loop but avoided any direct confrontation with it [See Posts].

The traditional method to arrive at Brahman is to begin with a Mahāvākyam [‘Summary Affirmation’]. It is an approach to the terminus, a pedagogic convenience, not the terminus itself [as so frequently and incorrectly extolled in the present Guru-Culture].

The earliest Mahāvākyam, [‘Summary Affirmation’], is from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (around 1,000 BCE): Sarvam Khalvidam Brahma: ‘All [this] is Brahman‘ [3.14.1].

Variants of this theme can be found in every one of the World’s Mystic Traditions. Kurt Gödel [1906-1978] the celebrated Logician, a subject at the opposite end of the Mystic Spectrum observed: ‘Mind is everywhere is the great Mystic Teaching.’

Here, from the Christian ‘Gnostic Gospels’ [around 100 CE]: ‘You read the face of the Sky and of the Earth, but you do not recognize the one before you and you do not know how to read this moment..I am the All. The All came forth from Me…and attained in Me.’

Or the Plotinus’ ‘One’ which dominated European Mystic Schools for a millennia: ‘A Nameless Unity, indescribable, undefinable.. never known measure, stands outside number..is under no limit of any kind..is Everything and Nothing..’

OK. Now for the tricky part. What is Brahman? I don’t know. In fact I can never know what Brahman is. And why not? Because I am part of this ‘All’, whatever this ‘All’ is. Else it wouldn’t be the ‘All’.

The word Brahman is ensconced in layers of self-reference, what we call the Self-Loop. It will twirl you around like a top if you don’t stay alert.

I can’t locate ‘The All’ while sitting on my rocker because ‘The All’ includes me sitting on my rocker. And it includes me thinking about locating ‘The All’ while sitting on my rocker. And…ad infinitum.

Any Inquiry into Brahman begins with the issue of the Subject. If I duck the confrontation, I will reduce Brahman to an Idea, another Man-Made ‘God’, the Immaculate Perfected ‘Being’. Which is pretty much the state of things today.

Brahman, from the root ‘Brh‘: ‘To Uphold, Support’, is the central Dharmic posit. ‘Brahman is that and only that of which the Upaniṣads speak’ begins the celebrated Kena Upanishad.

‘The deluded fools believing observance
and doctrine to be the highest,
do not understand the path to Brahman…
That Brahman alone is before, is behind,
is to the right, is to the left…above and below.
There is nothing here other.’ [The Mundaka Upaniṣad; 2.2.12]

”Mind is everywhere‘is the great Mystic Teaching‘ noted Kurt Gödel, the doyen of modern-logicians, a subject diametric to mystic discourse.

Brahman disgorged of the Self-Loop is Not-Two.

‘Something unknown is doing we don’t know what. We have found that where Science has progressed the farthest, the Mind has but regained from Nature that which Mind put into Nature.

We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories..to account for its origins.

At last we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprints. And Lo! It is our own.’

Science, Modern Man’s most embraceable Religion, began with a verifiable claim on planetary self-displacement. Where we stand is not the true center. The Observer is not the unmoving ground.

Nickolaus Copernicus [1473-1543], a Renaissance scholar and a catholic cleric, began the Modern Age of Science. In his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium:

‘There is no center for the celestial spheres; the center of the Earth is not the center of the Universe; the spheres revolve around the Sun..‘.

Before him, dear old Earth was the static center of the Universe [‘Geocentric’ paradigm]. The Heliocentric Theory [‘Helios’, the Greek Sun-God] found a new deity. The real center, it said, was in-fact the Sun.

But Science keeps replacing every displaced god with a new deity. Is there a center, any center? Is there an Independent, Observing ‘Self’?

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Earth, taken from the hugely successful Voyager mission [1990], 6 billion KM away, as it turned its lens inward one last time before entering interstellar space.

A ‘Pale Blue Dot’, they called it. Less than a Pixel; but still not Zero.

What exactly are you looking at when you look through a telescope? And who is doing the Looking?

‘To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world‘ noted Carl Sagan a principal scientist on the mission [and one never known to be shy at the mic.]

The universe does not begin in a distant and cataclysmic ‘Big Bang’. It is less dramatic than that portrayed by the scientists.

Logic, as the ancient Philosophers before Aristotle knew and warned, begins in Ontology. If your ontological assumptions aren’t transparent and verified, the Logic will sooner or later buckle.

Logician’s, like Prophets and Politicians, have long cherished the idea of a mystical, divine origin for their calling. But the rules of Logic are not on stone-tablets nor have they fallen from the sky. They are rooted in a set of rarely reviewed, implicit and unstated ontological assumptions. 

The paradigmatic, foundational syllogism: ‘All Men are Mortal; Socrates is a Man; Socrates is Mortal’, begins with the unstated assumption that there ‘is’ an identifiable, stable entity called ‘Socrates’. The rest of the inference is inevitable.

You can’t spot a Man holding the same pose twice in a lifetime. Take a snapshot of every moment of a Man’s life: no two will be identical.

The atoms in a Man’s body are in constant motion, continuous replenishment, day and night. His skin gets replaced about once every 30 days; his bones about every 6 months.

Look in a mirror. Is this the same face you saw last night? [Of course it is].

Oh, you mean something inside Socrates…

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See the post: ‘The Ontological Elephant’ et al

This must be one of the oldest Posts in my dog-eared file box. I need to update it with some of the new non-linear logic that’s making the rounds. I’ll get around to it.

Formal Inquiry begins with Definition. It is the center bolt of Rational Discourse. And the line limiting fraudulent bombast.

‘Definition’ derives from the Latin: De Finito-‘to make finite’. In other words, to draw a line. to divide and to make Double. Definitions are co-dependent and have no life except in mutual relationship.

You may not explicitly know the definitions, but are implicitly using them in any form of expression, logic or language.

Definition can be verbal, as that provided by a Dictionary. It can be spatial, auditory, tactile, explicit, implicit, smooth, crooked and so on. But there must be a boundary in order to define something. And there must be a definition, explicit or implied, in order to have a dialogue.

But how do I define ‘Definition’ when every definition of ‘Definition’ is itself a defined word? We’ve got ourselves a fenced space where the fence needs to be moved further and further out as we repeatedly try to fence it in.

If you can’t define ‘Definition’ all inference drawn is spurious precision. The Logic will prove whatever you want it to prove.

So what’s the definition of ‘Love’? What’s that? You’ll tell me when you feel it? Touché!

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In the wonder-world of the Self-Loop, the word with the most number of posted definitions the last time I checked seems to be the word ‘Set’, as in Mathematical Set, which is another word for ‘Definition’.

‘Know Thyself’: Gnothi Seauton. In the Sanskrit: Atmanam Viddhi. You can find variants of it in every literate culture. The oldest, most ubiquitous injunction in Language.

Self-Inquiry is an absurd idea. I can inquire about any and all things in this great and grand world of ours. Except inquire about me.

Self-Awareness? I can never be aware of that which is aware. I can be aware of anything but the source of my awareness.

Self-Knowledge? I can know about all things in this our magnificent cosmos. But I may never know myself.

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Gnothi Seauton. The celebrated words on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

The new Christian Theodosius razed it to the ground hoping to end all remnants of Paganism. It didn’t work.

Oscar Wilde proposed an appealing alternative, a big hit with the New-Age community: ‘Be Thyself’.

Wisdom may be inexpressible. The ‘Formless’, unnameable. But Information is eminently expressible. In fact, expressibility is what makes it ‘Information’.

This, they say, is the Age of Information. ‘Information’ is from the Latin: In form-atio. Knowledge which has: ‘taken form’, in other words, given name and dimension.

A single line divides a page in two. It just takes one cut to separate a Dot and a Dash, to create the couple ‘0,1’, which together can express all Information.

The Information Age was begat in the Binary System of Number Representation. The ability of the computer’s magnetic core to organize all information in hierarchical structures of pairs in a coding of: ‘0,1’.

‘True: False’, as the Boolean Algebra folks like to say. [Or would you prefer: ‘True: Not-True’?]

But how did you decide on the First-Divide? If you are sure that: ‘True; False’ is itself a ‘True’ distinction you are a convert, no longer an inquirer to its truth. You stand, already divided.

So, as the Zen-Man would say, what then is your Original-Face before you were born to Male and Female?

The coronation of the Binary as Truth. The contemporary understanding of ‘Self and World’.

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This gets more interesting as we enter the Brave New World of Quantum Computing and its claim to have exited the limitations of the Binary World. Nothing of the sort. The Loop has just dug itself deeper into the software. See later Posts.

‘From the first Nothing is!’ declared Hui-neng, the pioneering 6th Chinese Patriarch of C’han-Zen.

Now, 1,300 years after Hui-neng, a new and widely- publicized survey was done among a group of distinguished Intellectuals. The question was solemnly titled:

[What is] ‘The Most Important Unresolved Question Of All Time’?

The prize went to Dr. Martin Heidegger for his celebrated query [itself, a variation on Aristotle’s ‘ti on’, literally, ‘What Is?’]:

‘Why is there Something and not Nothing?’

Jeez! You know, smart people say the darnedest things.

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If the universe was entirely pink, I will never know it to be so.

There has to be a spot of not-pink somewhere so that I can confirm that the rest of the Universe is pink.

There has to be a minimum of two colors in order for me to see one color. Anything I see is only spotted in relationship to what it is not.

And one more thing. I need to be able stand apart from this pink and purple Universe in order to see that indeed the Universe is pink and purple.

I need, in other words, to be an ‘Independent Observer’. [‘Independence’ requires separation. A helpful redundancy, a shoulder-strap in addition to a seat-belt.]

When Professor Heidegger affirms a ‘Something’, he simultaneously affirms his presence as an ‘Independent [hence Separated] Observing Self’.

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This is the basic idea underlying the widely-popular and much-mauled Principle of Co-Dependence, also called the ‘Doctrine of Dependent Designation’, a doctrine on the conditional nature of the Binary.

‘Does God Exist?’, the indispensable question of every Thinking Man and Woman.

The question is premature and presumptuous. The proper question, prior, proximate, more modest in its reach is: ‘Does Man exist?’

The Lady doesn’t need you to verify Her presence, thank you very much. She merely asks that you first confirm yours.

The launch to ‘God’ begins at the Limit of Man. Any ‘God’ [or ‘Reality’ or ‘Truth’] you find prior to reaching the limit is not an act of sober piety but one of vacuous ignorance. A deity in the image of Man. Spiritual candy.

St. Augustine [354-430 CE] arguably the most influential of Christian Theologians warned: ‘Si Comprehendus, Non Est Deus’: If you have understood ‘God’, what you have understood, by that very fact, is not ‘God’ [Sermon 117].

A displayed humility is greater hubris. The grander your tag the greater your pretense. Pick any theological text of any religion and be awed at the sweep of reckless excess.

You always and only seek to first verify the presence or absence of ‘Man’. You always and only orient to mortification, never the other way around [‘God’ or ‘Ultimate Reality’ and such].

There is a problem though, a big one. Any search for ‘Man’ by man is an act coiled in the Self-Loop. You’ll get whatever answer your wishing for.

Ten learned men were holding hands crossing a turbulent river. Once on the other shore, they decided to count themselves to make sure all had safely crossed.

They took turns counting. But every time they counted they came up with a total of nine. There was one missing.

Their desperation grew until a cheeky local kid watching this drama came over and pointed out that the counter kept forgetting to count himself.

So the ten learned men took turns recounting. And Lo! This time they counted ten!

The ten learned men cheered for joy, congratulated each other for being so astute, and went on their way.

Remember to count the Counter. Or be sucked into into the Self-Loop.

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A skeptical prince who was a pupil of Śaṅkarācārya [around 700 CE] decided to test his teacher.

Once when the illustrious scholar was walking up the royal pathway to the palace, the prince unleashed an elephant from the army stables directly onto Śaṅkarā’s path.

The Brahmin, not known for valor of this sort, proceeded to climb up the nearest tree.

The prince approached the teacher, bowed, and inquired as to why the Guru had climbed the tree since according to his own teaching all, including the approaching elephant, was illusion.

‘Indeed’ said Śaṅkarā, ‘the elephant was unreal, but so was your presumption that there was a me climbing a tree.’

Mystery and enigma unveil more readily in the fluid feminine of Myth than in the linear logic of argument and sermon.

A Story of Creation is told in the Vishnu-Purāṇa where Vishnu as primordial divinity is stretched in slumber on the cosmic ocean of milk. He rests his head on the abyssal serpent Ananta [‘Endless’] and dreams a great and grand dream of the universe.

Vishnu is dreaming a great and grand dream that He is dreaming a great and grand dream, and all men and women, all living things in Vishnu’s dream are in turn dreaming a great and grand dream of the Universe in which Vishnu is dreaming a great and grand dream.

[Lots of meticulous synchronization needed; but then that is why Vishnu is Divinity while you and I take the bus to work.]

Vishnu awakes and a lotus unfolds. Brahma, the divinity of Creation emerges and rules the created world of Vishnu for 100 cosmic years [Maha-Manvantara: 311 trillion human years, rounded-off].

At its end, Vishnu closes his eyes and returns to slumber. The lotus folds and the universe and all that is in it return to their source in the Cosmic Dreamer. In time Vishnu awakes, a lotus unfolds, a new Dream begins.

Stop.

You may not interpret the myth of Vishnu’s Dream in any conventional way. For any commentary you have on this myth is itself part of the myth.

If ‘All is Dream!’ so is my claim that: ‘All is Dream’. If ‘All is Illusion!’ so is my claim that: ‘All is Illusion’.

You reading these lines, right here, just now, about this Dream, according to this Dream, is in the middle of this very same Cosmic Dream.

Now you may choose to not wake-up in the Dream in which case Vishnu will dream that you chose to remain asleep.

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Relevantly, this Puranic Tale is widely told but rarely in connection with the Self-Loop. It goes back in its earliest version to the 5th Century CE. A measure of the regressed state of contemporary Dharmic Understanding.

The Buddha didn’t think much of ascetics, god-men or philosophers. And he preferred concrete metaphors to abstract terms like the ‘Self-Eating Expression’.

And so it is that the final self-scuttling turn of Yājñavalkya’s abstract Formula gets a very tangible, everyday illustration.

From the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra [Front Page]:

‘My teaching of the Good Law is to be likened unto a raft. [Does a man who has safely crossed a flood upon a raft continue his journey carrying that raft upon his head?]

The Buddha-teaching must be relinquished; how much more so mis-teaching!’

You ‘Burn the Sūtras’ once their work is done. Gut the very boat that takes you across the river. This is the rounding of Yājñavalkya’s Rule [See Post] expressed as the central metaphor of the Buddha-Dharma.

‘Method’ wrote Immanuel Kant, is ‘Procedure according to Principle’.

In the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra [See front page] Yājñavalkya’s Algorithm was given a practical turn with the Sūtra‘s central directive: ‘A Bodhisattva should develop a mind which alights upon no thing whatsoever; and so should he establish it.‘

Or in its best remembered concatenation, the seminal rule: ‘Arouse The Mind With No Abiding-Place‘. To get stuck in ‘An Abiding Place’ is to be stopped at an improperly investigated Binary-Truth, confounding it as a foundational truth.

The method has remained largely unchanged over the centuries. Here is Takuan Soho [1573-1645], 1,000 years later, arguably the most influential Zen Scholar/Teacher of modern Japan, summarizing his Teaching:

‘Not Stopping the Mind is Object and Essence’. This: ‘Engendering the mind with no place to abide‘ is the authentic: ‘Mind of Zen’. In counterpoint, a ‘Stopped Mind’ is ‘the affliction of the Abiding Place‘. In his words: ‘Delusion’. [A ‘Stopped-Mind’ is one stuck on a high binary-truth.]

Not-Two is a direct descendents of Yājñavalkya’s Algorithm [See Post] and the convergent terminus of the rounded rule as extended in the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra. The: ‘Not-This’ of the Upaniṣad; the: ‘No Abiding Place’ of the Sūtra.

There is no binary-ground to be found that can be settled-in, no ground that you can alight on as foundational truth. There is nothing to cling to nor is there a need to cling to anything.

This condition is the seed that in time results in the creation of a unique construct, the Symbol ‘0’ in the Dharmic Tradition. [See later Post: The Symbol ‘0’]

Shiva-Naṭarāja, Chennai Museum, India

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Brahman is the central Dharmic posit. So what is Brahman?

From the Brihadäranyaka Upaniṣad [2;3;6]: ‘Now, therefore, the description of Brahman: ‘Not this, Not this’ (Neti, Neti); for there is no other and more appropriate description than this’.

The full formula, which originates with Vaiśampāyana’s distinguished disciple Yājñavalkya, reads: ‘Neti, Neti’: ‘It is not this! It is not: ‘It is not this!’ [around 1,500 BCE, Oral To Script].

Why repeat the Rule twice? It is not just an expression of emphatic negation. It is repeated twice because the full expression is a meta-statement. The deconstruction must finally turn in on itself. The rounding must complete. Else, the recursive rule will enter into an insidious and indefinite spin: The Self-Loop.

The original formula was as a verb [Neti!; ‘Not-This’], an Act that must scuttle [Negate; ‘Eat’] itself in the rounding. Ultimately, the term ‘Brahman‘ itself gets swallowed into the belly of the Algorithm.

‘Neti, Neti’: ‘It is not this! It is not: ‘It is not this!’ is the earliest algorithmic form of the logico-lingual Self-Eating Expression.

Yājñavalkya himself [as did Aristotle in Metaphysics] used a series of compounding contradictions to lay the stage: ‘An endless infinite reality’ which is also ‘an inner controller’. A: ‘mass of intelligence’ which is also: ‘the unattached and the undecaying’, and so on.

Yājñavalkya‘s was the tightest description of ‘Not-Two’ [a-dvaya]: ‘Neither inside nor outside; neither above nor below’. Much of what settles as ‘Method’ in the early literature originates with him. The Axioms of Sight and Self, the recursive negation rule, the marking of: ‘The Other Shore’, et al.

Every major Dharmic School expresses its truth using a variant of Yājñavalkya’s Algorithm. See Śaṅkarācārya’s Nirvāṇaṣatkam [around 800 CE], or a millennia later, Ramana Maharishi [1879-1950].

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Yājñavalkya’s Algorithm is the origin of the Symbol ‘0’ in the Dharmic Tradition. [Neti {Not}; later as Śūnya, Pujya, Bindu et al]

The Decimal System of Number Representation [Sanskrit ‘Das‘, for Ten] births within 200 years of the oral-rendering of the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra [Front Page]. See Posts.

The Mathematician Pappus records Archimedes [287-212 BCE]: ‘Give me a place to stand and [with a lever] I shall move the Earth’.

You don’t need to move the Earth. But you do need to step back to Nothing to see what’s going on with Everything.

In looking for ‘Everything’, you must remember to include the Looking-Subject. ‘Everything’ is radically inclusive.

In looking for ‘Nothing’, you must remember to exclude any sensory, cognitive or affective representation of it as Object. ‘Nothing’ is radically exclusive.

But what happens if you forget the Looking-Subject? Or stop-short of Nothing at ‘Something’? A new and sophisticated word for this forgetting is ‘Self-Reference’. And to get stuck in it is to get snarled in the Self-Loop.

‘Look cuttingly: Who is it that looks? When you thoroughly penetrate this, the clarity stands out as lacquer black as a coal goose standing in the snow.

Just abandon the myriad Dharmas, discard reason, let go of loss and gain, good and bad this instant and return to yourself and look penetratingly:

‘Who is it that Sees?’

The four elements are without self. I am originally without a master. This masterless master is the body, and this selfless self is true nature.

Body and Nature are not two, and the ten thousand Dharmas are one. In this unity there are no sages and no ordinary people. Where can life, death and Nirvana come from?

The merit of existence and non-existence does not apply to this wondrous wisdom. How can words or silence, movement or stillness affect it?

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There are many ways to interpret this classic poem. I’ll leave it to the reader.

Honest Inquiry begins inwards, backwards. The assumed Subject had to be clearly identified, the Inquirer’s Platform laid bare, prior to any investigation on an Object or else one keeps tripping on the Self-Loop. It was the defining difference that marked early Dharmic Inquiry.

The modern assumption that the Subject can be ignored as long as the Object was clearly in view was, after repeated and painful experimentation, found to be false.

In time there spread a wider appreciation of the issues involved. That this type of Inquiry was of a very special and perilous character, that any inquiry on the nature of the Subject, by an assumed Subject, was fraught with miscues, wrong turns and short stops.

Vedic Truth: from Vid; To Know, To See; Proto-Indo European Weid, as in Vide, View, Video. Hence Schools of Philosophy as Darśanas, from dṛś: ‘To View’.

The Philosopher [Phílosophía: ‘Lover of Wisdom’] is replaced by the Seer. I can debate you to the grave. But I can’t unsee what I see. One loves Wisdom of course, yet the conviction is unstable until I see. To ‘See’ is the irreducibly simple act.

‘Seeing’ in its analytic meaning is is all about catching the beam in your own eye. I catch the beam in my eye: and catch myself catching myself; and catch myself catching myself catching myself. And so on.

I See. I See that I See. I See that I See that I See…I Know. I Know that I Know. I Know that I Know that I Know…I am Conscious. I am Conscious that I am Conscious..and so on.

This is the unwinding. Each element ‘eats’ the one prior to it once it catches the beam in its own eye. Step-back until you are in clear view of what is going-on.

The issue of Self-Reference, a defining difference between Dharmic and other religious templates, leads to the evolution of its primary investigative tool: Formal Meditation Practice.

Vedic inquiry begins with Formal Meditation Practice [Dhyāna], the original ‘Laboratory For Inquiry’. [‘C’han’ and ‘Zen’ for example are morphed extensions of the word ‘Dhyāna‘.]

An elemental and time-tested tool, it is the single-best practice to catch yourself catching yourself, to grab the swirling cat’s tail.

How do ‘I’ investigate ‘Me’? How do I spot the beam in my own eye?

Meditation isn’t an aimless open-ended Sitting. There isn’t anything warm and fuzzy about it. Properly done it should gut you out.

Aside from the Dharma, I continue to remain incredulous that self-referential loops whether in Language or Mathematics or even social-systems such as Post-Modernism or Marxism, are so routinely missed.

No person should teach, write books [or websites], or hold-forth on the Dharma until his bottom is permanently numb from long hours of Sitting. The Numb-Bottom Test.

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See the Posts on Science, in particular the ‘Scientific Stance’ which ironically shares this requirement in order to identify the ‘Objective World’. It was the steep decline in Dharmic Traditions of Inquiry that made it miss the Scientific Revolution altogether.

Step into your bathroom. Turn on the lights. Wipe mirror with a damp cloth. Look.

Do you see your eye? Of Course you do. But what you don’t see is the source of your vision.

In fact, what you see in the mirror cannot be the source of your vision. In fact, it can be anything but the source of your vision.

Your source of vision may never see itself. And anything you see as the source of your vision, by that very fact, is confirmed as not being the source of your vision.

There are no claims of error in which I can have greater conviction. [Note that these Axioms of Sight precede and preempt the Axioms of Logic which originate in primary ontological assumptions. See the Posts on the Origins of Formal Logic.]

This Axioms can be extended at many levels. I can’t see the source of my seeing, hear the source of my hearing and so on.

More generally, I can’t have any true relationship with ‘Me’. Any relationship I have can only be with ‘Me’, the idea of ‘Me’, in a confounding of ‘Object’ as ‘Subject’.

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The Axioms of Sight are the Virgin Twins. They are not to be violated. So what happens if I do? I then: ‘Give Birth To Myself’.

I look into a mirror. And I am absolutely certain that what I see is the source of my vision.

In claiming to see my own eye, I become an Object to myself as Subject. I double, I multiply and divide.

The ‘Cycle of Birth and Death’. The Self-Loop.