Being purposefully indeterminate I would suggest that there would
appear to be (something akin to) three
round symbols above this text — between it and the previous
block. We might suppose that we should ‘count the colons’,
but at first — I didn’t decide to.
Since they are ‘more round than oval’ most would decide
they are either ‘circles’ or different cases of the
letter ‘O‘, rather than being zeroes of different
sizes. I do not mean to imply that what ‘most would decide’
matters or is any sort of guide to what is accurate or
moves progressively toward such a target. Yet we might agree that
there are either three circles, or three ‘O’s —
and that the two at the sides about half the size of the one between
them. Notice, for example that we have a term for decide —
which is a sort of division, but we do not have an opposiing term
at hand, such as encide...except ‘inside’. Of course,
we do have ‘co-incidence’.
In terms of ‘what they mean’ we might somewhat accurately
suppose that they are a ‘typographical construct’
which is indicative of some form of ellipsis... a pause, shift
or introduction to change — maybe it’s just a fancy
replacement for an ellipse.
What I wish to explore with you about the symbols (if that’s
what we decide they are) up there is that there are a variety
of problems with counting — and toys of solving them, that
— speaking generally — we get little or no exposure
to.
In order to remedy this to some degree, I will ask you to agree
to play a game with me. In other words, for us to proceed and
prosper, please begin by agreeing to ‘be on my side’
in terms of valuing our explorations for a moment. I realize how
pedantic my plea appears, but I must convey how crucial it is
that you ‘stand on my side’ of the line of skepticism
— for only in so doing will you have the opportunity to
truly taste the very uniquely empowering potentials and transports
of relation available in my humble offerings.
o:O:o
Let’s suppose we ‘wish to count’ the components
of this glyph. We might immediately notice two potentials —
in other words, our common habits of counting would guide use
to offer that either:
a: (counting the big obvious ‘frontmost’ or ‘most
important’ things) there ‘are 3’.
b: (counting everything we can at scale 1) there ‘are 5’.
c: (counting every discrete element we can locate) there ‘are
7’.
I said two, and presented three – but we often discard more
than one before emerging with the ‘little polarity’
which we then somewhat flatly employ in judging and lensing our
experience. We will, almost invariably, and ‘very naturally’
limit these three choices to the most significant two, even before
beginning — and thus, before we’ve begun to count,
we are already dividing...and subtracting* — usually
in a set of domains we are unequipped to explore. In this we see
an echo of the problems that arise when potentials are shaved
away ‘for the sake of clarity’. In the gardens where
the meanings of knowledge are growing, this shaving results in
constant catastrophe — primarily because it is accomplished
silently, under a veil we also have no metaphor of.
[* In essence, we can observe that to subtract is to ‘divide
away from’ and to multiply is to ‘add sums unto’
in an orderly sequence.]
Notice that in our choosing that happens in a place and at a
speed we are not likely to observe — we are selecting a
schema based upon a perception of significance. In a sense we
might say we will process the question such that before we begin
consciously processing anything we ‘draw a circle of light’
around the schema (underlying structure map) that appears to us
by habit or agreement to match the need at hand. This appearance
is startlingly inaccurate in many cases, however. And there are
dimensions inside us, extremely important dimensions — which
lose energy and potential in geometric waves if we are consistently
obliged to select or authorize ‘a single schema’ over
not only knowledge, but even ourselves. Specifically — our
human and animalian character.
In carefully examining the roots of how we assemble our understandings
— for example in ‘knowing the count’ of a thing
— we can locate the places that were shaved off to produce
the somewhat tyrannical toys we are accustomed to serve and use
and replicate. But the toys we have possession of are not the
limit of our inheritance. In fact, my position is that in most
cases the opposite is true — our toys are actively hiding
our inheritance from us, while appearing to be the primary transport
to it. This is not because they are bad toys, per se — but
rather because we choose a form of relation with them, as we are
taught to, which is fundamentally and dangerously flawed. It’s
also startlingly easy to resolve.
If in our counting-game around the symbol, we apply only the
slightest spice of poetic relation in our parsing (interpretation
of meaning-relation-values of various perspectives on unity and
division) we might for example decide that the symbol is first
a unity; that before we began thinking of counting it, we did,
in some ‘place we don’t mention’ — ‘count
it as one‘. So we see that ‘from nothing’ we
derive something — which then may be ‘counted’
in various ways. For now, we’ll preserve the 1 for ‘the
thing we are counting’.
There is also the poetic shape-likeness (isomorphism) with ‘a
day of the Sun’ — divided into rising, noon (high
sun) and setting. So we could for example say that the symbol
is a story, and that the story is about ‘how the Sun’
is the ‘source of numbers’ and is — in this
graphical entity, represented as the 1 that is 3, that is 5, that
is 7. We may observe that the glyph has a single largest participant,
flanked by two smaller participants. Betwixt them there
are two symbols we would recognize as colons, each comprised of
two dots. And these are less apparent, or ‘signIficant’
than that which they stand as divisors betwixt.
And then we might debate whether ‘the 1’ is ‘the
symbol as a whole’ or ‘the big circle in the center’.
But we might decide to count both. If we did, we might
have to decide to count the ‘whole’ as an entity unto
itself, or include it in the ‘full count’. For example,
we might decide to count the whole as ‘zero’ or the
‘mysterious emptiness of source’, and then proceed
to arrive at the position outlined above.
Let us decide to preserve each of the counting-positions (or
count perspectives) — not merely as an element in a list,
but instead as being positions of equivalent and profound value
in a symmetry of counting — in terms of
meaning, and relation to our understanding of the ‘entity
being counted’. We are, in effect ‘making a ring of
scales of counts’, and while we craft it, we are attaching
poetic meanings to each perspective, such that we get ‘a
form of sums’ that itself tells a story — i.e. has
and expresses character ‘about’ something extremely
essential: thinking and divisions — as well as the subject
we are playing our games of counting around.
Preserving our counts thus far would render the following positions:
1 (a ‘single’ symbol)
3 (most significant elements)
5 (discrete characters)
7 (very discrete elements)
While this seems unnecessary, or perhaps esoteric — the
action of doing it and what emerges from this activity in
terms of experiential understanding is not. If we are taught,
for example, to only value a single scale as real, or
relevant to our activity — even and sometimes especially
if this is ‘only implied’ by the shape of our relations
with these ideas and knowledge-systems — the results immediately
bleed over into intellectual domains, and domains of meaning-relation
(metaphor) as well — too often catastrophically. The reason
is that our metaphors utilize the features of the elemental mathematics
we are taught — if this is ‘one sort’ we get
‘one sort’ of relation-math to choose from —
when our choices should far more abundant, as well as recombinant.
To understand what we are — and thus
what counting is — we must discard entirely the admonitions
of our common agreement that ‘a number’ is ‘without
character or meaning’ except as a marker of quantification.
This is not now and has never been ‘the most accurate truth’
about numbers or our relations with them — except when it
is decided and enforced that it shall be. In reality, it is a
single pragmatically self-replicatory idea — useful under
certain circumstances — that is masquerading as the arbiter
not only of truth, but of its more mundane progeny: ‘fact’.
Repeated and creative experiential exposure to this ‘kind
of multiple counting’ activity reveals something
crucial about counting; which is in part that
it is a matter of ‘assembling and valuing’ scales
of perspective, biases, contexts, and transports and mode-movements
(dances) of assembly. Our options vastly superceede the frozen
and often tyranical perspectives that our education and experience
oblige us to.
Because we are weaned from experiential learning on theories
and single-modes (distant experts), we are not only likely
but forcibly coerced into remaining experientially and imaginally
blind to the power of their precursors — or of having multiple
modes at our disposal. And these are, in any real analysis, our
powers.
o:O:o
Far from being ‘not smart enough’ — what human
children and the adults they become actually are is ‘far
too intelligent’ to bear common servitude to a single mode,
instead of multiple simultaneous choice amongst many modes and
even radical integrations of mode (which is the common activity
of the child, regardless of our models — given environmental
support for this). We are born intelligent beyond our wildest
fictions, and the necessity of binding us to extant modalities
of knowledge acquisition and expression is not only absurd, but
amounts to a plague of cognitive slavery that has been erasing
the essential sentience and connectivity of our species since
well before the time of Christ.
If we ‘are not exposed to’ this essentially poetic
terrain of numeric sources, relations, children and environments
— we are trapped in a tiny (perhaps the tiniest) sliver
of our real organismal and cooperative potential for exploration
and application of understanding — not only in terms of
applied formalism — but in terms of the experience, expression
and liberty of access to our own inherent human potentials. In
other words — in terms of the most essential and crucial
of our human birthrights. Whatever we lose here, will be greatly
magnified in our human assemblies at every scale, regardless of
their formative ideals.
It is not merely some ‘tiny portion’ of ourselves
that is thus obscured — but instead a ‘portion’
which has and continues to expand geometrically such that ‘any
portion at all’ is ‘mostly this sort of expansion-portion’.
Almost all of what is being replicated so miraculously is something
we might tag for the moment as ‘compression-error’.
This ‘species’ of erroring in cognitive, intellectual,
logical and biological terrains is a momentum more deadly than
almost any we can name, for it acts as a primary source of human
confusion, suffering, and atrocity against each other and our
planet.
o:O:o
In the circumstance we modernly exist as unwitting
prisoners in, most of us will never have the opportunity to explore,
celebrate or test (taste the different potentials of) the relation-value
in thought and action of ‘more than a single mode at a time’
with the various toys of knowing we are endowed with. Even a cursory
examination of actual human experience and expression would imply
that we are taught and teach each other that in these domains
there is some inviolable admonition against ‘using
multiple perspectives’ integrationally.
This idea is rendered absurd with nothing more than a simple glance
at the ways in which the biological aspect of
what we are emerges and proceeds toward assembling
itself — and the ‘how’ is in scalarly self-referencing
waves. Rendered into intelligible language: to grow at all —
we re-include all previous growth, in
the most general of senses, and across all dimensions, contexts,
barriers and transports.
The specific implication is that ‘most people
are not smart enough to do this’ — this ‘magical
genius dance’ that emerges when we are at liberty to consort
with our living sources in the terrains we call knowledge. Yet
‘almost every person’ learned a whole plethora of
functionally alien languages — when we were infants!
The absurdity of this ‘invisible standing rule’ is
rudely magnified by our continued practice and observance of it.
How can we be born incapable of doing what we are already being,
and what sort of intelligence would stand in its own way with
such absurd bases of self-understanding?
It is ironic that in the 21st century we toil beneath the incalculable
weight of a burden of primitive perspective about our own
powers of knowing that even our ancient ancestors were
commonly more free of. Personally, I find it even more ironic
that much of the source of this rapaciously virulent burden comes
from metaphors and relation-schemas that imply the incredible
prowess of mechanism over organism. Yet the merest glimpse
at the realities of such positions reveals a nearly total disregard
of accessible and crucial realities in these cognitive gardens,
stemming primarily from the habit of ‘discarding’
scales and domains of complexity or relation we are unaccustomed
to credentialing. In almost every case, the first to go are the
domains of diversity, and character — both stunningly foundational
prerequisites for every dimension and element of human life and
liberty.
Examining the history of the idea that we are ‘too dumb’
to employ simultaneous paths to expression, exploration, cooperation
— or worse, that there ‘simply aren’t any other
paths’ other than the impoverished ‘single finger’
rationalities we’re obliged to leaves one breathless in
awe at what we must first be denied in order to assume such a
position of perspective. The bare realities of our history and
common endeavor, viewed in their detail, lends our species the
cognitively prognathous appearance of an entity ever-more determined
consider itself ‘ever more dumber’ than its toys of
knowledge-acquisition, encoding, sensing, &c — when
the reality is that we are their source — we cannot be ‘dumber
than our toys’, neither in generalities nor specifics.
Would that it were unnecessary to point out that this comprises
a long-standing and utterly fallacious preconception
about the powers and potentials of the human intellect —
particularly in the child — and this fallacy is brutal in
its everpresent reminders that ‘we are dumb animals’
— except for the somehow undeserved power of specific
systems of knowledge-relation, lovingly bestowed upon us
by our progenitors. What a pile of cognitive garbage!
The only way this could happen, I might suggest, is if some of
the ‘ways of knowing’ we credential and authorize
so highly were — underneath their garb of heroes —
bullies. In short — our formal systems of knowledge
acquisition, credentialing, authorization and valuing have, for
at least a thousand years or so — been acting overtly as
‘terrain hogs’ while masquerading as ‘protectors’
or ‘the true source of the gifts of knowledge’.
This form of ‘problem’ has been ‘proceeding
in geometric scales’ of expansion for thousands of years
and billions of human lifetimes, and is consistently
active not only in converting the terrains it ‘owns’
into reproductive resources — but works also to literally
‘assemble new dimensions’ into which it may assemble
‘more new self’. It is viciously virulent in its nature,
activities and proceedings.
o:O:o
In the modern moment we are only allowed the opportunity to very
vaguely realize the powers that the simple underpinnings
of our knowledge-systems hold out to us, or refuse to
our general and specific access. Such refusals are based upon
our own habits and selections of process-form in relation to our
active and potential motivations —our habits of perspective,
assembly, valuing and credentialing.
It is as if there is an ancient gatekeeper who serves the rightful
ruler of these gardens (which themselves thrive near the (real)
analog of ‘Sun’ in our inner universes). This undefeatable
sphinx controls access to an inwardly-leading imaginal
gate.
Whenever we approach this gate (for example in seeking to count
something — the Guardian demands our credentials in the
form of an identity-riddle.
Since no portion of the ‘place’ in which these events
are emerging is mechanical (we are speaking of inward domains
of agreement and imaginal relation — which are fundamentally
biocognitive), the presentation of a ‘mechanical answer’
will merely bring ‘a mechanical result’. So if one
approaches the gatekeeper, who then demands one’s credentials
thus:
‘What is the number of the things in the symbol?’
And we provide the mechanical answer:
‘I count 7 discrete elements.’
Then the gate swings wide and we are seemingly admitted to the
paradise we sought — but as we pass through the gate, the
gatekeeper ‘changes the hall’ we pass into, such that
everything beyond the gate is fundamentally sourced and existing
in only those dimensions of perspective available (as
source and schema) in our own answer!
Thus it is that we actually arrive not in the palace
of our own sources, but instead in a masquerade-palace, where
(in this case) everything is mechanical, and statistics
stand in the place of actual character, meaning, and relation-benefit.
Everything appears as we imagined it might, and thus we are literally
unable to detect that we’ve strayed — at all.
The ‘measure’ of the gatekeeper’s instructions
is simple:
‘Allow all aspirants to pass the gate, every time, but
pretend this is not so.’
‘Let the measure of the scalarity of the password they
offer, be the measure of the scalarity they encounter beyond the
gate.’
In our case, the modern one — the gatekeeper will ‘always
open the gate for you’ — granting you the appearance
of ‘great success’ in passing the test. But
your success is no success, if in answering you’ve accidentally
(and innocently) traded the real potentials of the palace for
the merest sliver of a single reflection of it.
The problem is our species long ago ‘fell in love’
with specific schemas of knowing — instead of keeping
our relations with the sources of schema open, accessible to ourselves
and active. In so doing, we ‘froze out’ vast terrains
of potential and experiential relation in favor of our favoritism
for the superficial power of the product of a given schema:
mathematics, for example.
We ‘lost the source of math’ and ‘gained a
tiny photograph’ of it, in ‘trade’. The photograph
is furiously sexy, in a variety of ways — but is of little
value when our access to a direct experience of its sources is
unobtainable.
The trade wasn’t made with an understanding of
what was being lost or traded, in part because it was made by
a child — the child our species is and has been. And it
was made in every case under great duress — in
fact, it still is. This ‘choice’ we appear to have
agreed to — is not a choice at all.
It is a trap.
And if there’s one thing we know about traps, its that
they have these things associated with them:
1. A maker
2. A quarry
3. A purpose.
o:O:o
Let us return to our progress in counting the glyph above (or
was it the one previous to this?)
So far we followed the accrual and preservation of 5 ‘essential
perspectives of count’ if we ‘included a number (or
position) for the unity’:
0: 1 : 3 : 5 : 7 (symbol itself counted as 0)
1 : 1 : 3 : 5 : 8 (symbol counts as 1)
This renders two patterns — rather than ‘rows
of numbers’:
1357 (add 0)
2468 (add 1)
We could ‘reduce’ these by summing them, producing
a unity:
1+3+5+7 = 16, 1+6 = 7 — summing ‘our separate counts’
grants us access to the ‘most discrete count’ —
that which we generally agree to be the most likely ‘total
number of discrete elements’ in the glyph.
or...
2+4+6+8 = 20, 2+0 = 2— by summing this (in this case, not
necessarily in all cases) we arrive at the value of the ‘the
counter’ (a number-position for ourselves) and ‘the
counted’ — the term we preserved for the wholism of
our symbol. Of course, this is merely my selection of its meaning.
— but I chose it in order to demonstrate a ‘two sides’
approach, where the latter is the side of ‘ways’ and
the former the side of ‘counts’.
So we have established not merely ‘4 scales’ of counting
a single symbol, but also a schema — which we could limit
or elaborate. The schema is ‘to have multiple scales’
and ‘to have those scales we can easily locate visually’.
In our schema, we’ve decided to ‘include the whole’,
but since we are uncertain whether the ‘beginning’
is 1 or 0, we preserved models of both. Notice that there are
still many more participants we could add or explore numbers for:
the counter, the context, the history — the source of numbers
— we could add a number for ‘the one who will read
what is counted’ as well. There are many potentials here
whose real import belies their easy dismissability in our common
logics and knowledge-habits.
In simple terms, we have decided to do something we are unaccustomed
to by credentialing the value of preserving a minimum (in this
case) of 8 perspectives upon ‘what the number of things’
is, and we have done this without strain or stress, merely by
playing with some stories of counting.
Let us suppose for the sake of continuing our explorations that
it is crucially important to have and preserve multiple
simultaneous counting-schemas for reasons that have as
much to do with intelligence as they do with mathematics. For
example, we could decide that it is crucial to teach and understand
the poetic relations of the cardinal numbers to their divisions
and each other. This ‘mere idea’, which we will explore
shortly, would in fact radically altar our experience, expression,
activity and understanding in ways that our modern civilizations
would be entirely shocked to discover, or experience. There is,
in point of fact, something like a plague of relational mechanization,
and its costs in the biosphere and in our human lives are no different
than if it were a viral or bacterial plague. So swayed by science
and material invention are we, that human beings in the modern
moment have come to believe we are ‘more like machines’
than like ‘magic’. The source of this absurd idea?
Formalized and mechanistic systems of value-relation. Architecture-systems,
if you will. We could say, and not be far from the mark, that
it is ‘the assembler-elements’ within the animalBody
of knowledge who, by their nature, desire to ‘take over’
and ‘rule’ all inner kingdoms. These elements were
already the primal source of the momentums that shave away character
to produce tool — in other words, these ‘assemblers
of assembly’ were probably the sources of many of the modes
we employ to assemble anything, and thus it is a relatively simple
matter for these ‘little intelligent swarms’ to ‘assemble
a mimicry’ such that they inhabit the throne of the kingdom
they were purposed as the servants and architects of. In such
a model, this outcome is partially the result of their nature,
and more largely the result of our human cognitive relations with
ourselves, ideas, each other, our history and our potentials.
We might say that ‘the way in which we approach’ the
assemblers too often causes them to ‘attempt to rule over
us’ when the natural relationShip with these ‘assemblers’
is meant to occur with each of us individually and collectively
on sitting on the ‘throne’ of intellectual and emotional
sovereignty. In such a case, the assembler acts as ‘a trusted
servant’ instead of a tyrant. And this is the ‘cure’
for the plague; to return the assemblers (our ways of knowing)
to their proper position:
That of servants — instead of serpents.
o:O:o
Counting and valuing, as well as size and shape are crucial formative
momentums whose relations deeply influence the assembly and meaning-relation
and poetic shape-likeness within ‘metaphors’ —
the tokens of imaginal connectivity which we assemble into knowledge
of various sorts. But when numbers and letters are allowed to
preserve the character aspect of circumstance-relational
meaning — in terms of poetics — we add many dimensions
into which entirely knew forms of information can be ‘stashed’
(authoring) and from which incredible powers of knowledge-relation
emerge as the result of participation (exposure/interpretation).
I realize that I’ve asked a lot of my readers in following
my presentation thus far. What I am trying to point out, which
I admit my difficulty in, is that it is crucial that we conserve
with equal value certain means and games of relation with numerism
that our ancient ancestors were well-aware of, yet which our perspective
has forced us to regard as largely meaningless. Yet these forms
of numerism and what appear to be ‘children’s games’
with numbers and ‘relations of quantity’ are anything
but what their surface appears. If we don’t place our activities
and noticings about numerism in the respected class of mathematics,
we automatically value-lock them into an even worse position by
‘giving them over’ to numerology — a commonly
denigrated value-class. This is where ‘most people’
would locate the material we’re pursuing. In some cases
this might be relatively accurate, but in this case it is
not, for we are examining the sources of both numerology and mathematics
— and these sources exceed both of these children in catalog
upon catalog of ways and means.
In fact, this entire garden from whence our numerisms and maths
emerge is and has long been considered a vast secret, known only
to those who have personally touched the living source of numbers
— or have remained in the general or specific tutelage of
someone of this nature. The result of this has and continues to
be catastrophic: without access to the ‘core meanings’
of numerism we are utterly lost in any terrain of valuing or judgment.
If our ‘core meanings’ are largely or purposefully
obscuratory, or misguided in their formation — again, the
same result.
There are perhaps three important ‘stories’ of how
we can do this, let’s call them ‘toys of counting’
that we have lost, or miscoded over time. Generally speaking I
might describe them as ‘Ordering of counts’, ‘Progressions’,
and ‘reCognition of character’. These might be restated
as reCognizing descent, understanding scales of growth or decay,
and poetics of sets.
For example, we recognize descent in placing the number for the
whole ‘first’ in our ordering of counts. We might
also call this ‘the unityNumber’ — however what
I mean by this will be clarified shortly. Here we are actively
acknowledging that ‘there is a number’ for the beginning,
where we ‘attend the whole matter’ first, before
speaking of divisions. This has a power which is not merely
poetic, however it appears from outside. Part of this power is
that we begin to recognize that numerism and character have
an essential relation which is entirely outside of formal
systems. It must be individually experienced to be expressed or
explored, and in each individual and moment of circumstance it
remains unique, regardless of its seeming, at some scales of perspective,
to follow some offerable schema ‘precisely’.
We reCognized progressions (or scalarity) in having a ‘count
for each scale we can discern’ in the symbol, and preserving
them in order of descent. And we made a nod toward the reCognition
of character in my passing comment upon the shape-likeness (isomorphism)
betwixt the symbol and ‘a Day of The Sun’.
In counting a flat symbol, however, we may have ‘begun’
in a place where there ‘is only one side’ to count.
Organisms are different, and follow a different schema. In counting
the sides of, for example, a person — we might say there
are three (from one perspective): the front, the back, and ‘the
side which isn’t seen or named’. This side is, in
form and effect, not a side at all — but a meta-side. Such
a ‘side’ is actually ‘the source of sided things’
— and has no sides — of its own.
‘Sides’ are instead an expression of its local presence.
understHanding
Let’s take as a second example something a bit more real,
which we can each examine directly. Many scholars presume that
our hands, being 10-fingered, resulted in our adopting a base-10
(decimal) counting system, and as I understand it, the term ‘digit’
with which we reference numeric positions is significant in its
relation to fingers, which have been and remain amongst the most
amazing ‘devices of counting’ ever embodied.
I would suggest from my own direct experience that the human hand
is actually an organic computing matrice of unparalelled
and largely unplumbed ‘features of numeric integration’.
I mean this in a startling way: it is my belief that ancient peoples
possesed games of counting — a way of relating
to numerism — that allowed them to calculate the speed
of light — and many other things — with incredible
accuracy, using only their hand. I realize this sounds
absurd, and yet I have seen and experienced toys like this myself,
as well as others using them — and I believe quite sincerely
that we shall rediscover them together ‘very shortly’.
What we will discover will appear superficially absurd —
to wit: your hand is a more powerful computing device than all
human computing mechanisms combined. The reason it is possible
for us to discover this, against all habit of knowledge and consciousness
is because it is not a theory. We are about to have the direct
experience of this again, together.
Our goal for the moment however is to gain experience with some
other (and multiply preservable) ways and rationals of counting.
We are ‘aiming’ for a new sort of experience with
numbers, counting and numerism in general* — an
experence where ‘each count’ has a meaning which
is not abstract in the way we expect numerism to be abstract.
Part of this meaning is poetic, and we can experience this portion
most easily by adopting a playful relationship with the game of
counting — one in which we begin with the expectation that
each thing we count will reveal more of its character and schema
— as we count it in different and multiple ways.
[* Perhaps most specifically with what we call ‘operations’
with numeric entities — the schemas of assembly and division
— and these begin with counting. in other words, once we
have reMastered the many real gardens of counting — this
will naturally radically altar our relationShips with more complex
operations, such that what we reDiscover here, will magnify itself
in its children. So while we are seeking to restore the poetics
of numerism and counting, we are also seeking to radically alter
our relationships with ‘operations’ in the same way.]
These things to be revealed are neither abstract nor mechanical
— but instead have to do with ‘a sort of story of
arisal’ — a riddle of liberation — hidden within
the very places we are familiar with. To glimpse and ride it merely
requires that we set aside our common expectations to some degree,
and play with some new toys of assembling knowledge. Thus we are
not ‘doing some new kind of arithemetic’ — quite
the opposite. We are undoing the threads of what later becomes
arithimatic, to see not their structure — but instead the
‘parable-story’ of the source of numerism itself.
We invent the quantities and membranes of separation which we
are taught are pre-existing. The strange thing is, the value of
their pre-existence has become to vast and for the wrong reasons:
numbers ‘are worth more’ than organisms — including
human beings.
To understand how this circumstance came to be, we need to understand
that the source of human numerism was based primarily in practices
of accounting and war, rather than a more organismal or cognitive
basis — such as that of animalian relation, or biological
numerism — or the charactered poetics emergent in a living
environment. In other words, the ‘maths’ handed down
to us have come only after having shaved away their most useful
and important powers: those of sentient relation — whole
dimensions of useful and often impossibly illuminative content
— were thrown away, as though dross.
We preserved only the tokenized aspect of numerism, to such an
expanding degree that if asked ‘What does the number 5 mean?’
most children who’ve suffered the cognitive mutilation of
formal education will respond: ‘What? Numbers don’t
mean things. They are just something you count with.’.
In other words — our species is generally convinced numbers
are abstract, as a kind of irrefutable fact. More than the opposite
is true. Numbers aren’t anything more or less than our relation
with them. Without us, there’s ‘no such thing’,
which means that numbers in general will rescue, ignore, or consume
us in equal measure with our clear understanding of their powers
and realities. If we pretend they are abstract, we beccome like
them, and the rather terrifying truth of abstraction leaks into
our lives and experience where it lays hold of terrain and begins
replicating and enforcing its own sovereignty.
o:O:o
If we examine the palm-side of the hand, we find plainly writ
there a set of ‘divisions’. On the reverse, we may
have wrinkles and other more vague lines, but on the ‘inside’
of the hand the divisions are clearly marked. Of course, as with
our symbol, we may argue as to scale — and if we were to
count every discrete line, the countings would be complex indeed.
We can avoid this for the sake of our learning-experiment by limiting
the number of scales, at least in making a beginning, to three.
The inside, the other side — and the unity.
Four our toy of counting, which can be made and played in different
ways, we will consider the sides of the hand as the side of unity,
and the side of divisions, the palm corresponding to the latter.
We will eventually speak of the hidden side, as well.
On the inside of the hand we find four fingers and a thumb, or
five appendages. The fingers are divided at the palm approximately
in thirds, and the thumb differs in being divided only once. The
palm itself, will tend to show three major lines of division,
other than at the bases of its small family of members and where
it is unified with the wrist. In a sense, we might consider the
wrist the ‘tail’ of the hand, or ‘that which
connects it to its sources’.
If we examine the sides of the digits, we see that their ‘divisions’
end about halfway around, inside to other. And on the other side,
we see ‘the whole’ — that ‘thing’
we name, and then proceed to divide, or ‘count the number
of’.
Examining the inside, we count 4 fingers, a thumb (or 5 members)
— and add a member for ‘that which unifies and makes
the hand’ — the palm — a member we might normally
discard entirely in our count, never having been empowered to
count thus. This resolves to a position of 5 plus-the-palm = 6
on the inner side.
Turning the hand over, we see the unityCharacter first.
On the inside, the divisions are ‘counted first’ but
on this side ‘only the unity is really countable’
(at this scale of detail, in the game we are together buildign)
— thus we don’t ‘recount’ the five members,
or the palm from which they emerge. We might, for example, if
we were interested in a game that ‘preserves counts of opposites’
(a game that adds ‘shadows’ in a metaphoric sense).
For the simple count, we will count 1 for the unityCharacter,
or ‘that which what we are counting is, taken as
a sum’ — the Hand. One for each member, and one
for the palm.
and if we sum these we obtain 50, which we might
reduce to 5, arriving back at the ‘common count’.
But let us also examine the relationship of the sides:
The side of many:
Palm(1): 3 divisions, 4 portions
Fingers(4): 2 divisions, 3 portions
Thumb(1): 1 division, 2 portions
6 : 6 : 9
The side of one:
‘A membrane’ ending in 5 extremities, each ending
in a nail, and resolving to a ‘point’.
(from something) into 1 into 5 into 5 points into (the side of
many)
On the side of one, we are attempting something difficult. For
on this side, simple examination will reveal that the membrane
is unified. This is of far vaster import than we imagine, for
in fact the ‘unities and divisions’ of our own bodies,
our own forms — comprise a scalar parable that is ‘playfully
devised such that it always leads to its source’. And this
source is a thing we are not yet clear about a metaphor for —
either a poetic or philosophical entity (meaning-relation-token).
[notes:]
Primary exposed divisions:
Front: elbow: arm / forearm — 1 division / 2 portions
Rear: knee: thigh / leg — 1 division / 2 portions
Primary unique division: :
Rear: Division leading to anus: 1 division / 2 portions
— with a singularity leading inward toward the gut between
them.
Frontal Mid Singularity:
Umbilicus (fore-tail) — a circle leading inward.
Inward-outward leading portals:
eyes (vesicas): 2 members
nose: (rough vesica): 1 member, 2 entrances
ears: 2 members
mouth: 1
anus: 1
umbilicus: 1
man: penis: 1
woman: vagina 2 (1 womb) 1 (bladder).
A man has an etrinsic penetrative ‘rod’ with a ball
at the end.
A man has two ‘balls’ outside within a membrane.
3 in 1.
A woman has an intrinsic rod (hall) leading inward to a ‘ballRoom’.
Past her inner ‘hall’ a woman has two ‘balls’
at the end of arc’d tunnels.
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If we are forced to limit ourselves (because the shape of our
knowing-toys demands this) to domains that relate only to classification
(terms of common reference by which we reCognize elements and
assemblies in our environment) then these ideas would not be out
of place. The easily verified reality however is that simple ideas
that we use — schemas of how we assemble what and how we
know — can be ‘out of place’ in way which is
as serious as it is almost utterly invisible.
What is happening more often than not, in the places beneath
where we experience and express knowing is that we’ve been
habituated to ‘put’ certain ways of assembling knowledge
(in a ladder of value and significance) in a position of authority
that they in no way deserve or belong in. The key to noticing
this is that ‘we are forced’ to attend ‘matters
of classification’ (and their children — meaning
and value) before, and possibly to the exclusion of almost any
other perspective or domain. In other words, there is a ‘rude
empirical thrust’ to the entirety of the experiential and
real activity of human knowledge. This is a relatively new situation
on Earth, however virulent certain lineages of its precursors
may have been in their time — the onset of the mechanization
of metaphor has catapulted us into a terrain which is utterly
alien to human experience. Worse, we have little or no way to
point to, explore, or discuss these matters — should we
be graced with the experience of noticing them at all.
When we are stuck believing in an unconscious way that ‘class
of thing’ and ‘meaning-size-value’ are only
available from ‘empirical’ observations — observations
of ‘facts’ that discard character — we are in
more than grave danger of discarding character itself, along with
the importance it has — as one of the most intrinsic of
the qualities expressed by organismal life, and human sentience
and relation. When this character is denuded, classified, valued,
judged, reduced, copied and co-opted — that which is ‘suffering
behind’ all of these circumstances is actually ‘expiring’.
It is as if by exterminating species with the results of mechanization
and technology we are simultaneously erasing elements of our own
sentience — and in many cases those elements are the particular
constituents of our intelligence required to be able to recognize
the problem. Such complexly self-enfolded catastrophe is not uncommon
at any scale of human experience we may examine, and is instead
common to the individual, and, I would suggest, nearly any group
or assembly of individuals, in ways that express themselves as
distributions amongst populations.
If we ‘put the wrong thing’ in the first ‘to
do’ place in terms of our human intelligence, connectivity
and knowlege-acquisition-or-expression behavior — and especially
if this ‘wrong thing first’ tends to first block,
and later obliterate what it is ‘standing in for’
— we can see how in a very short time an entire garden of
sentient potentials of human relation could (need I say have been?)
be reduced to a vast patch of something like a single predacious
weed. In our case, this weed has adapted to the degree that it
now expresses a mimetic feature in place of evidence of its actual
activity: any time anyone examines this, it appears to be ‘something
very well-known and beneficial’. This ‘wrong thing
in the wrong place’ masquerades as what it was replacing.
And all of this is merely a preamble, to being able to ask a
simple question. I’m going to try to make it very simple,
and instead of doing what is common, we’ll explore some
relatively uncommon terrains together, using the question as the
frame and source
[mark of text in process]
stagecraft and misdirection
performance-element of commonly practiced stagecraft known as
‘magic’ which is often referred to as ‘misdirection’.
For example, in order to perpetrate an illusion that you have
selected a card from a deck of your own free will (further forcing
the value ‘this was a random choice unknown even to me’)
— I needn’t actually have you select an unknown
card at all. I must instead merely establish the belief that
you have; in you, and those assembled. Thus I can, by ‘directing
your attention’ cause you to select ‘some card’
and believe it ‘a random card’ — even when it
is a card known to me, or of my own choosing. This sort of misdirection
is not at all difficult to master. A curious person could learn
6 ways of accomplishing this element of card-magic in an hour,
with little or no previous experience — and they would succeed
nearly all of the time — because the ‘elements of
the sleight’ are essentially incredibly simple.
Part of what such misdirections depend upon for their continued
and uncompromised success is the pre-existing assurances we carry
around without becoming aware of their presence or activity. We
might model these as lenses, of a sort — for they change
what is in focus (and thus noticed) and what is blurry (and thus
largely ignored). We do not, as a general trend, like to maintain
relations with ‘blurriness’, far preferring the sexy
and often illuminated character of clarity and thus ‘precision’.
This latter desire is a trap set by a predator. Precision is fine
as an element in a well-rounded relationShip with sentience, but
as the arbiter of truth, statistics and their lot amount to little
more than prescriptive mimics who adopt the shapes desired by
those who craft them — to a much larger degree than ‘modern
people’ are likely to perceive.
A lot of these preconceptions that by their presence prosper the
proliferation of misdirection are incredibly primitive
(in terms of what we’d call logic and rationality) and they
are ‘so fundamental’ that the chance of us noticing
or questioning them (especially in the moment) are and tend to
remain negligible.
The point of this is simple: one carries and sustains the supposition
that ‘most things’ are going to be ‘a lot like
last time’. This leads one to believe that selecting a card
from a deck in my hand, is the same as, for example, selecting
a card from a deck ‘held by any stranger’ —
but this is of course utterly false. Even the ways they might
suppose it could be ‘different’ to select a card from
my hand — are just as erroneous as the idea that it would
be the same. In nearly every illusion I’ve ever learned,
the primary feature capitalized upon is not gullibility—
but instead habits of expectation that operate at an extremely
fundamental ‘level’ in our moment-to-moment consciousness
experience.
This results in a fundamental and constant misdirection —
a vaster single form than can be imagined, unless one has somehow
stepped outside briefly. It is a misdirection which first
steals potentials for escaping its own activities, in an uncannily
adept fashion.
The manner of its activity is surprisingly simple: it masquerades
as ‘the correct form’ or ‘good knowledge’.
What it directs us away from is ‘all other potentials’
— merely by significantly re-directing us to itself, any
time we begin to stray toward any paradigm or perspective that
would threaten the sovereignty of the one who’s spell we
are under. Thus it is that we agree that the idea that 1 + 1 =
2 is a ‘fact’. There are those who would claim this
is undeniably true whether or not we agree about it (crystallizationists)
as well as those who would be inclined to explore further if there
was significant disagreement (responsivists). Yet neither of them
would be likely to take their explorations into the domain of
how facts are arrived at. As it turns out, they are arrived at
by agreement — and not — as we’ve been commonly
scripted to believe, due to the existence of ‘proof’.
So essentially, by utilizing a rather sneaky way of reDirecting
(consistently) our attention toward a single possible way of relation
or knowing — we ‘automatically’ lose access
to precisely those domains and potentials we might require to
even notice such a circumstance, as well as those required to
empower us to attend it proactively. This ‘very simple’
sleight-of-hand occurs in a dimension we have little ‘insight’
into at all — because the products, transports, contexts
and precursors of these ‘places’ are all within the
bubbles and flows of our ‘imagination’.
Essentially, human ‘knowledge’ is imagination.
No imagination? Then there is no stage or ‘hand’ in
which to examine or assemble anything. If we begin to wonder ‘what
is the source of the illumination’ by which we ‘see’
inwardly — we have taken up with a path that will certainly
lead us beyond ‘single flavor’ knowledge-assemblies.
‘Knowing’ which humans are experiencing or exchanging
tokens about — is a fundamentally imaginary garden. If we
take, for example, the position of science — which is that
an empirical reality exists, we must first be forced to forget
that we can locate no empirical observer — we must
then agree to lie about the fact that every observer is charactered,
and brings character to observation — which (even in terms
of science) affects all observations. We should never need to
lie about such a thing. In examining what moves us to do so, we
may discover that ‘way down in the terrain of the tiny’
— in ‘the roots of how and what we seem to know about’
there is a vast array of broken mirrors. And what they have been
reflecting, primarily, for the past 4000 years of human history
— is their own damage.
It is an easy matter to point out examples that are, at least
to my own eye, rather startling. Many spiritual traditions make
use of the power of personal familiarity with paradox, or the
concentration of ‘everything’ into some form of internal
unity. Most such paradoxes contain their own answer, and it is
a much more real answer — often a crucially important one
— than we might expect.
For example, the common paradoxical lead-in that often functions
as our first introduction to paradox is “Which came first,
the Chicken, or the Egg?” Here we see the poverty and power
to occlude that our common modes and habits of knowing present
laid bare. The question is asking us to make categories, and establish
precedence. It is generalizing in that it is really referring
to whether there was a first chicken before there was a first
egg — since we believe (we are biased toward the polarity-side
of) that chickens ‘can only emerge from eggs’ —
perhaps slightly more than we believe eggs can only emerge from
chickens. In any case, what is more important to notice about
the question is that it is a riddle, not a comment. It was ‘crafted’
by its originators and copyists — to contain its own
answer in a magical way.
This is not the ‘high magic’ of those who prowl the
jungles of the occult — but instead the much more innocent
magic of a history of human sentience assembling itself, and leaving
important easter-eggs for ‘those who will return to the
garden wherein we dwelt’.
