Attempting answers (complement: questions; combination: analysis) at ancient analogies.
First thoughts roll with sevens. Seven days in a week, seven classical planets (recall the celestial bodies which circled round a stationary earth), lucky seven, The Chariot, seven major stages in the alchemical process: calcination, putrefaction, solution, distillation, conjunction, sublimation, and philosophic congelation. And of course, our seven sermons.
The Chariot is driven by the light and the dark engines—it is the two forces which power the single vehicle. If we can extract anything from Sermo I, it is a discussion of opposites, but on several layers. We are told that “[t]he pairs of opposites are qualities of the plemora which are not, because each balance each.” Above this statement we are shown eleven pairs of opposites as examples of the binary pairings which negate one another in the plemora. We will now list these as eleven unordered pairs: {effective, ineffective}, {fullness, emptiness}, {living, dead}, {difference, sameness}, {light, dark}, {hot, cold}, {force, matter}, {time, space}, {good, evil}, {beautiful, ugly}, {one, many}. It is these and other pairings that exist as one and the same thing in the plemora; that is to say, they don’t exist in the plemora because it of itself has no qualities. So we get a further pairing of {existence, non-existence} (which may seem similar, but perhaps not readily identical to {living, dead}), as a non/quality (and here we note the ‘/’ is used to indicate, in this case, both the absence and presence of a quality) of the plemora. We might want to recognize that some of Jung’s work focuses on the pairing {internal, external} with respect to individual; in different words, Jung looks at connections between a person’s psyche and the manifest world.
E.E. Rehmus informs us that the plemora itself is the Gnostic divine being, it is the Universal Soul. He goes on to note that all aeons emanate from it. In a Jungian sense, we might consider this to be the archetype of the Self, and from the Self, we derive selves—personal aeons or the aeon of an individual—in the small. In Sermo I, we are told that the plemora is nothingness and fullness, and I recall from a lecture on Jung that he felt the Self was also empty, yet contained every other archetype and, in this sense, is full. We are also told, in the Sermo, many other contrary things about the plemora. In particular, we are informed that we are not part of the plemora, that “we are from the plemora infinitely removed,” because to be a distinct creature is to be distinct form the other, and in specific, distinct form this Universal Soul, and in this Soul there is no distinction; however, we are also told that “because we are parts of the plemora, the plemora is also in us.” So we see here a further pairing of {plemora, individual} or, perhaps more in a Jungian flavour {other, self}. What we can begin to see is that the plemora and the individual, or the self and the other, share an identity in so far as each pairing, in their non/existence in the plemora, become one thing—we’ve denoted this one object by borrowing from set theoretic notation: the unordered binary pairing {x, y}—which is nothing (but of course, everything = nothing). We can note a numeric example of this pair as framed in computational language: {1, 0}.
More important to notice is that “the plemora is both the beginning and end of the created beings,” and that “the plemora prevadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof.” So here we have further pairings of contraries giving rise to our existence, and yet, canceling out that existence. We are told that the plemora has not created being, but yet, it is the end and beginning of existence, and that it is ubiquitous throughout existence. In the pattern of thought being followed, the plemora has {nothing, everything} to do with non/existence. Or in different, but unsurprising words, the plemora is all and it is nothing, that we are both the plemora itself and entirely distinct from it. It is in our being—our existence—that we continue and create distinction: “[w]hen we distinguish qualities of the plemora, we are speaking from the ground of our own distinctiveness and concerning our own distinctiveness.” Thus, since the plemora is empty and possesses no qualities, which is to say that it is full and posses all qualities, it is we who ‘pull out’ (‘push in’?) the pairings, and we who further divide the elements of the pairings—one here, and one over there. Put differently, it is we who create things, it is we who are the blind demiurges that shape the world, it is we who are the plemora. But if we weren’t blind and could see this in its entirety (its eternity), then this “would mean self-dissolution,” and “[t]herein both thinking and being cease.” Perhaps this would be the end (beginning?) of the Jungian goal: full integration of the shadow into the personality.
But still, there is nothing that “standeth [as] something fixed, or in some way established from the beginning.” So we speak of “qualities of the plemora which are not.” In other words, even our groupings of these pairs into units, and then into non/existence stemming from, into, through, an empty and full plemora is still creating distinction, it is still our thoughts about the plemora, and thus, “we have said nothing concerning the plemora.” “What is changeable” is the shifting thoughts and experiences by which, even in recognizing an x and its contrary y as an {x, y}, and then negating this in the plemora—which is ourselves, we generate the individual as “fixed and certain…or even as a quality itself.” “The plemora is rent in us”: there appears to be a necessity of something as it exists in the tension between everything and nothing, where {nothing, everything} is {infinite, eternal}, and yet, not that at all. In other words, we are thinking of a way, or a being told ways in which we can think of the unthinkable, by which we can ascertain something outside of our experience. Put differently still, the Sermo is both conditioning, reconditioning, and unconditioning our ways of thinking with respect to ultimate reality: it offers us tools that work on our neurosemantic interpretations of reality, and in effect, tells us at one and the same time that ultimate reality—here framed as the plemora—is both thinkable and unthinkable, knowable and unknowable, that from which our experience derives, but also that which has nothing to do with our experience. In short, it seems a jarring interplay between contraries which may serve to free the reader (or hearer) from his or her own private (or not so private) dogmas and fundamentalisms: nothing is true, everything is possible (?).
I would like to note that there is further binary pairings which can be built from basic units of pairs (this again borrows from set theory). We can see that what is asserted about the plemora can be modeled in the following way: {{plemora, {x, y}}, {not plemora, {x, y}}}. This pairing might shed some light on the “deep structure” of the first Sermo: the plemora is full of all possible binary pairings where these pairings are self-negating (balance each other out—cancel or annul one and other), and the plemora has nothing to do with any possible binary pairings. In a yet larger scope we might construct the following binary pairing: {{{plemora, individual}, {x, y}}, {{not plemora, individual}, {x, y}}}, or perhaps some mixture thereof.
To turn briefly to the closing remarks of the opening Sermo, which concern “the striving after your own being.” Which appears to concern the resolution or dissolution of apparent opposites into complementary unities with respect to the identification of self with other, or with the plemora and the individual. It is suggested that the only real striving is that after our self, which I think Jung would agree with: we are, through our being in the world, seeking after that which we are, which, I think, might be seen as a manifestation of Self. What appears to be asserted is that it is our very thoughts and thought processes which move us a step away from being in what might be seen as purely experiential; that is, it is thought which serves to divide the pairings of complements into pairings of opposites, and this division is what separates self from other (leading, in heightened or more “crystalized” form to acute alienation), which in turn places us a step removed from the “isness” of unanalyzed experience. In different words, our interpretations are simply partial representations which further increase distinction, and the uninterpreted is the undifferentiated reality. In coming to “the right goal by virtue of [our] own being,” we might come to the identification of self with other or come to know the unknowable not through analysis or thought, but by the absence of these. In closing, I’d suggest that Sermo I is linked to the first step of alchemy, calcination, where we burn (or transform) the black into the white.
Variables Vibrate Vicariously. |
