Whenever our spirit or mind wishes to sift out from among the chaos of cosmic phenomena the truth, or at least the most "likely" reason for the being of things and their life, it needs a guide.
This need to simplify the world's appearance, to reduce it to a simple expression, may be the fact of our inability to extend our view beyond a certain limited horizon, an inability resulting from the imperfection of our sensory organization.
Whether this is so, or whether the world is really of so disorganized a complexity that it cannot be understood in its totality, amounts to the same thing. In any case, irrespective of whether or not the idea is accepted by people uninstructed in occult teachings, our sensory organization clearly seems to be imperfect. It is therefore capable of being perfected, though not by a "sensitive" completion of the senses, the sensory memory, or the natural mnemonic functions, but by a perfecting of consciousness. This latter requires the determination of "reactives" (senses), corresponding to the energetic activities and influences of the environment.
We lack direct consciousness of Space and Time. We can only know them indirectly by means of mass, force, and energy, and by the intermediary of phenomena which may be tested by one or another of our five senses. Human beings thus lack the two senses necessary for a knowledge of all causes. From this imperfection, of which we are always being made aware, the need is born to simplify. By this need everything is reduced to fundamental properties, without any attention ever being paid to the form of all the various effects of this universal organization. The result is that the science of numbers, the most wonderful guide to the continual creation of the universe, remains an enormous hypothesis. It will remain so as long as its use has not awakened in us the higher consciousness that usually escapes us, as long as we have not, by a deepened knowledge of things and their becoming, come to recognize numbers as truth, and as long, finally, as we have not experienced with our senses that the living relation of a cause to an effect is truer and more real than the effect could ever be.
Between a hypothesis and the truth exists a world; this world is the battlefield of reason and "emotion," which we define as the pure sensibility of the senses - an abstraction formed from actual sensation. In this world the "logical reverie" of the scientist and the ecstasy of the mystic meet; the first is analytic, the second synthetic, and both lead to the recognition of the science of numbers as the science of the basic laws of the universe, the science which fixes the proportions of the building, indicating the position of each stone and determining its moment of construction or destruction: the Architect's plan.
That there have been men who knew how to read this plan cannot - without doubting all history - be doubted. To cite but two examples, Plato testifies to the existence of a Pythagorean science, and Judaism attests to the truth of the Kabbalah.
To undertake the study of numbers in a fruitful manner, we believe it to be necessary to adopt the following general plan of study.
The five essential points, the basis of the study, will be observed in the following order:
1. Numbers, values and relations
2. The disengagement of numbers
3. The harmonic basis of numbers
4. The development of values
5. The establishment of harmony
----------
1. Numbers are expressed by the figures 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on, up to 10. Here one will note immediately the double nature attached to numbers. There are, to begin with, numbers in themselves, forming a qualitative relation between each other. This is the relation between unity and multiplicity, with a fixed quantity of degrees and variation. Following it, there is the quantitative relation which results from counting things and defining a quantitative relation between them.
In this qualitiative and quantitative function we may discern both the nature of numbers, their immanent, abstract life, and the value of numbers, their manifested, concrete life.
By the "abstract nature of numbers," I mean the vital bond that exists between things. By the "concrete nature of numbers," I mean the manifestation of life under its many material, accidental aspects: weight, density, color, etc.
These two aspects of the nature of numbers have a common function: succession, by which the past, the present, and simultaneity, as well as the future, are defined.
Everything, in all things, may therefore be traced back to numbers, which are the last (or first) manifestation of matter, and the first cause of the creative idea. By this fact numbers are but the ideal and concrete relationship in the universe. Hence they constitute the principle of life, the vital impulse of the cosmos.
2. To understand true succession in creation, one must know how the first, or abstract, nature of numbers develops - how multiplicity disengages utself from Unity.
It is obvious that the first Unity, the cause without a cause, is indivisible. There are not yet any halves, thirds, etc. It is the first Unity. Hence it is purely qualitative, without quantity.
This first Unity is always, although under different expressions, the idea of the absolute, of the eternal, of the indefinite. This idea contains contraries (i.e., the same nature twice, but opposed in its tendencies), because the idea of an Absolute can only exist as the perfect stabilization of two essentially contrary natures. This stabilization cannot, however, exist, since manifestation immediately follows from it. In the last analysis, it is this idea that is generally meant by the term "cause without a cause."
This double nature of the first, abstract One is the reason for the disengagement of multiplicity from Unity, as we observe it in nature, in each branch of a tree, or, indeed, in any natural phenomenon whatsoever.
Nature possesses, in itself, the tendency to make "the definite out of the indefinite."
The first One can therefore only create a multiplicity by qualitative addition, and never by multiplication, because multiplication is proper to procreation.
It is in this way, then, that 1 gives 1 and 1 or:
1
1 1
and is by this fact, three. The indivisible One makes the first divisible number. This number, in its abstract nature, is 2 and becomes 1 as a concrete and divisible unity. Such is the triple nature of the Creator and this Creator is One, but a One manifested. According to the mystical explanation of numbers, the Creator God is referred to as this One, because in it one finds the father, the son, and the spirit: the creative principle, the created son, and the spirit which binds them together.
This is how numbers disengage from the abstract One.
3. The common function which determines past, present, and future decomposes into these three times beginning from the moment that the first One - the first, indivisible, purely qualitative, purely abstract cause - distinguishes itself into the nine other numbers that thereafter will constantly accompany it. This first cause has potentially in it all future causes. Hence it presents another state, simultaneity, that comprises past, present, and future in a single Absolute. This is the fourth time.
By the coordination of these times, as well as by the diversity of the double nature of number, one obtains harmonies and dissonances, pure and mixed colors, and whole and fractioned weights.
This is the first reason for cosmic harmony.
4. This harmony is manifested in the complementary arrangement of harmonies and dissonances. This mutual "complementation" of two natures gives birth to new unities, which are then complex and whose base is abstract Unity. These new unities will be the origin of manifested numbers, and their quantitative nature. In this way, values develop.
5. Harmony can only reign in the world if multiplicity disengages itself from manifested, hence divisible, Unity.
This function is the same as that by which multiplicity disengages itself from the abstract One, but the act is now complicated by the fact of the preceding creation. What is creation in the abstract becomes the first procreation in the formative idea. This idea again procreates a second time; and then the concrete world is manifested, because only in it can what is procreated procreate in its turn.
-R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, from A Study of Numbers: A guide to the Constant Creation of the Universe. Translated from the French by Christopher Bamford. Inner Traditions International, Vermont. 1986
No comments:
Post a Comment