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When the Egyptians sobered up enough to actually Name the gods they started with the basics and came up with an Ogdoad - a division into 8. Melchizedekian Muthas! Those 8 deities from the Old Old Kingdom were Geometrically Bisected into 2 Four-Member Sippes. In matters of Nature & Meaning they are constantly Antithetical. So there is a Female/Male Set, a Snake/Frog Set, a Dark/Light Set, ad infinitum. The Ogdoadic Primary Yang Bases are: The Primordial Waters, Air/Invisibility, Light, and Eternity or Infinite Space. The 4 Oppositional Bases which compose the Yin Side were lovingly named: The Nowhere, The Nothing, The Void, and The Dark. Skippy gets Teary-Eyed and Slack-Jawed when he chants that Mantra into his own Existential Nada. When these 4 Married their Opposites their Cosmic Jism became the rest of the gods whose Secondary Fuckings gave birth to the World. Spinoza never knew that about the Egyptians; he died two centuries before the Rosetta Stone unlocked Egyptian Writing Systems and we were able to rescue their Histories from Dust. But he would have loved that fact. The Geometric Figure to the left is an Asymptote - it depicts straight lines to which a curve becomes closer and closer but never reaches and therefore Never Becomes Identical. Baruch Spinoza was Reconfiguring - in his Mind - the Masks of God. All of the previous Masks he had rejected. As well as all of their Dogmas and Beliefs. The only real question left to the Philosopher was whether or not the True relationship between God and his Creations was Asymptotic. Was god always out of reach? If he was Outside of his Creations then he was and will be Forever an Other. But then what does Reality look like if God is not Outside but One and the Same with All?
It was Logic alone, Spinoza argued, which could reveal the "fabric of reality." Therefore, he mused, Logic was the Fabric itself. Barber Perfect, with a contemptuous sneer, put it like this: "Reality is a Whore with Open-Crotch Panties." Logic is the Silk that yields to the Portal. Pretty Rebecca Goldstein sighs and says that Bento's real arrogance was not against Religion but an "overconfidence in the powers of human reason." Spinoza was giving the Monkey a huge, rigid, tool to plumb the depths of Reality. Modernity has augmented Logic with Experiment and Observation, but Baruch had been sucked into the structures of Descartes' Geometry and was certain that Deduction, Axioms, and Definitions alone would pry the legs apart so that Reality could Bloom & be Fruited. Spinoza argued that Conceptual Truths [logical and a priori] entail Descriptive Truths [what actually exists - what IS] and that they entailed Normative Truths [what OUGHT to be]. Philosophers have named this problem the "Is-Ought-Gap," according to which Conceptual Truths could never mirror Descriptive Truths and lead to Normative Truths. Fuck you very much, said Spin. Reason, he declared, was powerful enough to Bridge the Gap. Reason, he declared would Reveal Reality and show us what we must do to Enter into Salvation. Spinoza claimed the Universe was "Causa Sui" - the cause of itself. There was nothing Outside it to flip a switch and turn it on. He believed in Deterministic Necessity. There is no Transcendent God outside of the World. God was Immanent in Nature, not Transcendent. Reason was Pure and had no "inexplicable danglers protruding from it." Again - we should think of God's infinite mind as "the world's being aware of its own explanation." No, scream the Transcendentalists, "all a priori truths are Analytic and all Analytic Truths are empty of Descriptive Content." Today, Sociobiology & Evolutionary Biology have stood the Is-Ought Gap on its own head. Natural Selection frames Ethical & Moral questions for us and strips them of "Truthiness" as well as any absolute morality. From the viewpoint of modern Biology Is and Ought follow from a Deterministic Necessity which is the child of the Innenwelt's intercourse with the Umwelt. If Reality is a Puta with Open-Crotch Panties then Reason can be either Its Pimp or its John. You Pay, you Play. That's Einstein's poem on Spinoza's "Ethics" to the right. Click on it to find a German Transcription and an English Translation. Can all Languages be effortlessly translated between themselves? What part does Language play in Framing "Is" statements? If it plays any part at all does it also then mold our "Ought" world? Is god and morality shaded by our Linguistic as well as our Biologic Inheritance? And what about Poetry? If it can be Conceptual, Descriptive, and Normative all at once - why can't "Truth?"
Spinoza claimed that Logic was not a Spot in Personal Space/Time. Instead, "It is the Nature of Reason to perceive things Sub Quâdam Æternitatis Specie." Shut my mouth. "Under the guise of a certain form of Eternity." When we "Know" Benito said, we should Know from Nowhere. Just the kind of statement which drives men to strong drink and weak women. All knowledge is created by perceiving it from a `certain point of view.' We see the Colors we do because our Evolution has molded us to recognize Ripe Fruits and Flowers from the Jungle of green - but the Universe is diffuse with many more colors than we can possibly see with our Monkey eyes. We do not see the Universe as it is, but rather we see it as we have been molded to see it. To see the "Truth" we must abandon our Prefigured and Default perceptions and attempt to see things as they are before our tools have "punched holes in the Continuum." How many "Frames" can you count in the Magritte painting to the left which is called "The Human Condition?" Evolution has provided us with Windows. Our Religions and our "Ethics" have supplied us with Canvas and Easel. But does what we Apprehend capture what Nature has Given? Men are in Error, Spin believed, when they judge the world from out of themselves, from out of the Ego which can only grasp the "I"-ness of the lone Artist in front of his Easel, in front of his Window to the World. To grasp God and the Truth we must shed Ourselves. We must kill Ego. We must stop painting what is only in front of us. We must learn to see the "View from Nowhere." Truly a Zen concept for a Westerner in Christian Europa in the 17th Century. Perhaps it helped that he was a Jew and already an Outsider. To be Rational, Baruch believed, is to forge a new Identity - a Supra-ID which we can share with all other "Rationals." Bright Becky writes: "To forsake, in a sense, one's Temporal Identity" which has flowed down to us thru "external causality," but which can never reveal to us or form our Essence. So to Save Ourselves we must "disinhabit ourselves." Immortality comes from abandoning the Personal.
Sub quâdam æternitatis specie. We need to be standing Nowhere to see it All. When we ditch the "I" we are "giving it up for the infinite web of Necessary Connections" that Spin identifies as the "Causa Sui," the self-explained . . . which is both God and Nature. "Deus sive Natura," Baruch thought: God or Nature - which is not a dichotomy when you realize that God Is Nature. Reason can get us here because the Universe is constructed of Pure Reason itself. God, Logic, Nature & Reality "is" the World - they are not "in" the World. The Universe - in its own Time-frame is nothing more than "all logical implications spun out in their entirety." Which is a very modern idea indeed. It smacks of David Hilbert and his model of "Infinite-D Hilbert Space" as the Ground of Being. Joe Campbell grins up from the grave. Super-String Theory with its "necessary" 11 Dimensions paints a canvas chockablock with All Possible Universes making up a MegaVerse where every single point of view is arrayed - each of them, in their Singularity, blissfully unawares of the Others. Reality only happens when every One of them becomes All of them by giving up Themselves to Rescue God.
Sub quâdam æternitatis specie. Under the Aspect of Eternity. "What is Universally and Eternally True, without any reference to or dependence upon the merely Temporal portions of Reality." Damn! Them Auto-Fellaters at Wikipedia sure can Bend the Lotus! Spinoza would have loved the Loggins & Messina drug-ode "Sailing Away." Skippy used to get stoned and ride his Motorcycle across Nebraska & the flatlands - June Bugs the size of softballs givin' it up against him - linear-landscapes flashing by - as he tried to ram-thru on the Cycle and move Asymptotically closer to Infinity. Nebraska always distilled a kind of Eternity in poor Skippy's addled mind. Then that line from the song would worm its way into Consciousness and Skippy would get lost in its ceaseless repetition - like a Mantra slowly erasing everything else in the Universe except itself until it was alone in Skippy's head: "I got half a mind to close my eyes and let the string go." Sailing Away. Which was the Prescription of the Philosopher: Lose Yourself & Gain the Universe. Lose Yourself & Save the World. Lose Yourself and Become God. Because that's what you are.
"Magritte is a framework to build user interfaces for Java, which are saved in XML files, allowing a user to change the interface without the need to recompile the code. It will also generate Java code to respond to GUI events." How fucking cool is that! Magritte, in this case, is the name of a Project from SourceForge a hot new Cyber Comp looking to ease into the market for GUIs & Masks, Portals to Applets, & ways for the John to touch the Face of things at least. Skippy ripped off this image to the right which is too clever by half at least. So clever in fact that you have to wonder if its creator really understood how deep what he's "saying" goes. He named this image: "Magritte editing its own Interface." So Skippy has Conceptual and well as Descriptive evidence that at least 3 of us understand Spinoza. I do not include either Barber or Pooler in that assessment because each of them needs Spinoza for `selfish ' reasons. And in Baruch's scheme - they don't count. They miss the point. When Barber went to see Spinoza in the small house at Rijnsburg he found the little man with soulful eyes bubbling with enthusiasm. "You look as though you have seen the face of god," Barber told him. Benedictus smiled and answered that he had seen something better. The Mind of god - and even better - the Mind that did not Need a god. Barber nodded and the fear began.
What Becky Golden Stone was driving at was this: "We survive our death to the extent that we have already let go of being our Singular Solitary Selves." You go Girl! Immortality is Impersonal. It's a Salt Doll. In the Upanishads you find the image of the Salt Doll - the accreted substance locked in its own being, its own Singularity. When the body dies the soul can finally find Unity again with God - "Like a Salt Doll that has walked into the Sea." Skippy came upon that Upanishad thru Joe Campbell who he was reading by the Pool in his Hotel in Foix, France. He was on the 2nd leg of a 3 Summer Sabbatical Study in Paleolithic Symbol Systems. Over the first 2 Summers he had visited every major Cave, Grotto, and Daylit Abri with Paleolithic drawings and carvings. He spent months driving across the top of Northern Spain digging into the Cantabrian mysteries at places like Altimara, Castillo, and La Pasiega. Lascaux in France and all over the Dordogne: Les Eyzies, Font de Gaume, and the brilliant Hand Prints of Pech-Merle. Finally at Le Mas d'Azil and especially at the Cave of Niaux it all came together - not in a flash - but like the last tumbler falling. The myth of the Grail began in the Paleolithic Caves where the Monkeys first started to apply a Mask to god's face. The Labyrinths in the French Gothic Cathedrals were topo-transforms of the meandering paths down into the Limestone earth of the Paleo-Caves. You can see the roots of the Painted domes of Firenze & Roma on the ceilings of Altimara & Lascaux. Then suddenly at 3am the phone rang in my room at Foix and a U.S. State Department secretary told me that my mother had died. Cancer ate her. Later, at Arles, Skippy wrote this poem called Salt Doll where he brought all these things together. It was Parzival - the Fool - who had Repaired the World by simply asking the Wounded Fisher King a question: "Oeheim, was wirret dier." Uncle, what ails you. When the Knight sheds Ego long enough to care about Someone else then the Round Table is Restored, the Land is Reunited with the King and it blossoms. Emerson said: "We live in division, in parts, Meantime within man is the Soul; the wize silence: the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the Eternal One." Immortality is Impersonal. We are all a Salt Doll and the Sea is Logic, Spinoza came to believe. The "I" was a barrier to the Soul which is the World. Proud, proud, Becky caps it: "Paradoxically, the only way to flourish in one's being is to cease being only that being." The Cosmos, the Philosopher thought, was Causa Sui - a "vast system of logical implications that is the necessary expression of necessary existence itself." Everything and everybody was just one "implication in the implicative order that is the world." You will find the Poem Salt Doll by rolling over Escher's Ants. Escher might have understood Spinoza. His iconic image of the 2 Hands Drawing themselves into Being says everything you need to know about Cosmology and Psychology. Of course what Spinoza would ultimately lead to is the Idea that got Bruno burned at the Stake only 50 years before the day that Barber went to question Spinoza at Rijnsburg - Cosmology and Psychology are One. It was an idea whose "implications" sent a long, cold shiver up the old Teutonic Knight's spine. The little Jew Spinoza was thinking his way out of God - and that could not be allowed in Barber's "I".
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