Beginnings
If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.
If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn't be, and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see? — Alice in Wonderland
The issue with paradoxes is that they make you wonder if you are expanding your mind or if you are going crazy. But the feeling brought by any kind of thought experiment is most likely old (or strong) neural connections making space for new ones, in a playful method of neuroplasticity.
And this is what’s this all about. Identifying cognitive patterns and allowing their expansion into new ones. Into new cognitive dimensions for transcendence.
The outcomes of such endeavors are well-known in terms of cognitive benefits. But the downside is a particular mechanism to which my attention has fallen: fragmentation — the process in which the whole system breaks down into parts, each of which is then treated as if it were a separate entity in its own right.
Understanding fragmentation (of data, of systems) as a quality, creates the opportunity for new dimensions of knowledge. While, without fragmentation important aspects of cognition could not be available (such as perception, identification, or recognition), according to Bohm, when this modus operandi is applied to our self-world view, it can lead to a sense of extended fragmentation; as if our world is made up of separately existent bits and pieces.
Fragmentation is self-perpetuating via action-as-effect in a feedback loop, leading man to mistakenly believe that this process is independent of his own (free) will. It becomes a major obstacle to understanding reality, a process that further leads to an artificial separation of the world into infinite disconnected parts.1
"[..] fragmentation is continually being brought about by the almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for ‘a description of the world as it is’. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality "
But, when these parts become as important as the whole, the existence of any kind of entity becomes less conditioned by fragmentation and perceptual or cognitive borders and more by relational and logical structures. This opens the mind to abstract and possibility, leading to the acknowledgment that everything is, indeed, connected and conditioned; and, much more: that the “unconditioned is the source of all conditioned things”.2
To this effect, under the auspices of technological and scientific advancement, more and more disparate phenomena and physical concepts are defined by fewer and fewer principles, governed by fewer and fewer fields, forces, and laws — many of whom can generally be described by geometric frameworks. And, the more this theoretical unification falls under the umbrella of geometry, the more it is removed from ordinary human experience, revealing structural dynamics and order beyond human imagination, beyond the fabric of space and time, and that of a conscious observer.
The polynon is abstract and elusive, residing beyond human imagination yet within its grasp. No heavier than a fleeting idea, but far too heavy to be understood. A palindrome for language and thought, mirroring itself in perpetual paradox.
Beginning the same way it ends.
David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order
Manly P. Hall, The Five-Fold Nature of the Self
what next?