Circlemath
and Religion
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The War 1
A Dialectic Marred in Application. 4
Husband and wife, parents and children,
brothers and sisters. 6
The Polar Relationship Examined. 7
The Curse and its Overcoming. 9
The Circlemath/ Religion Relation. 10
Religion, from re + ligio, to bind back,
implies an initial unity and parting. It stems from birth, wherein two bodies,
those of mother and baby come apart physically and are bound back again in
nature’s physiological and psychological process known as bonding.
As studied in natural childbirth, this is nature's
supreme process, at once the foundation of mind in the newborn and religion in
society. It tells us that religion is indwelling in every individual, and that,
as a social persuasion it is a hallmark of our human state, even though it can
take many forms, according to the influence of experience and ideology.
The process is at once the stem of all human
relationship and the foundation of every new mind. As polar opposites create a
magnetic field, the relation between mother and baby creates each new individual
mind, which then progressively develops. Circlemath, which brings mind into
view, allows us to see this. If, however, this mathematical foundation remains
hidden, so does the genesis of mind in the life cycle. An account of the path
that led to the math's origin may help to bring this aspect into focus, which
as warranted therefore follows.
A week after the outbreak of the second World
War, at the age of twelve, I visited the city library, thinking to discover
what it was all about by reading Hitler's Mein Kampf. The newspapers, radio and
conversation were devoted to war news: bombing, tanks advancing and ships
sinking. The whole seemed to be collective madness; only the ‘other side’ was
missing. Reading Mein Kampf, I thought, would fill that in.
Quickly I learned that Hitler was fanatically
against Jews and Marxists. The former I knew only vaguely as the people of the
Bible, and more specifically as Shakespeare's Shylock, but I had never heard of
Marx. Still confused I returned to the desk and asked for a book by Karl Marx.
As I read it the darkness receded and understanding took its place. It was a
factual analysis of the forces at work in society. Like the still eye of a
hurricane, it made sense of the furious wind. To respond to that in a bellicose
way, to threaten and prepare for war, the attitude adopted by Hitler in Mein
Kampf, could only mean one thing, it had struck a nerve of truth. I would
finish my education, whatever it might take, and then come back and study it
carefully.
Upon completing in medicine, I married, took a
job in a hospital and purchased an armful of books on Marx and communism. This
was to be my postgraduate study! Three years later, I joined the New Zealand
Communist Party.
There, besides my ongoing study, nothing
happened until, in the early nineteen sixties the rift in the World Communist
Movement became public. My response was immediate. I took the Maoist side. We
opened a sharp attack upon something called revisionism, but in truth, our goal
was the right to know, think and speak the truth.
The faults in the movement, going back to 1905
and earlier, were glaring. In 1963, at our triennial conference, the N.Z. Party
swung in behind the Maoist (Chinese/ Albanian) side against the hitherto
dominant Khrushchev-led USSR. For others and me the fight went on, for we saw
allegiance change, but not the tactics. Changing horses in midstream, they
demanded obedience and in turn expected to be kept by an overseas patron. We
pointed this out and their response was to expel us.
The Vietnam War was raging, and as an opposing
group we sensed that their antiwar stance was nominal. It provided them with a
comfortable electioneering policy and their placid reporting of events told us
that they were happy for it to continue. We decided to join a non-Party youth
movement in a protest fast they were staging.
To me, being against the war was also to be
against the Communist Party's deceptive policy, and I carried on my fast to the
fortieth day, almost casting my life away. As the fortieth day drew near, in a
state of mental dissociation and quietude I considered whether to persist for
another few days and perish, or live. The thought that there was still work to
do prevailed and I broke the fast with the juice of a squeezed orange.
It was midwinter, but throughout the fast
crowds had gathered regularly at the park and we distributed thousands of
broadsheets explaining our position. Local and international news media gave
mention and we continued to post off our analysis and version of events to the
Communist Parties of China, Albania, USSR, US, UK etc. We received no replies,
but neither did we expect any. Not a word appeared in the NZCP paper or monthly
journal, and this, their silence, was exactly what we wanted to hear. It told
us that we were on the right track. They had no answer to our allegations.
A few months later, those who had engineered
our expulsion, including the top leadership, met the same fate. They too were
expelled, and with this implosion the party became a stump, a virtual
non-entity. For myself, I vowed that I would never again join a self-serving
movement, political or otherwise. It is sufficient, I thought, to be a member
of the human race. In place of my Party work, after discussion with my father I
contacted some interested individuals. We called a meeting and founded New
Zealand’s National Association on Smoking and Health.
This led me to work with religiously motivated
individuals and groups. Religion had always been a null subject for me. I was
neither for nor against, but the Party's attitude, forever circling around it,
unaware that their emotive opposition was a form of religious expression, had
focused my interest. Consequently, I began studying religion, attending the
services of various sects, not to join, but to learn what each had to say.
Perceiving that every denomination had a
hardcore teaching, beyond which all is laissez faire, I concentrated upon the
core teachings of each, falling into line to the best of my ability. Thus, I
desisted from tea coffee tobacco and alcohol, became vegetarian, set myself
against psychoactive drugs and chose celibacy. I abstained from gambling, never
tossed a coin to make a decision, ceased shaving and cutting my hair,
surrendered my life insurance, and declined to vote in the elections. In each
religion I found a prescription and I added one of my own: I declined to shake
hands. It was a steep path, but it never gave me cause for regret. In
retrospect I would not have it any other way.
While I listened to, but disregarded the beliefs
of the various religions — for belief is spontaneous and inherent — neither did
I require a logical reason for adopting their teaching. For me this was covered
by what I saw as a higher logic; that religion, in the form of a coherent body
of people who uphold an irreducible moral and ethical conviction, is the sole
font of desirable behavior. We no more create our own moral and ethical values
than we create the language we speak, but we absorb them from our social
environment, where they exist in virtue of religious input, having spatial and
temporal dimensions across geographical regions, and origins lost in the depths
of social time.
My political study now became critical.
Stalin's writings were devoid of interest. Lenin's books were a challenge, but
in the light of history and every test I could apply, his conclusions were
incredibly wrong. After his death in 1924, they were preserved as carefully as
his body, and as thousands walked past his glass coffin, their application,
centering all decision in Moscow, robbed the movement of its initiative and
paved the way for Hitler's rise to power. Pointing this out had earned my
expulsion, but now, sensing that the error that had split the world movement
from top to bottom went back to its founder, I saw the need to step out of
Marxism in order to evaluate it dispassionately. But where to step? What, if
anything, was before Marx?
I found the answer in the Preface to his
monumental work, Capital. There he said,
“My dialectic is not only different from the Hegelian, but its
direct opposite.” (and)
“I avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even
here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes
of expression peculiar to him.” (The dialectic, he added)
“suffers mystification
in Hegel's hands, for he stands it on its head,”
and it was his (Marx's) good pleasure to stand
it upright again. The irony is that this is straight out of Hegel:
For the naïve
consciousness, to give itself up completely and straight away to science is to
make an attempt, induced by some unknown influence, all at once to walk on its
head. Phen 87
In this way Marx attacks Hegel's dialectic,
without however, understanding it. Marx then begins his book by defining a
commodity as a thing, but does not go on to define ‘thing’. Had he done so, he
would have arrived at the observation that while every commodity is a thing,
not every thing is a commodity. ‘Thing’ is the wider category, and every
determinate thing, from a speck of dust to a star, falls to a meaning.
In ‘a thing and its meaning’ Marx could have
found the balanced formulation wherein to align the two moments, use-value and
exchange-value that he found in every commodity. Meaning would have brought
mind into the picture, and he would have been in step with Hegel. Setting
paternalism aside, he could then have gone on to discover the source of his
‘surplus value’ in the unpaid labor of the mother in the home.
This comprehension, which seems so simple now,
cost me years of study. I needed Hegel to understand Marx. Struggling for
sense, five years passed before I finally believed that I had it. When that
time did arrive the test was clear; I should explain it to others. If I could
do that, it would confirm that I had it myself, so I set out on that course.
Unfortunately, try as I might, I could not do so. The absolute
philosophy, the philosophy of mind, advanced as applying to everything, itself
resisted explanation.
There was only one thing left to do; submit my
own problem to it, my inability to convey its sense to others, for the
predicament that had overtaken it historically, its utter collapse after
Hegel's death, was still with it, and with me. Why, I asked myself, does
thought trip up when it tries to elucidate its own operation? The answer came
back: “the medium is wrong.”
Thought resolves problems by standing aside
from them. This detachment, which we call logic, is essential. We loosen a knot
in order to undo it and thought dissolves an impasse by standing aside from it.
When it endeavors to explain its own mechanism it trips up on its own footwork.
Standing aside here meant approaching it from a deeper level. Specifically, it
called for a self-tracking logic, and this is the definition for
mathematics.
To me this meant that there had to be a
thought-like circular system within mathematics, lending it its logical
coherence. This was nowhere in sight, therefore it must be hidden. Because it
was my postulation I had to find it, so I packed up my philosophy books, took
pen and paper and began applying the Hegelian dialectic to the mathematical
process. The task advanced steadily, but three years passed before the total
system suddenly appeared, complete, without reserve or fault.
How does the brain generate thought-governed
behavior? My own theory of mind required a grand circularity, but twisted like
a figure 8, then folded into two adjacent circles, and the whole repeated to
give a quadruple circularity. We take one side as mind, the other as world;
subjectivity and objectivity, each a twofold structure, whose sides act in
coherence with, and opposed to the other in a seamless but differentiated
unity.
Taking this speculation back to the Hegelian
philosophy, we live in a world of infinite relationship. In his ‘Phenomenology
of Mind’, Hegel endeavors to determine which particular relationship, as
universal, founds all the others. We will now see the steps he took and the
conclusions he reached.
Applying his dialectic Hegel concluded that
the universal human relationship, that which, by founding mind, supports and
sustains all the others is that between a brother and sister. To the casual
glance the question may seem to be insignificant, but as belonging to
philosophy, and the absolute philosophy it is the basis of the human economic
social and political pyramid that comprises civilization. Get it wrong, and
everything else will be correspondingly disordered.
According to Hegel:
Amongst the three relationships, however, of
husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, the relationship
of husband and wife is to begin with, the primary and immediate form in which
one consciousness recognizes itself in another, and in which each knows that
reciprocal recognition. Being natural self-knowledge, knowledge of self on the
basis of nature and not on that of ethical life, it merely represents and
typifies in a figure the life of spirit, and is not spirit itself actually
realized. Phen 474
Of the many family relationships, he chose to
examine only three. It was sufficient. He first examined and dismissed, that
between husband and wife, as, ‘not spirit itself actually realized’. Now,
‘spirit itself actually realized’, is spirit certain of itself in all being,
absolute spirit that picks up on the primeval word God, reflected as a world
mind in every mind. It is the acme of human being, the final maturity of mind
in all experience. As instituting a family, the husband wife relationship seems
to come first, but if we examine the life cycle, this begins in conception,
passes through birth and completes in mature age.
Born in 1770, the modern—scientific age was
just beginning—Hegel's knowledge base looked back across the space of some two
thousand and more years upon the history and literature of ancient Egypt Greece
and Rome. In particular, philosophy, his chosen subject was maturing.
For us, in a very different scientific world,
conception, against the background of DNA and cellular morphology is a natural
starting point. Our science works forward from there. Hegel begins with the
idea of pure spirit (enlightenment), and in his analysis of mind seeks the
ground of certainty that science needs in logical analysis, building upon a
Kantian foundation.
His method, which Marx failed to understand,
is correct insofar as it yields his dialectic. His philosophy however falls
into error when in applying it he introduces false belief or wrong conclusions
into its interpretation. The combination of Marx’s lack of understanding and
Hegel’s interpretation errors led to Marx’s assessment that the whole thing was
‘upside down’ (a liability which Hegel had predicted). Hegel was well aware of
the potential for confusion, for he wrote:
There is a
difficulty which might well be avoided. It consists in mixing up the methods of
procedure followed by speculation and ratiocination, when what is said of the
subject has at one time the significance of its conceptual principle, and at
another time the meaning of its predicate or accidental quality. Phen 122
The problem neither lends itself to an easy
explanation, nor is it easily avoided. It all but conceals itself in Hegel's
account, to which he devotes several pages where he should have devoted several
chapters, nor can it be avoided, for excluded, it perpetually finds its way
back in. However, when he makes a mistake, it shouts from the rooftops. We will
see the flux of correct method and error at work in his analysis of family
relationships, while his real weakness rests in his lack of an in-mind
mathematical foundation. This, we can now know, takes the form of a circular
system.
Marx wrote a whole book endeavoring to
untangle the Hegelian dialectic,[i]
but without success, for as we see in the Preface to his Capital, he calls it
mystification. We must deal with it before going on for it left nearly a
hundred years of debate in its wake, affecting the course of history.
Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Mind was
published before Darwin was born, rejected evolution. Then, because his
viewpoint was firmly entrenched in the precept that human life began, without
any previous history, as patriarchal command (“Let there be light,” etc.), the
idea that the mind, like the body, could have a developmental history from
birth onwards never entered his consciousness. Nevertheless, the object of his
study, his dialectical system, is the mechanism of thought within the brain, no
less than the object in Mendel’s green pea experiments is that of DNA within
the reproductive process.
Mendel came in the wake of Hegel. We must
therefore look to Kant, who saw himself as the Copernicus of the mind, for the
true background to Hegel’s philosophy. Because Hegel's work completes that of
Kant, we can see that the Copernican revolution, spark of the scientific age,
comes into focus as Hegel’s particular and specific background.
Now, the Copernican astronomy overturned the
old belief structure, which held that the earth is flat and still, unmoved in
the heavens, about which the sun and stars duly rotate. In this perspective,
Hegel’s philosophy, in spite of its shortcomings and reversals, as an analysis
of the mind's function, lifted human thought out of the mediaeval age.
In summary, and we are really skipping over it
here, Hegel’s philosophy stands the right way up, and we must dismiss Marx’s
assertion that it is wrongly conceived. It needs, however, a mathematical
underpinning, and it fails to postulate the genesis of mind in the
mother-infant relation. Instead, Hegel hops through at this point on one leg so
to speak, developing it in terms of the master slave relation (his Lordship and
Bondage chapter in the Phenomenology). We now return to his search for the
universal human relationship.
Hegel dismissed the ‘husband wife’
relationship because:
it merely represents and typifies in a figure the life of spirit and is
not spirit itself actually realized.
(Phen 474 as above).
He then goes on to examine the second
relationship on his list, that between parents and children. The term ‘parents’
alerts us to the possibility of error, for it lumps mother and father together,
obscuring their distinct roles, just as ‘husband and wife’ avoids mention of
the mother. This is all part of his patriarchy. We must remember that up to his
time it was firmly believed that inheritance was through the husband alone. The
role of the wife was to provide a nest and nurse for his seed. If no seed
arrived, the nest was shed, and this was the menstruum. The first microscopists
to see spermatozoa made careful sketches, showing homunculi, as fully formed
miniature human beings, curled up inside.
Picking up on his words, ‘represents’ and
‘figure’ (as above), Hegel then says:
Figurative representation, however, has its
reality in an other than it is. This relationship, therefore, finds itself
realized not in itself as such, but in the child—an other, in whose coming into
being that relationship consists, and with which it passes away. And this
change from one generation onwards to another is permanent in and as the life
of a nation. Phen 475
Figurative representation is his name for
religion's picture thinking, and there he has it before him, the Virgin Mary
and Jesus, mother and child. The ‘mother and child’ however, is virtually the
symbol of the Roman Catholic Church and Hegel was a devout Lutheran in Germany
when the coals of the Reformation were still hot. Theology presents the
relation as a Trinity of Father Son and Holy Ghost. The latter can only be
interpreted as mind or mother.
He then comes to a correct conclusion in a
misconstrued setting:
The reverent
devotion of husband and wife towards one another is thus mixed up with a
natural relation and with feeling, and their relation is not inherently self
complete. Phen 475
In the viewpoint of empirical science, the
mind no less than the body develops through babyhood infancy and childhood.
Feeling and emotion belong to its structure. Hegel reasons from the ideal,
instanced here as reverent devotion. He assumes that the husband wife relation,
in which phenotype-determined circumstance chance and caprice enter, initiates
the family, but a case can equally well be made for the mother baby relation
which taps down to a genotype-determined foundation. Science and sociology must
consider both, and when taken together the mother baby relation is the deeper
and more fundamental criterion.
Reasoning objectivity from the bottom up, we
say, “This is how it is.” Hegel reasons from the top down, saying, “This is how
it would be in a perfectly good rational world.” Now this perfectly good
rational world is the religious world, determined from God down.
This manner of reasoning, peculiar to
religion, must not be dismissed. It does not annex God but is propaedeutic, ‘teaching
in advance’, extending science's reach to include the human mind as a
working mechanism in its field of endeavor. It emerges in science as the need
to bring the observer into the picture in relativity and quantum physics in
order to explain the ‘we’ for whom science exists.
Hegelian scholarship is consistent in seeing
the dialectic as an objective subjectivity, an objectivity that includes the
mind, and a subjectivity that includes the world. The two sides, one
characteristic of religion, the other of empirical science, which in a sense
contradict each other, from the bottom up and the top down, are actually
complementary. They belong to each other. Each is a side, a moment in our
humanity. Together and only together, they comprise the nature of our human
kind.
Hegel then takes the next step:
An unmixed intransitive form of relationship,
however, holds between brother and sister. They are the same blood, which,
however, in them has entered into a condition of stable equilibrium. Phen 475
By ‘stable equilibrium’ he no doubt means
empathy, but the simple fact is that the relationship that launches a new mind
and every new mind is that between the mother or mother surrogate and the
newborn. We can dismiss Hegel's ‘brother and sister’ choice as an error.
Internally it lacks necessity, while externally or to an observer, it is
apparent that females often lack brothers, and males often lack sisters. It is
not therefore a universal relation, let alone the central universality about
which all others turn.
The new mind steps from an imprint
awareness of the mother, to awareness of its whole environment, in an ego
inversion, whose prodromal step, some time earlier, is Piaget object constancy.[ii]
An older sister mothered Hegel from his infancy, teaching him to read Latin and
Greek alongside his native German by the time he was five. We can understand
therefore, his brother/ sister choice, which made him the center of insight,
and led him to declare:
The loss of a
brother is thus irreparable to a sister, and her duty towards him is the
highest.[iii] Phen 477
Had Hegel seen that his sister was to him as a
surrogate mother, his conclusion would have reflected the truth of the
actuality his philosophy sought. In nature's plan, the human mother, as a
spiritual being, is in her self, the template of the new mind, which takes
imprint from her, the mother, at birth. Her presence and attitude, combined
with the newborn, determines the mind to be. Civilization always has, and
always will pivot upon the unique characteristics of the mother and motherhood.
Having identified the universal relationship,
we can now look at its polar identities. A single sex gives birth, but two
sexes, male and female, result. The mother is therefore the universal being.
The babies, born male or female occupy the pole of differentiation and
individuality. If we look at the logical sequence in its pure form we see that
it corresponds to the relation in the following sentence:
In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Ge 1:1
The template for this statement, which
corresponds to the birth of our kind, exists immediately in birth
itself, in its mundane, physical physiological and psychological
characteristics. The mother prefigures God, whilst in awareness we find
duality, in this case, the differentiation of sky and earth. It does not make
the mother god, but it tells us that God is not intrinsically masculine, not a
member of the weaker sex.
A
little further on we read:
And God said,
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heavens, and over the
cattle, and over the whole earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth
on the earth. And God created man in his image, in the image of God created he
him; male and female created he them.
Ge 1:26, 27
‘Our image’ and ‘our likeness’ indicates a
plurality of gods, antedating therefore our current sense of monotheism.
Furthermore, if ‘male and female’, we are in the image of God, God too must be
in this male and female form. Now, imprinting gives form to the human race in
the image of the mother. This gives our kind a kick-start, lifting it in
dominance over fish fowl beasts and creeping things and the earth itself.
Looking now at imprinting, the terminals in
this generation-spanning relation, so mother and baby, are at once inseparably
linked and independent. The pattern revealed, whose modern foundation takes us
into DNA research, is the hitherto unidentified biological model for the
Hegelian dialectic. In other words, the brain, taken as a functional whole,
consists of inner and outer sides of different genre. The inner is bedded in
the DNA and receives its pattern (imprint) from the mother. Above and beyond
this, the outer is bedded in the brain-based sensory system and receives its
pattern within it.
The mother cares and the baby is cared for.
Parturition, more than a physical process, leads the mother into bonding. Birth
initiates a relation between the mother as loving, and the baby as responding.
Her love is for the baby. The baby reciprocates, but as arising from the zero
beginning of a newly forming mind, its character is that which we call faith.
In the fullness of development, this unity of faith and love — being the ideal
that founds every new mind — becomes the relation of ego and world.
The mother is unique in the life of every
individual, and of society. Civilization will attain to its maturity and truth
when it recognizes this and models itself accordingly. Not until we recognized
that the sun, not the earth is relatively central in the solar system,
and that the earth rotates around it, were we able to resolve our knowledge of
the heavens in accordance with actuality. For thousands of years we harbored a
wrong opinion, and we still have further to go along that road.
Motherhood is physically and mentally distinctive,
because (understand the words), the mother, no less than the baby, is born as
a mother, in the labor and giving birth. Labor is a transformative process
and this is nature’s accomplishment. The baby comes into the world with the
attitude it needs, a perfectly attuned responsiveness intact. Nature creates
the mother’s attitude, complementary and corresponding to this in the process
of labor and birth, which, if natural and free from adverse influence, moves
into place upon anciently perfected physiological guidelines.
To attain to its maturity, society must
understand the natural processes and forces at work in its foundation, and
recreate itself in their relation, so that the mother’s collective voice,
whilst not forging the way ahead, will nevertheless assume the role of
superintendence, so that no political measure will ever pass without its being
consulted and approved. If this sounds so obvious that it warrants little or no
attention, be warned that the curse, described anciently in the Bible, has
prevailed across the ages since.
The curse appeared first in the form of a
serpent, taken as the symbol of cunning and deception. It then fell upon the
woman in the following peculiar manner:
To the woman
he said, I will greatly increase thy travail and thy pregnancy; with pain thou
shalt bear children; and to thy husband shall be thou desire, and he shall rule
over thee. Ge 3:16
Then came Adam's turn, ‘Adam’ in Hebrew
meaning ‘the earthy race’:
And to Adam he
said, Because thou has harkened to the voice of thy wife, and eaten of the tree
of which I commanded thee saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed be the
ground on thy account; with toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
and thorns and thistles shall it yield thee; and thou shalt eat of the herb of
the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread until thou return to
the ground; for out of it wast thou taken. For dust thou art; and unto dust
shalt thou return. Ge 3:17,19
Sleep re-establishes the mind in a 24-hour
cycle. Labor and birth do the same for the life cycle. Parturition resets the
woman's mind, creating the psychological mother in the life cycle. To function
correctly it requires a comparable state of peace and tranquility. It is not
sleep, for labor retains a pilot consciousness until the transformation,
known as the moment of forgetfulness, occurs. Nor is it a state of trance for
it is physiological in its own right, indeed the foundation of consciousness on
the path of the natural and normal.[iv]
Like sleep, it is sensitive to disturbance and
this is birth's vulnerability, through which the curse intrudes. Human
knowledge itself infringes the equanimity required. The least suggestion of
danger or uncertainty triggers an unconditioned reflex that arrests labor, in
the first instance to facilitate escape, but which, if unrelieved, throws the
birth and bonding process into disarray.
This disturbs bonding, which in turn impacts
upon the newly forming mind, and here we have the hidden reservoir of nervous
imbalance and disorder peculiar to the human that marks our race as fallen;
self-tortured in its very intelligence, suffering and inflicting suffering upon
others and the environment.
Notice the reference to ‘the voice of
thy wife’. Voice, in Old Irish is guth, Old Norse goth, Old High
German got, Old English god whence our God. To listen to the
voice of God (our conscience), is to listen to that of our mother, captured
within our mind and present as its imprinted foundation. To listen to the voice
of a contemporary, whether wife, husband or other, is to be influenced by one's
own immediate interests, and this, when it leads to ‘eating from the forbidden
tree’ is evil, in flood tide in our modern world.
The curse describes the impact of
language-driven knowledge upon the capabilities and needs of the generative
cycle’s mind-formative procedure. It disrupts the peace, the inner
tranquility that birth needs to initiate bonding, and it does so by reflecting
simultaneously from within and without, within the mother and from the
bystander. To overcome it, we must understand it, and the entrance here is,
first the understanding vested in our own mind, as given to us by nature and
our own birth, and secondly the experience that then goes into its development.
This is a specialist subject, not something we can go into here, but one thing,
which lends proportion to the whole, can take our attention.
Just as Marx should have explained thing
before he explained use-value and exchange-value, we must explain relationship,
before, at the other end of the scale we explain relativity. Read ‘mother
infant’ into relationship and ‘Einstein's theory’ into relativity to see what I
mean. The one aspires to comprehend the zero beginning, the other the infinite
end in all knowledge. To understand one extreme we must understand the other,
and the mother-infant relation comes first.
We must rescue Hegel's philosophy from Marx's
condemnation, for although Hegel is prone to misapply his dialectic, this does
not nullify its constitution. Delving into the processes at work within
thought, before technology had yielded up the electrophysiology of the brain
and the influence of DNA, he had the history of philosophy before him, and the
work of many thinkers, and this accumulation of ages, brought to a head in the
work of Copernicus condensed into his dialectic.
The mind steps from generation to generation
through the process of birth and the mother infant relation. The advent of
humanity represents a climactic threshold on the path of evolution, at once an
ascent and descent whose resolution unfolds in our experience as religion. Our
technology has advanced even as our intuition of life's purpose has plunged.
Applied without understand, technology's harm outstrips its good. The following
quotation applies:
Artemis, the patroness of childbirth, is
herself childless; and so, while she did not allow barren women to be midwives,
because it is beyond the power of human nature to achieve skill without any
experience, she assigned the privilege to women who were past child-bearing,
out of respect to their likeness to herself.
Socrates in Plato's Theory of Knowledge, p. 25 Cornford; Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Circlemath is the result of applying Hegel's
dialectic to mathematics. It consolidates the dialectic and brings mathematics’
inner foundation into view, extending its application to a vast new field. If,
then, we also see that it arises from a theory of mind — it has this other leg
— which relates directly to neurology, and on the other side takes religion
back to birth and the mother-infant relation, we can see that it links all the
major parameters of being, mind and knowledge in a single framework.
Religion, as re + ligio, tells us why,
not how we are religious. We are born so, and there is nothing in our knowledge
that does not fit the pattern. We can neither deny nor affirm it because it is
present everywhere. This could lead one to think that it must escape attention
altogether, but this is not so, for it is the foundation of our mind and the
nature of our being, so an ever-present influence. The sun is the light of the
world and religion is the light of the mind. There are many denominations, but
every mind is religious in itself in its own way. As flint must meet steel in
order to spark, two sides, baby and mother, or ego and world must come together
in preformed harmony in the creation of mind.
Circlemath, in its abstraction, is the stem of
all knowledge, mathematical and discursive alike. It is two-sided in itself;
0,1 and number, odd and even, circular and straight, identity and pattern,
touching at once DNA order and the brain’s mind. This duality then breaks out
as religious and secular understanding at a higher level. With circlemath in
place, we can understand math in terms of its inner meaning, which properly
taken, comes before our methodical knowledge of how its various equations fit
together.
Given this foundation, understanding can
potentially inform the whole of knowledge. In the resultant unity, compulsion,
the bane of religion—for it destroys its spirit—finds no purchase. There is no
compulsion in the original model, the natural relation between a mother and her
baby. Historically, force and expediency have ridden roughshod over truth and
freedom, imposing a perpetually one-sided form of belief and knowledge.
Religion implies a state of mind that involves
freedom of conscience, to believe or not believe, join or not join this or that
discipline, and so behave. It has a natural place in our being, built by nature
into our consciousness through conception and birth. Mind is understanding, and
understanding is recognition. The first recognition in human life is that of
its mother by a baby, within the reciprocal relation of bonding.
Through birth our mind is at once indwelling
and other-dependent; indwelling because it is based upon our genetic
inheritance; other-dependent because it is of two parts, one given in the
baby's appreciation (the baby imprints), the other in the mother's presence and
demeanor. As male and female (gametes) combine to comprise an individual, so
mother and baby combine to comprise a mind. In its further cultivation and
development, this conception of mind, re + ligio, a binding back, is the
foundation of thought.
Now thought is the agent of freedom. In every
circumstance, necessity binds us to one or another course. One action excludes
another, but thought, holding action in abeyance, allows us to evaluate all
options, and this action-in-mind, which is thinking, is the realm of freedom.
Thinking makes us free, and this, particularly in the abstract form of
religious practice, meditation etc., is the hallmark of our species.
Unless it is whole, total and entire in accord
with its original nature, knowledge erodes its own foundation. The task
therefore is to complete it, fitting everything that belongs, harmoniously into
the whole, and this includes circlemath.
Copyright © Stephen W. Taylor 030303 email: stetay at bigpond.net.au
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