I always felt a lot of curiosity about the apparent world I
lived in, but was never even offered the idea of a Creator god as a child (although I knew
from school that many people
did choose to believe something that odd).
It seemed clear to me that Universe had no beginning or end
that we could perceive, and I discovered the lovely word ‘infinite’ along with
all the paradoxes inherent in it.
Once you get into the self-referential, bootstrap
theory, mutually arising phenomena, and all that – your attention naturally
gets drawn to the field within which all this supposed activity goes on –
Nothingness, the Void, the Ether, the Plenum, the Tao.
"Tao gives birth to one,
One gives birth to two,
Two gives birth to three,
Three gives birth to ten thousand beings.”
Whatever you call it can never come close, because
definitions (by definition) draw a line (an outline) around something. Attempts were made to use the negative “Neti
Neti” (Not this, not this) but it didn’t help me much to imply an Absence
rather than a Presence. Nagarjuna
applied recursive logic to this problem…
So when I stumbled over The Laws of Form, the book rang bells
in my head, even if I don’t really understand advanced maths and symbolic
logic, etc. The second half of the book
does attempt to put the formulae into natural English, clearly enough, at least,
for me to get just a glimpse of what a profound attempt to describe ‘things and
events’ can emerge out of nothing spontaneously (or something like that).
G Spencer Brown starts from the first step of “Making A
Distinction” on the blank field. For
argument’s sake we will use a circle, which divides the space into an inside
and an outside.
"The theme of this book is that a universe comes
into being when a space is severed or cut apart.”
A curiously similar phrase turns up in Zen
“If there's even a hair’s
breadth of difference, heaven and earth are clearly separated. How do you
understand this?" Hsin
Hsin Ming
Sengcan said, "The supreme Way is without difficulty – it is only
averse to discrimination."
If you want to play with the ideas found in G Spencer Brown's enigmatic book, the Markability site offers not only clarification, but interactive tools and exercises to really understand.
