« 070: Gathering The Pieces | Main | 072: The Invention of Belief » February 18, 2004

071: The Great Work

There are aspects of Gematria which fascinate me --- well, aspects of any attempt to reduce our comprehended breadth of knowledge down to a single luminous moment is fascinating, when you get right down to it -- and the effort to reduce language to a series of inter-related numeric sequences is one of my favorites. Now, a proper technique of Gematria -- the art of reducing words and phrases into numeric values -- really requires a knowledge of Hebrew because the art is based on the idea that one is attempting to pierce the veil of mystery surrounding God's words which have been set down since antiquity and since God's words were transcribed in Hebrew (and I'm only really talking about the Torah here, anyway), performing gematric valuations on sentences and words in any language other than Hebrew is already removing yourself one step from your solution.

However, the basic idea is this: distillation. It's the alchemical Great Work all over again: attempting to distill the unpure into a single drop of purity.

[And I'm distracted for a moment by consideration of that phrase "single drop of purity." If you define this as a brief dollop of Godhead, then you can call it a "single drop of God's blood." What about our blood? A single drop from you or I contains enough coded information to recreate the human race. Your DNA stand (which is evident in every cell of your body) identifies your individuality, but it also preserves our identity as a species. How's that for singular purity?]

So, distillation. The argument follows that we would recognize a more pure state, we can distinguish between more and less pure (and I use these terms instead of "simple" and "complex" because I don't think it follows that "more pure" is necessarily "less complex" -- it's that DNA thing again). And "recognize" may be the wrong term; we are "cognizant of" greater purity, we understand the possibility of greater purity. We "know" greater purity.

What I've been circling for a few weeks is the idea of a single core language, a pre-Babel lingua franca that was universally understood and known by all mankind. God's own tongue, if you will. Some will say -- and there may even be a quote by Einstein or some other historical scientific luminary to this effect -- that mathematics is the pure form of language.

Posted by Teppo at February 18, 2004 03:59 PM

Comments

I like 'recognize' (re-cognize) better than 'cognizant of' in this case. Recognize: bringing to consciousness something that is already 'known.' DNA is (hidden) knowledge.

True. Very true. Which shoves us back towards the whole question of what have we forgotten?

See, that's a train of thought that I don't really agree with. In my estimation, there's nothing that we've forgotten, it's all there, just at a level separate from our conscious thought. We're bringing things to consciousness by decoding DNA, even if we aren't sure of their meaning, but that's what we do best.

We're meaning makers. Synchronicity, symbolism, mythology, magic, all of this is giving meaning to otherwise "random" patterns. How much of this is hardwired within us, however? When we recognize meaning in a gestalt, what is working there? How do the building blocks of the world effect how we see the world?

There's a quote I like to use in my sig files that I think is appropriate to the tangent I've run off on:
"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creature, shaped by their hard, defining edges. . . I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcereor alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all." - Gene Wolfe from The Shadow of the Torturer