The history of thought betrays an obsession with dichotomies, whether affirming them, falsifying them, or balancing zen-like between. We cannot escape them. From the classic, “There are two types of people in the world...” aphorism, to the binary alphabet of 1s and 0s in modern computer-speak, dichotomy represents the human story—or at least half the story.
Early on, things were simple. The world consisted of multitude of these dichotomies, these uses-and-thems, lights-and-darks, eithers-and-ors. We generalized, we distinguished, we grouped reality onto a flat dish of this and that. Then someone got the bright idea of jumping up a level, and philosophy was born. Now, in addition to acknowledging the multitude of diverse groups, we abstracted the notion of a single unifying group, a new “meta” dichotomy between the universality of everything and the particularly of everything. No longer were things separate, they were also the same. And this was a duality of a higher order. It led to an evolution of our reason, and an excess of headaches. Through civilized history the universal and the particular chased each other’s tails through the minds of brilliant men with too much ink, and this is why philosophy is so confusing. To those who couldn’t spare the ink, and needed to figure out a clever way to get more, science was conceived. It happened in the West and in the East, and as an added touch, it happened in two very different ways.
Against my better judgment, I have decided to jump headfirst into this soup. If the world is a spiral that is stirred with a spoon, engaging her requires adding my motion to the mix. I can't promise that any of these diversions will be useful. Some will be interesting; most likely some will be boring. The more you read the greater the odds that you will be wasting your time, but like a madman tapping Morse code on the bars of his cage, I will write anyway.
I am hardly a philosopher. That doesn't mean I’m immune from their curse, and the cure for the curse is exorcism of the lengthiest kind. It cannot be meticulously planned out, nor can one simply fling forth willy-nilly, so I will do both. I will rigorously challenge the simplest assumption; then I will draw vapid connections between unrelated concepts. I will attempt to bring together disparate concepts like chaos and order with one hand, and then shatter any hope of a unified reality with the other. Yet, I will not walk the middle line. Instead I will tear these two notions into their great extremes, and can only hope to rejoin them somewhere on the fringe, where language and reality bend backward onto their opposites. If you enjoy bold and unrestrained flights of fancy, you will want to stab your eyes out; if you are committed to hard science and strict logic, you will want to stab out mine. I will dichotomize you, dear readers, and will not make amends. Only now, while I still have my wits about me can I offer a single piece of advise: stop reading immediately, lest you catch the curse yourself, or, for those of you impervious to the siren’s call, suffer nauseous attacks from overexposure.
To the brave and silly reader who ignores my warning, prepare for many extremes. I am a lover of logic, and I will use it wherever I can. But I also distrust the fickle bitch and will abandon her from time to time for the embrace of poetry, humor, and lunatic speculation.
My title is The Cross and The Spiral. It’s what I keep coming back to, no matter where my mind roams. The cross and the spiral. The linear and the circular. The embodiment of so many commingling dichotomies. Two pillars grounded in the psychic roots of our cultural history, perhaps even in our genes. So dissimilar, yet perhaps a polar manifestations of a single concept, segregated only by—well, by the fundamental features of reality: time, space, and the like. So the same they certainly aren’t! Lest I define sameness as that which every object shares in common: the utter distinction of itself from what it is not--hm... or maybe I WILL define it that way, but not yet. I mentioned before that we deal with dichotomies either by affirming, falsifying, or trying to balance between, implying that we need not necessarily deconstruct our dichotomies dichotomatically. This third choice has been before us for centuries. It found expression in the koans of zen masters, in Hegel’s synthesis, and in many of the groping of an esoteric madman. It hints to a future shift in human thought and consciousness, and if we’re lucky, may already be leading to a revolution not only in the way we view the world, but in the way we solve our problems, so many of which seem insurmountable within our current paradigm.
There will be no real structure to these posts. They will speculate to their heart’s content, with as deep a respect for reality and rationality as speculation can have. Despite my warning, I really don't want to drive you away. Not yet. Read, read, read! And then take up thy own spoon and stir!
