Numbers

Two is the number of opposites.1 It is therefore also the number of the world, since everything here participates in qualities more or less—there is no quality that is only positive. Someone who thinks in twos will not be able to see the paradox—or rather, they will be irritated by the paradox, and they will attempt to resolve it by looking away from it. Two-thinkers are reductionists. And when they meet people who are not two-thinkers, they consider them stupid yet also find them arrogant and annoying.

Take a step back, turn around, and behold: three! Dialectic. For each pair of opposites, there is some third thing which binds them together: Plato’s ideas. What seems to be a paradox is “resolved”, so to speak, not by actually providing a solution, but rather by seeing the paradox as the thing itself which gives rise to its contradictions.2 The contradictions cannot be so properly called, because they in fact do coexist, whereas the word “contradiction” would seem to imply that either one or the other must be false. There are no facts which are either literally true or false; rather, all things are really true. Everything is. The words don’t matter. Things are not words.

After the three must come the four. I have only just glimpsed the four in dreams. Kusters3 writes of the four that it is “implicit and concealed”. The four is a kind of mirror that reflects reality back on the one seeing so that the structure is revealed; we cannot see what we are except when we look in mirrors. The four-thinker is a psychic and a magician. Perhaps, the only true four-thinkers are gods. The psychotic is someone who sees the fourness of reality but describes it in terms of twos.

I have this memory, which may relate to the number four: Immediately after waking up, before I have opened my eyes, even before I have thought any thoughts (as myself), I watch (so to speak) all the different potential thoughts moving through my mind, like particles in a cloud chamber. From this, I conclude that I am now a human, whereas while I was in deep sleep, I was something else—it could be called a god. I recognize the shape of the human mind in the ways feelings and thoughts interact with it. Another memory: I wake up, and hear two people talking. Both have my voice. Then, one of them interrupts the other, saying “he’s waking up now—bye!” Then that’s it.

  1. See also A Philosophy of Madness, p. 650 ↩
  2. According to Proclus, what we call language is itself an image of a higher “language”, spoken by the gods. What appear to us as paradoxes are resolved in the higher language. Words have meaning because they flow from the higher “words”, and each words in apparently different languages has something of the divine source word. See SHWEP, episode 187. ↩
  3. Kusters p. 650 ↩