Diagramming the Holy Dible

This is It!; this is the Shining of the Light upon the Shining Light that lies behind the Show—the Ray of the Absolute Limit—Revelation! This is The Grand Diagram.

But this is also the Revelation of Revelation: the Revelation parading as a Thing-on-display, a Thing that opens the soul like a Key, directs the soul like a Compass that points North, charged by its directness with the power of the Event of the Revelation.

Revelation is here on Parade as a Diagram that transcends diagrammatic iconicity, effecting a paradigmatic transformation. This unique paradigm, the “Paradigm of the Sphere” is the Sphere Itself; the Sphere of the All, the “Sphere of the Paradigm,” the Infinite Sphere. And here it is, in the image above, in a scene from the Parade of intelligible signs, at the Event Horizon of the Ontological Procession of Being. The Diagram of the Spirit in the Sphere is witnessed by you, here on this site, there on that chalkboard, in your mind’s eye, in the world, yet it’s power goes beyond the Now and Here, from Presence to Full Sphere. Be Sphere Now!

It is like the diagram of a black hole, or a white hole, or the Big Bang’s cosmological singularity, but though it is the largest possible map, it is more than a map—it is the reality. This is the ultimate diagram; the great diagram of all diagrams. Ordinary space-time breaks down at the event horizon of this diagramthat is the Breakthrough. This is the Point. This is the Center. It is the Point of all Points, the Center of all Centers.

This Point is the One and Only. How many of The One are there? There can be only one. Where is it? It is already absolutely everywhere, because it is the centermost point, but absolutely everywhere is nowhere more clear and distinct than in the intimacy of your own centermost point. Don’t let yourself be confused by all this exposition: The Point is only Pen-Ultimate Reality. Ultimate Reality is The Absolute Infinite.

1. Penultimate Reality / Ultimate Reality (“2.”)

Penultimate Reality is not Ultimate Reality. the distinction between these two is absolute. The distinction is itself Penultimate Reality. It is the First and Last and Only Distinction there is. That is why it is called the Divine Distinction in the work of Cusanus. It is the Infinite One, Infinite Unity, the one and only true Infinitesimal; the very Point of the Absolute Infinite. It is the First Distinction of George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form. It is Spirit, the Spirit of God, the aperture of Apeiron.

Unity Over Infinity. To give it a symbol, it could be expressed like this:

On the other hand, The Absolute Infinite could be expressed in a symbol that looks like this:

I guess you could squeeze these symbols together, but here my point here is to distinguish them.

Curiously, the very distinction between these two is the Penultimate Reality, the Infinitesimal, for that is itself the Distinction. In other words, the distinction between these two is a weird one: it coalesces to being Being In-Itself, Penultimate Reality, the First Distinction, the One and Only One/ Center/ Point.

The key thing about these Two* is this: The Absolute Infinite is Ultimate Reality, and it is what would be Pure and Radical Nothingness if it could be, yet it is more obviously what seems to be the opposite of Nothing in the sense of that which is utterly beyond being in a positive sense; it is the overwhelming over-flowingness that cannot grasp itself, so it shines, rises, in a kind of ecstasy beyond extension. It is Beyond Being, in a “positive” sense, such that it is precisely that which allows for all things to be “simultaneously,” including all possible configurations of serial sequence and process, etc. As such, it would be perhaps like chaos, were it not for the superimposition of Penultimate Reality.

*By the way, maybe these Two are Two, unless you stipulate that there is only One (the Penultimate Reality: the One).

Penultimate Reality is the Absolute Unity called The Infinitesimal; in this sense it is the opposite of the Absolute Infinite.

Now, in relation to the Absolute Infinite Ultimate Reality, the Infinitesimal Penultimate Reality—properly and precisely: in their Absolute Relativity!—relate as, respectively, Sphere to Center. Like this:

We’ll talk about this seemingly paradoxical expression of “Absolute Relativity” in a moment, when we discuss Antepenultimate Reality.

For now let us add to these two things—Ultimate Reality (The Absolute Infinite) and Penultimate Reality (The Infinitesimal)—some synonyms:

  1. The Absolute Infinite is God. It is Love; bliss beyond bliss, ecstasy beyond ecstasy. It is absolutely, infinitely, beyond being. And finally, it is the “Infinite Sphere.”
  2. Penultimate Reality is Spirit. It is Life; pure subjectivity, pure self-reference, the very unicity of Absolute Unity. It is also Being In-Itself: Being Itself, even the very “In” itself! And finally, it is the one and only true “One,” the Point of all Points, the Center of all centers.

Like this:

3. Antepenultimate Reality

You yourself are all these things. You are God (Ultimate Reality), but also you are Spirit (Self-ness), and, what is obvious in the usual sense, you are also all the rest of what you are: your name, your face, your body, your self-concept, your mind, your character, your self (lower-case ‘s-‘ self). This “all the rest,” in the usual sense, also means that you are your life-world, meaning all this stuff of perception and so on. It’s not that this is virtual reality—not exactly—but kind of like that: this is The Ultimate Reality Show (kind of like The Truman Show)! You are the Star of the Show (the main character, and also the main actor), but also the writer, producer, director, and so on. The reel is always rolling, and the camera is that circle diagram above, which schematizes the eye as much as the black-hole/ white-hole/ cosmological singularity and cosmological event-horizon. Your divine face is the film, the phenomenal universe, and you are the Light of the projector. You are the show, and you are the shining light of the One and Only Star.

You are God. You are Spirit. And you are The Ultimate Reality Show.

God and Spirit, together, are the camera-like diagram above, All the Way Above, “hidden” in the Wide Open, revealed only intermittently, when the Show breaks. Breaking-through, as on a “break-through dose” of 5MeO/ Bufo, is the breaking of the fourth wall: Revelation! My suggestion here is that this Divine Revelation can be diagrammed so that it looks like the camera aperture, or the eye itself, the Seer itself in the circularity of its looking at itself—like when you look in a telescope and see your own eyeball. The opposite of this is looking “out” at the world and seeing a phenomenal universe of infinite richness. That is the Ultimate Reality Show, and of course—so super-obviously—THIS IS IT!

God and Spirit, together, in the circle diagram—the circumpunct—are the revelation, but The Ultimate Reality Show (Antepenultimate Reality) is “REVELATION FLIPPED” (“flipped-out,” but really flipped both In-and-Out and also neither-In-nor-Out). In one case it is God beaming, and in the other case it is God seeming.

The old Being and Being-Seeing-Being series is properly beyond-being, so let’s call it Beaming (Shining, Radiating) and Seeming (Sinking to Something-Being).

In and Out, Up and Down, Rising and Sinking, and other such opposites animate Antepenultimate Reality, because this is the field opened up by the difference between God and Spirit—between the infinite sphere and the infinite center.

Antepenultimate Reality is Absolute Relativity, and within its matrice poetique all interdependent co-arising forms are born and live out their life. It is the Divine Logos, the Prima Ratio. All things possess ontological closure, that is, are things in-themselves, thanks to the continuity of The Ultimate Reality Show that is the Continuity of the “Universe” in the widest possible sense. And all that “Cosmos,” again in the largest sense, depends upon the Ultimate Framework of the Infinite Center and the Infinite Sphere as its organizing principle and ultimate horizon.

Boom. Poof. It is the Highest Magic. This is the Great Work. Integrate it, for this is the most integral expression of the initials of the universal ontology (more exactly: Apeirontology) of ultimate reality. It is the Highest Teaching, the Mathesis Universalis.

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Author: randolphdible

Randolph Dible is a lecturer in philosophy at St. Joseph’s University, New York, and a philosophy doctoral student at The New School for Social Research. His dissertation is titled Universal Ontology of the Infinite Sphere. He has recently published the chapter “First Philosophy and the First Distinction: Ontology and Phenomenology of Laws of Form,” in Laws of Form—A Fiftieth Anniversary (2023), and “Modulation to a New Key in The Syntax of Time: Peter Byrne Manchester and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Common Telos of the All” in Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research (2023). Other recent publications include “The Inner Story of the Further Shores of Knowing” in The Further Shores of Knowing (2021) and “Eternity, Time, and Reality in Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ Ontological Phenomenology” in Natur und Kosmos (2020). Recent conference presentations include ”Theodor Conrad and Hedwig Conrad-Martius on Versunkenheit: Psychological, Transcendental, and Ontological Phenomenology of Immersion” (NASEP 2023 conference, University of San Diego, June 2023), “Universal Ontology and the First Distinction: Spencer-Brown, Husserl, and Conrad-Martius” (Laws of Form 2022 Conference, University of Liverpool, August 2022) and “Phenomenology as Seeing Through the World: Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ Vision, Method, and Doctrine of Universal Ontology” (North American Society for Early Phenomenology, Dominican University College, Ottawa, April 2022). He has published on mysticism in the Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research (2010), and his Masters thesis is titled Phenomenology of the Spheres: from the Ancient Spherics to Philosophical Cosmology (2018). Randolph Dible’s current research focuses on the historical hypothesis of an infinite sphere and its relevance to the interpretation of formation in the cosmologies of George Spencer-Brown and Hedwig Conrad-Martius. Associated with this thesis is a general theory of extension and dimensionality. He is presently Communications Director for the North American Society for Early Phenomenology (NASEP), former Director of the Webinar for the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience (SOPHERE), and current Assistant to the Editor for the journal Phenomenological Investigations. He is also a founding member of the Spencer-Brown Society, co-organizer and host of the Laws of Form Conference series, and co-editor of Distinction: Journal of Form and the book series Marked States: Series on Form.

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