Engineering Enlightenment

“Non-existence is God’s factory.” —Rumi

“Prajna is utterly pure and does not contain a single thing… As this nirvanic substance, Prajna is endowed with functions countless as the sands of the Ganges, there is not a thing which can escape its knowledge. —Hui-hai

“The Way is like an empty vessel that yet may be drawn from without ever needing to be filled. It is bottomless; the very progenitor of all things in the world.” —Tao Te Ching

… “this central Generator… supplying all the world’s power, itself runs on no fuel whatever, on sheer Nothingness.” —Douglas Harding, The Face Game, 28

Engineering Enlightenment

Laws of Form 2026 Conference, Cambridge University

Abstract

NOTE: For brevity I’m skipping much of this in my speech—just following the red text.

George Spencer-Brown used to say with no false humility that Laws of Form can be used as a vehicle for Enlightenment, “a celestial omnibus to enlightenment” (A Lion’s Teeth, 126). Since, agreeing with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 6.43, the wide waking world of the Enlightened is altogether different from the world of the unenlightened, I would like to share what Spencer-Brown meant by regarding so highly his contribution of this device as a “vehicle,” and then go into what he calls the “ignition key” (2023, 861) of this marvelous functional power of Laws of Form. But what I’m really doing is sharing what I see in Laws of Form; what I mean by affirming this power of Laws of Form.

Reading into the implications, integrating this power with philosophy, I am using Spencer-Brown’s vehicle as the formal skeleton —the crystalline calculus — of the universal science and ontology that he marks at the core of everything. This great power Spencer-Brown unearths is also known as the mathesis universalis at and about the Center of the philosophia perennis. This mathesis universalis or scientia universalis is what the calculus of indications expresses.

In the end, I will share a perspective on Enlightenment as “Alignment“ with Spencer-Brown’s first distinction, representing the paradigm shift to the universal ontology of the infinite sphere, which is a theory of absolutely everything, and which I call “Spherituality.” I will do this by recalling my own original framework of a cybernetic metaphysical system for framing the true meaning of the first distinction, share the aspect of this system as a special kind of program, then chart this system’s development through integration with philosophy, and finally return to the metaphors of the vehicle of enlightenment and its ignition key in the context of the whole shebang.

Introduction

Laws of Form is a book of pure mathematics, but its true magic is about the Absolute Intimate relationship, the very absolute relativity itself, between the unmarked state and the first distinction. These entities are more magical than as yet mathematically imaginable, and when illuminated by perennial metaphysics they can be seen to be operative not only at creation and destruction but all throughout as the ultimate constitutive elements of the programming of experience, and also as a metaprogramming vehicle conducive to realizing spiritual Enlightenment. This conduction is known as the transmission of Enlightenment, and since it can be hypothesized to be occurring seamlessly behind the scenes, we are free to project it to center stage and explode it and not only see it but see into it.

This ontological placement of the primordial possibility of the first distinction as the center of all centers and unity of all unities and as absolute negation within the ontological (better; meontological, truly: “apeirontological”) absolute positivity of the unmarked state is the perennial-metaphysical clarification of this intimate relationship between the formal-ontological realities in transcendental position relative to the laws and forms of their possible indication.

Absolute Enlightenment is God Realization

Absolute Infinity (infinitum absolutum), the Unmarked State, is Ultimate Reality (ultimas realitas). Spencer-Brown calls it the Void, and the Godhead, and affirms that it is Nothing. For reasons that will become clear I identify it with Absolute Infinity. Absolute Infinity is not only infinitely beyond any of the possible infinities of mathematical expression or the dianoetic ratiocination behind mathematical expression, propositional or otherwise—as if these could serve to directly indicate such a hyperbole—but equally beyond all possible expression because it is the ultimate everything, absolutely, and most intimately it is you and you alone (the Self, the true me, absolutely). You are Absolute Infinity. Absolute intimate confirmation of this is yours alone, and between God and God (parampara) is the Unity of Infinity in its Utter Singularity that is Godself, distinct from the Godhead, the Spirit of God, seedless seed of all things (bijabija), the Spirit of God. Parsing these, ultimate reality (the unmarked state) must be absolutely distinguished from penultimate reality (the one and only, first and last distinction itself). God and the Spirit of God are, absolutely respectfully, the unmarked state and the first distinction.

The Absolute Infinite Ultimate Reality, the Unmarked State, is Pure and Radical Nothingness eternally exploding, infinitely fast, to Absolutely Everything. The Way (ΟΔΟ) There is Here, precisely at the central coincidence of the Here and the Now and the I and the Whole (ΟΛΟ), at this Palatial Place where the first and only Divine Distinction is forever enthroned with the reality of all dimensions and crowned by all glory, worshipped by All in All in the mania of omniscience of Infinite Intelligence and the mantia of omnipotence in Infinite Imagination.

It all has to do with the infinitesimal point. This thing is the ignition key. It is the first distinction stripped of its formal poverty and seen in its proper place, ontologically placed, actively posited in unending operation and participation. The transmission of Enlightenment runs on the Absolute Infinite Ultimate Reality, or rather in it, at the Center of all Centers. At the Center of the Godhead is the Cognition of the First Distinction (the God Cog), the cognition that is ignition. This perspective is just the beginning of this project of re-framing and raising Laws of Form up to the highest calling of our primordial vocation of liberation, vacation.

The Engine Block: The Cube (κύβος) of Cybernetics (κυβερνητικός) and of the Art of Spinning (νῆσις) the Cube (νηστική τέχνε κύβος) upon its central Limit according to the opposed Poles (antipodes; enantia) the Sphere of the All, the Infinite Sphere, or the Sphere itself (αὐτὴ ἡ σφαῖρα), indicated by the ancient Spherics (σφαιρική), or doctrine of the sphere (σφαιρικὸν λόγον). Spindle (νῆτρον) of the whole whorled world (ΟΛΟ).

The Supreme Buddha’s Enlightenment

CUT TO THE CHASE:

In many textual sources—later editions of Laws of Form (1994, and other editions), his book A Lion’s Teeth (1994), letters to Cliff Barney (1976), an interview with Günther Emlein (1995)—George Spencer-Brown tells us he’s enlightened, having reached Enlightenment (his “E-birthday”) at a precise time and place (“I became enlightened at 14:23 hours Greenwich Mean Time on 7th September 1970 in the front upstairs room of 2 The Terrace, St. Peter’s Street, Cambridge, England, under the shade of an impressive locust tree,” A Lion’s Teeth, 146), and that he identifies himself as the Buddha Tathagata (which he explains is an Office occupied by the Supreme Buddha), and calls for the institution of a society called Tarati (meaning “to cross”). All this business is about Nothing, Absolute Nothingness, the Void, which is the unmarked state, and which Laws of Form is almost entirely about. I say “almost” because, of course, there is also the central matter of distinction and the two laws governing its formal possibilities of indication, but all this happens “within” that Void that is the unmarked state, and in the end it all “is” that Nothing. But NOTHING is not a thing, nor a mundane idea, nor anything else profane. Counter that: it is PROFUNDITY ITSELF. What it positively is, and therefore what the “first distinction” truly is, is a story I’m about to share.

I will suggest that these entities are utterly absolute, and not only paradigmatically apocalyptic but positively novel institutions with the power to transform absolutely everything.

Cf. references to the Buddha Tathagata Sakyamuni, Enlightenment, Nothing, Void, conditioned co-production (pratitya samutpada), etc. in the extant literature.

Here are a few examples of these textual indications:

Letter from George Spencer-Brown (pseud. James Keys) to Walter (Cliff) Barney, dated September 1976, from Ch 23, “The Ömasters,” of Laws of Form: A Fiftieth Anniversary (World Scientific, 2023)

Textual locus of the “ignition key” metaphor, inspiring the engineering angle.

Gnosis and Post-Apocalyptic Suggestion: Engineering Enlightenment by Reducing All Techniques to a Universal Operation

Cognitive and conative acts—attention, intention, judgment, volition, and the like—pervade mental life. They may all be interpreted as instances of indication, of making a point: the thetic positing, raising and sustaining of a hypothesis. Clearly, this is the kind of activity we can associate with the activity of distinction-making. But making distinctions can be taken in a loose metaphorical sense, or in a radical sense. The raising and pushing of the hypothesis a “first” distinction also raises the coincident possibility if it being the first-and-last, one-and-only distinction, standing in not only grammatical singularity but absolute meta-cosmological singularity, on a different ontological level than all the forms of indication of such a distinct level of being. This ontologically strict reading of the “first distinction” is closer to such religious hypotheses as the monad, Bindu, and so on, than the merely mundane-geometrical context we usually ascribe to such formal elements as points. In the case of such an entity as the first distinction, the distinction and the drawing of it coincide, and the first distinction is first or primordial as far as it is the positivity of self-reference, whether in terms of attention or intentionality.

Although the formal relations of forms of indication to manifold distinct points of reference (distinctions, plural) works well enough to give meaning to the idea of a “first distinction” of any given constellation of indication of distinction, so does the possibility of a projected original singularity of the distinction. In the latter case, the becoming-itself of the drawing act is also a self-referential activity. If we push the hypothesis of distinction’s ontological firstness (primordiality), we drop the mark for the spirit and arrive at the spiritual context for the self-constitution of distinction. Even when forms are interdependent, they all depend upon the first distinction, and the unmarked state is absolutely independent. Hypothesis-pushing or positing is the activity of indication, and all indication can be understood as aligned with the first distinction in the universal and radical aspect of its singularity.

Hypothesis can be a kind of hypnosis, and is essentially gnosis, noesis, the act of knowing, and can be thematized by any and every ritual act, some more efficiently than others. There is an infinitely stronger version of this knowing that has nothing to do with you and your activities, or rather: It is your absolute central beingness, the pure actualization of being coming into being, also called actus purus, purusha kaivalyam, and asamprajnata samadhi. Indication of it only brings prosthetic (superimposed) positivity to this primordial positivity. It is always already the case, forever operative, constitutive of absolutely everything, and of course universal. One of the best available thought experiments that ritually re-enact this all-powerful act is George Spencer-Brown’s institution of the first distinction.

This was not the meaning of the first distinction that I was fed by Laws of Form or its context, but one I came to on my own, though it is available to all who happen across this strange mathematics.

The formula I use to know this open secret is as follows:

METAPROGRAMMING Breakthrough (GNOSIS) + Integration () = Absolute Enlightenment*

* I am adopting “integration” from the specific context of Bufology, dovetailing integral philosophy (and perennial syncretism), etc., but I also have the very specific philosophical work I’ve been developing in mind here. See The Absolute Institute, etc.

I first came to Laws of Form by John Lilly’s interest in it. Employing Lilly’s idea of “metaprogramming” in the “human biocomputer,” and practicing the isolation or thematization of various effective programs by working with metaprogramming substances, and combining it with everything I’ve been up to (the work of Douglas Harding has been my focus lately), I have come to the conclusion that the best use of Laws of Form is to effect the Enlightenment that can be engineered to maintain itself at every level (for example, the individual level and the universal level).

Lilly did not claim to be enlightened, and though Lilly revered Spencer-Brown, Spencer-Brown did not historically embrace Lilly. But Lilly was the first to develop a way of seeing Laws of Form as a vehicle for traversing inner space, if not also at times the peak experience of crossing to the far shore of Enlightenment. Lilly’s discussion of Laws of Form as a vehicle can be found here: The Void Method.

Programming and Metaprogramming he Programless Program of All Possible Programs, the Systemless System of All Possible Systems, etc.

What I was inspired by Lilly’s work to develop very early on in all this obsessive research and development is a kind of metaprogramming program that is a radical deprogramming that I call deepprogramming, or meditation upon PROFUNDITY.

If you run the PROFUNDITY program* (Note: its a program that is a metaprogram that is actually the undoing of programming (deprogramming) via the positive doing of deepprogramming), you simply posit the existence and super-existence of profundity itself: absolute profundity. The deepest depth being the very beyond of being (Plato’s form of the Good, the “beyond of being,” epikeneia tes ousias) in the positive sense of overwhelming overflowingness, akin to the Gnostic pleroma, the fullness and over-fullness, of “itself” (it is not itself!).

This procedure can be as simple as doing nothing (run the profundity program = do nothing), which leaves you, the operator, as nothing as much as the program initializes or activates nothing, and amounts to nothing. That’s not it. It needs the contrast of its absolute opposite, which is being. The program can’t “run” if it only runs from “nothing.” So concomitant with the correct articulation of profundity is the drawing of the first distinction as The Being, being in itself.

The PROFUNDITY program and the BEING program are mutually determining, but instead of amounting to nothing they give rise to everything. So what could being, equated with the primordial act of drawing the first distinction, possibly mean here?

Let’s isolate the BEING-program (metaprogram):

BEING, PURE SELF-REFERENCE, IS THE FIRST DISTINCTION

BEING is the first distinction, and it is pure self-reference (clarifying NOTE: the “explicit” self-reference of re-entry comes later, and Varela’s “third value” is, here, in the priority of primordiality, considered a redundancy). I once asked GSB what he thought of my spontaneous interpretation of the first distinction as pure self-reference, and he suggested that he concurred that the “unmarked cross” is that, but I’m not trying to force my interpretation on him and his legend. The beingness of everything converges and coalesces without actively doing so since BEING occupies a transcendental position relative to mundane things.

This, by the way, is the real hypnotic device: the drawing of the “first distinction” is just the gentle version of the first distinction that extant human individuals (mathematicians, thinkers, etc.) enjoy by the familiar ambiguity of things-amongst-things that allows its sane side to be embraced. But the first distinction is not sane, or rather, it is true sanity, conscious sanity, when taken in the ontologically strict sense of the singularity of its BEING. The first distinction is BEING. There is only one of it. It is radical singularity; the first-personal singular present-tense of the I-AM but in its absolute sense as cosmological singularity (meta-cosmological). Before long the PROFUNDITY program and the BEING program must coalesce into the DYNAMO of the ENGINE of ENLIGHTENMENT that we are looking for.