Why ‘Enlightenment’? Seeing the Big Picture

October 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The term ‘Enlightenment’ refers to both a particular period of European history in which rational enquiry and the concept of a human-centred approach to knowledge became privileged, and also to the individual experience of ‘awakening’ that is found in many spiritual and religious traditions including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity.

This term, Enlightenment, is part of a complex set of metaphors which structure our relationship to knowledge. In this structure, light is associated with knowing, and darkness with not-knowing, hence the period preceding the historical Enlightenment is sometimes referred to as ‘The Dark Ages’. This association of light and knowledge may be because the presence of light allows one to be able to see, and in the absence of light one is effectively blind; this then correlates with a related metaphor, KNOWING IS SEEING, in which the abstract concept of knowing is comprehended by a mapping from the visual sense. So when we wish to indicate that we understand something we say ‘I see’, and when we do not understand we say ‘I just don’t see it’. In such circumstances we may even say we are ‘in the dark’.

What the light allows us to see, presumably, is ‘the big picture’; as the parable of the four blind men feeling their way around an elephant, all of whom take away different impressions, suggests, the visual sense confers a unity on experience which is absent from other senses. To ’see’ means not only to experience more but also to experience a unity.

In terms of personal Enlightenment experience, the darkness that one is assumed to be emerging from represents an inability see a unity of self and other, an inability which is resolved by the turning on of the light which allows the unity of all things to be percieved, just as one sees the unity of the world using the visual sense. The Enlightenment process allows this unity to be metaphorically ’seen’, resolving the apparent differences to produce the state of ‘non-duality’ or advaita, or divine union spoken of in scriptures.

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The Union of Love

November 16th, 2006 Fred McVittie

It is a cliche that love can take many forms; the love of a parent for a child, the love for a spouse, a mother or father, the love of country, land, and God, love of art and of ideas. Each of these different forms of love is accented with behaviours or ancillary feelings which make it distinct; lust, greed, patriotism, sacrifice, aesthetic appreciation etc. but all of them also have something in common; a shared property which allows us to recognise them as similar in some way, no matter how varied their manifestations may be.

Emotions are the felt components of complex drives, cognitive processes, and biological needs. Emotions, such as love, provide the motivation and personal validation for actions which we might otherwise not consider, from the instinctual retracting of hand from hotplate at the urgings of pain, to the magnetic attraction of life-affirming lust. The emotion of love, operating in different registers and forming the motivating part of different complex structures of behaviour, is always about union; in all cases, the emotion of love signifies the drive for closeness, contact, and ultimately fusion of self and other, whether this other be one’s country, one’s wife, or one’s God.

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Binding Science and Religion

September 15th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The term ‘religion’ seems to be derived from a term meaning ‘to bind’ or ‘to hold together’, which although in the modern context we might interpret as being somehow ‘bound to God’ or ‘held together in faith’, in the original it seems to be much simpler and less a priori theistic. I don’t know if we have a natural desire to embrace some kind of theistic religion, I suspect not, but the desire to take disparate experience and form some kind of consilient whole does seem to be a human universal. This tendency, or cognitive imperative, seems to operate on a number of levels.

At the level of basic perception we are able to take disparate sensation and compose them into the multimedia event of lived experience. As I look around the room I am not subject to a ‘blooming, buzzing, confusion’ (1) as William James put it, but an impressively singular, coherent, all-embracing totality. I even seem to be able to fill in the gaps in my vision; I don’t feel the area behind my head as a constantly present darkness, but build its invisible contents into my overall picture. Moreover, this totality crosses the various sensory modes; I do not hear the hum of this computer separately from my seeing of the computer, they are completely integrated into a unity. Further, I do not experience this panorama as a set of flashing still images following one another rapidly, but disjointedly as each millisecond brings new rays of light to my eyes. As Husserl noted, my present also contains fragments of my past and fragments of my future; the now, the not-now, and the not-yet-now, as he is often translated (2). We seem to have the capacity to blend the frames of time’s passing into a single extended present, or as T.S. Eliot put it:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.(3)

The basic act of being alive and awake seems therefore to involve a massive, unconscious, act of creative binding together.

The acts of consciousness also seem to have this tendency in spades, as witnessed by our almost uncanny ability to search out and detect patterns and consistencies. As kids we look for figures in the design of the wallpaper and do dot-to-dot puzzles, finding one picture of one bear where before there was only 35 random dots on the page: a trick we carry on into adult life every time we look up on a clear night, or look at the clouds during the day. This conscious striving for a unified picture where before there was only wildly separated splotches of colour finds its most noble application in our ability to generate towering, visionary edifices of ideas. The awesome regularity of the periodic table, in which every particle of matter so far imagined is brought into a single frame: the phenomenally elegant Darwinian model of descent in which all of life that has ever lived on the planet is brought into the fold of one gigantic thought.

One thing that I find with these routine and extraordinary acts of binding together, is how extremely pleasant and rewarding they are. Looking around the room and seeing it, just as it is, feels good, and it feels even better to stand on a mountain and have a hundred square miles of land and an immensity of sky come together in the unique singularity of my experience at that long moment of Right Here, Right Now. Also, just thinking about ‘the river out of Eden’, as Dawkins so perfectly described it, and holding that fantastic idea in my hand like one perfect rose, gives my goosebumps. If there really is a theory of everything, and if I ever hear about it, I think I might spontaneously combust from sheer awe-struckness. Which brings me, by a circuitous route, to the point of this post. Religion isn’t really about dressing up in funny clothes and praying to half-naked statues, or following a certain dress code and not eating this or that animal. Religion is a logical extension to our natural tendency to make coherent sense out of the chaos of the world, and the more religious we get, that is, the more we are able to include in our singular vision, the better it feels. The big ideas of religion feel great because they are about seeing eternity in a single glance and embracing everything, with nothing left out, and the same is true of the big ideas of science. I think the ambitions of science are exactly the same as those of the practices we traditionally refer to as ‘religions’. As Aleistair Crowley put it:

We put no reliance on virgin or pigeon
Our method is science, our aim is religion (4)

1. James, W. (1981). The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. p.488.

2. Husserl, E. (1964). The phenomenology of internal time-consciousness. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

3. Eliot, T. S. (1943). Four quartets. New York, Harcourt.

4. This phrase appeared on the masthead of each edition of the O.T.O. publication “The Equinox”.

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The Feeling of Light

September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Although enlightenment cannot be reduced to the feelings associated with it, feelings which might include awe, a sense of connectedness, a dissolution of the ego etc, such feelings can be considered as pointers, indications that we are on the right road. Provided one stays aware that these feelings can be a distraction, and that the path to enlightenment continues beyond them, one should welcome them as encouraging landmarks.

Although it is sometimes thought that these sensations are unique, emerging only from spiritual practice and having nothing in common with the more routine feelings experienced in everyday life, this is not the case. It is better to consider the sensation of enlightenment as an amplification of the sensations associated with other experiences and cognitive activities. In particular, it can be regarded that there is a set of experiences which constitute an increasing intensity of feelings culminating in this sense of enlightened ‘unity of being’. A provisional list of these sensations would include: perception, ‘noticing’, recognition, pattern recognition, problem solving, ‘realisation’ and the feeling of ‘getting’ a joke or solving a riddle, the generation of a theory, and the various reaches of artistic creativity. It will be noted that this list, which is not meant to be exhaustive, includes states of mind which are completely unremarkable, and which we would not usually draw our attention. In including perception, it also includes processes of mind which we are unavailable to conscious scrutiny but which perhaps underpin or give content to that consciousness.

These processes have a number of features in common, and which determine them as conceptually connected (remembering that such conceptualisation inevitably involves the use of metaphor). Two shared features are particularly significant for our purposes: these are that all of them involve the bringing together of disparate elements into a unity, and the second is that this unity is conceived of as existing in a single, brightly-lit space. As we will see, these two features are necessarily connected but it may be useful to consider them independently.

Unity
The first feature they share is that of Unification. All of these concepts depend upon the bringing together of disparate elements into a larger unified whole, a singularity or gestalt which is apprehended in its entirety. The difference between the concepts is the extent to which this unification takes place.

enlightenment
creativity
theory (and mythologisation)
realisation
recognition
noticing
perception

The higher up the list one goes, the greater the degree of singularity one is attributing to experience, with the ultimate goal of enlightenment as one in which one experiences the universe, including oneself as a single undivided whole. At that level everything is brought together and there is no distinction between self and other, mind and body, conscious and unconscious; all is seamlessly unified into the singularity of One. Starting at the bottom however this bringing together of individual elements is much more routine. Perception involves the compilation of sense data, the information about the world provided by the senses, into manageable and meaningful phenomena. When we look at a tree for example, we do not observe the individual elements that make up the tree: the branches, bark, leaves, the sound of the wind rustling those leaves etc, and then consciously assemble this data into a unified whole. Rather, it is the whole tree which presents itself to consciousness, the assembly having taken place in the interstices of the brain using the normal processes of perception. This compilation of sensory impressions into complex gestalts is entirely automatic and non-conscious. In fact it is only by an effort of conscious will that we are able to prevent ourselves from performing this routine act of creative construction. If we wish to see the elements which make up the tree, or make up whatever other gestalt is presenting itself, then we have to consciously shift our attention to those elements. (Actually, it may be inaccurate to say that this perception is ‘presented’ to consciousness as if consciousness is a kind of empty stage waiting for the performance of the world. It might be more accurate to see such a ‘performance’ as constituting consciousness.)

It might be a subject of interest why the routine unification of sense-data seems to operate at particular scales. When we look out into the world why do our non-conscious unifying processes stop at the place they do? Why, when we look at a tree do we see a tree first rather than the leaves or the forest? It seems likely that, since cognition derives from the adaptive processes of evolution, then the unifying processes of perception would tend to converge on scales which best served that end. When one is looking for somewhere to hide from a predator there is clearly an adaptive advantage to be gained from seeing tree rather than leaves or forest. Or to bring the example indoors, why, when we look at a chair do we initially and effortlessly see a chair rather than a composite of rectangular shapes or a general piece of furniture? For that matter, why do we not see fragmented patterns of light and shade or particles of matter. Normal waking awareness is partly a process in which the disparate sense data of the world is brought together by non-conscious operations into appropriately-sized gestalts, this ‘appropriateness’ being determined by the affordances offered by these gestalts.

(It should be noted that the scale at which this unconscious unification happens is not only a product of evolutionary determinism but is also partly determined by cultural circumstances; different circumstances suggest different affordances from the environment. So, for example, whilst I might take a trip to the coast and see the ocean, a surfer might look in the same direction and see the wave.)

Perception of the kind I am indicating here is entirely unconscious and requires no effort of will and need produce no sense of awareness. To experience the unification of the sense data of the world at this level would be totally unremarkable. This is the kind of perception we have when we are ‘doing something else’. When we drive down the motorway singing along to the radio, or daydream while we walk the dog in the park, this unifying of perception is what stops us crashing into the armco or stepping off the path, or bumping our head on the low-lying branches of the trees.

On a neurological level, this process is referred to as ‘perceptual binding’ and involves the synchronised firing of networks of neurons. These networks code for different sense data: vertical lines, particular colours, edges, certain shapes etc. and the synchronisation unifies these individual data items into a coherent mental ‘image’ such that we do not see these data elements but only the results of their synchronisation, a chair for example.

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Biting the Big One (part One)

September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

To the medieval mind, the universe consisted of a relatively simple set of components: the Earth, the various crystal spheres supporting the starts and planets, and the divine illumination beyond the outermost sphere. The revolutions of Copernicus and the extensions to that universe contributed by Brahe, Bruno, Hoyle, Hubbard, Einstein and the rest may, on the face of it, seem to have multiplied the number of parts beyond number, and it is true that the number of basic elements has increased from four (or five) to over a hundred, and it is certainly true that the estimated number of miles between one end of it and the other has been upped, along with the number of years it has been in existence. The low number of parts apparently possessed by the universe that Newton and Copernicus inherited pales into insignificance compared to the immensity of that described by the science of today. Yet modern science has one simplicity than that of Ptolemy et al lacked, and that is in the number of boundaries between the universe and ‘not-the-universe’. The Medieval cosmos, simple though it may seem, has a fracture line around it separating the ’sub-lunary’ sphere from the transcendence beyond. Outside of this boundary is the something else of God, presumably accompanied by hosts of angels, archangels, and the rest of heavenly society. The existence of this boundary, the difference that makes a difference, multiplies the thingness of the universe by two; there is an above and a below, a realm of men and a realm of God, a Heaven and an Earth. What’s more, this division is absolute and there can be no singular embracing of the above and the below in a single totality. No word existed which encompasses The Whole Thing.

Today’s universe is big in number of components only. In terms of conceptual unity it has the snow globe universe of the first millennium mystics beaten hands down. The modern mind has the incredible power, (rarely used unfortunately) to spread its wings throughout this immensity and imagine it as one thing, large and puffy, but easily countable on the thumbs of one hand.

Imagine the biggest thing you can fit into your mind, a mountain say. Then imagine something outside of this entity, a cloud shrouding the peak of the mountain. The duality of peak and mountain is easily dissolved by extending one’s imagination outward to include both elements within a single scene. The eagle flying high above the clouds may temporarily reinstate the dualism you have banished but this can be easily addressed by the simple expedient of moving the line around your mind out and capturing the eagle in these new outer limits. Of course, something else will emerge, a fleck of light reflected off the lake, the Sun going down over the ocean, an island on the other side of that ocean, a tell-tale footprint on the beach of that island which indicates the presence of another human being, but with each addition to the inventory of your mind you only need to loosen the lariat that you are throwing over these entities to catch them all, all at once. The moon rising, the rain falling, a star exploding into supernova, all of these things are contained in the one thought you have, call it ‘everything’ if you like. Nor need the embrace of the all stop at the merely physical; inside the atoms of all the planets are forces that you may have heard of but neither you, your anyone else has seen, and there is no good reason not to include them in the single catalogue of stuff.

You may be thinking around this time, if for no other reason than I am going to remind you of the thought, that the universe is so big that it exists not at a single moment of time, but across the reaches of all the time there ever was and ever will be. The now recorded by a clock on the Sun is nine minutes ahead of now here on Earth (or nine minutes behind depending on which of those two bodies you are standing). The time at the other side of the universe is almost incomprehensibly removed from Earth time and, from our perspective, most of those light burnt out in a remote past that will only become present to this region of space when the Earth itself is a cinder. Does this not mean that the unity that we seek breaks apart across the back of time, and that therefore the centuries are irreparably broken? I don’t think so. I see no reason why we need let time come between us when, with Einstein, we can simply let it be another kind of space, another extension to the mansion of mind, a useful dimension that we can use to measure the shear scale of the One Single Thing. Time is not on the other side of the universe; time, like everything else, is on our side.

Hold that thought; do we have a problem at the mention of the word ‘mind’? We may have if we choose to stop our thinking at cogito ergo sum and rebuild the wall around the world along a line that divides Res Cogitans from Res Extensa. Descartes’ famous formulation of the nature of being as consisting of two non-overlapping ontological magisteria presents a division between mind and body reflecting (probably not accidentally) that between God and man, the snowglobe and the hand of the snowglobe-shaker. And while Descartes may have speculated half-heartedly about the intersection of these two incommissable substances, (something about the pineal gland), he could not find a way, in his philosophy, to include both Res’s in a single unified Res Universalis. But that was then and this is now and no such division exists today. Even though the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and consciousness studies are riven with conflicting theories and rival opinion, one thing is sure, that whatever mind is, it exists in the same universe as everything else. Some may regard it as the routine product of the symbolic processing of input by a meat computer, others may regards it as a fundamental property of spacetime itself which just happens to congeal inside the folds of human brains. Either way, however difficult the hard problems of the mind might be to think about, let alone solve, there is no suggestion that this difficulty places them, or the mind itself, beyond the universe. When we throw open our arms to grasp the world in its totality, we hold mind in the single circle of that embrace, yours, mine, and ours.

Thanks to this radical and fundamental re-unifying of the universe, we are now able to conceive of space, time, mind, and all the entities, real and imagined, as simultaneously contained within a single term and a single concept. We might call it ‘the universe’, (although this runs the risk of someone inventing neologisms like ‘multiverse’, or we might call it ‘everything’, (recognising that some wag will point to something that is not a ‘thing’ and claim it evades capture in our descriptive net. It would probable be simplest to simply refer to it as One, and begin our counting from there.

We hold these truths to be self evident.

That these totality of all entities can be contained within the single category of the One.
That the One breaks apart into the various phenomena of the universe according to consistent laws.

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How to know Deepak

October 7th, 2007 Fred McVittie

“The same brain responses that enable you to see a tree as a tree, instead of as a ghostly swarm of buzzing atoms, also enable you to experience God.” - Deepak Chopra. ‘How to know God’. p.17

In this Chopra is probably correct. There are undoubtedly mechanisms within the neural labyrinths of the mind which take the raw data of the world and transform it into our imagination of that world. This data, filtered through the senses, is cast together into the unified experience of conscious awareness. In neuroscience this is referred to as ‘binding’, but was known in medieval times as the ’sensus communis’; the common sense of singular being in which seeing this branch, this leaf, this twig, is transformed into the communion of ‘tree’.

Chopra is right to suggest that these binding and consilient sense-making processes are not limited to the construction of those parts of the imagined world which appears as physical reality. It is this ability to build coherent and singular patterns out of fragmentary data which also allows us to conceive of conceptual ‘objects’ which are experienced purely cognitively, and which appear to have the same imagined wholeness as trees and rocks. These are the mechanisms which lie behind our apprehension not only of God, but also of theories and archetypes, of quarks and leptons, black holes and big bangs, love, justice, time, and anger. Such phenomena are inherently abstract, leaving no direct impression on the senses in the way that buzzing clouds of atoms seem to. And yet the sensus communis which makes the sense of a tree out of the imagination of atoms also makes sense of these ephemeral, disembodied, and evansescent entities. All of these, trees, gods, and atoms, are experiential patterns in one’s imagination of the world.

This does not mean however, that because all these entities are similarly produced within the individual imagination that all are necessarily equal, that all are equally ‘real’. What Chopra does not go on to say is that one’s individual imagination of a tree exists also within the imagination of anyone with eyes standing near where you are standing and looking where you are looking. The ghostly swarm of buzzing atoms (which is neither ghost nor swarm, and most certainly does not buzz), appears in the interpersonal imagination of the objectively described world. This is similarly the case with at least some of the abstractions noted above; a good theory is one which appears robust not only in the imagination of a single individual but in the minds of many, and which maintains its robustness in the face of attack and competition, whether this be in the form of organised scientific attempts at falsification, or the more vernacular processes of scepticism and doubt. It is through these processes that such theories as natural selection, heliocentrism, and relativity come to exist not as follies, ideosyncratically located within the private garden of an individual mind, but as metaphorical objects in the common ground of the shared imagination.

The U.S. constitution forbids the construction of religious icons on government land, and similarly there is no statue of God in the public park of interpersonal reality. Whilst it is likely that the God concept is a result of the same processes of binding and imagination that produce the image of the tree, there is little agreement regarding the nature, appearance, provenance, role, or substantive nature of this God. To the extent that he, she, or it appears within the interpersonal imagination at all it is as the ill-defined subject of sectarian discord and is only maintained through institutional dogmatism, wishful thinking, and pseudo-academic theological hand-waving.

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Binding Religiosity

October 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Imagine a traditional monotheistic religion, perhaps a little like one of the big three Earth-based religions we know so much about: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. This religion has its holy scriptures, its administrative architecture of clerics, prophets, and priests. Its buildings and sacred burial grounds. This religion is totally embedded within the fabric of the society and the people who live in this land, and references to its axioms, its characters, and its creed appear, unbidden and unconscious, on the lips of the people many times a day. When they wish to assert the truth of a claim they say it in the name of the deity, and this holy name is the most common last word of those unfortunate pilots who fly their planes into the ground.

The people of this society find great solace in their religion, and it explains many things that would otherwise be inexplicable to them; the source of good and evil, the creation of the world, why their loved ones die and why they themselves will die. Their religion provides an answer for all of these questions, and these answers all come from a single source, an idea that is at once so powerful, economical, so intuitively satisfying, that not only does it account for the wildness of the world, but it can be held in its entirety between the fingers of the mind like a pearl.

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Metaphor Theory as a Conceptual Framework

November 4th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Conceptual metaphor theory provides a meta-analytic framework to consider a range of different types of writing: scientific, poetry, impressionistic, anecdotal, imagistic, and technical. All of these highly varied writing forms, and the concepts they refer to, are ultimately grounded in the common vocabulary of the body and the sensorimotor system. Indeed, there is no good reason why non-written forms might not also be embraced within the terms of CMT since pictures, actions, objects, etc are as susceptible to metaphor analysis as written or spoken texts.

George Lakoff in ‘Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things’ begins just such a cross-modal analysis in his discussion of the concept of anger. Through the identification of a key metaphor for anger in which it is conceived of as pressure in a sealed container, (usually in the presence of heat), he is able to track this idea across personal narratives, cartoon images, fictional writings, and scientific (psychoanalytic) texts.

The common ground of conceptual metaphor in which all expression operates, regardless of its status as objective or subjective, personal or interpersonal, scientific or artistic, provides a space in which all of these expressive forms can be considered.

It further seems likely that the organisational devices that hold together individual and collective pieces of writing might also function metaphorically, as for example when we understand a story as having a ‘narrative arc’. The ‘arc’ of a story, whilst evidently abstract and intangible, is conceptualised through embodied experiences of similar arcs in the physical world, the most common being the flight of a projectile or possibly the swinging of the limbs during walking. These physical schema provide the source metaphor for an embodied understanding of the structure through which ideas are expressed. It may be interesting to consider what embodied schema may (or may not) be mobilised in the understanding of texts which have non-linear structures, this blog for example.

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Soul of an Atheist - Overview

November 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The ‘Soul of an Atheist’ section of this writing refers to the hypothesis iterated in various places throughout this blog that the desire to understand the relationship between self and world, the universe and the place of human beings within it, is a universal tendency. This desire may be simply a side-effect of the operation of cognition, perhaps an overactive holistic operator (Newberg & D’Aquili), or some version of the HADD or ‘Hyperactive Agency Detecting Device’ suggested by Barrett, or some other pattern recognition system. Such devices, systems, or operators are presumed to provide the function of cohering data from the senses such that prediction and control become possible; we see patterns in the seasons which allow us to plan our harvests, and this same cognitive skill allows (or demands) that we see patterns in the stars, or in the entrails of sacrificed animals. Furthermore, this cohering tendency operates across a range of scales. At one end there is the relatively discreet process which allows us to cohere the partially occluded outline of a tiger in the bushes into a complete image of the entire terrifying animal. At the other end of the scale the tendency urges us to find a single unifying pattern in all creation. It is interesting to note that at both ends of this scale we ourselves are also posited as an element within the unified image; the fearful symmetry of the tiger produced by our cohering cognition is fearful to us, and that fear is part of the image and the rationale for our producing it in the first place. Similarly, our seeking of a unified image of the universe, a cosmology if you will, also inevitably contains ourselves as active participants.

The quest for a satisfying cosmology probably underpins much of the action of scientists in their talk of ‘theories of everything’, and also of seers, prophets, and evangelists who make apparently similar claims for a unifying goal.

For a cosmology to be both useful and satisfying, as well as being resistant to rational dismissal, it must fill certain criteria. These are, that it be coherent, without obvious internal inconsistencies; that it be expressed in concepts which are capable of embodiment (possibly through the use of conceptual metaphor), and that it not be contradicted by the processes of logical deduction and the scientific method.

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Binding Religiosity

November 30th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Imagine a traditional monotheistic religion, perhaps a little like one of the big three Earth-based religions we know so much about: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. This religion has its holy scriptures, its administrative architecture of clerics, prophets, and priests. Its buildings and sacred burial grounds. This religion is totally embedded within the fabric of the society and the people who live in this land, and references to its axioms, its characters, and its creed appear, unbidden and unconscious, on the lips of the people many times a day. When they wish to assert the truth of a claim they say it in the name of the deity, and this holy name is the most common last word of those unfortunate pilots who fly their planes into the ground.

The people of this society find great solace in their religion, and it explains many things that would otherwise be inexplicable to them; the source of good and evil, the creation of the world, why their loved ones die and why they themselves will die. Their religion provides an answer for all of these questions, and these answers all come from a single source, an idea that is at once so powerful, economical, so intuitively satisfying, that not only does it account for the wildness of the world, but it can be held in its entirety between the fingers of the mind like a pearl. It is at once the single, infinitesimally small unity at the heart of everything, and also the infinitely large, inexpressibly all-embracing totality of that everything.

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