The Book of Mind: Seeking Gnosis

The Dark Night of the Soul

Before the Temple of Ceres at Patras, there was a fountain, separated from the temple by a wall, and there was an oracle, very truthful, not for all events, but for the sick only. The sick person let down a mirror, suspended by a thread till its base touched the surface of the water, having first prayed to the goddess and offered incense. Then looking in the mirror, he saw the presage of death or recovery, according as the face appeared fresh and healthy, or of a ghastly aspect. – Pausanias

Divination by mirrors is called catoptromancy (from the Greek katoptron, mirror + manteia, divination). The reflection in the mirror reflects the truth of the situation. The mirror shows the true state of a person’s soul or shadow. Vampires have no reflection in a mirror because they have no soul.

It was essential not to gaze upon the mirror directly. It was set at an angle to reflect the rays of the moon, or to mirror some other object, or to capture the background of the mirror-gazer rather than show the mirror-gazer himself. It was said that an adept gazer could use the mirror to make contact with the afterworld and communicate with the souls of the dead.

In ancient Rome, the priests who practiced catoptromancy and had mirror-induced visions were known as specularii (from the Latin speculum, mirror). Sometimes they used reflective glass, or a polished mental disc.

In spiritualism, a psychomanteum (from Greek psychē, soul + manteia, divination) is a mirrored chamber, set up to allow communication with the spiritual realm. The mirrors are angled to reflect nothing but darkness, so as to maximize contact with the spirits of the dead. The small chamber is illuminated only by a candle or a dim light bulb.

To speak metaphorically, physicalism (science) is all about pointing the mirror at the lit world, while non-physicalism (spirituality) points the mirror at the darkness, the unlit world, the unobservable world.

Is there anything more simplistic and childish than the claim of scientism that only observables exist? Reality consists of the observable and the unobservable. Any system that ignores the unobservable is false, and any system that cannot account for the observable is equally false.

Which mirror are you looking in? What do you see, and what do you not see?

Plato said that reality comprises the sensible and the intelligible, with the latter being the true foundation of existence. Scientism says that only the sensible exists. The intelligible aspect of science is mathematics, which scientism regards as unreal, abstract and manmade … because mathematics is not deemed sensible.

Ontological mathematics takes the opposite stance. Mathematics is the essence of intelligibility and is real, concrete, and the true language of Nature. Scientism is an unreal, manmade abstraction, created according to the manmade ideology of empiricism and materialism. Scientism radically falsifies reality, while mathematics is the mirror into which reality stares and finds its true self.

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In ancient Greece, the Nekromanteion was a temple of necromancy devoted to Hades (god of the underworld) and Persephone, Hades’ consort. The temple was located on the banks of the Acheron River, at the meeting point of the Acheron, Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus, three of the rivers that fed Hades, hence the temple was believed to be an entrance to the realm of the dead.

Nekromanteion means Oracle of the Dead (from Greek nekros, dead body + manteia, divination), and the faithful came to contact their dead ancestors. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus entered the underworld via the Nekromanteion.

Katabasis versus Nekyomanteia

Katabasis involved a living person descending to the spirit world to ask questions of the dead, while nekyomanteia involved summoning the dead back to the living world in order to question them. Wikipedia says, "In ancient Greek cult-practice and literature, a nekyia is a ‘rite by which ghosts were called up and questioned about the future,’ i.e., necromancy. A nekyia is not necessarily the same thing as a katabasis. While they both afford the opportunity to converse with the dead, only a katabasis is the actual, physical journey to the underworld undertaken by several heroes in Greek and Roman myth.

"In common parlance, however, the term nekyia is often used to subsume both types of event…"

Odysseus’ nekyia is the classic underworld tale. Odysseus visited the Halls of Hades to consult a dead seer about how to return home to Ithaca despite the attempts of Poseidon, god of the sea, to prevent him from ever seeing his family and homeland again.

Carl Jung, after enduring a breakdown, said, Like Odysseus, I was presented by fate with a nekyia, the descent into the dark Hades.

To reach the depths of one’s own psyche, it is necessary to venture into the underworld. Jung said, "The Nekyia is no aimless and purely destructive fall into the abyss, but a meaningful katabasis eis antron, a descent into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge. The journey through the psychic history of mankind has as its object the restoration of the whole man, by awakening the memories in the blood. The descent to the Mothers enabled Faust to raise up the sinfully whole human being – Paris united with Helen – that homo totus who was forgotten when contemporary man lost himself in one-sidedness. It is he who at all times of upheaval has caused the tremor of the upper world, and always will. This man stands opposed to the man of the present, because he is the one who ever is as he was, whereas the other is what he is only for the moment. With my patients, accordingly, the katabasis [descent] and katalysis [dissolution] are followed by a recognition of the bipolarity of human nature and of the necessity of conflicting pairs of opposites. After the symbols of madness experienced during the period of disintegration there follow images which represent the coming together of the opposites: light/dark, above/below, white/black, male/female, etc."

Jung used nekyia (the night journey on the sea ... the descent into the belly of the monster (journey to hell)), and katabasis (descent into the lower world) more or less interchangeably. He deployed this symbolism as a metaphor for the journey of the psyche to find enlightenment, first having gone through challenges and trials in its night journey where it faces its worst fears and demons. The psyche descends into the dark (hell) before finding its way out on the far side, where it returns to the light and emerges transformed.

Are you ready for the path of trials? Are you ready to face your demons? Are you prepared to descend into the depths before you ascend to the heights?

The Book of Mind will take you on your unavoidable katabasis, followed by your anabasis (ascent into the higher world), where, at last, you will see the light.

The Materialist

SB: I’m speaking as someone who has studied biology and worked in healthcare. When brain death occurs, we are dead. I’m also an atheist and simply don’t believe consciousness survives death. I think consciousness is no more than synapses firing. When they cease to fire, no more thoughts are generated, the same as when you shut down a turbine that generates power. I’m curious regarding which mathematics support a mind/body division.

Imagine you are a technician looking down on a broken military drone that is still making sounds, and showing flickering screens. Suddenly all of the activity ceases. The drone is certainly dead, isn’t it? No more synapses are firing. Do you immediately conclude that the drone pilot thousands of miles away is dead too? In fact, the pilot is very much alive and well, and now in need of a new drone. Exactly the same is true of the soul.

Why is this simple truth so difficult for materialists to grasp? Why do they imagine that drones/bodies are alive? Drones/bodies are not alive. They are controlled by living things (pilots/souls), and when that control breaks down, the drone/body perishes, but not its pilot/soul. A pilot can order a new drone, and the soul can order another body via reincarnation.

Materialists are unable to conceive of an immaterial, living Singularity of autonomous Fourier frequency domains (souls). That’s their problem, not reality’s. Life continues regardless.

As SB demonstrates, materialists regard the death of the body as the death of the mind because they have convinced themselves that the mind is exclusively a product of the materialist brain. In fact, the death of the body merely breaks the connection between body and mind … an entirely different concept. The body is dead, not the mind. Materialists cannot envisage the dimensional body being connected to something dimensionless. If they could, they would no longer be materialists.

By her own admission, SB is an atheist and materialist. She doesn’t make any attempt to imagine a reality beyond the materialist paradigm to which she has eagerly signed up. She clearly knows nothing at all about ontological Fourier mathematics, which proves definitively how minds can exist independently of bodies without any religious voodoo or mysticism.

Isn’t it extraordinary that people can be so certain in their views when there are vast vistas of mathematics about which they know nothing, and which provide full and exact answers for why they are totally wrong in their beliefs? Ignorance is not a defense.

You can’t go around stating that idealism is false if your own materialist knowledge is insufficient for the task. Scientism has no clue what mathematics is, so it has no clue that it has been entirely refuted by mathematics. It dogmatically dismisses mathematics as unreal, just as it dogmatically dismisses the soul as unreal. The two are of course one and the same. The soul is pure mathematics, and mathematics is exactly that which demonstrates the truth of idealism and the falsehood of scientism and atheism. It’s all in the math.

Science does not provide a complete and consistent explanation of everything. Ontological mathematics does. Get with the program.

The Scientific Claim

Science claims that certain systems of lifeless, mindless, purposeless atoms with no freedom can be alive, can think, can have purposes and can have either actual free will (by some unexplained miracle), or something even more miraculous – the illusion of free will. If you reject this as irrational nonsense, as you ought to, then you have rejected materialism and accepted idealism.

Idealism asserts that reality is made of free, autonomous, living minds, imbued with purpose. Leibniz called them monads, and they can be given an exact mathematical formula (Euler’s Formula). These living mathematical minds can, between them, construct collective thoughts which have a solid, objective character, and are what we perceive as external matter.

Matter is made of Eulerian sinusoids. Science gets close to the truth when it claims that everything is made of strings. In fact, everything is made of analytic sinusoids, ideal strings.

The Vibrational Universe

The universe is about endless shifting patterns, vibrations, oscillations, waves, frequencies, energies. These are all different ways of describing thoughts.

It is essential to link the vague, undefined word thought to something that can be defined. An individual thought is an individual frequency characterizing a sinusoidal wave. A Singularity of frequencies is a thinking organism, a mental organism, a Cosmic Mind that has the most wondrous and also the most terrible thoughts. The dialectical opposite of heaven is hell, and the universe makes sure it inflicts heaven and hell on everyone. No one can escape the dialectic.

The key to making profound intellectual breakthroughs lies in connecting things that do not seem in any way connected. Science is hopeless at this task because it has only one card to play: stuff = matter. It has no choice but to conceive everything in these terms. It can’t call on anything else. It can’t imagine anything else. It doesn’t even contemplate anything else, since anything else is external to its paradigm, hence non-existent. Mathematics features in science but only as an undefined, unreal, manmade abstraction.

It is impossible for science to define a thought since there is nothing in the materialist paradigm that would suggest itself as a candidate for what a thought could possibly be.

Ontological mathematics, in accordance with Occam’s razor, imposes the severest possible restriction on reality by reducing it to sinusoidal waves and nothing besides. Hence it becomes inevitable that the most basic element of life and mind must be … the sinusoid. It can’t be anything else. Why are sinusoids any better than matter as an explanation of life and mind? Let’s return to this question shortly.

The obvious problem with atoms, the building blocks of matter, is that they are by definition lifeless and mindless, so only a miracle could extract life and mind from them, and miracles don’t happen. Science uses a different word for miracle. It deploys the term emergence. So, life and mind don’t come from lifeless, mindless matter by a miracle. Rather, they emerge from lifeless, mindless matter. This is a still miracle, but one that is acceptable to scientists because the actual word miracle isn’t used, and a different, camouflaging term is used instead.

No scientist has ever explained how rearranging lifeless things causes life to emerge. No scientist has ever explained how rearranging mindless things causes mind to emerge. No scientist has ever explained why some arrangements of matter – astoundingly few (basically only those concerned with DNA or similar) – should be associated with life and mind, and all the rest with the expected non-mind and non-life. Modern Atomism is no more convincing than the ancient Atomism of Epicurus. Nothing has moved on.

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It is immensely advantageous to reduce reality to one thing because then you have no choice but to explain everything with regard to it, and see how your explanations hold up. The trouble is that if you have chosen a poor candidate for everything, all of your explanations will fall apart. Only one candidate is right, and every other candidate is wrong.

Science claims that the world is made of lifeless, mindless atoms, and nothing besides (we’re leaving sub-atomic particles out of it since they don’t materially change the argument). It is therefore self-evidently impossible for science to explain mind, life, thought, the unconscious, the conscious, purpose, and free will, i.e. everything that defines human existence.

Materialism is directed towards explaining what humans observe out there, and it then tries to explain humans themselves on the basis of what is conjectured to be out there.

Idealism is directed towards explaining what humans experience in here (i.e. within the human condition itself), and then seeks to explain the external world on the basis of what idealists have determined is essential to being a human.

Ontological mathematics asserts that you cannot get a human being without first having monadic souls made of sinusoids, and then explains the whole of reality on this basis.

Leibniz said, [The perfect world is] the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena. This is just a different way of stating Occam’s razor. To explain the complex world via Occam’s razor, you require the simplest possible system that produces the maximum variety, as opposed to the simplest possible system that produces the minimum variety (because that system would be non-existence, or something so lacking in properties as to be functionally the same as non-existence).

This places an enormous constraint on what the most productive and simplest system must be. Ancient Greek Atomism was a good early proposal. It used nothing but atoms and void to explain everything, and even had a place for soul atoms in its scheme in an attempt to explain the mind within a materialist setup. However, the law of simplicity means that we immediately have to question whether we need both atoms and void in this system. Can we get rid of one or the other and thus create a simpler system, a monism rather than a dualism?

Ontological mathematics reduces the whole of reality to a sinusoidal Singularity, which the Atomists would have regarded not even as void, but as non-existence (because, like modern scientists, they were obsessed with the sensory property of extension and could not conceive of unextended existence, i.e. frequency existence).

It is impossible to reduce reality to any state more fundamental than a sinusoidal Singularity. This is exactly why we are 100% right.

Moreover, the language of waves (ontological mathematics) is the most powerful possible language. It is the Ur Language, the one which can express all other languages, and the only one with this capacity. It is impossible to find a more fundamental and expressive language than wave language. This stands as another criterion for why ontological mathematics is indisputably correct.

Scientism never employs considerations such as these. It is not interested in simplicity and fruitfulness of phenomena. It is focused at all times on trying to explain observable stuff, which is to inevitably arrive at the 100% wrong answer to existence, one that wholly violates Occam’s razor. That’s why scientism ultimately gets everything wrong.

Scientism uses mathematics to describe the spacetime world of matter, and it is thanks to mathematics that science gets anything right. Science without mathematics doesn’t bear thinking about. It would return to the ancient materialist way of thinking about things in terms of the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire, i.e. material observables. These elements were the basis of alchemy, the forerunner of chemistry.

Thinking simply, clearly and systematically is beyond scientists. They refuse to use the Principle of Sufficient Reason, they refuse to use Occam’s razor, and they refuse to use ultimately constrained thinking, by which we mean focusing on the barest possible systems, and explaining everything using them exclusively, with no other additions.

The closest science has got to ontological mathematical thinking is string theory. Wikipedia says, "In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. It describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string. In string theory, one of the many vibrational states of the string corresponds to the graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that carries gravitational force. Thus string theory is a theory of quantum gravity.

"String theory is a broad and varied subject that attempts to address a number of deep questions of fundamental physics. String theory has been applied to a variety of problems in black hole physics, early universe cosmology, nuclear physics, and condensed matter physics, and it has stimulated a number of major developments in pure mathematics. Because string theory potentially provides a unified description of gravity and particle physics, it is a candidate for a theory of everything, a self-contained mathematical model that describes all fundamental forces and forms of matter. Despite much work on these problems, it is not known to what extent string theory describes the real world ...

"One of the deepest problems in modern physics is the problem of quantum gravity. The general theory of relativity is formulated within the framework of classical physics, whereas the other fundamental forces are described within the framework of quantum mechanics. A quantum theory of gravity is needed in order to reconcile general relativity with the principles of quantum mechanics, but difficulties arise when one attempts to apply the usual prescriptions of quantum theory to the force of gravity. ...

In everyday life, there are three familiar dimensions of space: height, width and length. Einstein’s general theory of relativity treats time as a dimension on par with the three spatial dimensions; in general relativity, space and time are not modeled as separate entities but are instead unified to a four-dimensional spacetime. In this framework, the phenomenon of gravity is viewed as a consequence of the geometry of spacetime.

Why does string theory rely on non-analytic strings? Why not analytic sinusoids? Why would Nature choose strings over sinusoids? Why would Occam’s razor choose complicated, badly defined strings over simple, perfectly defined sinusoids? That would be to violate its own raison d’être. It would be to add needless complications, which Nature never does.

Science is forced to appeal to strings rather than sinusoids because, if it chose the latter, it would be acknowledging that the universe is mathematical (rational, made of intelligible language) and not scientific (empirical, made of sensory stuff). Because it is a religion, it refuses to do this. By religion, we mean any system of thought based on unreasonable faith in an unproved claim, which explicitly rejects rationalism and rational scrutiny.

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Why do sinusoids contain life and mind? It’s because they are created by the PSR, the principle of intelligibility, which also serves as Plato’s Form of Life itself. Life means mental activity, and anything that has intelligence is automatically associated with life.

Scientific matter, by contrast, is created by the principle of sensibility (an unintelligible principle). Nothing made of unintelligent matter can have any association with life.

Anything intelligible is mental, while anything sensible is material. Anything mental is alive. Anything material is dead. When Plato divided reality into two domains – intelligible and sensible – he was actually dividing it into alive and lifeless: eternal souls and temporal drones.

Life, to be meaningful, must be expressed as a unity. A monad is an autonomous mental unit, made up of a complete set of basis sinusoids (from which all private thoughts are constructed). A monad is alive. An individual sinusoid is not. An individual sinusoid is an essential building block of life, and contains life, but is not the functional unit of life. The monad is. (Sinusoids cannot in fact be defined individually. They must be defined in terms of a full monadic collection of sinusoids, which is why the monad and not the sinusoid is the basic unit of life/mind.)

In ontological mathematics, matter is made of sinusoids, hence contains life, but is not functionally alive. It is derived from the collection of all monads, but is not under individual monadic control. A material spacetime body is alive because it is controlled by an individual monadic mind (and ceases to be alive when this control ends).

A dreamworld created by a monadic mind is not alive, but is generated by a living mind. The objective world created by the collection of all monadic minds is not alive either, but is the product of all living minds.

It is impossible for dead things to create life. It is impossible for dead things to create worlds. Life is at the root of all creation. All things either have primary life (mind), or secondary life (matter). Mind and matter could not interact unless they shared living, mental qualities. These are supplied by the sinusoids from which both mind and matter are made.

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We might talk of two degrees of matter: 1) cellular matter, which comes under direct control of individual monads, 2) and non-cellular matter, which does not (it remains under collective monadic control). The first degree of matter serves as food (the organic), and the second as non-food (the inorganic).

The Many Dimensions of String Theory

"In spite of the fact that the universe is well described by four-dimensional spacetime, there are several reasons why physicists consider theories in other dimensions. In some cases, by modeling spacetime in a different number of dimensions, a theory becomes more mathematically tractable, and one can perform calculations and gain general insights more easily. ... One notable feature of string theories is that these theories require extra dimensions of spacetime for their mathematical consistency. In bosonic string theory, spacetime is 26-dimensional, while in superstring theory it is 10-dimensional, and in M-theory it is 11-dimensional. In order to describe real physical phenomena using string theory, one must therefore imagine scenarios in which these extra dimensions would not be observed in experiments. ...

"Compactification is one way of modifying the number of dimensions in a physical theory. In compactification, some of the extra dimensions are assumed to ‘close up’ on themselves to form circles. In the limit where these curled up dimensions become very small, one obtains a theory in which spacetime has effectively a lower number of dimensions. A standard analogy for this is to consider a multidimensional object such as a garden hose. If the hose is viewed from a sufficient distance, it appears to have only one dimension, its length. However, as one approaches the hose, one discovers that it contains a second dimension, its circumference. Thus, an ant crawling on the surface of the hose would move in two dimensions.

One of the challenges of string theory is that the full theory does not have a satisfactory definition in all circumstances. Another issue is that the theory is thought to describe an enormous landscape of possible universes, and this has complicated efforts to develop theories of particle physics based on string theory. These issues have led some in the community to criticize these approaches to physics and question the value of continued research on string theory unification. – Wikipedia

If you reduced one-dimensional strings to analytic sinusoids, and reduced twenty-six, eleven or ten-dimensional string theories to a zero-dimensional theory (reflecting a Singularity universe), you would arrive at ontological mathematics. You then create dimensions from this dimensionless Singularity via Fourier mathematics, which produces an extended spacetime domain from an unextended frequency domain.

Scientific thinking, with all of its extraneous dimensions, its particle zoo, and all manner of ad hoc and heuristic add-ons, is not constrained enough. You must go to the state of maximum constraint (points alone, i.e. things with no dimensions and no properties), and then work your way up from there.

Points are the supreme expression of Occam’s razor, the principle of ultimate simplicity. The only thing that can apply to points and which can extract anything useful from points is the Principle of Sufficient Reason. When this is done, the result is Euler’s Formula and thus Fourier mathematics, i.e. ontological mathematics.

Science keeps getting everything wrong because it parses everything through the fallacious manmade ideology of materialism and empiricism, and even subjects mathematics itself to this manmade dogmatism, thus butchering mathematics. Mathematics is based on points, singularities, frequencies, waves, and complex numbers. Science uses a subset of mathematics based on non-points, the denial of singularities, the denial of ontological frequencies, the denial of ontological sinusoids, and the selection of only real numbers greater than zero and less than infinity as the output of any calculations. This makes a mockery of mathematics and destroys its full and awesome power.

Science applies a false constraint to mathematics in order to accommodate a manmade philosophy. It needs to ditch its manmade philosophy and embrace full, ontological mathematics, i.e. all possible sinusoids and their combinations, all possible numbers, and zero-infinity singularities.

The Kantian Error

Plato argued that intelligible reality was Truth, and sensible reality an inferior copy, hence Falsehood. In other words, we should look to rationalism rather than empiricism for genuine knowledge. Kant took the opposite view. He said that empiricism set the valid limits of knowledge, and rationalism went wrong whenever it exceeded those limits.

Ontological mathematics asserts that rationalism sets the valid limits of knowledge, and empiricism goes wrong because it rejects exactly all of those things that are vital to complete and coherent knowledge but which are not empirical.

Empirical science uses rational mathematics despite regarding mathematics as unreal (hence unempirical). This is a blatant contradiction that science, with its customary intellectual dishonesty and contempt for philosophy, refuses to address. Why does no one demand that science be coherent?

Kant got round this problem by appealing to a transcendental layer of existence, to which he claimed mathematics belonged. In effect, Kant claimed there were three domains of existence: 1) the empirical (based on the synthetic a posteriori, 2) the transcendent (based on the analytic a priori), and 3) the transcendental (based on his specially invented synthetic a priori judgments). Kant claimed that the transcendental was necessary to escape from Hume’s radical empirical skepticism and create the framework in which knowledge was possible at all. His secondary claim was that the transcendent – the domain of pure reason – went too far and became detached from any knowable (empirical) reality. Yet it is surely preposterous to cite an unempirical transcendental layer to explain reality, while rejecting a transcendent layer, which is equally unempirical, and barely different from the transcendental.

Science uses mathematics in a Kantian transcendental sense, without acknowledging that it is doing so, while vigorously rejecting mathematics used transcendently. To be more precise, science is happy to use mathematics in the context of positive real numbers greater than zero and less than infinity (i.e. numbers compatible with empirical observables), while rejecting all imaginary numbers, all complex numbers, most negative numbers, and zero and infinity (i.e. transcendent mathematics, incompatible with empirical observables), although, incongruously, it is perfectly happy to use imaginary and complex numbers in its calculations and formulae, just so long as they vanish by the time any scientific output is generated. The elves are allowed to make the shoes, just so long as the elves are gone by morning, and the shoemaker can be congratulated for his positivist efforts.

Ontological mathematics, by complete contrast, accepts all mathematical numbers – in fact, it is based on complex numbers rather than real numbers, and singularities rather than spacetime – i.e. it uses mathematics transcendently rather than empirically, and rejects the transcendental. It views the empirical – resulting from the limited human senses and a bogus subset of mathematics – as a radical falsification of knowledge.

Science accepts only observables (the empirical), while ontological mathematics accepts observables and unobservables (the empirical and the transcendent), and thus ontological mathematics provides a vastly bigger picture than science, one that reverses the reducing valve of human-based knowledge based on the human senses, and gives us access to a whole universe that transcends the human condition.

It is in the anti-Kantian transcendent universe that all the big answers to existence lie. This is the domain that scientific materialism and empiricism can never access, but mathematics certainly can. This is the authentic Platonist, intelligible universe of life, mind and Truth.

Do the senses provide a legitimate limit on reason (as Kant and science argue), or do the senses produce a radical reducing valve on what is really rationally there, which we must transcend in order to access real, ultimate knowledge? This is the key question, and ontological mathematics emphatically comes down on the latter side. All empiricists oppose this conclusion, which is exactly