The core moment of science is a purely mystical phenomenon – something Einstein spoke about very directly in his later years. Perhaps this is why contemporary scientists, in this final age of denial, have reverted to technology and avoid all talk of the epiphany which is the essential attraction of scientific work. That epiphany cannot be described by the usual presumptions of ‘scientific method’ and therefore falls outside of the purview of the present self-definition of science. When certified scientists popularize the delusion that science itself, as an experience, is not only other than paradoxical, but also the categorical denial of spirit and the religious shift in awareness, then one can only chortle at their stupidity about their own experience – for want of weeping.

            When I was sixteen, Einstein’s simplified description of the Special Theory of Relativity brought to a close my contemporary version of the old fate / free will struggle. Light is not two things. But the empirical evidence pointed to two natures in light. How Hendrik Lorentz and Einstein synthesized those two natures showed me the radical natures of Spirit and Cause, how time can be both sequential and simultaneous, and therefore how the moment can re-determine fate through the restructuring of time in the moment. Over the years, this has emerged as a range of formal practices. But it also opened the gates to the seeds of the view which is Science itself.

            Science, of course, is an historical phenomenon. For one, science is the inverse of prophecy. Einstein’s initial conversion has its great historical force precisely because it meets at the merging of the mystical and the scientific. Time, as cause, was always the essential issue of Science. What causes what. But cause is also an historical product. But civilization – apparently necessarily correlated to philosophy in some form – nevertheless does not automatically focus on cause. This is the one appropriate claim for the kinship of classical Greece and the later European West. The Greeks pointed directly to cause, and established, if somewhat defectively, the ground for cause.

            The only problem, finally, was that the ground was the five elements.

            Science now demands numerical evidence. But Science itself is a child of number. We could define the present impasse – the intellectual corollary, certainly, of the ‘final days’ – as the failure of the zero / One definition of Science. It is this zero / One definition that the professional atheists with scientific degrees are now purveying, as if it were not only still alive, but as if it were the only possibility of truth.

            But science is also the key to the reflective eye – what I commonly, in these scribblings, refer to as the Eye. Cause is the medium of self-awareness. Inference and analysis are the necessary conditions of self-awareness or first reflection. Neither self nor object exists in first consciousness. Self and world begin to emerge when we are three. Paradoxically, the model for object and for our reifications of ‘self’ is the inherent behavior of the structure of awareness in the act of reflection – consciousness not being different from identity (and hence ‘field’), from focus as both value and act, and hence from volition itself. But as volition and identity, awareness is already potentially reflexive.

            But reflective awareness also emerges as a post-evolutionary fact of human prehistory. And since consciousness of cause is the necessary condition for the objectification of reflective awareness – beyond prophecy and shamanism – we have a philosophical history that leads to Science. But this is not just Bacon and Descartes and the so-called Aristotelian thread. Hume has generated his zero / One addiction game for the street level concept addicts – who nowadays have great skill in acquiring degrees and professional status – but the problem is other than One, particularly the empty One that ‘measures’ zero.

            But this means there is no single cause, a fact that the legitimate philosophers of empiricism – simply read ‘philosophers’ – have invariably adverted to, even in the driest darkness.

            Momentarily, we let the ‘prophecy’ slip by, but you knew we had to come back to it. Here is where things get strange. We do our explicitly spiritual or religious voyage, at a certain point – sail across continents, if not oceans – and what we find on the other side of the field is the same book we left with – the Gospel of Thomas. If prophecy is fulfilled, we can take the defective definition of the elements and turn them into causes. Jesus says, you have five trees in paradise, and they are not moved in summer or winter. You would have to be pretty much physical to say they are just the senses. Why five? Taste falls into four. Skin has several. Why five?

            As the Narrator, I can point to the Poet. Here, his mind, if not his Voice, necessarily joins us. What follows is something of a Duet.

            I was always disturbed by the strange and infinitely replicating cosmologies of the gnostics. But if, as we have said, the zero / One Proposition has died the living death, there is no single cause. That is, Cause itself cannot be Single.

            What our ‘researches’ have shown us is that the ‘true’ One is Five. The living One invests both world and abyss. Concept reduces the living One to the dead artifice of concept as habit or habit response. The zero / One Proposition held that this dead concept One covered cosmos. But finally, even inference and analysis cannot be derived from it. While the living One is beyond words, there is also the true One, which is the created nature of the reflective act. And this One is always Five, whether as the functions of awareness itself, as cause or as the elemental basis of psychology.

            As the Poet studying Spirit and Cause, one became absorbed in Oracles. Perhaps I have recited this history here before, but it is worth repeating. I started to look at I Ching because the whole framework expressed an obverse for what I had experienced ‘in the darkness’, so to speak, in my first encounter with Einstein. If the moment determines value, all values are functions of the moment. The essence of the moment brings all history to bear. (Hence the creative act restructures history.) But this, of course, is also a viable, if not active, description of ‘Spirit’.

            Spirit, finally, is the ‘aura’ of value, the power of value that can be finally separated as Symbol or ‘expressed value’ – a key to the reflective act, though less than the whole potency, since awareness and value themselves are apparently prior to this ‘emanation’ from value, this active principle of value within awareness.

            So one can study Spirit as the act of value in terms of the moment. But the context supplied by I Ching is synonymous with classical Chinese culture, legitimate scripture in its timeless value for the culture. But one already had too much take home homework to enter the kaleidoscopic radiance of those ancient halls.

            So, instead, one found this apparently western Oracle, lying in pieces, that, as far as one could tell, only a deceptive catholic priest had tried to integrate – and then only as a proselytizing instrument for the church – a dastardly travesty as well as sacrilege and blasphemy in terms of the actualities of the Cards.

            I have spent years struggling with the fact that the core philosophy of reflection, as I understand it, is expressed through my formal work with the Tarot Cards. It falls within the scar in my soul, the distance between Poet and Narrator – a narrator desiring to retain his potens as the serious Voice of the culture and a poet perfectly willing, finally, to take psychedelics and see the White Light in a nutshell as well as the shell Eye of cosmos.

            But we have always been jongleurs in our rags.

            The Cards are Numbers and Symbols. The Major Arcana are the ‘moral history’ of the mystical path, since true mysticism can only begin in a concern for Justice. The dead truth of concept is not Justice, except the concept stand up and walk, leading back through the abyss to its source in value – the brief epic of awakening. And we can use the Minor Arcana to create a structured framework for the formal presentation of the philosophy of reflection, a necessarily multidimensional phenomenon, although the transcendent Five, being itself subjected to reflection, to view and viewed, is necessarily reduced to Four (since ‘the witness’ necessarily holds a position) and expressed through sets and sequences.