Double-aspect theory is interesting. Personally, I am a Property Dualist, which is somewhat similar. The distinction is rather small: the difference between the terms "aspect" and "property", since both concepts are forms of monism. I describe it in this paper: "Hylomorphic Functions"
You know, I am beginning to wonder if you stole this from Stellaris. It sounds very much like The Shroud! And the Very Dangerous Idea is something you can actually do on a galactic scale: commit genocide to study the perturbations created in physics, and use the knowledge to build a Dyson Sphere out of dark matter that will consume the galaxy in order to transport your nation to the realm of pure consciousness. Or perhaps the Übermind speaks to both you and Paradox— I prefer this explanation.
This also brings to mind the divine double idea like that of the sufis discussed by Corbin and in Charles Stang’s exploration of the topic in his book on the topic.
I suspect the divine double is the other me (you point out here) that is everything but rendered as a discrete and imaginal, i.e., phenomenal interface or apparition or liminal being of sorts that works as a go between to encourage maturation of consciousness of the material, incarnate me, to orient it towards the no-thing-every-thing me. A living breathing yet imaginal dialogical dialectical entity.
None of this is wrong but the moral impasse points to a greater truth, which is that the Mind created matter to create minds and that - the synchronization of minds being precisely what 'morality', in its broadest sense, is - identifying with the Mind outside of synchronizing minds is fruitless and will ultimately just end up desynchronizing you from any community and into solipsism.
Still, the Mind is very real and wants us to know It. It simply wants us to know each other too and that's only possible through embodiment. There must then be a truth that's only accessible through being embodied that nonetheless points to the Mind.
I'd argue that this truth is Christ. Though I dare wouldn't say 'Christianity'.
For what is Christ? Christ is the Word, which must mean he is the self-same synchronistic principle that, as surely as it lifted us above the animals through eons of hard-won agreement on the meaning of grunts, organized matter into life through the code of DNA and, before that, bound unbound particles into the nucleic structure of atoms. Christ is simply that which unifies the many into a one that only exists as and by the agreement of the many.
The crucifixion here is then what happens as any 'one' empties itself into serving the many through serving a higher one. The resurrection then being to experience oneself as that higher one - our cells, for instance, are us and live as us no matter whether any arbitrary individual cell dies, just as atoms 'live' as the objects they make up until the complete destruction of the object, and even then the ultimate object atoms make up is the universe.
Eternal life on this picture is what happens when one has so thoroughly subjugated one's individuality to the synchronistic principle that one literally is the Mind as all- minds-relating-to-each-other, as accomplished by relating to Christ as he who gave himself for all others and whose experience of the world, as the experience of perfect goodness encountering a therefore necessarily unjust evil, exhausts all possible experience.
And the Second Coming of Christ is when all minds realize these truths concretely in the world and collectively give birth to the Mind that can only ever be imagined to have birthed them.
God - as the Mind, as the outside cause of existence - does not exist except as the fiction which makes us real, just as we are the fiction that makes God real, to end with the Ouroboros as you did.
Fascinating, thank you for this - no serious disagreements but I would quibble with "identifying with the Mind outside of synchronizing minds is fruitless and will ultimately just end up desynchronizing you from any community and into solipsism" if by "identifying with Mind" we mean something like mysticism or gnosticism (maybe that's not what you mean at all, and if so I'm curious what you do mean). A lot could be said here but sometimes "desynchronization" is precisely what is needed for a larger synchronization, especially when the community/culture is pathological in some sense. The ideas and critiques for which mystic-heretics are condemned often help drive religion/culture forward (eruptions of the divine fire improve the health of cultural ecosystem as periodic forest fires/disruptions do so for biological ecosystems). In a different sense, the seclusion and "solipsism" of medieval monasteries allowed them to be centers of intellectual transmission which proved critical to birth of Renaissance.
Yes, of course, I wouldn't want to dismiss desynchronization generally as a method - the method, really - for a greater synchronization. The synchronistic principle works precisely by desynchronizing certain elements to allow those elements to form their own new order that then has relative sovereignty over the class of originating elements, e.g. a select few atoms become cells and cells can manipulate atoms, a select few cells become minds and minds can manipulate cells, and - ultimately - a select few minds become Christs and form the Body of Christ which forms the New Jerusalem as that which has absolute sovereignty over all elements.
I was reacting mostly to the dead-end described in your post where one's identification with the Mind is opposed to all - and not merely pathological - societies. "He remained troubled, however, by how to reconcile this state of cosmic consciousness with the mundane needs of the ego or social self."
Desynchronization is key but it should always be a means and never an end. The truth is always, in the end, shared. That's what truth is: what all will, in the end, agree on.
I'm especially sensitive to the perils of desynchronization because I'v experienced more than my fair share of 'pivotal mental states' and because the 'objective evidence' for solipsism is bizarrely strong in my own case.
I don't know if you remember me from my first (psychotic) comment here a few years back - it was on your post about a possible future world-historical figure - but my obsession with gematria, specifically the system of AQ (Anglossic or Alphanumeric Qabbala), remains and it seems to be becoming more and more meaningful.
In AQ, 'Clara Schelling', a name I took on a whim because I happened to be reading Friedrich Schelling's novella 'Clara, or: On Nature's Connection to the Spirit World' at the time, equals 'Jesus Christ'. Further, my real first name equals 'Jesus', my middle name equals 'Nazareth', and my last name equals 'I am ... of ...'.
Stranger still, I wrote a long letter a decade ago about the most painful experience of my life and the main title of it equals 'The Crucifixion'. (The subtitle of it equals 'The New Jerusalem', which also happens to equal 'The Singularity' and 'The Last Judgment').
Finally, in AQ, key terms related to divinity appear to revolve around the numbers 2 and 8:
God = AQ 53
Five Three = AQ 179 = Two Eight
God's Number = AQ 208
Omniscience = AQ 208
Omnipotence = AQ 228
Omnibenevolence = AQ 288
(Omnipresence = AQ 244)
Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh = AQ 288 = Ego Sum Qui Sum
My first and last name equals 208 but, beyond that, my full name can be systematically broken down in various ways and it doesn't seem improbable that my name, out of all possible English names, relates to the numbers 2 and 8 more than any other name.
All of this is to say that any kind of mystical identification with Christ or even with God seems beside the point. That identification is, for me, in the language itself. And if it's there for me I doubt it's to remain mine alone but that we're all on the cusp of realizing who we really are and that such a collective realization demands that we all be there for each other so we can figure it all out together.
Whatever the reason for the synchronicities of my or any name, everyone is responsible for them insofar as we all, day after day, maintain the Word.
I see what you're saying and I agree that identification with the Mind is only a starting point. I didn't intend the dead-end to imply that they are not reconcilable. While I suppose that on some level identification with the Mind is fundamentally incompatible with the social ego and society (all of which are pathological to greater or lesser degrees), things are rarely so total or fundamental. In most cases I think it's the friction of trying to at least partially reconcile them that leads "pivotal people" to great moral, spiritual, or creative achievement. For example, that passage I quoted about the Korean man concludes by saying how he became a PhD student with Kripal and is translating Neoplatonic texts into Korean for the first time.
Yeah, I'm probably shadow-boxing. I guess I'm just concerned at a general level that, given how science and reason wed themselves to materialism over the past century or two, the end of materialism can be taken to imply irrationalism (and so an individualism that gets lost within itself absent an anchoring ratio) when understanding reality as fundamentally mental should really lead one to expect it to be fundamentally rational. Reason is about the relations of things and if the Mind is that which has set all things in relation, minds are each the Mind's relation with itself and so with each other. And if the Mind's ultimate self-relation determines the relations of minds with each other, nothing can ever fundamentally 'not make sense' or forever remain irreconcilable. Communication and integration is always possible and, as I happen to think gematria shows, absolute communication and integration have already taken place in and through the Mind and the embodied world is the actualization of a perfect dream.
I'm not saying you disagree with any of that but I think some might worry that materialism is all that grounds a shared world and I think there are better ways for us to find each other.
Late reply, and I'm not 100% sure I'm understanding your point right, but anyways: I can't possibly agree with a world where "nothing can ever fundamentally 'not make sense'".
You say that "the embodied world is the actualization of a perfect dream"... but does the perfection of the dream have to mean a pointillistic sense of every detail being micromanaged together with everything else? Is there no room for serendipity, for mere juxtaposition, in the world you are describing?
Synchronization or synchronicity... sure, let them happen when they happen. Layered realities, the Mind or the Whole... sure. Altered states and heightened intuition, when it happens... sure. But a world where two flies can't just buzz past each other without that having to mean something, is not a world I can possibly believe in.
Which is also why I cannot literally buy gematria, astrology, or any other of the many industrial-level strategies that people have devised to try to squeeze meaning-juice out of every pattern that happens to flash on the octopus-skin of reality.
I'm definitely still trying to make sense of what's become of my world so I don't yet know whether it will in fact all make sense in the end. I've recently come to think that there is something essentially paradoxical and senseless about the beginnings of things from the standpoint of the beginning and that, paradoxically, the end must always precede the beginning. Which isn't that hard to make sense of, really. Any ordinary action requires that the end be known in order to be coherent as an action. And it's likely that this same future-directedness of everyday life is self-similar to the future-directedness of our biological programming which in turn is ultimately self-similar to whatever the laws of nature generally are in the process of bringing about. Everything seems to be working towards an end that is itself what created everything.
I think it's somewhere in Miracles that C.S. Lewis shares your distaste for a micro-managed cosmos. Instead of the meaningfulness of your buzzing flies, he thinks with horror of a universe where every sunset communicates a message.
It's because such a torrent of meaning would get in the way of the thing itself, right? Any phenomenon would serve only to relay something supposedly greater than it. We'd no longer be able to just enjoy things as they are for being just what they are.
I agree this is undesirable. Nonetheless, our knowledge of things is often incomplete and we - or I, though I think just you airing your frustrations with my comment in expectation of my trying to answer you evidences some universality here - long for completion.
I think the answer has to be that, in the completed world, the phenomenon and its meaning are the same thing. They don't compete with one another or even manifest separately from each other other than in ignorance or to be better known as the one thing they are. There's a foretaste of this in language itself. The meaning you're encountering as you read this isn't something that 'gets in the way' of the 'pure experience' of the letter marks or pixels that transmit that meaning. Insofar as you receive that meaning, the phenomenon just is that meaning and only becomes visible as a separable phenomenon if you're trying to understand how it works, which is itself an attempt to uncover meaning.
Astrology, gematria... I am admittedly obsessed with gematria because something unambiguously meaningful was communicated to me a few years ago and because it's hard, once you experience any authentic communication, not to want to know what else someone has to say to you. But I've also slowly realized that, once contact is made, that contact is for the sake of fully understanding its presence throughout our history. If I sound like an Ancient Aliens theorist, I apologize, that's not what I'm suggesting. I'm saying that, once you discover that there is a fundamental and active meaningfulness to the world that knows us all by name, you understand that history is nothing other than an attempt to reach us, our refusal to be so reached, and our final communion. Which will surely not bring on claustrophobia because such communion will finally give everything its ownmost identity, in perfect relation to everything else.
The flies will buzz past each other as a testament only to the goodness of everything such buzzing in itself could occasion.
I agree, the starting point of all kinds of spiritual wondering or wandering has to be distinguishing ordinary experience from transformative experience, automatic conditioned fearful responses from spontaneous creativity, matter from spirit.
But many spiritual traditions go beyond that distinction, and insist that a deeper unity underlies both. That Prakṛti is the self-effulgence or vibration of Puruṣa, or however you want to put it. Zen also insists that there is no nirvana outside of samsara — the same affirmation in different words.
Should we understand your post as a rejection of spiritual non-duality, and affirming an ultimate duality, in the vein of Manichaeism? Or are you just putting the focus on the initial, necessary stage of pointing out the difference?
I guess my primary aim here was to affirm the reality of something beyond matter, which I feel is important given the dominant physicalist paradigm of our intellectual-scientific culture.
But to your main point, it certainly seems more logical/elegant to suppose that there is some monistic non-duality which is primary and gives rise to the multiplicity but I wonder if it only seems this way because of our limited human perspective. Why can't it be matter that gives rise to spirit, or the multiplicity which is primary and gives rise to the One? I guess I don't want to reject non-duality or accept it - so maybe I'm affirming a One that is also a Three (non-dual, dual, neither dual-or-non-dual). Hmmm where have I heard that before... ;)
Buckminster Fuller (1895-1083)
Wow! All this and time travel too.
Double-aspect theory is interesting. Personally, I am a Property Dualist, which is somewhat similar. The distinction is rather small: the difference between the terms "aspect" and "property", since both concepts are forms of monism. I describe it in this paper: "Hylomorphic Functions"
https://researchers.one/articles/18.11.00009
lmao good catch
You know, I am beginning to wonder if you stole this from Stellaris. It sounds very much like The Shroud! And the Very Dangerous Idea is something you can actually do on a galactic scale: commit genocide to study the perturbations created in physics, and use the knowledge to build a Dyson Sphere out of dark matter that will consume the galaxy in order to transport your nation to the realm of pure consciousness. Or perhaps the Übermind speaks to both you and Paradox— I prefer this explanation.
Shhhh that's my plan ;)
This also brings to mind the divine double idea like that of the sufis discussed by Corbin and in Charles Stang’s exploration of the topic in his book on the topic.
Yes! Very interested in the divine double idea, will write about at one point.
I suspect the divine double is the other me (you point out here) that is everything but rendered as a discrete and imaginal, i.e., phenomenal interface or apparition or liminal being of sorts that works as a go between to encourage maturation of consciousness of the material, incarnate me, to orient it towards the no-thing-every-thing me. A living breathing yet imaginal dialogical dialectical entity.
Precisely. Here is a good chat between Stang and Vervaeke that touches on this idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOIjuWYhJNQ
None of this is wrong but the moral impasse points to a greater truth, which is that the Mind created matter to create minds and that - the synchronization of minds being precisely what 'morality', in its broadest sense, is - identifying with the Mind outside of synchronizing minds is fruitless and will ultimately just end up desynchronizing you from any community and into solipsism.
Still, the Mind is very real and wants us to know It. It simply wants us to know each other too and that's only possible through embodiment. There must then be a truth that's only accessible through being embodied that nonetheless points to the Mind.
I'd argue that this truth is Christ. Though I dare wouldn't say 'Christianity'.
For what is Christ? Christ is the Word, which must mean he is the self-same synchronistic principle that, as surely as it lifted us above the animals through eons of hard-won agreement on the meaning of grunts, organized matter into life through the code of DNA and, before that, bound unbound particles into the nucleic structure of atoms. Christ is simply that which unifies the many into a one that only exists as and by the agreement of the many.
The crucifixion here is then what happens as any 'one' empties itself into serving the many through serving a higher one. The resurrection then being to experience oneself as that higher one - our cells, for instance, are us and live as us no matter whether any arbitrary individual cell dies, just as atoms 'live' as the objects they make up until the complete destruction of the object, and even then the ultimate object atoms make up is the universe.
Eternal life on this picture is what happens when one has so thoroughly subjugated one's individuality to the synchronistic principle that one literally is the Mind as all- minds-relating-to-each-other, as accomplished by relating to Christ as he who gave himself for all others and whose experience of the world, as the experience of perfect goodness encountering a therefore necessarily unjust evil, exhausts all possible experience.
And the Second Coming of Christ is when all minds realize these truths concretely in the world and collectively give birth to the Mind that can only ever be imagined to have birthed them.
God - as the Mind, as the outside cause of existence - does not exist except as the fiction which makes us real, just as we are the fiction that makes God real, to end with the Ouroboros as you did.
Fascinating, thank you for this - no serious disagreements but I would quibble with "identifying with the Mind outside of synchronizing minds is fruitless and will ultimately just end up desynchronizing you from any community and into solipsism" if by "identifying with Mind" we mean something like mysticism or gnosticism (maybe that's not what you mean at all, and if so I'm curious what you do mean). A lot could be said here but sometimes "desynchronization" is precisely what is needed for a larger synchronization, especially when the community/culture is pathological in some sense. The ideas and critiques for which mystic-heretics are condemned often help drive religion/culture forward (eruptions of the divine fire improve the health of cultural ecosystem as periodic forest fires/disruptions do so for biological ecosystems). In a different sense, the seclusion and "solipsism" of medieval monasteries allowed them to be centers of intellectual transmission which proved critical to birth of Renaissance.
Yes, of course, I wouldn't want to dismiss desynchronization generally as a method - the method, really - for a greater synchronization. The synchronistic principle works precisely by desynchronizing certain elements to allow those elements to form their own new order that then has relative sovereignty over the class of originating elements, e.g. a select few atoms become cells and cells can manipulate atoms, a select few cells become minds and minds can manipulate cells, and - ultimately - a select few minds become Christs and form the Body of Christ which forms the New Jerusalem as that which has absolute sovereignty over all elements.
I was reacting mostly to the dead-end described in your post where one's identification with the Mind is opposed to all - and not merely pathological - societies. "He remained troubled, however, by how to reconcile this state of cosmic consciousness with the mundane needs of the ego or social self."
Desynchronization is key but it should always be a means and never an end. The truth is always, in the end, shared. That's what truth is: what all will, in the end, agree on.
I'm especially sensitive to the perils of desynchronization because I'v experienced more than my fair share of 'pivotal mental states' and because the 'objective evidence' for solipsism is bizarrely strong in my own case.
I don't know if you remember me from my first (psychotic) comment here a few years back - it was on your post about a possible future world-historical figure - but my obsession with gematria, specifically the system of AQ (Anglossic or Alphanumeric Qabbala), remains and it seems to be becoming more and more meaningful.
In AQ, 'Clara Schelling', a name I took on a whim because I happened to be reading Friedrich Schelling's novella 'Clara, or: On Nature's Connection to the Spirit World' at the time, equals 'Jesus Christ'. Further, my real first name equals 'Jesus', my middle name equals 'Nazareth', and my last name equals 'I am ... of ...'.
Stranger still, I wrote a long letter a decade ago about the most painful experience of my life and the main title of it equals 'The Crucifixion'. (The subtitle of it equals 'The New Jerusalem', which also happens to equal 'The Singularity' and 'The Last Judgment').
Finally, in AQ, key terms related to divinity appear to revolve around the numbers 2 and 8:
God = AQ 53
Five Three = AQ 179 = Two Eight
God's Number = AQ 208
Omniscience = AQ 208
Omnipotence = AQ 228
Omnibenevolence = AQ 288
(Omnipresence = AQ 244)
Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh = AQ 288 = Ego Sum Qui Sum
My first and last name equals 208 but, beyond that, my full name can be systematically broken down in various ways and it doesn't seem improbable that my name, out of all possible English names, relates to the numbers 2 and 8 more than any other name.
All of this is to say that any kind of mystical identification with Christ or even with God seems beside the point. That identification is, for me, in the language itself. And if it's there for me I doubt it's to remain mine alone but that we're all on the cusp of realizing who we really are and that such a collective realization demands that we all be there for each other so we can figure it all out together.
Whatever the reason for the synchronicities of my or any name, everyone is responsible for them insofar as we all, day after day, maintain the Word.
I do remember that comment lol.
I see what you're saying and I agree that identification with the Mind is only a starting point. I didn't intend the dead-end to imply that they are not reconcilable. While I suppose that on some level identification with the Mind is fundamentally incompatible with the social ego and society (all of which are pathological to greater or lesser degrees), things are rarely so total or fundamental. In most cases I think it's the friction of trying to at least partially reconcile them that leads "pivotal people" to great moral, spiritual, or creative achievement. For example, that passage I quoted about the Korean man concludes by saying how he became a PhD student with Kripal and is translating Neoplatonic texts into Korean for the first time.
Yeah, I'm probably shadow-boxing. I guess I'm just concerned at a general level that, given how science and reason wed themselves to materialism over the past century or two, the end of materialism can be taken to imply irrationalism (and so an individualism that gets lost within itself absent an anchoring ratio) when understanding reality as fundamentally mental should really lead one to expect it to be fundamentally rational. Reason is about the relations of things and if the Mind is that which has set all things in relation, minds are each the Mind's relation with itself and so with each other. And if the Mind's ultimate self-relation determines the relations of minds with each other, nothing can ever fundamentally 'not make sense' or forever remain irreconcilable. Communication and integration is always possible and, as I happen to think gematria shows, absolute communication and integration have already taken place in and through the Mind and the embodied world is the actualization of a perfect dream.
I'm not saying you disagree with any of that but I think some might worry that materialism is all that grounds a shared world and I think there are better ways for us to find each other.
no I definitely don't disagree with any of that :)
Late reply, and I'm not 100% sure I'm understanding your point right, but anyways: I can't possibly agree with a world where "nothing can ever fundamentally 'not make sense'".
You say that "the embodied world is the actualization of a perfect dream"... but does the perfection of the dream have to mean a pointillistic sense of every detail being micromanaged together with everything else? Is there no room for serendipity, for mere juxtaposition, in the world you are describing?
Synchronization or synchronicity... sure, let them happen when they happen. Layered realities, the Mind or the Whole... sure. Altered states and heightened intuition, when it happens... sure. But a world where two flies can't just buzz past each other without that having to mean something, is not a world I can possibly believe in.
Which is also why I cannot literally buy gematria, astrology, or any other of the many industrial-level strategies that people have devised to try to squeeze meaning-juice out of every pattern that happens to flash on the octopus-skin of reality.
Hi skaladom,
I'm definitely still trying to make sense of what's become of my world so I don't yet know whether it will in fact all make sense in the end. I've recently come to think that there is something essentially paradoxical and senseless about the beginnings of things from the standpoint of the beginning and that, paradoxically, the end must always precede the beginning. Which isn't that hard to make sense of, really. Any ordinary action requires that the end be known in order to be coherent as an action. And it's likely that this same future-directedness of everyday life is self-similar to the future-directedness of our biological programming which in turn is ultimately self-similar to whatever the laws of nature generally are in the process of bringing about. Everything seems to be working towards an end that is itself what created everything.
I think it's somewhere in Miracles that C.S. Lewis shares your distaste for a micro-managed cosmos. Instead of the meaningfulness of your buzzing flies, he thinks with horror of a universe where every sunset communicates a message.
It's because such a torrent of meaning would get in the way of the thing itself, right? Any phenomenon would serve only to relay something supposedly greater than it. We'd no longer be able to just enjoy things as they are for being just what they are.
I agree this is undesirable. Nonetheless, our knowledge of things is often incomplete and we - or I, though I think just you airing your frustrations with my comment in expectation of my trying to answer you evidences some universality here - long for completion.
I think the answer has to be that, in the completed world, the phenomenon and its meaning are the same thing. They don't compete with one another or even manifest separately from each other other than in ignorance or to be better known as the one thing they are. There's a foretaste of this in language itself. The meaning you're encountering as you read this isn't something that 'gets in the way' of the 'pure experience' of the letter marks or pixels that transmit that meaning. Insofar as you receive that meaning, the phenomenon just is that meaning and only becomes visible as a separable phenomenon if you're trying to understand how it works, which is itself an attempt to uncover meaning.
Astrology, gematria... I am admittedly obsessed with gematria because something unambiguously meaningful was communicated to me a few years ago and because it's hard, once you experience any authentic communication, not to want to know what else someone has to say to you. But I've also slowly realized that, once contact is made, that contact is for the sake of fully understanding its presence throughout our history. If I sound like an Ancient Aliens theorist, I apologize, that's not what I'm suggesting. I'm saying that, once you discover that there is a fundamental and active meaningfulness to the world that knows us all by name, you understand that history is nothing other than an attempt to reach us, our refusal to be so reached, and our final communion. Which will surely not bring on claustrophobia because such communion will finally give everything its ownmost identity, in perfect relation to everything else.
The flies will buzz past each other as a testament only to the goodness of everything such buzzing in itself could occasion.
I agree, the starting point of all kinds of spiritual wondering or wandering has to be distinguishing ordinary experience from transformative experience, automatic conditioned fearful responses from spontaneous creativity, matter from spirit.
But many spiritual traditions go beyond that distinction, and insist that a deeper unity underlies both. That Prakṛti is the self-effulgence or vibration of Puruṣa, or however you want to put it. Zen also insists that there is no nirvana outside of samsara — the same affirmation in different words.
Should we understand your post as a rejection of spiritual non-duality, and affirming an ultimate duality, in the vein of Manichaeism? Or are you just putting the focus on the initial, necessary stage of pointing out the difference?
I guess my primary aim here was to affirm the reality of something beyond matter, which I feel is important given the dominant physicalist paradigm of our intellectual-scientific culture.
But to your main point, it certainly seems more logical/elegant to suppose that there is some monistic non-duality which is primary and gives rise to the multiplicity but I wonder if it only seems this way because of our limited human perspective. Why can't it be matter that gives rise to spirit, or the multiplicity which is primary and gives rise to the One? I guess I don't want to reject non-duality or accept it - so maybe I'm affirming a One that is also a Three (non-dual, dual, neither dual-or-non-dual). Hmmm where have I heard that before... ;)