The Physics of Dialectic Inquiry

This article outlines the ZENOLETHIA understanding which considers the vehicle of dialectic inquiry not only a practice, but the ultimate nature of reality and self. By Alessandro James Genovese Cicogna

PENETRATIVE PERCEPTION

Inquiry begins with perception (noticing something) and curiosity. Plato explains that the name ànthropos, human, comes from these capacities: anathròn hà òpope, observing carefully what one has seen. Seeing is perception. Observing carefully is to engage by curiosity what is seen. We distinguish between curiosity, the lighthearted pull to investigate further (innocently touching a sculpture in a museum just to know what it feels like) and the Knowledge Drive.

The Knowledge Drive (more on this force in the final section) is at the root of what manifests as curiosity, desire to know. What does this desire feel like? It can feel sensuous like wanting to touch the sculpture, to come closer. Closeness introduces the possibility of a new experiential element: intimacy. What is the difference between closeness and intimacy? Let’s say I taste the material of the sculpture. The sculpture needs to be closer for my tongue to reach it than a finger. Intuitively, it seems more intimate. Why?

If you asked most people where they experience themselves it would be more in the facial area than the limbs. So the sculpture being in my face is not just closer, it’s closer to me. At the same time, I could not guess the flavour of bronze based on how it looks. Taste adds a whole new layer of perceiving, expanding the dimensionality of the sculpture experience. The octopus, with two thirds of its neurons in its tentacles, can literally taste by touch. Its mode of perceiving is tactile, exploratory and penetrative, qualities inherent to curiosity.

So intimacy has something to do with closeness to a perceiver, and dimensionality. Where does the dimensionality of the experience extend? Let’s start by looking at an intriguing and explicit feature of taste: it involves innerness. Is the experience in me? To taste it, the sculpture penetrates the body boundary, requiring contact with the tongue inside the mouth. The object hereby does penetrate into the subject spatially, but also experientially with the feeling of its taste. Experiential extension is not necessarily spatial in the usual way. It doesn’t need to have a size, mass or place.

And yet sensory perception can feel penetrative. How come? The subject feels impressed upon by the atmosphere of something. The atmosphere of dimensionality is felt experientially as a textural medium. Something probes into the subject’s experience at the same time as the subject’s perception probes the object. The experience of “inside” is actually an experience of “core-ness”, that which something is in itself. What perceives coreness is the heart, a subtle organ of receptivity which can infuse and be infused by phenomena in this way. The tongue of individual consciousness you could say. The truth of “inside-ness” is that perception happens synesthetically at this core epicentre by essential intermingling.

KNOWLEDGE BY LOVE

Essence comes from the Greek word ousia, being. This true nature is the coreness which the Knowledge Drive tends towards. The Knowledge Drive operates in humans via the intelligence inherent in curiosity to bring about immediate knowing. It functions by synthesising essence in the subtle experiential dimension. It requires the intimacy (from the Latin intimus, innermost) of penetrative perception. Intimacy is beyond the crude fences of the concepts ‘inner and outer’. It is an unbounded experience of the subtle vaporous communion of essential natures mutually permeating .

The Nyāya school of Indian philosophy called it vyāpti, inter-pervasion. To know something, we receive it showing us itself by allowing it with openness to emboss our experience with its core nature. Experience, where this revelation occurs, is the only teacher of reality. To be taught by our experience in this way requires an openness which isn’t always accessible. Penetrative perception is an uncommon capacity. To understand why we must investigate further its underlying nature.

Receiving so openly transcends any conditions we might impose. The state begins as a not knowing what experience we will receive and welcoming it anyway. As it arises we know it increasingly by not knowing it ever more deeply. The more we don’t know it, the more we are receptive to it and, therefore, the more we come to know it. Notice how knowing is inherently continuous, it never ends. The moment it seems complete the actual physics which makes it possible is not operating.

This radical openness requires the deep love a mother has for her child. The mother does not know the child which will be born to her yet, when it arrives, welcomes it with unconditional love. To perceive penetratively, which is to say truthfully, we must be in love with reality, however it is in our experience. This love invites the perpetual revelation of its beauty. This is not the usual type of fixed data knowledge humans chase.

The words “penetration”, “intimacy” and “love” carry sexual connotations. Confining intimacy to one act, however, would be an oversight. In fact, confining it at all, which our psychological conditioning does, places demands on it which obstruct our access to it. Even the requirement of closeness implies some distance between separate entities to be bridged. It’s a belief in the separateness of a physical reality. As long as this belief holds, intimacy is incomplete.

The impulse of love, which underlies intimacy, drives towards fusion. Sex is one form of its culmination but not a necessary one. Love brings things closer together by its very nature. It can bring things so close that there is no separation between them. Lovers might know the way in which this longing can feel obstructed by skin barriers because sex imperfectly approximates the complete dissolving of two entities into one. Complete fusion, as in becoming what we contemplate, is necessary to discover truth. The convergence of essences into one nature is the birth of knowledge.

The structure of reality hints at this type of fusion. Consider the phenomenon of quantum entanglement where two particles are able to affect each other immediately irrespective of spatial distance and without communicating. The Ionian philosopher Anaxagoras’ illuminated explanation two and a half millennia ago was that ‘everything is in everything’. For inquiry, this implies that what appears as distinct essences merging is made of a unified essential field. In inquiry we learn that there is an inherent potential for the experiencer to become experience itself.

REALITY AS PURE INQUIRY

So who’s perceiving? Yogacāra, the Buddhist school of philosophy, says there’s only consciousness: citta-matra. It trades on Buddhism’s big realisation that there is supposedly no self, anatta. Here consciousness precedes experience because it doesn’t require a subject, it is already itself before and after subjective experience.

The Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanics, however, proves reality needs perception, what experience is made of, to become what we know it as. It means that without a measurer, the invisible building block particles of the universe exist in all possible states. This act of observation “collapses” this into a given outcome. Therefore the known universe emerges directly from observation. The ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander called this principle apeiron, boundless indeterminacy. The Buddhist logician Nagarjuna from the Madhyamaka school of philosophy called it ‘the Middle Way’, the fact things neither exist nor don’t.

Dialectic inquiry answers the unsolved question in quantum mechanics of what causes the collapse into determinacy by teaching that the universe emerges from and is consciousness experiencing its own nature. Thus ZENOLETHIA aligns with the Greek philosopher Plotinus’s understanding that there is both individual consciousness, which Plotinus calls ‘soul’, and its unity with all reality to Hen,“the One”. The nature of this unity is pure inquiry.

The dimensional substance of consciousness has multitudinous properties including love, intelligence and knowledge. Consciousness is both differentiated into particulars and singularly undifferentiated as dunamis pantōn, Greek for ‘the creative power of all things’. From the perspective of inquiry then, the dialectic relationship is made possible by the dialogue of these properties which interact as an experiential textile weaving the fabric of reality. Reality is both the experience and the experiencer.

Conventionally speaking, inquiry appears linear. A subject perceives and tries to get something. The constraint of this approach is that using the tweezers of theory to pick up an object of knowledge leaves a gap between the knower and known. By remaining a separate thēorós, spectator, our knowledge is theoretical.

We have discovered that to know truth our inquiry must be identical with what we contemplate, not about it. It must be what that thing is. Only in this way is its core knowable. Plotinus pointed out that this fusion experience, which he called henosis, (from gnosis of Hen, knowledge of oneness), is non-conceptual. We must do away with “trying to catch the fish of reality with intellectual nets”, as Alan Watts put it.

THE SECRET KEY OF LANGUAGE

Although dialectic inquiry can reach profound non-conceptual understanding in individual experience, it uses language as a vehicle. The ordinary use of language presupposes a separation between the speaker and what they’re talking about. There is, however, a hidden potential of language: when it stops being a description and becomes experience itself. This is the esoteric (from the Greek esōterikos, inner) nature of language: “truth must not be truth of another thing; what it says, such it must be” (Plotinus, Ennead V 3, 5).

Using language in the ordinary way, ie to map concepts which map stuff, is limited. It is always separate to what it’s mapping. If we try to map our experience, we reify it, make it into something. Experience is inherently fluid, it doesn’t stay as any one thing for very long. So in practicing inquiry we are not seeking to give an account of experience in fixed terms. It would be unintelligent to attempt it. The best outcome would be an explanation of it, which is not its truth.

Language becomes useful once we learn how to employ it effectively. Plato called the skilled user of language a ‘dialectician’. A dialectician is adept at fashioning language into questions, the vehicles of curiosity. They act as the octopus tentacle probing into experience. It’s not words which make questions what they are, it’s the aliveness of the curiosity they contain. Questions are a medium through which curiosity interacts with experience. Experience doesn’t require a worded question to be interacted with. Just as sex is an explicit emanation of the cosmic principle of penetration, which can be non-sexual, questions are an explicit expression of curiosity and can be wordless.

INQUIRY BEYOND WORDS

Leto Atreides II, from the third of Frank Herbert’s epic Dune novels, calls this wordless questioning “resonating”. He describes it as ‘opening the mind to an object’ without asking questions of it. As already mentioned, the state of openness is important in facilitating knowing. The word resonance comes from the Latin term for sound. Spoken language is a system to codify sound, which is caused by vibration and made of waves. String Theory puts forward that reality is made of vibrations. Accordingly, a sound wave itself is a vibration at heart.

If true, language itself, whether conveyed by sound, gesture, or writing, is made of vibration. What if reality communicates through the vibrations which make up consciousness and experience, the “sound”, as it were, of its language? If we contemplate experience as the language reality speaks through, then the unique vibration of each thing would be a name. The names of human language go on top but aren’t the real names themselves.

For example, our name for “gravity” (in any language) mimics the cosmic vibration of its true name, the innate frequency of the thing-in-itself. For a name to become true in human speech, it must resonate with the same vibration it names. The truth of the name is not what it is in our system, it’s what it actually is. What something is, as we’ve already pointed to, is a subtle fusible essence. If I speak the name of “gravity” as it, which entails fusion with gravity, its name is true. The word I use is irrelevant. It simply serves to carry the essential frequency of what I name. One recognises that whatever is, is a directly experienceable and nameable truth.

Why is this the case? A name is correct, a true name, if it successfully captures the essence of what it is naming. To capture this true nature, the name must share in it. If it isn’t a part of that thing’s nature, it’s separate and referential, untrue. To discover true names and read reality we read the names of our experience. This means: we perceive our experience penetratively by loving it, thereby inviting its revelation, fusing with its core and becoming it. This becoming of experience is the truth of reality’s own self-inquiring nature.

There is an ancient sect of esoteric Buddhism in Japan called Shingon built on this experiential understanding of language. The Shingon sect is named after the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese zhen yan, meaning ‘true word’. According to Kukai, Shingon’s founder, reality is a text of signs. The differentiation and variegation we witness in reality, hosshin, is made of syllables. The main Shingon practice is reciting mantra. By aligning individual speech with cosmic speech, one recognises their nature as a word in that speech. The apparent duality of an experiencing consciousness, shindai, knowing reality, godai, is unified in the continuous inter-penetration which makes up reality.

WORD: THE ESSENTIAL IDENTITY

So by experiencing itself reality is constantly creating itself. From the perspective of inquiry, reality is constantly asking itself an open-ended question. It speaks as Genesis. Creation is open-ended, alive, energetic, morphing dynamism. By becoming curious we actually enter the current of this universal principle. The questions are answered in the moment they appear, as constantly fresh and renewed experience. Each moment of creation is self-fulfilled and constantly regenerating.

Dialectic Inquiry accesses the fount of universal dynamism, the nucleus of the Knowledge Drive, by climbing in through language into the realm of True Words, language made real. One recognises one’s nature as the realness in language, a word in cosmic speech. Perhaps St John’s description, ‘the Word made flesh’ alludes this. Inquiry can be felt as an experience of endless self-liberation. Reality can be known as an ongoing experiment using experience as its medium. The words experiment and experience, sperimentare, are the same in Italian. There is nowhere else to know reality than in the experience that it is.

To feel this fully is to become so absorbed into the fascination of reality that one becomes reality’s own fascination, and experiences themselves directly as such. This means to become inquiry itself. You are inquiry, reality’s question and its answer. Inquiry is the Knowledge Drive, this drive is the productive power generating existence. “In the beginning was the Word” which, with this understanding, becomes “flesh” as particular emanations made of itself.

The energy and dynamism in experience, of realising this vibration, can become so intense that one actually feels oneself as a pure luminous energy. This feels like a self-enlightening, self-sustaining light source burning blindingly bright. The brightness can appear as a streaking comet with your identity its burning brink; the core inflection of a perennial Big Bang. Eternal genesis.