GESTURES OF WILL IN MANIFESTATION

In a previous article I used the systematic lattice to explore the wholeness of ancient civilisations relative to their concerns such as astronomy and musicology, a fairly immiscible pair of terms. Substances are said to be immiscible if in some proportion, they do not form a chemical solution and J.G. Bennett proposes that in the Dyad, or two-term systematic, the two terms are incommensurate; that is they cannot divide into each other but instead create a static field as is found with force fields that are dyadic between poles but within which complex behaviours can be acted out.

PLEASE READ: Anthony Blake's essay Language of Will at the DUVersity.org website, if you have not already. His lattice progresses horizontal numbers of terms of the same systemic attribute from the Monad of ONE amd increasing in number according to what is then a Triangular Number in its sum, as below.

SO: The Systematics Lattice is a triangular array in which each row grows by one term from a single term, this representing an authentic whole. To comprehend the lattice or to engage in constructing one, it is important to grasp the component processes which are, in the language of will, gestures or moves used in a “game” of understanding.

1. In the beginning there is nothing, that is no recognition of wholeness. This is our own transcendence, in that we are independent of any need to understand that wholeness. In our gallery of gestures this is an empty frame, perhaps filled with noise.
2. When a wholeness is identified then it has the property of the number one, the Monad, in which there are many things and relations that somehow belong to this greater whole. The whole can be identified as Unitive, in the sense that the whole holds together many relations and terms but there is only an implicit order, not yet understood. Its symbol is the circle forming a boundary for all that the monad contains.
3. To enter into understanding, there has to be a fundamental cut into two parts and these parts must represent a strong duality or dyad operating on the elements within the whole. For example in cosmic structures, the dark and light matter might be a good cut. This action of division, similar to cell division for the whole modadic cell, is a creative act because it will define everything that emerges in the higher order terms later in any progression. Its symbol is the circle with a line across its diameter.
4. The division of one into two is the gesture of divergence from a single term into two terms, repeated throughout the lattice. There is a left hand and a right hand path, each leading to a new term related to the preceeding term. Thus, the creative act creates two out of one and brings into existence a relationship (or connective) between two terms – and this is repeated in all of the new relationships made on the horizontal level between terms and this new world of relationship between terms will have this first relationship as its source just as every term in the lattice will have the initial monadic term as their source. This advent of relationships between terms represents consciousness which requires difference or, possibly, is created by difference as a cosmic energy. Its symbol is an upward facing equilateral triangle connecting each of three terms at each apex, the monad being above.
5. The transition, in level, from two terms to three terms introduces a third term that is a blending of the two dyadic terms above. The archetypal gesture of blending is what naturally occurs everywhere except on the boundary edges of the triangular lattice. The symbol of blending is a downward facing equilateral triangle with two terms above and one blended term below.
6. Where terms are on the outside edge, left or right of the lattice, they mutate into a new term relevant to the systemic attribute of the level they are entering. The left side by convention describes the development of the quantitative aspect of the whole and the right hand side the qualitative or intensive side of the whole.
7. Some blended terms appear in the centre of the lattice, when a layer is odd in number, in which case a line of concreteness or incarnation, within the whole, is being recognised. This appears as an achievement of the whole within its manifestation whilst it is actually an achievement within our understanding of the structuring of will within the whole.
8. Each layer, containing an additional term, comes under the framework of the systemic attribute for that number of terms. JG Bennett identified these within his systematics.
9. The layers have no two dimensional structure but their connectives (i.e. relationships between each pair of terms), have the property of being generated explicitly between the terms on that level, or of already existing as the relationships directly above non-adjacent terms, in the lattice. That is, those relationships between terms found in the two dimensional graphic for a given system are to be found in all of the relationships (horizontal lines) between the terms on that level and above. Those relationships above the current level will may need to be adjusted (mutated) within the two dimensional form.

Bennett's opus The Dramatic Universe introduced his Systematics plus a set of philosophical categories that interact because Systematics was his evolved technique for Understanding, itself a category of Will quite different to Knowing. Bennett uses the dyad FACT and VALUE as quite fundamental to the world of consciousness and a triad FUNCTION BEING and WILL that were different to Gurdjieff's AFFIRMING, DENYING and RECONCILING. These can be shown as:

Note how the relationships beg to become clearer between terms whilst staying within the frame of the wholeness itself. This is the holistic property of this technique which I hope to show in later papers connects us to Phenomenology in which the parts reveal the whole and the whole reveals the parts.

This Lattice can be extended as a basis for understanding wholeness without particular thought for Bennett's originational terms, as in:

Obviously there are steps here in transforming Function into Properties, Being into Systems and Will into Media. These are worthwhile meditations that can reveal much about the world. In the Tetrad, Chaos and Order provide a strong dyad that can be mediated by instrumentality and direction. There is much about traditional Systematics at www.systematics.org and a blank template for printing out is available here for download.