Band 5 Revisited (1)

It is over a year since I last contributed to this blog.

However an advantage of such a delay is that it enables a perspective from which to place what has already happened in context, while equally enabling a fuller appreciation of the direction in which one's personal development is heading.

In previous entries I refer to Band 5 as the descent, whereby one attempts to achieve a better balance as between both the transcendent and immanent directions of development.

However in a way this is too simplistic.

Previously, I have used the analogy of a steep mountain climb to refer to the transcendent aspect of the spiritual journey.

So with Band 3, emphasis is indeed devoted to the ascent with emphasis mainly on the transcendent aspect.

However even here there is necessarily a counterbalancing descent with respect to gradual uncovering of the primitive instinctive aspects of personality.

So we could perhaps use the corresponding analogy of a deep underwater submersion (into the subconscious regions) to refer to this immanent descent.

However when the emphasis is primarily on transcendence - in the continual effort to erode undue attachment to conscious phenomena - this tends to repress instinctive response, thereby setting limits to the degree to which the corresponding immanent descent can be successfully negotiated.

So the peak of transcendent development at Band 3 (Level 3), where one finally reaches the top of the spiritual mountain, is likely to coincide with residual unacknowledged desires remaining with respect to the “lower” self, due to unwitting repression of primitive instinctive behaviour.  

While then consolidating the transcendent aspect of development at Band 4, so that one can better accommodate it with the immanent aspect, it is only with Band 5 that the task can be fully accomplished.

Up to this point - certainly in my experience - there had been a tendency to identify transcendence unduly with the superior (rational) aspect, with corresponding immanence remaining somewhat repressed as the inferior (sense) aspect of personality.

However, through growing recognition of the need for a substantial change in direction, whereby bodily desires and fantasies were allowed to increasingly speak directly for themselves, the transcendent descent (from the mountain peak) was thereby now likewise facilitated.

So apart from the substantial release of previously unacknowledged repressed desire through a deeper immersion in the subconscious depths, Band 5 (Level 1) was equally associated with the gradual grounding of the refined supraconscious intuition that had already unfolded through previous development, in the ordinary mundane understanding associated with the middle band (of linear reason).

And I have previously expressed at length the precise manner by which this unfolded.

So at Band 3, I had become aware that the more advanced levels of spiritual contemplative awareness were directly connected with “higher” dimensions in a holistic mathematical fashion. So in my previous writings, I had dealt at length with the nature of 2-dimensional, 4-dimensional and 8-dimensional understanding (that are especially important in terms of integral appreciation).

So for example 4-dimensional understanding - inversely related to the 4 roots of 1 - entails the dynamic two-way interaction of positive and negative polarities in both a real and imaginary fashion.

In this context, positive and negative relate to external and internal (and internal and external) aspects and real and imaginary relate to the relationship as between parts and whole (and whole and parts).

So all holons (whole/parts) and onhols (part/wholes) - as the fundamental dynamic constituents of phenomena - interact with respect to real (analytic) and imaginary (holistic) aspects in both an external (physical) and internal (psychological) manner.

And this represents the nature of 4-dimensions in holistic mathematical terms.

And just as with a compass we can obtain ever more refined notions of direction using the basic co-ordinates of E and W and N and S respectively, likewise all “higher” dimensions can be looked on as providing ever more precise interpretation with respect to differing configurations of external and internal and wholes and parts respectively.

However all the “higher” dimensional knowledge that unfolded at Band 3, initially seemed somewhat divorced from the understanding of mundane reality.

Then in a remarkable way at Band 5 (Level 1), I was to discover that all these “higher” dimensions are in truth implicitly involved in our everyday appreciation of ordinal notions. 

So for example with respect to 4 members of a group, the recognition of these members as 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th with respect to each other, implicitly requires the “higher” holistic appreciation of 4-dimensions that I have just been illustrating.

And such understanding provides a ready means of acknowledging the relative independent identity of each member  while simultaneously enabling one to appreciate the relative interdependence of all members. And the beauty of such appreciation is that this can now be achieved in a refined manner free of rigid attachment.

Put another way, the conscious understanding of simple ordinal relationships, implicitly requires the unconscious appreciation of these same relationships.

And to be free of inordinate attachments with respect to phenomena, both the conscious and unconscious aspects of relationships must be integrated with each other in a balanced manner.  

The importance for mathematics could not be greater as it means that the ordinal system of number, whereby we can consciously rank different objects in relation to each other, strictly has no meaning in the absence of the corresponding unconscious (i.e. holistic) appreciation of this same system.

So mathematics as formally understood at present represents but a reduced conscious interpretation, in a rigid absolute fashion, of relationships that are inherently dynamic containing both conscious (analytic) and unconscious (holistic) aspects.

Therefore I only properly realised during this transcendent descent how the holistic aspect of the ordinal number system (in the interactive appreciation of “higher” dimensions) becomes properly incorporated with accepted analytic understanding.   

And such mathematical appreciation then provides the basis for the subsequent grounding of all “higher” transcendent knowledge in the customary linear understanding of the middle band.