I.

          Theology and philosophy are branches of the esoteric, not simply historically, but actually, and, finally, transitionally. The esoteric stands between the gods and cause. Hesiod apparently tries to justify the gods by rationalization, that is, by asserting their aetiological force or process, not realizing that cause subverts the gods.

          Cause subverts the gods. But cause is the prophetic corollary. Prophecy itself is prophetic. That is, the prophetic begins ‘prior’ to prophecy and prophesies itself. All culture is prophetic, finally, since it insists on a terminal recognition of value, an undeniable final experience of value, of the teleology inherent in ‘nature’ or ‘matter’.

          I cite Hesiod and the self-prophetic nature because the esoteric begins in Greece. Perhaps the Greeks received the prophetic from its Semitic grounds, being fierce traders and dominating, in their day, the eastern Mediterranean Sea. But the elemental description that emerged between Thales and Aristotle bears all the marks of pre-prophetic prophecy.

          The five elements finally lift the cycle of experience out of the round of the tangible cosmos, the tandem of the timed phenomena of the heavens and seasonal recurrence. The esoteric emerges with the sophistication of number, the sign sequence of cause and the prophetic, capturing not only the infinite in an unknowable number, but also the potencies of the One as the whole circle in which all figures ultimately appear.

          The One was the unexpressed reality of the heavens honored for example on Salisbury Plains. Can we assume this precision without mensuration and architectural points? Needless to say, every good carpenter knows how to measure without number. But number shifts the world into its new frame. Like the five spoked wheel that defies the self-destructive resonances of speed, the five elements grasp that single extra which defies the quartering forces of the diurnal world, a fact certified by Aristotle’s simultaneous discovery of the fifth element and rejection of the elemental description, as not ‘true nature’.

          Perhaps Thales had no inkling of the anti-theistic nature of his proposition, but the charge against Socrates apparently had some basis. Like Hesiod, Aristotle manifests a dialectical paradox, but reverses its vector. Against the elemental description, Aristotle asserts ‘true physics’, the ‘true nature’ of inertia. Inertia is cause. And for one seeking the source of the spontaneous act, Cause, not the One, must be the true origin. Unfortunately, ‘cause’ is only descriptive. While inertia is cause, neither is substance, the physis of ‘physics’. This question of substance continues to hover over philosophy to this day, although the logicians convinced themselves that they had found the safe crypt bunker beyond substance.

          Only evolution makes substance and cause necessary. But the evolutionary origin of consciousness certifies that value, ‘for nature’, falls into these two categories. We could call these the two sides of the One, although the dialectical One is all sides for all phenomena. But this is to return philosophy and theology to the esoteric. The separation between cause and substance points to the integral separation necessary to produce self-awareness. Here, of course, is where sentience finally challenges evolution, insisting that ‘matter’ has an unexpressed potency that can only be revealed by an inexplicable act, the spontaneous act of the ‘self moving’ that Aristotle was seeking, above all.

          But substance cannot be equated with cause. That is, unitive substance cannot be equated with singular cause.

          The fascination, of course, is that the history of the five elements insists, finally, that cause and the elements coincide. Aristotle posited four causes. But his causes were external to substance. The substances only become causes by experience. That is, it is in the modes of experience as the fivefold division of substance that causation can arise, first of all, as the volitional mobilization of the given substantive ‘mode’.

          The five elements then are five empirical modes of consciousness, first of all.

          Had Aristotle not discovered the fifth element, he would not have been able to assert both inertia and cause, since both are functions of the separation which is self-awareness. This is the point at which the fivefold breaks the four world, since the recognition of the aetheric, the ‘heavens’, within the frame of the empirical, separates, first of all, the mind as we now understand it: that a substance stands outside the ‘sublunar’ establishes the otherness of mind – that this self-aware activity now points to a tangibility beyond sensuous tangibility.

          For Aristotle, the substantive uniqueness of the heavens consisted in their diurnal circulation, their circular motion. The motion on Earth is linear, his first statement of inertia.

          Here then, is the formal difference between four and five. Obviously, Aristotle felt that the heavens were a-causal. Hence he posits four, rather than five causes. For him, the aetheric is the repository of the spontaneous, a fact articulated in his rigid equation of psyche and cosmos. As we have said, this is the seed assertion for ‘mind’ as we now understand it. The rigid correlation points to a tacit understanding of reflective awareness. But only the esoteric, as it stands at that point, can carry the understanding forward, through philosophy and theology.

II.

          Theology, and hence modern western philosophy, begins with Plotinus. Plotinus insists that he has synthesized Plato and Aristotle, something we can only grasp if, unlike modern interpreters who do not hesitate to project historically anomalous empirical orientations back onto these nearly prehistoric philosophical figures, we enter their fields of consciousness. Socrates holds the gods at bay, but his enlightenment as a philosophical consciousness, the gift of his ‘genius’, hardly obviates the saturating spiritual environment. Rather, it insists that we address the ‘magical’ nature of analysis itself. But, like the Buddha, Socrates will not give us a single pulse width of access that does not directly address spontaneous mind. But we must remember, as well, that he is an old man steeped in the living traditions of earliest dialectic at the time we first meet him.

          For all appearances to the contrary, we have not lost our focus on cause. But if we intend to synthesize Plato and Aristotle, from the objectifying distance at which Plotinus stood, the issue becomes psychological first of all. The Sun is still the ruler of the psyche, but now as consciousness (nous). We could say that Plotinus first recognizes the reflective nature of awareness, its mirroring function. But his description falls within the single dimension of the mirror, flattening the reflective process. Seeing three points as basis technically lifts us off the mirroring surface. But only one hypostasis at a time can be lifted. The ‘global’ nature of the function, as well as its indefinable ‘context’ – the separative otherness, traditionally ‘the mystery’ – both remain beyond the grasp of three.

          What three does, precisely, is isolate cause.

          Plotinus cannot incorporate the other except as the primal One. The One stands over all and directs both light and dark. But the fact that the One itself is a created function of consciousness remains beyond his knowledge. In other words, this is the most primitive One, the teleological One, and hence both ‘realized’ and ‘unrealized’. This is Socrates’ ‘genius’ turned inside out, the One unseparated from the other and separation itself. This is the peculiar potency of the ‘living’ One, the One in its primitive state as both the condition of immanence (form) and the living presence of otherness or separation – what Plotinus calls ‘the father’.

          This ‘other’, as empirical, is, in fact the source moment for both cause and substance. But we cannot fully experience these modes until the otherness is radically separated from the One, something that does not happen until we get to theology.

          As much as I detest Augustine, his ignorance serves in the final conversion of the trinitarian hypostases of Plotinus into the duplicating trinities of God and consciousness. An immanent trinitarian theological philosophy had been established by the time of Athanasius. His creed calls for three hypostases in a single personal treasure (ousia). The treasure is understood to be the logos as re-manifested through gospel. But, as such, it remains fluid. Augustinian trinitarian myth, however, begins to align trinitarian godhead with a material creator. While the prophetic god had been defined as creator, it simply placed the prophetic marker beyond the realm of the gods, thus insisting on a unique God. The concept of ‘materiality’, as we understand it, begins to emerge with the concept of cause, the process of ‘philosophy’ that we are defining here.

          In other words, trinity becomes the ‘mind’ of God, of which the human is a tacit duplicate, being the ‘image’ of God. This doubling of the primal unity creates the basis for the separative, the radical separation between God and the individual. Perhaps Calvin ‘discovers’ this on a moral level. But he can only do so because Thomas Aquinas did it first in terms of pure abstract cause.

          Again, as much as I distance myself from Aquinas, since analytically, his cause is a stone knife in this age, potentially, of a purely aethereal dialectic – of a raw, teleological analysis – he is nevertheless the father of cause as we understand it. He has separated cause from substance, thus finally ‘severing’ the One. But he reads like a blind child of history, even though he lays a soft finger on dialectic at every turn.

          But let us notice, first of all, that this function of trinity is derived from five. When we understand the dialectical paradox of Aristotle, we recognize that inertia is produced by the developed historical description of the five elements. And this inertia, as a pure empirical instance, ‘produces’ the analytical modes of cause and substance within experience. Trinity, however, is necessary first to stop or lock up the One; and then the doubling of trinity is necessary to produce the severing movement that underwrites the radically distinct causative force. This causative force, in its radical nature, precisely controverts substance.

          Substance, like inertia, begins in the One. Substance and inertia ‘convert’ the ‘primitive’ aspect of the One, so that the experienced phenomena under their spell are imbued in their very forms with that formless force. In the pre-reflective, of course, that force is the only experienced expression of value. While it has been separated since the inceptions of reflective awareness, it only now comes to the fore as potentially cognizable in itself.

          But the focus I want to bring to bear here is the force of the numbers themselves.

          We can extend this so that it includes the most basic archetype for cause, which falls under the three. In the context of three, the One falls back entirely into the nature of the separative. The three is the all-inclusive number, the undivided which, divided by the One, yields the two. This is a more accurate definition of dialectic than the linear triad that emerges out of German Idealism, namely: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. As pure number, these abstractions allow for the relative globalization of the dialectical process, since no necessary vector is prescribed.

          While this is the tacit description under which the analytical process of modern western philosophy has operated, we must notice how the history itself points to its arbitrarily abstract nature. Inwardly, it bears the appearance of the whole instance of the reflex, the whole ‘moment’ of experience. But it is necessarily immobile, inwardly and outwardly. It ‘describes’ cause, but cannot enact it. Precisely the lack of vector vitiates the model, if we only consider it in terms of the first three.

          What restores the model, if not the raw force of the empirical itself, is a reversion to the five, but a reversion, specifically, in terms of the two ‘contained’ in the three. What is separated, precisely, is the five that divides between substance and cause, between the perceptual and the volitional.

          This five was not coincidental. The five elements are the natural correlates for the gods on the road to bringing analysis itself into cognitive view, that is, of bringing dialectic or reflective awareness within the frame of abstractive consciousness, the realm of superimposition that we call ‘mind’. As such, the five becomes the ‘two sides’ of the One, the ‘living One’ ever separating and uniting at the core of consciousness, equating the instrument of perception and cognition with the teleological force of the given value.

          As such, of course, this history of the esoteric equates with the actuality of consciousness in the moment of reflective awareness, the moment of ‘experience’ as we understand it.

III.

          I want to pause here, then, to note what this means toward philosophy and theology. I have characterized both as ‘transitional’. Theology abstracts ‘cause’. Philosophy gives us cause as dialectic. Neither teaches us proper use. Hitherto, cause, inertia, substance as matter or otherwise, and the One as logic or otherwise have all failed to yield the keys to analysis, this function which objectivity has proven is equally objective.

          If we wish to ‘return’ to analysis for the first time, that is, bring it fully, cognitively into view and learn its consistent pragmatic exercise, we must revert to the numbers, the only historically legitimate basis for describing it.

          Moreover, this historical process shows that both philosophy and theology as we understand them are interim. The only ‘proof’ of the divine lies within, in encounters with the One both as synthetic and as separative. The synthetic One, also known as Spirit, shows us the other created world that corresponds with the ‘inner’ nature of our experience: mind as the whole, value as the visible auras of the world, perception as a magical immediacy. Hence Spirit extends beyond the reactive and mechanical, how far analytically verifiable remains to be seen.

          The otherness within, however, spontaneously actuates ‘mind’. Since it reflects value, it possesses a value. We assume that awareness is essentially the same, individual to individual. What differs is how the moment expresses value to the value ground that is ‘individual’.

          The externalization of cause as ‘God’ is necessary for the objectification of reflection. Perhaps some ‘saint’ can now bring the ritualizing allegories back in line with this basic interpretation, this basic necessity of consciousness. But I doubt it. These ‘evolved’ rituals, like the ‘theological’ works of Augustine, are an historical mash. Their values subsisted in the single synthetic instance of an individual consciousness. Granted that Augustine, as an example, synthesized a range of the collective thinking of his time, the actual transition taking place is only partially expressed. The teleological force of that which is emerging as ‘history’, as ‘theology’ itself, is its passing value.

          The externalization of inertia, cause and science to some extent hold the same temporal values in philosophy. But the history that brings these thetic instances back to the contemporary consciousness has clearly ended in intellectual disaster – in intellectual as well as cultural disaster, considering the history of the twentieth century.

          While pragmatic dialectic, then, involves an understanding of an abstractive structure, a structure, in essence, defined by the small or ‘emergent’ numbers, the numbers themselves are never final. Nevertheless, the prophetic tradition dovetails with the esoteric in identifying the prophetic with seven, a number which can stand either for value or for the otherness or separation. That is, the seven ‘falls off the end’ of the dialectic: the ‘point’ at which value both ‘emerges’ and is ‘extinguished’.

          Seven, then, is ‘the mystery’ that remains.

          Numbers are never final because the dialectic is form producing, and therefore not form in itself. For dialectic, process signifies, rather than value. Since value is the key to the ‘sensory’ as well as the ‘structure’ of consciousness as reflective, the dialectic, while reflective, is process rather than structure. Moreover, dialectic is precisely what emerges as we ‘move away’ from the One as the ‘most primitive form’, with its inertial and causative force. The small numbers correspond with the dialectical movement because they represent directly the emergent structure of relationship posited by the appearance of form.