Philosophy of Zero Forms and it’s practical consequences
The more I connect with others who find joy and benefit in adding a practice to their daily life, the more I appreciate the fact that Fighting Monkey as a practice has taken into account a specific human tendency for easing our life:
we love to know,
we like to stay sure of ourselves,
we do find comfort in knowing
we’d appreciate others to stay within the bubble of our knowing too.
The danger however is when a practice allows you to live on that island where no one ever contradicts your ideas, your favourite thought constructs, your behavioural habits.
One way of categorising FM Practice is as follows:
me in relation to me
me in relation to others
me in relation to the events I meet
“Me with me” refers to the individual practices within FM Practice. They are enveloped by Zero Forms. These forms are about finding your “biological signature”.
In this post I’d like to write about the importance of a name, how naming can give orientation and how engaging oneself with that name can lead to a widening-narrowing dynamic of our life experience.
Zero Form, in my opinion, has a powerful perception-expanding effect when practically contemplated in physical practice because of the paradoxical energy that moves behind the name. It is a name that demands participation, rather than explaining itself - which most of has been taught to disapprove of.
Zero Forms seems to be expressing a simultaneous zero-ness and one-ness.
This lead to me look into the earliest sources of “zero” which is a fascinating research itself and many researchers broke their heads over finding the “original zero”.
Original Zero in the numerical system
The first known English use of zero was in 1598. It came into English language via French zéro from Italian zero of the Venetian zevero form of Italian wefiro via sift. In pre-Islamic time sift had the meaning “empty”. Sift then evolved to mean zero when it was used to translate śūnya in Sanskrit.
Fibonacci, the Italian mathematician, who’s credited with introducing the decimal system to Europe used the term zephyrum.
Zero seen in a numerical way is unique in representing absolute nothingness, it serves role in the decimal system as the placeholder which gives other numbers their power. Zero enables the numerals to “cycle.” Depending on their location, they have different meaning. Babylonians had a mark for nothingness, some sources say, but treated it primarily as punctuation. Romans and Egyptians had no such numeral.
We write 101 to say that there is 1 hundred, there are no tens and there is 1 unit. The zero indicates here the absence of 10s. This idea of the need for a symbol that represent “nothing” as part of writing numbers in the place number system has a very ancient heritage: 5000 years ago, the Babylonians used a double wedge for nothing as part of the cuneiform symbols to write numbers on stone tablets. The Mayans were using a symbol of a shell to denote absence in their number system 2000 years ago.
We however, are not numbers. Therefore what does zero signify in relation to being human?
Enter Philosophy of Zero Form and it’s practical consequences
I’m starting to realise that the true gift, wherever I am, is found in seeing.
Or rather I’m starting to realise that whenever I am, I’m seeing - and that that is the true gift,
Now seeing is the toughest of all nuts to crack. It feels like paradoxical to be talking of seeing so maybe it would be better to say what it is not.
Seeing is not seeing as soon as naming starts
as soon as conceptualising starts
as soon as comparing starts
as soon as relating to starts
as soon as judging the seen starts
as soon as all those formations start
unless, of course, if I see those too.
This ‘seeing’ refers to clear seeing, fresh, uncoloured seeing, the field from where the forms arise.
When I now reflect back on the name of Fighting Monkey, where the title of this writing begins with, I realise that on this moment the “fighting” in FM reconnects me to what René Daumal described so well in The Holy War:
“He who has declared this war in himself is at peace with his fellows, and although his whole being is the field of the most violent battle, in his very innermost depths there reigns a peace that is more active than any war. And the more strongly this peace reigns in his innermost depths, in that central silence and solitude, the more violently rages the war against the turmoil of lies and numberless illusions.
A Battle to Fight!
The fight that is being fought is an inward battle: it is a battle between that which could be called seeing or, perhaps, presence and our tendencies, our habits, our comforts, our preferences, our cultural value sets, our treasured thought constructions or in elegant French terms the “idées fixes” we dearly hold onto.
The latter represents what many would argue exactly what make us human. Nietzsche, with his gunpowder attitude, would add “… all too human.” In Fighting Monkey, at least in the interpretation that I allow myself here, this “dearly held” definition of “human” can be read as represented by the second term in its name: “Monkey”.
We seem to have a conflict here:
human is fighting its human-ness
or
human is fighting the monkey
Fighting Monkey in this way becomes a verb, not a noun. Beyond the concept of FM, reading it as a verb makes it an act one commits oneself to. It could just as well be read:
I am fighting monkey, with monkey referring to the set of “idées fixes”. Not a fighting monkey.
Don’t Fight, There Is No Battle
This battle or fight, however, is only battle if we hold on to the assumption that “human” can and should be defined, and the consequent human lived experience, through and within the limitations of those “idées fixes”.
If we, on the contrary, allow ourselves to give up that defined-ness, we have freed ourselves of such fight. In order to free ourselves of something and give it up we first need to be able to take it to us. To take something to us, we need to first see it.
Et voilà, there is not more battle because we see (the hard part and highest skill) the opponents (idées fixes) that we have made ourselves. Only if we aim for maintenance, we remain in battle.
Realising we fight self-made ghosts, we can relax as the opponent has been exposed. There is no more opponent and therefore no need for battle and the tensions it brings. The problem is that as humans we have developed the learnt preferences of holding onto. This defined “human” tendency is the monkey we are in battle with.
The battle only remains because we fight from the assumed belief that those tendencies are what make us human. We are fighting from the perspective within the field of seeing - which is an already coloured point of view - rather than from clear seeing.
Enter Zero Form
Here comes in Zero Forms as a practical physiologically applicable philosophy through the aspect of play in FM.
A recent letter exchange made me deepen my reading into the words Zero Form when I came by Douglas Hofstadter’s response to a letter of the highly esteemed game designer Robert Abbott wrote:
“So far no one has found it useful to explore the consequences of positing that zero equals one.”
I do have this inner sense that what FM aims at, in the personal interpretation I allow myself here, is the - in practice and through direct experience - interrogation of Hofstadter’s question by physicalising it in alive form in the space.
Reading into Zero Form in such a way, Zero signifies a state of presence, of that seeing that is the original, the source field or real Self where thoughts, images, evaluations memory, etc arise that then became externalised as our actions, behaviours, thought constructs, orientations, etc.
However if we do not see, if we are not here in a state of non-judgemental, non-evaluative, pre-suppositionless awareness to this process - the process of being wherefrom emerging originates - our behaviour, our actions, our whole mode of being in reality becomes habitualised.
We took on form, which of course has its functions. It is useful to have habits in riding your bike for example. At the same time it seems even more useful, when we speak of the experiencing of reality, to understand through direct experience - which is not equal to knowing - where habits find their origin.
Here we enter the observable arising moment of where 0 and 1 meet or interrelate. It might be beneficial to emphasise that 0 is not 1 in a dead, static way but rather rather that 0 has the possibility of instigating a process of becoming 1. It can just as well decide not (yet) to become one, now… or later…
This “decision” we could define as returning from a habitual reactive or automatic mode of being to a state of presence where one - or rather 0 - is not preparing for anything, rather just is:
0 is nothing, yet … but not nothing, 0 holds within itself endless possibility
one is in a state of presence to become anything … preparing to become nothing
Zero Form makes impossible become possible
Zero, as in Zero Form, therefore holds all of the potential 1’s or forms:
manifested forms
known latent forms
unknown latent forms
To give 1 some credit here, we should say that 1 ≠ 1, 1 is our symbol here in “source field language” for any form or anything that can take form - whether material or invisible (which is also material of course unless you are a materialist).
Therefore this 1 should also be used in referring to the imaginal, true and individually unique for each being which can be manifested in the form of an expression which humans in all times have done through their art, enterprises, dances, style, projects, writing, etc.
You see here the multiplicity of forms or “ones” that zero can take. The impossible becomes possible or 0 can become 1. This capacity for becoming is found in the in-between-ness between 0=1, the “=“.
This “=“ from a materialist point of view could be easily overseen, however it is not an “it-is-just-so-ness”. One cannot just surrender to it passively. It demands participation!
Absolute practice of “Zero Form” philosophy would therefore imply that one should free oneself (the verb of fighting monkey) of one’s definitions of that what one wills because one has realised that along the course of one’s life this has become formalised (idées fixes, wants and preferences, or fixed forms have swum their way into the idea of “free willing”).
Reading into Zero Form in such way, one starts to understand that this “return act” is something that is within one’s will. Understanding this, one get a glimpse of what perhaps Dante meant by “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.”
One loses what one though one was.
1 loses what 1 thought 1 was.
The good thing is that 1 is solely an extension of 0.
In this way one obtains the freedom to align oneself with the origin of will. If not, then one’s will is not free - it is a will based on wanting and preferring. It is a will based in 1 rather than 0. It believes it will freely but it wants only fixed forms, which is a defined will or a self-defined freedom of attachment to hold onto defined things.
When the philosophy of Zero Form or “0=1 procedure” is then applied to absolute free will, which in this way could be read as the living experience from 0 freed from all 1’s, it then is absolutely free to align itself with the original, a “True North”, the source of where “will” arises from:
to will something through the process of becoming into being, into form.
Phoenix Project: Zero Form in Systems
Observing this process above on the level of human nature has been done in many forms over the human evolution. Great systems have been developed.
However, great systems can only be called great when within those created systems is in-built “0=1”. Or in harsher terms, for those who attach to the form of those systems, they as well hold no privileges and can be burned down to ashes. From which can rise again.
Many philosophers have died mad, aged fast, practitioners ended up so over-sensitive that their students had to wash themselves with special soaps so they would not get allergic reactions.
The process or practice therefore that one selects on this “return journey” should be based on deep findings - systems of systems - within the traditions that researched human nature and at the same time be in process itself by being adapted to contemporary context.
If there are idées fixes within the system of “0=1” practice itself that are overly formalised and accepted, those too need to be kept open for revision - or returned to Zero.
When taken as a system, Fighting Monkey’s process exists of physical situations or games where the rules themselves, the tools, the rhythms, the partners are changed often: the within-games change ánd the games change.
Participating within such system that has “0=1” in-built in its system,
this continual change will, at some point, provoke a conflict in the participant,
but if and only if,
that participant holds onto a fixed or correct form of how situations should unfold
- a specific style, a preferred rhythm, a verbal explanation, an appearance, an interpretation -
and consequently identifies any other in the “form”
in thát actual situation or game than thé one,
the one has held onto dearly as an idée fixe.
Zero Form as a practical philosophy is the big revealer! It’s practice reveals where one has attached to form, where ones reality if conflict with actual reality, where one’s 1 conflicts with another 1 because one is unable to return to Zero.
Zero Form hold endless opportunity to engage in the act of, as a verb, “fighting monkey” or overcoming the self narrowly-defined as a particular 1.
Return To Zero
Zero does not mean nothing.
We do not end up here with nihilism or 0=0.
We end up here with the live-affirming prospect of endless creation or 0=1 and 1=∞.
The allowing of oneself to express oneself,
to permit oneself oneself without defining self as 1 (1=1, this is it)
- in such manner one allows oneself to be more than “one” expression - without attaching to forms.
Self returns where it came from.
Self returns to Zero.
With the words of Hassan Sabbah who William S. Burroughs so admired:
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
or
0=1, “=” is permitted
And to add to that, with the words of Dutch Frederik Van Eeden I see so often on a building in my hometown Antwerp:
“Nothing is the absolute truth, and not even this is.”
0 is not static, it is not nothing. 0 can become.
The plastic or adaptive tool to learn therefore seems to both be able to become 1, to create and take on form, and return to 0 without attaching to any particular of the 1’s.
“Form is dead” just as God was dead when Nietzsche wrote it and what was received so provocatively. Provocation it was exactly because of having named and having attached to fixed human-made form, which is always not the reality.
In the words of theoretical physicist Barasarb Nicolescu:
“Reality is that which resists our experiences, our representations, our descriptions, our images, our mathematical formulations.”
Zero Form seems to not be something you do,
it is the before and the after doing,
it is nowhere where clear doing arises.
Zero Form is a symbol for what is expected,
from what you are given, in life,
and it demands all of you:
To give unto form what is form’s and to give unto Zero what is Zero’s.
Frederik van Eeden quote found on the building of a local business in Antwerp.
Sources
Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101668.Mount_Analogue)
Douglas Harper (2011), Zero, Etymology Dictionary, Quote="figure which stands for naught in the Arabic notation," also "the absence of all quantity considered as quantity," c. 1600, from French zéro or directly from Italian zero, from Medieval Latin zephirum, from Arabic sifr "cipher," translation of Sanskrit sunya-m "empty place, desert, naught";
Menninger, Karl (1992). Number words and number symbols: a cultural history of numbers. Courier Dover Publications. pp. 399–404. ISBN 978-0-486-27096-8.;
"zero, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press. December 2011. Archived from the original on 7 March 2012. Retrieved 4 March 2012. “French zéro (1515 in Hatzfeld & Darmesteter) or its source Italian zero, for *zefiro, < Arabic çifr”
Ifrah, Georges (2000). The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-39340-5.
Barasarb Nicolescu, The Hidden Third (https://parabola.org/2017/07/30/the-hidden-third/)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/origin-number-zero-180953392/
https://gizmodo.com/origin-of-zero-symbol-centuries-older-than-previously-t-1810428439
