Re: VMs: Finding

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jorge,

> You seem to have deliberatley ignored all the rationalization and
> justification that accompanies my argument and also my implicit suggestion
> for being careful about "not seeing the forest for the trees" when examining
> ornamented interpretations of minutiae.

I've read a great deal about qabbalah, sephiroth, gematria, etc etc - and I 
certainly agree with you that the Tree of Life could well have been an 
influence on the original diagram-maker.

Part of the cleverness of the VMS is the way that it has been made to 
appear to be outside existing traditions - many of us assume that this has 
been done to hide underlying patterns, but this is no more than a working 
assumption. All of this makes it the easiest thing in the world to project 
your own experiences and patterns onto its (essentially blank) semantic canvas.

A complex diagram like the 9-rosette page is a key case in point - I've 
gone over the photograph of it in H.P.Kraus' book with a magnifying glass, 
and nearly every time I find some new microscopic (or macroscopic!) detail 
to surprise me. It's already a forest of details, and so it's up to us to 
discern the real pattern.

However, this means that many theories are possible - and my best guess is 
that several may well prove to be true simultaneously, so the underlying 
logic ceases to be a binary "either-or" (much like Derrida's critique of 
Aristotelian logic in "Of Grammatology"). What is important about each 
hypothesis here is that we try to work out what it would mean for the VMS 
if it were true - and what its relationships with other hypotheses are.

I suppose what I'm saying is: I'm not looking for *rationalization and 
justification* as much as for *implication*... where ideas lead *to*, not 
where they're *from*. This is because the problem with rationalization is 
the same as with almost all statistical proofs - it confuses correlation 
(ie, coincidence or concurrence) with causality.

For the Tree of Life correlation, I can see your justification perfectly 
well - but can you take it to the next stage now, and tell us what that 
would say about the VMS if it were true?

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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