Chapter 5 - Measure: Searching the Circle

Summary

There the measure is to love without measure.

—Severus, Letter to Saint Augustine

Full of Itself

Seriality, the line of the real passing in all and no directions between and beyond everything, may be understood as the measure of reality. As measure involves the scale and order of things in relation to themselves and each other, the immeasurable unitary whole of everything as it were measures itself by being simultaneously ONE and a series of ones, by having the nature of a series of itself. Ocean and drops measure each other at once. We may say that seriality is the paradoxical fate of reality, the necessity or constraint through which it overflows with itself, the rule generating the identity of one and many, ocean and drops, recalling the connection between measure and fate, as noted by Hegel: “measure […] is necessity. Fate, Nemesis, ultimately comes down to a determination of measure.” The whole and serial ONE as if rules itself or everything in the form of an immeasurable ruler, that is, a series or unending line of units no less whole and complete than the whole series. ONE = one, one, one, one, one, one, one … The ONE is full of ones, full of itself, multiplied in the infinite unity of being divided by nothing, the zeros of illusion or separation which may be equated with the gaps in the series, the purely relative spaces or shadows that paradoxically manifest the unity of the series, as if gluing together what cannot be separated from itself. As Meher Baba says, “NOTHING is in EVERYTHING; EVERYTHING would not be a complete whole without NOTHING.”

In other words, the ONE is individualized, wholly measured by its own measureless indivisibility, just as the act of measuring proceeds from the indivisible to the complete, moving serially via repetition of one (the unit) up to a whole. As Aristotle observes, “the measure and starting-point is something one and indivisible […] everywhere we seek as the measure something one and indivisible; and this is that which is simple either in quality or quantity […] [and] where it is thought impossible to take away or to add, there the measure is exact.”