Chapter 4 - Seriality: It Goes On

Summary

Life is a series of experiences which need innumerable forms. Death is an interval in that one long life.

—Meher Baba

Rule of Itself

Seriality is a deceptively simple idea and phenomenon with connections to various interrelated concepts like sequence, succession, repetition, consequentiality, implication, order, iteration, list, coincidence, enumeration, pattern, and so on. To think clearly about seriality requires understanding the distinctions between seriality's proliferating possibilities while staying within sight of the principle of seriality in its simplicity. This is always somewhat difficult because of the way seriality mirrors the movement of thinking as a passage from thought to thought, to the point that the being or existence of a series may appear indistinguishable from the thinking of it. Just as, in thinking, we pass from thought to thought in a manner that makes one focus on the thoughts and forget or elide their passing per se, so in the perception of seriality is there a natural tendency to give attention to the elements of the series and their interrelationships and to disregard seriality as such. We think and talk all the time about series of this or that without properly considering that we are dealing with seriality, no less objectively than subjectively. As many forms of relation and non-relation fall within the general idea of seriality, so do thoughts follow upon each other in all sorts of related and unrelated ways, such that the two are always becoming entangled. Whenever we are perceiving a series, however seemingly random or formally defined, there remains this unshakeable sense of its inseparability from the seriality of experience itself, as if the unity or individuality of one's own being cannot but mark itself indexically across serially salient points of awareness, and vice versa, as if our integrity, the unity of oneself, were somehow inseparable from this indicating of unities, one after another.

Thus, in the case of the random or coincidental series, say a sequence of stars, there remains, despite the evident dependency upon seeing them as a series, the fact of their seriality being objectively or phenomenally there to notice.