Damn the spaghetti! Full speed ahead!
Fair enough. Like I said, I haven’t read Wendt (nor Quigley, for that matter), so I am in no position to say anything about anything they think or say. However, …
The notion of “abstraction” as a “fifth dimension” (besides the Moon being in the 7th House, and Jupiter being aligned with Mars) is catchy (if that’s the right word), because Aryeh Kaplan, in his Sepher Yetzirah: The Book of Creation, which is his own translation and commentary on the ancient Kabbalistic text of the same name, tells us that Gen 1 (which is the basis text of which the Sepher Yetzirah is the commentary) that we exist in a five-dimensional universe. I have long wondered what that means.
Somewhere post-Arthur Young and the Mereon Matrix and Meru, Sir Geoffrey and I pondered on what it means to envision/understand/conceptualize/grok (?) four dimensions, and both of us without much success, so the challenge, for me at least, to get just what it is that Quigley and Kaplan may be talking about is pushing me to my limits, I fear. OK, maybe I just naturally tend to make things more complicated than they really are, but “abstraction” as a “fifth dimension” strikes me – post-Gebserianarily or post-Einsteinianarily (i.e., “time” may or may not be 4D) – as not all that convincing.
Stan Tenen, from the Meru Foundation, has demonstrated that the Sepher Yetzirah exhibits the same letter-level coding as Gen 1. This is, in a word, spooky, if not unnerving. It means, on the one hand, that Kaplan may be “right” (or at least accurate in his observations), and, on the other, that a more intense consciousness than our (mere) human variety may be involved in the composition. This would be significant if only in light of the fact that both texts – Gen 1 and the Sepher Yetzirah – seem to be talking about consciousness itself. Given that – as far as we know – only we humans are (even potentially) capable of “grokking” this is cause for concern; that is, for serious consideration of what it is we’re even talking about.
For this reason, I am always interested in anyone who starts talking about these things in a coherent manner. (There are enough marginal thinkers who are not contributing significantly or seriously to the discussion.) This isn’t necessarily a “project” of mine (though maybe it should be), but sometimes I read/hear things that snap my attention around to possible resolutionary approaches.
Your commentary on Wendt piqued my interest for this very reason, that’s all.