The Monad

Before there were ninety-five knots, there was one. This is where the ascent begins.

1 ﹁ The Monad is the first of the ninety-five untyings of the Order of the Universe, and it opens where every ascent must: at the self that has been divided against itself. The knot of this degree is Division — the scattered motive-set, the person who is one thing in one room and another thing in the next, pulled apart by Geresen] long before they had any name for it. The untying is Oneness: the recovery of a single self, and with it the first real capacity to lead oneself at all.

A full monograph of seventy pages, opening the band of the Self Leader (Degrees 1–19) and moving through the number one on every level the Order recognizes:

The Mythological — the Pythagorean Monad as the indivisible origin from which the Dyad and every number after it proceeds, and the circle as its figure, having neither beginning nor end; Plotinus and the One of the Enneads, beyond being and non-being, from which Intellect and Soul emanate in hierarchical descent; Leibniz's Monadology, where each monad is a metaphysical point that mirrors the entire universe from its own vantage, coordinated with every other in pre-established harmony; and the civilizations that set the One at the head of creation — the Chinese yī and the Dao from which yin and yang arise, the Brahman of Hindu philosophy, the Egyptian Atum rising alone out of the primordial waters, the singular God with whom Genesis opens, and Ahura Mazda of the Zoroastrians.

The Spiritual — the Law of One as it is actually taught, tradition by tradition: Advaita Vedanta and the identity of Atman with Brahman, sealed in the Mahavakya Tat Tvam Asi, reached by self-inquiry, discernment and detachment; the Sufi doctrine of Tawhid, with dhikr, the annihilation of the nafs, Rumi's longing for the Beloved, and Ibn Arabi's Waḥdat al-Wujūd; the Kabbalistic Aleph — two Yuds and a Vav, the letter of Keter, binding the upper and lower worlds in a single figure; and the Dao of Laozi, the unnamable source to which all things return, approached through humility, simplicity and wu wei.

The Numerological — one as new beginning, independence and leadership; the qualities it carries of self-reliance, ambition and assertiveness; the seed that already contains everything it will become; the Sun in astrology as vitality, creativity and the life-giving force; and the Law of One taken not as doctrine but as operation — the untying of the knot of division itself, and what the passage from division to oneness costs and returns in a real life.

The Developmental — the Age of One: the first year of a human life, when sitting, crawling and the first steps buy the body its autonomy; the pincer grasp and the stacked block; object permanence, Piaget's finding that the world goes on existing unseen; the grasp of cause and effect; babbling resolving into first words; and the beginning of self-recognition in the mirror. Set alongside the research that established it — Bowlby on attachment and Ainsworth's Strange Situation, Tomasello on joint attention, Waxman on early vocabulary, and the work on neuroplasticity and early adversity from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child.

The Operative — self-leadership as something built rather than assumed: an honest inventory of strengths, weaknesses and intrinsic nature; emotional intelligence and resilience; self-discipline, consistency and commitment as the machinery by which long-term goals are actually reached; purpose, and the alignment of daily action with core values; communication, empathy and conflict resolution; and the financial acumen and strategic thinking that the Order treats as inseparable from any other kind of mastery.

It closes on a promise the rest of the series keeps: that what begins here in English will not stay English, and that Geresen] — met in this degree as a concept — will return before the ascent is through with a body, a season, a compass direction, and a face.