The Borromean Knot
“Borromean rings depicted in a church in Florence, Italy. If any one of the three rings is removed, the other two are no longer joined.” Credit: Raphael Salzedo/Alamy
When I saw this in Nature magazine a week ago, my heart did a flip. It seems that this never-ending knot has been reproduced energetically by some scientists working on quantum computing. They are very excited. So was I. I’ll explain why in a minute.
It turns out I am not the first with a philosophical bent to delve into this idea. Jacques Lacan started fooling around with the concept of the meaning of knots in the 1950’s. By the 1970’s he had developed ideas around the Borromean knot, to which he linked the concepts of The Real, The Symbolic and the Imaginary. As no two rings in the not intersect, should one be cut, they all separate out into individual circles and the knot relationship no longer exists. The knot has an interdependence on the rings, whilst they exist whole within their own right. Lacan was a renowned psychoanalyst and psychiatrist of the time, working with psychosis. I on the other hand, work with ordinary neurotics like myself. Maybe that’s why a different definition jumped into my mind.
If you have been reading my work on the website, you will see that I have been delving into the concepts of the individual self, and the conflict that being true to it can cause when introduced to ‘other’. Indeed, the trilogical essays ‘Separation v Unity Parts 1-3’ are an exploration of this.
The newer offering, ‘What the Tree Told Me’, is a different look at the same subject.
You see in our development into a modern society, we have become very muddled on whether we believe the need to be an individual eclipses the need for community, while at the same time being dragged into a collusive relationship with an overly dominant cultural economic structure. In the course of this process, we have lost any idea of a bigger cosmological picture.
In the worlds of our indigenous ancestors, the recognition that we lived within a larger cradle was inherent with their daily life, understanding that existence depended on Nature to provide the resources, making that possible. In that world they developed ritual that celebrated that fact, enacted regularly to honour the relationship they held with this entity.
About 12,000 years ago all that changed dramatically. The emphasis was shifted away from respect to a more human-centric world view. Recognizing our interdependence on everything else gradually became ideologically non-essential, the topic of my soon-to-be-released book, ’The Infinite Compass- A Journey into Wisdom.’
When I saw the Borromean image depicted above, something clicked. Each ring, for me, represented: firstly, the independent individual, secondly, the collective that is the combination of all individuals, followed finally by the third ring representing the cosmic overlay that holds us all. However, like the Borromean knot itself, when one ring brakes the knot itself ceases to exist. We are left with three separate, disconnected rings with no cohesion. When we took away the understanding of our place within the whole, we were setting ourselves adrift on a big, lonely sea of money, for money’s sake.
One of the things that Lacan looked into was the idea that psychosis was brought about by the breaking of one of these rings, causing the loss of cohesion within the personality. Because of his model, naming each ring for reality, symbolism, and Imagination, he thought to add the fourth ring to the chain, hold the others together. When I look at it through Celtic eyes of three being the number of balance and magic, I feel that we perhaps just need to bring the cosmological component back into our awareness, holding the Self and Community together in a new whole.
We need the Self. It’s the holder of our uniqueness with all its skills and genius. We need to offer it to the whole so that we can all learn and grow from and with each other. Community is the place where we can join it all together, whilst retaining our individuality.In this place the whole can become more than the sum of its parts. All of it is then held, nurtured and supported within the web of Indira’s Net. We play our part for the good of all, alongside the benefit of our self-expression and the diversity of others.