treei.org - A Personal History

A Personal History

Written by Armando Busick

Alamo Gordo

In the year of 1945 the atomic bomb was tested and dropped upon a city. I was a child profoundly threatened by these events. I felt this awful fire would end all that I knew and loved in my world. My world suddenly became impermanent and fleeting.

I began walking circles in the living room of my house. While I walked, I sent my mind out across the universe in search for something that would survive all change.

For months, in my waking hours and in my sleep, I journeyed across the star fields and the ages of creation. The visions that I visited and the dreams that I dreamed became the most vivid memories of my childhood – I saw a sunrise from a canyon rim on Mars, I passed a blue-white star (Sirius?) and felt the power of its song. I walked night roads under a sky illuminated by towering orange nebulae, I visited a houseboat in Sausalito harbor 28 years in my future. My walking wore a visible circle in the rug of the room. At last, at the edge of the universe, I looked out upon what I had been seeking – that which was eternal and unchanging. The constant background of everything – the Void.

I stopped walking.

In 1966 I was attracted to a set of archaic cards – the Tarot. I purchased a replica of a 16th century deck – the earliest I could find; I was seeking insight into the sources of primal symbolism. I discovered that, for centuries, these cards been mapped upon a mystical geometry called the Tree of the Qaballah. I spent several years committing this system to verbal and image memory and inhabiting its universe. The central image of this system was a diagram called “The Tree of Life”. From its branches I explored other symbolic maps of the universe: the chakras, the I Ching, and the contemporary scientific world-view (my education had originally been math-science).

I eventually abandoned the study of the Qaballa for two reasons:

The first reason was that to fully enter into its depths I felt I would have to learn to speak and think in Hebrew and inhabit the Hebrew cosmology of the 14th century. As an original Spanish-speaker, I had experienced an entry into another world-view when I learned English at the age of eight. I also experienced, at that time, the filters and limitations each language imposes upon our perception of the world. It became clear that my evolution would not lie in learning another system of limitations.

The second reason was that a new symbolic study was opened to me when, in 1973, I was given the unexpected opportunity to live on the houseboat of the philosopher Alan Watts in the last year of his life. When I stepped into the houseboat I recognized that place I had visited in the circling journeys of my childhood. I was open to receive whatever I was there to receive.

I had been keeping illustrated journals of my studies of universal symbol systems; These pages were filled more with images than with words. After examining my journals, Alan suggested I look into a recently published book by his friend – English mathematician, G. Spencer-Brown, who had put forth a simple but powerful calculus consisting only of a single symbol. This symbol acknowledged the presence and effect of the surface of the blank page (the primal Void) upon what was drawn upon it. The symbol reflected the order of the distinctions that create a universe. It was a calculus of consciousness.

Inspired by this calculus, my journals began to include elements of Boolean algebra, computer logic, evolutionary biology, and cybernetics. Gradually, a single symbol with interactive elements began to emerge upon the pages of my journals. This symbol and its elements were to become Treei.

Across the years, Treei has evolved into a form similar to its original inspiration – a deck of cards and a single symbol that are an interface to a system of cognition and connection to a greater universe. A system of cognition that I offer as a healing for the afflictions of our disconnected species.