In this plane of understanding, static patterns of value are divided into four systems.

Inorganic patterns, biological patterns, social patterns, intellectual patterns.

They are exhaustive.

That's all there are.

If you construct an encyclopedia of four topics, inorganic, biological, social, and

intellectual, nothing is left out.

No quote unquote thing, that is.

Only dynamic quality, which cannot be described in any encyclopedia,

is absent. But although the four systems are exhaustive, they are not exclusive. They all operate

at the same time and in ways that are almost independent of each other. This classification of

patterns is not very original, but the metaphysics of quality allows an assertion about them

that is unusual. It says they are not continuous. They are discrete. They have very little

to do with one another. Although each higher level is built on a lower one, it's not an extension of that lower level. Quite the contrary. The higher level can often be seen to be in opposition to the lower level, dominating it, controlling it where possible for its own purposes.

And then so there's a great deal of independence between the layers, but they're also

interdependent and even contentious. I feel like we're getting into alchemy, actually,

because it talks about this refinement process, right?

Like you must refine inorganic reality and then refine biological reality.

You have to be very clean.

And then this propagates up into refinement of social reality and refinement of the ideas.

So it's almost like there's this polishing of the mirror process.

And in the philosopher's stone,

by that we've been talking about this contention between opposites generating reality in a way.

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