Always and Forever — Constant
A number expressing a relation or property which remains the same in all circumstances, or for the same substance under the same conditions.
The universe is a living contradiction, and I stopped trying to reconcile its paradoxes a long time ago, so I will state this knowing it doesn’t yield to logic.
Existence is constantly in motion, endlessly transforming and renewing itself, and yet, throughout its churning essence there are fixed points, constants, fundamental invariants.
They are not fixed in the sense we normally understand that word, so things appear to us to be changing, even though in a larger sense they are not. There is a fine structure of constants underlying existence, a structure that governs it discretely and throughout.
For example, we can see every system in creation at a large scale, where we can measure its energy and its movement, and at a small scale, where we can define its essence.
These two values, the measure of its energy and the measure of its substance, are always in the same proportion, no matter what system you are contemplating.
This is not something reality makes obvious to us, from our standpoint all we see is matter, constantly decaying, recombining, bouncing into other instances of itself.
We can’t see the law behind its apparent chaos, the law that says that the energy of a system and its temperature are always relating to each other in the same way.
Constants like that are few, but together they are enough to define our reality, and if we were to alter even one, whatever we know of it would cease to exist. No need to worry, though, this is impossible.
Why? Everything, including yourself, is made of matter organized according to a blueprint, a set of instructions, if you will, which tell your body that it is flesh, but they tell this coin that it is metal, instructions buried and repeated in the essence of the tiniest pieces the two of you comprise of. You can’t take the metalness out of this coin any more than you can turn yourself to stone. It doesn’t matter how thin you slice a lodestone, it will still attract metal. It is its set of instructions, buried inside its essence, that makes it what it is. Without it it wouldn’t be a lodestone at all, it would be something else entirely.
The same goes for existence itself.
Existence hides from us the things we are not ready to grasp. It reveals itself gradually and we can only access its secrets at the level of understanding we have already reached. I am not speaking metaphorically here, these things we aren’t yet ready to understand can be right in front of our faces, we wade through them, oblivious, all the time.
For instance, if I covered your ears so you can’t hear a thing and I beat a drum behind you, you would feel its vibration in your stomach, and because you associated it with the sound of the drum at one point, you would know what it is. What if you couldn’t feel those vibrations at all? How would you even know they existed? Like the sea anemone, there could be a whole rip current ten feet away from you and you wouldn’t be aware of its presence.
These constants, these invariants of reality are part of the set of instructions that make it what it is, without them it wouldn’t be our reality at all, but some other form of organization, so different from our own and so inhospitable that nothing you know could exist in it.
We tend to associate constants with the world of matter, science likes to study things it can see and touch, things on which it can run experiments and verify hypotheses, but these constants exist in all the facets of reality, in energy and in thought as well as in the world of matter. Let me discuss a few of them.
Reality must be consistent within and among itself.
This is an energetic constant we can’t test in our waking life, because it is impossible, but which our dreams make obvious, because dreaming is the state of mind where we suspend reason.
Different things occupying the same space, aberrations of scale, inanimate objects that speak, falling through solid matter.
And that brings us to the master constant: causality. Even when we don’t understand how, we don’t doubt that everything that happens is a logical consequence in a very large, very complicated game of cause and effect.
This is also a law we can only test in dreams and in other states of altered consciousness, when things happen for which you have no explanation.
The absence of causality wrecks damage the very foundations of being by severing its connections. It turns reality into a useless timepiece for which we have all the gears, but no idea how to put them together.
Sameness.
All there is in existence is put together in the same fashion.
That drum sound I mentioned does the same thing to your body as a rock to a pond, as an earthquake to a building, as light to a crystal, as heat to the air in the desert when it generates mirages. The same animating spirit that allows me to think allows clouds to spark lightning, and lodestones to point north, and little pieces of fluff to get stuck in your hair when the air is dry. It is for this reason we can share in the energy of a plant through nourishment, and it can share in the energy of the earth and of the sun. We’re made of the same building blocks, despite belonging to very different organizing systems.
Thought has constants too. Everything and nothing don’t change, regardless of their context. The principle of duality is a reality constant, where all things that are not everything or nothing have an opposite: good and evil, front and back, chaos and order, full and empty, big and small, true and false.
[We found the famous etching of the Circle of Knowledge in this document.
This drawing was so extensively publicized I hesitated to describe it in this research at first, out of fear of redundancy, but in the spirit of thoroughness I will provide it, anyway.
The drawing depicts the sun god surrounded by three dragons, whose heads and tails connect, forming a triangle.
Around this triangle, evenly displayed like the petals around a flower, are seven angels, holding hands.
The master conceived the drawing to use solids and voids equally in the rendition of the three forms, in a manner in which the angels, the dragons and the sun share each other’s contours.
The main reason for this drawing’s startling popularity is that it creates the same three dimensional optical illusion as the roses.
At first glance the dragons, rendered in dark purple ink, seem to fly above the rest of the group, but then they recede slowly into the paper while the angels, now in the foreground, lean in to watch the center of the drawing, the sun, whose wavy rays seem to vibrate.
The angels wear white robes and have very long hair, rendered in gold leaf. Braided locks of hair from all the angels join to form a highly ornate frame around the group; the hair is so finely braided that it is impossible to distinguish which tresses belong to which angel.
The image of the sun, which is relatively prominent when one first lays eyes on the manuscript, fades into the void when one focuses one’s attention on the golden frame, and its representation turns from solid to void, thus becoming a space to inhabit instead of a central totem.]
Could you please allow for more space around the drawings? It is important for the overall appeal of the manuscript to maintain proper proportions between the content and the space. Illumination is an art, and so is calligraphy, don’t forget that! We are conveying meaning, that is true, but we also want it to please the eye, so we are placing it in a beautiful container. Make sure the ink color matches, it needs to be the same purple.
What would happen if a constant got smaller, for instance? Which one? The one that connects energy and temperature?
If you were still here to observe it, you would probably need a lot more wood to heat a room, and it would take you a lot longer to do it.
Why can’t everything and nothing be a pair?
Because they are not opposites of each other. Everything and nothing are a lot more alike than they are different.
Let’s think of everything as a huge room. If that room exists, it belongs inside itself. Its opposite would have to belong inside itself too. Then you have a room that contains something from outside of itself.
Everything doesn’t have an opposite. Nothing is not the opposite of everything. Nothing is not detracting. We have a concept of what nothing means, therefore it exists, and if it exists it belongs in the room.
Let’s talk about nothing. No matter how rarefied existence is, you will still find bits and pieces of it, floating in the empty space around it, which is not nothing, it is empty space. Let’s say you look deeper and deeper inside the smallest components of this empty space, until you find yourself unable to relate to whatever you find there. You are in a place that has no scale, no shape, no dimensions. You can’t tell whether it is hot or cold, large or small, rare or dense, because you have no means to measure its temperature, size or density, and nothing to relate them to, even if you could. You can then make them be anything you want, decide randomly that this place is hot and large and dense or its exact opposite, and you’d be right either way.
There is no reason why everything couldn’t be inside this space too. But if you have everything, then you can easily find your measuring stick, as well as many things to measure with it, and this space is no longer devoid of scale, dimension, time and shape, because it contains both matter and something to measure it with. It no longer has the characteristics of what you called nothing before.
Did I mention the contradictory nature of reality? You can run yourself in circles until you go mad, it will still do what it wills and not feel obligated to explain itself to you.
So much for everything and nothing.
If nothing exists only in concept why did I call it a constant of reality? Can you conceive of a reality without the nothing? What would that look like?
Every process meant to put things in balance would end up leaving something behind, a remainder, a little tail you wouldn’t be able to shake and which would get in the way of things all the time. You could never solve an equation, balance a chemical formula, or bring motion to a stop.
Reality would look like a messy garment, made by a lazy tailor who didn’t care enough to tidy up the loose threads.
What if it really looks that way?
Then we’re all wasting our time here. Just do anything whatsoever whenever you like! Oh, wait! Time would have little tails and loose threads too, so you wouldn’t be able to do that, not with any level of consistency.
But what if it really looks that way? What if this is one of those things reality cloaks from our sight because we’re unable to understand it?
I don’t know. See, this is the thing about science. It models the things we already understand. I can only present to you explanations for the things you know exist. One of those pesky side effects of the rule that says time must run in a straight line and in one direction. Were we past that point in our history where this ceased to be a well known fact, I could discuss it with you, but as of now, I can’t.
If I can make an observation (take it as my opinion, nothing more), it will be that whatever you are sure you know will be proven wrong at some point. This gets easier to accept this once you know you should expect it.
