Divided by Zero — Revelation
The divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something unexplainable relating to human existence or the world.
The expectation to understand everything, while worthy, is unreasonable. Some things can’t be counted in the time frame of existence, some knowledge is so alien to our mind we can’t put it in a structure of understanding.
Don’t shun such knowledge and such things. It is pure vanity to believe we have a grasp on reality just for understanding a few of its laws.
Think about it.
We can only understand the things close to our scale, everything that is significantly larger or smaller is outside our grasp.
We can only see things that get revealed by the light, everything that is finer than the top if its range or coarser than its bottom is invisible to us.
If I were to move so fast that, as you blink, I shifted my position from this side of you to the other, your mind could not find a reasonable explanation, and would think me magical.
Faraway things may look real to us, when in fact they are just mirages of light.
You say that the mirage phenomenon is not foreign to our understanding, and that we all heard about the strange tricks eyes play on weary travelers when they’re lost in the desert, thirsty and exhausted.
I’m not talking about extreme situations, I’m talking about things we take for granted every day.
If we were to model reality on the things our eyes tell us, we’d all know that every road that goes into the distance narrows down to a single point, that the walkable earth ends at an edge, that the sun is a fiery ball, the size of our heads, which pops up from under the earth in the morning and falls behind that edge I mentioned earlier at night, that, at the approach of winter all the trees die, that water has a color, which is blue, or green, and that if birds can fly nothing should stop us from doing the same.
We don’t think of the reflection we see in the mirror as a real person, but we do that with the reflections of stars, because their mirror is very far away and made of an essence we can’t understand.
That is the paradox of trying to understand infinity: although you can grasp the concept in the abstract, it eludes scientific tools, categories and unifying theories, because, by its very definition, no matter how many things you understand about it, you can always add one more.
Those things that defy reason, we usually tuck them away, label them as coincidences, lapses in attention, primitive thinking, but they are there, consistently, and the more you try to make them fit neatly into their boxes, the weirder and the more insistent they become.
Because our rational mind always dismisses these things, you won’t find them explained in scientific tomes, we immortalize their mysterious occurrences in myths and folk stories, in poetry and old traditions, in art. They are the revelatory gift existence doles upon us small creatures way before we are old enough to understand it. Reality lets us know that things are a certain way. We can’t explain it, we don’t have the tools to verify it, we can’t bring it up as an argument in a discussion and expect to be taken seriously, but we know. Is this knowledge useful to us in our daily lives? Yes, we use it quietly all the time.
I know what you will say, that the things we describe as revelations are just an unconscious cumulation of observations that finally structure their common traits into a rational thought.
That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about just knowing things we don’t have the capacity, the instruments or the time to know, not based on scientific precepts.
How did the first person know a certain plant eases a fever, or helps heal a wound faster? How did people intuit that a bunch of tiny stones cut at an angle and stacked to form a semi-circle could hold more weight than a heavy stone lintel? How did people sense the needed ingredients and the series of processes that would turn iron ore into strong, flexible steel? Why would somebody attempt heating and cooling metal really fast in the hope that would increase its strength?
We take all the advances of humankind for granted.
They are part of the arsenal of science now, and we act as if they were all happy accidents, when any rational analysis would eliminate that circumstance for being too unlikely to have happened.
Legend has it that a Chinese empress, forty-five hundred years ago, was having tea in her garden, and a cocoon fell in it and started to unravel into delicate silk fibers.
Maybe Athena visited her, before she settled down in Greece to teach the women there how to make pottery, baskets and woven fabrics.
Apparently one of her gifts was to inspire new technologies.
She later on traveled to Rome to give people the formula for underwater concrete and color changing glass and then headed to Bohemia to whisper in the glassmakers’ ears “add lead oxide”.
She guided the hands of ancient metal workers as they devised techniques for metal coating still unparalleled to this day, taught sailors how to navigate by the stars and make lodestone compasses and showed the people of Babylon how to build a clock that runs on shadows.
[We assume that the color changing glass the master is referring to is the Lycurgus Cup, a fourth century Roman artifact whose dichroic effect, which renders the cup green when lit from the front, and rose when lit from behind, is thought to have been achieved by accidental contamination of the mix with gold and silver nanoparticles dispersed in colloidal form throughout the glass.]
Please allow me a slightly more detailed description of the techniques used in the making of steel and I will leave the chance and coincidence explanation up to you.
People mint a special rock, called iron ore, from the ground, mix it with two other special rocks, limestone and coal, and pour it into a fiery furnace. In the top part of the furnace, the burning of the coal changes the nature of that first special rock, separating it into iron and air.
Meanwhile, in the bottom half, the second special rock, the limestone, traps the impurities and the ashes, turns into slag, and floats on top of the pure metal, which is heavier.
The furnace has a tap at the bottom, through which the molten metal flows out into heavy clay molds. After that, it is mixed with more coal and other metals, allowed to harden, and flattened with a hammer.
It is then reheated until it glows, folded, flattened with a hammer and dipped in cold water, a process repeated several times, and then it is finally heated and cooled again to different temperatures to make it strong but supple.
We are not comfortable with the thought of inexplicable bouts of inspiration visiting people, so we attribute the advancement of civilization to an even less explicable string of good luck.
Maybe we should give muses their due, at least in a metaphoric sense if nothing else.
I am not trying to say that these incredible coincidences result from divine mercy doled upon the chosen to better humankind.
I am just allowing for the possibility that humans have more than one way to ratchet up knowledge, and that this second way of thinking, which differs greatly from reason, works in concert with the latter and makes it possible for our species to evolve over thousands of years instead of hundreds of thousands.
What is revealed truth? A sense, maybe. The sense that allows us to perceive the intricate workings of being in ways we can’t explain, because the explanation would have to fall back upon itself. It would be like trying to explain hearing. Could you describe hearing to an intelligent species that doesn’t have this sense?
Am I trying to say that we can hear the principles of chemistry, for instance, as displayed in our world?
If you want to put it that way. We pull strings from the fabric of existence whenever we notice them just to see where they would lead us, and often we stumble upon interesting and useful things on the way. This is no more of an accident than getting startled by a noise, or feeling happy at the sight of a loved one. We have this way of relating to the world woven into our being, just like we have all the other abilities we take for granted — our senses, our reasoning, our emotions, our capacity to connect.
[The team commented, tongue in cheek, that maybe this extra sense the master is talking about explains our obsession with trying to unravel the knotted skein of divergent ideas that is this manuscript.]
You are asking me if I exclude the possibility that this revealed knowledge was directly inspired by the divine. Not at all. I don’t know enough about what constitutes divine nature to make that assertion. I don’t know what direct communication with it would mean. I don’t know if our structures of understanding can relate to it in ways we can describe. It is possible that our very existence is nothing more than a way of communing with the divine, our way of playing in its giant sandbox of matter and thought.
Does that open the door for hacks and charlatans to lay their hands on reason and manipulate it for their own interests? Who is to say which revelation is valid and which is made up self-serving nonsense?
I am a utilitarian in that respect. If something proves useful, I welcome it; if it doesn’t, I discard it.
What if I’m wrong about this and everything is just a series of random coincidences and happy accidents?
Then we have to congratulate ourselves: our species is the luckiest and most opportunistic group of beings in the universe.
Can I elaborate on the limitations of human perception?
We can’t try to understand things we don’t know exist, and we can’t know that those things exist if we don’t have the tools to perceive them, or if the range of those tools is so gross it doesn’t pick up any of their relevant details.
There is also the problem of seeing things wrong. Our senses and reasoning abilities have evolved to simplify and relate events and perceptions to each other, so we can access them fast and use them in context. We complete partly hidden objects, we assume repetitive actions; we ignore extraneous detail; we fall back on what we already know to infer solutions to new problems. Reality doesn’t really work that way.
Imagine that you live in a projection of reality, and in it, there is something that looks like a circle.
That circle can represent many things: a sphere, a flat disk, a cylinder, a weird and twisted shape whose projection falls on a circle, a random set of points, unrelated to each other, whose only connection is that when they cast their shadow on your world, their projections fall on the circle too.
You can’t make any assumption about what that shape is just from what your senses tell you. A partly hidden shape can have the entire hidden portion missing and the way something looks, so similar to what you already know, may be of no use to you at all. You open a box and see what looks like a scrumptious cake, but when you try to cut a slice from it it falls apart and flows through your fingers like mist. You are conflicted, because you need things to follow the rules, but that doesn’t mean there is something wrong with the cake look alike. You made the assumption it was a cake, and that’s what was wrong. Not an easy thing to live with, for sure.
Why is that?
Because if the thing that looks like cake was something entirely different, it makes you question everything you are sure about, and reality becomes a very scary place.
People are much happier with false knowledge they are certain of than with the realization that everything they thought about reality is now in question.
We feel our reality, like the giant sea anemones sense the shifts in currents. We’re stuck in our spot, in our understanding of the world, and find some comfort in the fact that it looks unchanging.
Above and beyond many things happen. Ships pass on the surface of the ocean, schools of fish move around the bend, rip currents run mere feet away, but it isn’t important to the sea anemone, as long as none of these things touch it.
It can live its whole life without the experience of, let’s say, a cosmetic palette, accidentally dropped into the water at just the right moment, falling into its lap.
How would a sea anemone relate to the reality of the palette, if that happened?
It would assume it was a strange mollusk, an information as misleading as it is useless, but which would allow it to continue living in a familiar world, where every piece has a dedicated sorting box, and where the weird shell is incidental, anyway.
Am I suggesting we are better off with false information about the things that don’t affect our lives? Unfortunately for us we’re not sea anemones.
