Divided by Zero — Shift
A slight change in position, direction, or tendency.
Let’s talk about a quality of existence which escapes the inattentive eye: its movements are not smooth, it advances in jerks and jumps, in sudden shifts, going from one state to another without passing through the stations in between.
This works for gaining understanding and knowledge as well as it does for freezing a pond. Reality doesn’t advance along threads, it takes the stairs.
It stays in a state for a while, no matter how much effort goes into moving it forward, and then it jumps, suddenly and for no particular reason, to the next state, which is not only a change in quality but also different in nature, so different sometimes that we can’t even recognize it as the next logical step in a progression.
It is often easier to recognize the shifts.
They are sudden events, out of the blue, but even when we expect them, they still take us by surprise, because we can’t figure out their timing or the fashion in which they will present themselves to us. We understand them in retrospect, clear as day, but when they move life to a new state we can’t recognize it, for the simple reason we haven’t seen it before.
These shifts are sudden, but subtle, like rip currents at sea, which you only acknowledge after you’ve been caught in them.
Let’s run through an example.
Somebody figures out how to fashion a boat which other people perfect and use it to venture out to sea.
First, they reach the island in the distance, which they could always see but never explore, and then, with emboldened curiosity, they venture into waters unknown, and find more islands, and shores, and cultures, and then, one day, they venture out into the ocean, just to find out what is out there, and discover a whole other continent.
This was a series of small steps in the same direction, not much different from each other, a perfecting of a process, but what people discovered during this process changed humanity’s picture of reality forever, in ways that can’t be undone.
You can’t undiscover a continent, once you’ve seen it.
You can’t unknow a natural law once it made it to your understanding.
The discovery is a sudden, solitary event, but its preparation was an endless series of efforts, all the same and which seemed to yield nothing.
Once humanity advances to a level of progress, it never goes back to the previous one, even in the face of tragedy and devastation.
The level of progress needs to match up to the level of knowledge, like water in communicating vessels. You can’t continue holding a lesser state once you’ve learned the truth.
There are many such moments through our lives, and we don’t pay attention to them: the moment we could read the meaning of those little symbols on a page instead of seeing them as pretty scribbles, the moment we stepped into adulthood, the moment we recognized a life-changing event.
These are all sudden shifts, not smooth progressions, even in the wake of years or decades of preparation.
The ability to read is a sudden gain in knowledge, and once we possess it, we can’t go back to the state in which we were before. If we could remember the earliest times in our lives, we would acknowledge that the same goes for our ability to walk, recognize our mothers, grasp and reach for objects, understand language.
It is the same for the advancement of science, whose concepts usually come in breakthroughs and which, once accepted, change the way we relate to our existence forever.
It is the same for the slight changes in the attributes of a plant or an animal, which also happen suddenly and with no explanation, and which are also irreversible, sometimes to the point where they give birth to different species.
It is the same for changes in the moral code of a community, in the beliefs of what we deem possible, in the understanding of matter.
How do these shifts happen? Sometimes I think they are like throwing darts at a wall so many times that one of them is bound to hit the target eventually, purely by accident. It is also possible that when the facts in front of our eyes blatantly contradict the accepted knowledge we have no choice but to stretch our minds to reach a better level of understanding so that our personal experience fits into a coherent model of reality again.
For instance, let’s go outside and look at this gemstone in the sunshine. Now come back inside and look at it again, in candlelight. Is this a magical gem that looks like an emerald by day, but turns into a ruby by night? After your mind runs in circles around the possibility that this is not one gemstone, but two, and I’m trying to trick you, or that the stone may be enchanted somehow, you will have to consider the possibility that there are gemstones that change color and try to find out why.
You can’t deny the existence of such a gem once you saw it, as did other people, which excludes the possibility you may have imagined things.
You will want badly for this to be just an illusion, the result of a delicate mental state, and explain it away so you can hold on to your reality, which says that all gemstones display only one color, but if that stone consistently changes hues under the same circumstances, you won’t be able to deny the fact that your belief was wrong.
I will spare you the mental torment and explain that this is a color changing stone. Its crystals have formed around metal dust, which sifts the light that goes through it, unravels it into rainbows and erases strands of it; it will erase different colors depending on the light’s quality. By the way, light is not all the same, a fact very obvious to your perception, but which your scientific mind will refuse to accept, because it muddles the clear understanding you think you have about light. This explanation is much worse than the possibility you’re going crazy, or that the stone is some magical object with unusual powers, but you will have to accept it anyway, because it is the truth. From this moment on, everything you thought you knew about gemstones or light is gone.
I showed you something you did not know existed, and it turned your entire world upside down. The problem is not that your theory was wrong, but that it works only in a particular case which involves a much smaller set of objects. Reality is a very big place.
[According to our knowledge alexandrite was first discovered in the Ural Mountains around 1830, over three hundred years after the writing of this manuscript.
We have considered the possibility he is talking about a different color changing gemstone, although the description “emerald by day, ruby by night” is too specific to be random.]
Questions?
Are there any shifts that involve the perception of time?
Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to answer that question, not because I want to keep it a secret, but because it involves too many expansions to the current theories that model your world for the answer to be in any way useful to you.
I guess a short answer to this question would be yes in my version of reality and no in yours.
Where did I get the gemstone? It’s a gift from a friend, a fellow explorer.
Can I give you examples of how reality works in jerks and jumps?
Consider your experience of time. You always live in the present, but a second ago the present was different from what it is right now. You don’t perceive these two instances, which both have been the present, as continuously flowing into each other. Your present is always a still point, a delineation of no dimension between the past and the future. No matter how finely you chop time to anchor yourself into the present moment, you will always feel these points, that have all been your present at some point, as a discrete collection, not as a continuous transition. From any moment to the next you jump, you don’t slide.
You can also think of this in terms of your body. The body you have now differs completely from the one you had when you were four, and will differ completely from the one you will have fifty years from now. I intentionally spread out the gap between these frames of your life to emphasize the difference, so that if you could see all three versions of yourself together you would agree that they are different, but this is a process that happens every moment. Parts of you get discarded and replaced with new, and every time this happens, your body changes to a different one. How big or small that difference is is just a matter of degree. You do not have the same body now you had a second ago. It didn’t smoothly morph into the one you are in right now, the two differ by a number of components you can count.
Can we discuss the variable nature of time and how it works within this concept?
Think about an event from your past, one you remember well, to the last detail. That event covered a few hours, but now when you bring it back to your mind you can see it all in an instant. It is the same information; you have access to all the details, but they are all there for you simultaneously, in the present. I am asking you, which is the real time span this event requires, since in your mind, in the present, this event and the memory of it are the same information. Why does one take several hours and the other only a moment? Because the first had to be experienced in its grainy form, where it moved sequentially from one instance to the next, whereas in the other it is a true continuum, where all the components that made up the event coalesced into a single form.
Is reality not granular at the level of thought then?
If it is, it’s a lot less so. For instance, we can carry on two thought processes independent of each other at the same time. We can still understand the question someone asks of us, or have the memory of an event, or acknowledge that we are hungry, even as we are concentrating on your work, and we don’t need several hours to revisit an event that lasted several hours.
In the world of matter we can’t be both here and somewhere else at the same time.
Even the way the memory presents to our consciousness is of a different essence, one that lacks the sequential processes we can’t avoid when dealing with matter.
This essence doesn’t differentiate between things, emotions and reasoning, it combines words, images and analysis in what I can only call diagrams of thought, reduced to their pure meaning and stripped of anything that would slow them down or burden them unnecessarily.
This is another thing you can’t do with reality — eliminate all the components that are not useful to your task at a particular moment. Reality is all there whether or not you need it to be.
Is thought a superior form of existence then?
Superior to what? It is a different form of organizing information that already exists. Even in dreams and fantasies you can’t conjure up things from outside your sphere of awareness. All that you can think of already exists somewhere in space and in time.
[Is he trying to say that thinking itself is just a map, a scaled replica of external information that already exists?
That all we are doing is to reflect, to resonate with a much larger library of data in the same way a tuner induces its sound into a tube when placed at the correct distance?
Is he trying to say that thought can’t be superior to other forms of reality because it is only mirroring those forms?
That all this intelligent awareness we pride ourselves on is no more sophisticated than the vibration inside a crystal glass?]
Why jumps?
Everything you see is made of atoms.
Matter is a collection of tiny things, hanging on to each other, and its essence is grainy, even in its liquid or gaseous form.
If you can picture the fact that the world is made of tiny balls stacked on top of each other, you can only move a ball at precise distances, which are proportional with the distance between the centers of the balls. You can’t place a ball at half that distance, or one and two-thirds, only in full increments.
I said that knowledge shifts but consciousness is a continuum. This seems to be a contradiction.
Imagine a curve which represents your thought, that breaks at some point and continues at a higher level. Between the two pieces there is a gap and inside that gap there is nothing. It isn’t even ‘nothing’ in the context of your particular curve, it is nothing in a broad sense. You skipped a space, as if you suddenly found yourself inside the house without having to walk through the door.
Why do I say that the states of this step ladder progression are different in nature?
Let’s take the example I gave you earlier, with the color changing gemstone. It changed your map of reality, did it not? Now your reality has light that comes in different flavors, which unravel like poorly spun thread and whose loose strands you can delete with a metal dust eraser. I will say that the nature of this reality is very different from the nature it had before that. Before that light was made of one essence, which was all white and stayed in one piece. It would go through transparent gems so you could notice their color, because that was the role of light, to illuminate things so you could see their colors.
I haven’t even brought up your role in this whole spectacle, in which you are so much more than an uninvolved observer, but I think we chopped reality fine enough already.
