The Shape(ing) of Life
Perhaps I’m a little late to this party, but apparently the flat earth theory is making a comeback in contemporary times. Even sports stars, celebrities, and people who are famous for having pleasant looking human bodies are jumping on the flat earth boat (I hope they don’t sail too far though or they might fall off!).
Could the theory that the planet we inhabit is a giant sphere spinning around a fiery sphere be the biggest lie we have been taught as humans? I’m not convinced (yet) that is it, however what really draws me to the flat earth theory, and the following this theory is getting, is the idea of illusion. What really defines our reality? What is an illusion? Well, everything really.
“Consider the opposite scenario...Imagine that our pulse, instead of speeding up, were to beat a thousand times slower than its normal rate. If we assume the same amount of sensory experience per beat, then the life time of such a person would reach a ‘ripe old age’ at approximately 80,000 years. A year would seem like 8.75 hours. We would lose our ability to watch ice melt, to feel earthquakes...We would see mountain ranges rise and fall but overlook the lives of ladybugs.
Flowers would be lost on us; only trees would make an impression. The sun might leave a tail in the sky like that of a comet or a cannonball. Now multiply this life a thousand more times, to produce a man living 80 millions year but having just 31.5 heartbeats and 189 perceptions in one Earth year. The sun would cease to appear as a discrete circle and would instead appear as a glowing solar elliptic, dimmer in winter. For ten pulse beats of the year Earth would be green, then white for ten more; snow would melt in a heartbeat and a half.” - Alan Burdick, Why Times Flies
All information comes to us through a filter. The filter, is our beliefs. Our beliefs influence the way we perceive the world, and how we perceive the world is our reality.
“And then, in this wearisome nowhere, all of a sudden,
the ineffable spot where the pure too little
incomprehensibly changes, veering
into that empty too-much ?
Where the many-digited sum
solves into zero ?” - Rainer Maria Rilke
The first time I read this passage in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Fifth Elegy, I was blown away. These few words quickly dissolved many perceptions I had about reality. A reality that I thought, at the time, did not solve into zero. Solve into zero? What does that even mean? Everything solves into nothing? But zero isn’t nothing, it’s still zero. Below zero are negative numbers, and above it, positive numbers. So, does the many-digited sum of life solve then, into the zero of both positive and negative? Of light and dark? Of love and fear, combined into one, balanced equally, in the ineffable spot of eternity?
Letting go of blame and ego, taking control of ones life by realizing that you know enough to know that you know nothing, is the beginning to dissolving the veils of illusion.
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Now that it seems the flat earth theory has found a revival, it’s no wonder there is so much turmoil and unrest here on earth. We can even decided as a whole what shape we live on. However, whether earth is a flat disc, or a sphere shouldn’t really be the concern, as either way, it’s the only place for life that we have. Thinking in terms of a more cohesive disc or sphere, where all life is connected, all actions have a reaction, and that this reality is an illusion. The point of this life is to remember what the truth really is. Even if that truth is, an equation that solves into zero.
In the mean time, a small update on my herb garden, which thankfully in the time scale I live, I am able to perceive the growth of these time plants.
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Reading - The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
Listening - Death Song by The Black Angeles
Watching - Cosmos: A Timespace Odyssey
