19 Dec 2008 @ 09:42, by John Grieve
Cosmic Egg, Cosmic Onion
It is time to stop being outsiders looking in, aliens in a place which is our own, alienated people who don’t belong, fragmented beings seeing things with a fragmented consciousness and awareness. One way we can deal with these problems is to start looking around from the inside, being comfortable with ourselves and the world, constructing a worldview where we are insiders rather than outsiders.
In his book “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” David Bohm looks at the situation instigated by the creation of a grid which we put in front of our eyes and consciousness and see things “over there”, separate and alien. This is the case, he suggests, with Descartes’ co-ordinate system and also, going further back, with the Euclidean geometry project itself. In passing, he suggests that herein lies the mystery and solution of Zeno’s paradoxes. In slightly different language and terms I will try to convey my understanding of what he is getting at. A line between A and B is finite but the minute we try to measure it with a number system we encounter problems that lead to contradictions. The minute we try to measure a finite length with numbers we create a fractal, something where finite and infinite co-exist because between any two points on a line an infinite number of quantities exist, which is what Zeno’s paradoxes are all about. This is my interpretation of what Bohm says when he hints that he has solved Zeno’s paradoxes.
And indeed, as we know from the Differential and Integral Calculus, this Cartesian system does not like infinities. You cannot integrate or differentiate across discontinuities. The hidden bugbear of this alienated Cartesian system, despite its successes of the past three centuries, is infinitude.
The Cartesian project, like the creation of 3-D perspective which happened earlier, in the Italian Renaissance, are signs that a certain split in consciousness, in awareness, was descending on the Western mind. Other evidence of this is the Mind/Body split and dualism also associated with the name of Descartes.
Now is the time to heal this split. How to do it? By taking the grid away; by taking the graduated quantities also. One way we can do this is suggested by Chaos theory which isn’t very interested in grids and gradations, but is rather more interested in maps and scales of self-similarity. In Chaos theory infinities are no longer seen as a problem but as something inherent in the fractal vision which can easily be dealt with.
Personally, I believe that the ancient view of a cosmic egg, or the more modern idea of a cosmic onion, both fractal, are very near to the truth. I also believe that the so-called space-time continuum is an alienated view that misses a lot and does not exist. It seems to me that the reality we are in is the inside of a cosmic entity, such as those just mentioned, and that at the centre of each whirling fractal at smaller and smaller scales lie infinities. In other words the inside of this cosmic entity is discontinuous, riddled with an infinity of holes rather like a Sierpinski gasket. Infinity is no longer something that can be ignored.
Moving inside and looking around and exploring is the first step to becoming Insiders, and at home in the Cosmos.
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