Skip to main content

Giants turning into Windmills


I knew someone who believed that in Rama’s time (if there ever was such a space-time) people were nine meters tall. He also thought that the loquacious snake that talked to Eve in her lost paradise was a mere figment of a poet’s imagination. As a matter of fact there are, full groups, sects, churches and assemblies that would support the literal meaning of one of these myths (usually denying the other). It is difficult to see our beliefs as a myth, easy those of others.


  What is there? I mean it in its more general sense, what is there in the universe?, or in front of us? The basic question of ontology will remain a continuous engine of delusions and misunderstandings as long as we hold our naïve conceptions of myth. Giants turn into windmills and these into power generators, machines that deal with electrons, or shall we say fermions of the lepton kind?, or what myth shall we use to express our ignorance?, or is it knowledge? The thinnest razor’s edge separates both, a shade-like filament projected over our minds by the same mysterious object in different moments of our fuzzy and presumptuous history.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...

Ritual, Scientific Experiment and Truth

 Human rituals have their roots in animal behavior, and the animal pattern has its roots in the need for repetition of living organisms, in the cyclical structure of physiological actions. At the human level, ritual behavior involves a delimitation of space and time, as well as a different meaning of both with respect to the spaces and times of everyday experience. From the ritual ceremonies of cold societies, we observe the care and thoroughness of the shaman to determine with precision the spaces, times and elements that intervene in the rite. Sacred space delimits the world, not only as a place of action, but also the scope of meaning of the things contained in that space. It is a space loaded with meaning: there is an order in things. Time itself acquires its meaning in relation to this order of things, and cyclically closes the space in the “tempo” of the rite, a tempo that is a symbol of the tempo of the World. What is not in the rite or is not referable to the rite has no re...

Metalanguages are formal metaphors

  In a logic class, the professor tells his students: "Yesterday, while talking with my Sufi gardener about happiness, we ended up talking about metalanguages, because he said that orchids are 'chambers where light plays between amorous encounters.' I told him: 'You have to be a poet to talk about poetry.' He replied: 'You just have to be human.'" In what way can we say that my gardener is proposing that every metalanguage is a formalized metaphor for its object language and what would be the metaphor for arithmetical addition? Furthermore” -he asks-how does this little narrative show that Kurt Gödel was a Platonist? One student answers: “The gardener uses orchids as a metaphor for biological reproduction, and from this he makes a second-order metaphor at the human level, calling reproduction a loving encounter. The gardener is a Sufi; in Sufi ontology, the word 'encounter' is used as equivalent to 'existence,' a double meaning (Wujud)....