On Connectedness--DNA, Language, Potential

It is known that each individual cell in the human body contains the entire genetic code for the organism. At the same time, our inherited genetic code is a form of collective memory, known to us primitively as instinct, to which we may either add our own mutations in the form of individual traumas and excesses or merely accept those which the angel of history delivers to us. In a certain sense, the individual has a certain capacity, manifest or not, to transmit the message of all of humanity and all of creation, from whence it arose, in a single breath. The message itself suffers under the confines of symbolic language, which, just as with our DNA, we inherit as the mutated grunts and groans of earlier species—copies with no recourse to an original. Our bodies and our symbolisms move toward evolutionary perfection, yet we are always painfully aware that even the Goethe's and Beethoven's of the world are still just Nth digits of Pi, paling in comparison to what infinity has to offer.

The principle affliction of mankind is neither its mortality nor its insatiable appetite for power, but its inability to connect with itself and the universe around it. It fancies itself alone in the cosmos, sometimes with, sometimes without an equally individual and lonely creator. Of all my proposals in this essay, perhaps the most controversial is the idea that our seeming inability to connect with others will be lessened to the degree that we are able to perceive and know our Others in new ways.

If indeed we as humans share with insects, snakes, sharks, bats, and dogs a common ancestor, then it follows that it is within our potential to develop as least as well as these creatures those senses which have been favored in their evolution and apparently disfavored in our own. A few of the most commonly known examples: many insects can see ultraviolet light and some are suspected of seeing infrared, sharks are able to sense electric charges and can also navigate through magnetic orientation, eels may electrocute their prey, bats navigate with sonar. Most recently, dogs have been shown to be able to detect cancer in humans, either by smell or by some other as yet undefined sensory capability. The examples are predictably numerous. Further, it seems entirely possible that other senses which are not known to exist innately in any living creature, such as sensitivity to radio or microwaves, may at some point occur as mutations along our genetic path.

The human brain is infinitely more complex than that of a butterfly, yet we are baffled by its ability to see ultraviolet as just another color. How difficult could it really be for us to direct our evolution in such a way as to favor the ability to distinguish this color? Imagine how much closer we could draw together were we able to perceive each other in ways never before imagined? What if you could not only see me in a new color spectrum, but could also feel the magnetic field around my body, the specific gravity that pulls us together and the electric currents generated in my brain and in my muscular movements? What if you were even able to use your own electrosensitivity to trace the synaptic firing in my brain and willfully reproduce it in your own brain, thereby thinking as I think and feeling as I feel? The more you are able to perceive me, the more you know me, the more you see that we are connected in countless ways, the more fully you will be able appreciate my otherness and love me. And I you.

The development of consciousness must not be simply a series of technological advances. In fact, technological developments which increase our ability to detect those phenomena which remain undetectable to our individual brains have done seemingly little to decrease human isolation, mainly because they are controlled by governments, corporations, and ultimately, philosophies which contemn the individual subject as such. Night vision goggles are used for warfare. Radio mostly serves up G-rated commercials and artless music, metal detectors are used to screen air passengers for bombs. One sure way for the individual to side-step the established systems of control would be to develop as best s/he can the ability to perceive the universe, if not directly, then at least through the mediations of his or her own perceptive capabilities.

I suspect that the sensory abilities of our "animal" cousins are not lost to human DNA lines completely, just as countless inessential and even harmful recessive genes survive by riding along with essential ones in the caravan of our genetic history. These abilities manifest themselves, on occasion, in the person of the psychic, the lunatic, the shaman, the poet, but often it is with everyday people whose quotidian experience escapes the focus of the news-hungry public. In the same way that the vastness of daily experience is quashed by the exquisite filtering power of the brain, those people to whom we might connect and from whom we might learn to perceive ourselves and others are all around us, in the checkout line, the unemployment line, at the bar and in the brothel. The universe presents us with myriad opportunities and signs, yet they remain in our perceptual blind spots, they appear as white noise, which must first be noticed to be decoded, in the same way that a dream has first to be recognized as such before it can be ridden like chariot into the margins of the mind. Yet just when our dream-chariot seems to arrive at the mind's outer limits, the last digit of Pi, the margins unfold yet again, adding to the origamic beauty of eternity.

The mind is lustfully eating its fill, overwhelmed by an orgy of infinite possibilities, yet the body yearns for the here and now, for FINITE action. But what action is worthy of the thought which provoked it? Perhaps an act of love, and act of life, an absurd act, an unpredictable act. If I lie down on the ground and kiss the earth, if I copulate with the sand on the beach, I may well be arrested or scorned as a lunatic, yet my act is an act of love—it is an act of life. It is the first act, the original. From it may evolve a new world order, a new language, a new divergence in the path of humanity. If the single cell contains not only the code for the entire being, but also the history of the entire universe, then the old adage must be true: "Whoever saves one life, it is as if he saved the entire world."

Pi and the Eternal

π and the Eternal
I was recently on a flight home from Dallas when I started seeing things, familiar things that I had seen dozens of times before, more profoundly than I ever had. In the endless rolling cloud-mountains and cloud-caves, cloud-valleys and cloud-plains, I recognized the patterns of the landscape which framed my youth, and contemplated the much larger underwater mountain ranges, caves, valleys and plains which the casual boater sails above without ever pondering the abyss below. In the sky, the distance between traffic is measured in miles, and it is easy to feel close to the variation and repetition of eternity’s music, as if you could throw yourself from the airplane directly into God’s waiting arms.

As night overpowered the day, the cities and towns which I saw through the microscopic lens of a window seat appeared as naked beasts, as parasitic organisms whose tentacles were limited only by the municipalities’ willingness to pay the power company. Their interstate arteries pulsated with slow-moving, microscopic, glowing white blood cells, which I knew to be vehicular traffic. Yet I found it unimaginable that each of these cells contained within it at least one, possibly more sub-cellular particles, which I knew to be human beings, each of which contained within itself the genetic code for the entire organism known as the city at night. The nighttime amoeba operates in a time frame much different from that of its component particles. It takes decades, sometimes centuries, to swallow other, nearby amoebae. Accelerated to the pace of the sub-cellular particles, the passing of day and night must occur to the amoebae as in incessant strobe light.

Back on the ground, I imagine that I’m inside the amoeba, but I realize quickly that my scale is all wrong. The amoeba is actually nothing more than a fungus, growing slowly upon the body of its host, a round, single-celled organism floating through water-space, pulled by gravity into a love-dance with a far superior cell called the sun—it is not the sun’s only suitor, but like its fellows, it will eventually be consumed in penetration of its lover. The offspring of this final rendezvous may indeed be the genesis of yet another cell, just as the cell we call the moon still carries the DNA of its parent, Earth. The fungus isn’t concerned about the final rendezvous—it knows its host will be depleted of life long before consummation.

It is known that the volume of an atom is occupied almost exclusively by nothing at all; that is to say, by space. Thus, the spatial relationship between the nucleus and the electrons in an atom is analogous to that between the sun and the outer planets in the solar system, which makes up, in a certain sense, a single atom with nine electrons. What compound is it that is comprised, at least partially, of that atom which is our solar system? Is it a liquid, solid, gas, or does it take some yet unknown form? Is it perhaps part of an infinitely larger gasoline molecule, which is in turn being burnt by some beings whose presence is so much bigger than the known universe that it eclipses our ability to imagine or detect it?

I am starting to feel infinity--I’m inside it and it’s inside me. Yet it is outside of space, since space is measured as distance between objects, and we still don’t know what object our solar-system-atom is helping to build—how can we even begin to measure distances? Infinity exists within non-time--we have to live a trillion lifetimes to see just a single one of its days. The higher being experiences this day as a constant, dim light, which only upon extreme deceleration is revealed as a strobe of sunrises and sunsets. I feel infinity and eternity; it’s all around me, out there in the universe, inside my breast. I had no words for it, until now.

The universe brought me to Pi, that magical number which describes the relationship between the circumference and diameter of a circle. Mathematically and ontologically, Pi is both irrational and transcendental. It is the concubine of the supreme giver of the law, Gravity, which demands reverence in the form of orbits. Whatever being is burning the gasoline molecule that our solar system helps to build may not care about the sub-sub-sub-atomic particles called humans which make up the fungus on the cell called earth, but it is doubtlessly aware of Pi’s ubiquity, even if it doesn’t make such a big deal of it as I do.

As an irrational number, Pi cannot be arrived at by dividing or multiplying finite numbers or equations. Its decimal portion goes on forever, without ever repeating itself. It defies all patterns and predictions, and laughs out loud at those who try to contain or possess it. Within the first 2 million digits of Pi, there is approximately a 65% chance that any given 10-digit sequence will be contained somewhere in the string. But what are 2 million digits in the face of eternity? Mathematically, there is a 100% probability that ANY sequence of numbers of ANY length is contained in Pi, since Pi is infinitely large. This is not an illusion. It is an obvious fact—one whose contemplation opens the floodgates of possibility. But we could go further and be no less correct: the DNA code of every human being, when reduced to digits, is contained within Pi, as is the digital text of every book that has ever been written or ever will be written.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s even more somber news for the lovers of rationality, both mathematical and philosophical: Pi isn’t unique among numbers. There are infinitely many other irrational numbers out there, and there are also lots of other transcendental numbers (an uncountable number of them, to be exact). So there you have it—a single, discreet number contains the entire universe, and it’s only one of an infinite number of “equally” infinite numbers! How quickly our idolized systems of language fail us in the face of the eternal!

Naturally, once we re-discover our high-school pal named Pi, we want to know what we can do about it. For the revolutionaries among you, I have some unfortunate news: this information is not actionable. Nor is it a plot of the ruling classes or their lackeys within academia. It doesn’t care about race, class, gender, imperialism, hunger, love, or sex. It doesn’t care if we annihilate ourselves or direct our evolution intelligently. Pi isn’t active, it simply is. It’s not a concept or a percept; it has no values except its own. It’s not a construct of our number system—it simply reveals itself through the decimal system, as it does through all other number systems that we know of. It contains within its digital song all the good and all the evil of the universe and makes a joke of their opposition. It promises neither salvation nor damnation. It is neither benevolent nor jealous. Its invitation is open. I would invite you to join me inside, but you’re already here.