Uno and Nula
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away called Numero, on a lonely interstellar planet called Digit, lived an alien called Uno.
Uno’s birth was shrouded in mystery. Legend goes that the architect of the cosmos once in an utterly confused state uttered: “I think therefore I am”. These words created a prophetic irritation in the architect’s nose resulting in a divine sneeze that wrapped space-time – condensing dark matter and manifesting Uno on the planet Digit. Digit was a sub-brown dwarf without a solar system. But the planet’s sky was studded with far away galaxies and star constellations that brought in abundance of stellar light.
Uno was a thinker. Waves of thought continuously passed through him in sleepless time as he walked the barren grey landscape of Digit. He would often sit on a stone, with hands on his chin and drooping head, and think. He thought of geometries, of forms, and of architectures. He would then gather stones and rock formations and create structures through arrangements and curving using his mind and body. Rocks and dust would self-assemble at the power of his thought and he would make fine adjustments using tools that he created out of minerals and stones. Uno thought and worked endlessly, timelessly, without fatigue, without emotions… but suddenly once, something new and strange emerged and altered Uno. While sitting on his rock one day and working on his thinking as usual, he fell asleep and became immersed in a dream.
In the dream, Uno flew through the cosmos and came face to face with a black hole in which he was ever so slowly sucked in, deconvoluted from memory, and disintegrated into elements. Within the black hole he was reassembled, and he emerged into a parallel world as a poem in the diary of a young materials scientist on Earth. It read ~
As I entered the womb of death
Suspended in a velvet black, Time stood sill,
Until
A spark akin a lover’s touch propelled me
At quantum velocity
Through snow white dwarfs, pulsars, stars and spiral galaxies,
And delivered me on an azure dot, A mystique singularity.
As I nose-dived into the unknown, past clouds with pastel shades,
I became a black winged albatross grazing the ocean waves.
I glided along the bursting foam,
My shadow a dance in shape,
Three comrades in harmony, Wind, Surf and Self.
The aroma of sun, salt and phosphorous, caressing my outstretched wings,
Gently morphed into sinew, sweat and speed.
A stallion I was piercing the morning breeze with plumes of sirocco on my hooves ..power grace and ease. When I crossed dunes of sand and came to a flat beach,
My gallop gently became a strut,
Then bare footsteps begin.
A man I was with an elegant stride, Subtly balanced yet a prisoner of pride.
A distant fragrance allured me towards a forest of ancient trees,
And miles I walked a rustic path while doe eyes watched and blackbirds cooed in harmony.
Suddenly, like a charmers spell appeared from nowhere,
A jutting wall of mountain range, snow clad still and bare.
In front of it was a prairie with a central tree of life,
Laden with flowers of pristine white,
She was the sierra’s angel child.
As I entered the prairie, Wild flowers covered my feet.
Under the twilight sky Suspended in a velvet light Time stood still,
Until,
Tears flooded, fear dissolved and thoughts lost their inhibition,
I sat beneath the tree, saw my ancient face and became liberation.
Dr. Ubuntu Ramanujan woke up calmly from Uno’s dream.
He felt a subtle yet profoundly blissful joy within as he reflected upon every minute detail of his dream that he remembered so vividly. As he looked outside through a gap in the sheer curtains of his bedroom window at the moonlit sky – he smiled. The small holographic clock that popped up midair sensing him awake, displayed exactly 3:00AM. Beside him his girlfriend Philomela was sleeping peacefully, undisturbed. Ubuntu marveled at her angelic beauty for a timeless minute and turned his attention outside into the woods. It was early summer of 2040. The night sky was crystal clear- the star-studded tapestry adorned by the milky way rising like a gigantic plume was a spectacle to behold. The recent global restrictions on artificial lights, after introduction of tunable night vision technologies was celebrated as a victory of science for humanity and the planet. Along with the depleting greenhouse gases and vanishing atmospheric pollutants, absence of light pollution had a profound social effect. Nights became meditative, quiet, and contemplative.
Ubuntu remembered a recent letter that Philomela had written to him. He had carefully saved it to be read at an opportune moment. He reached for his bedside cabinet, took out the small folded white paper napkin from its envelope and was enthralled to find a short poem in it. It was called Nula’s Song. It read…
Nula’s Song ~
On the seventh night of Genesis,
While the Boss hooped her hula,
A divine yawn created dawn,
And a girl child called Nula.
At her every step a flower bloomed,
With every blink a star.
Every puppy, every kitten, every little bug,
Would hunger strike and agitate, until they got her hug.
At every tickle, every giggle, every wiggle of her bum,
With every rule that she would break,
A bird would jazz-a-hum.
Ubuntu felt a raising warmth of intense emotion in his body. An epiphany about a family with a little girl child glided his mind’s eye from frame to frame reminiscing his relationship with Philomela and his affectionate childhood with his deeply compassionate mother. A still timeless space surrounded him which had been a refuge for his creative potential since his teenage years. He got up from bed, slipped on his sandals and retreated to his study. His mind was suffused in monochrome with the words – Nula and Uno. Zero and One.
Ubuntu had first heard the story of Zero from his Indian grampaa when he was in high school. In a stream of consciousness, the story unfolded again correlated with an inquiry on memory and function in living matter. Ubuntu started jotting down his thoughts in his journal. He wrote ~
Grampa’s Zero
A unique contribution of the Indian approach to defining reality is the concept of an independent exclusive and objective observer. Early experimentalists who questioned the nature of reality and the consequent concept of the self, not only identified the existence of such an observer, but also went ahead to meticulously study, and subsequently disseminate the process and the psychosomatic consequences of the study.
The primary inquiry was: What is reality?
A question and an answer are the two faces of Janus- existing simultaneously yet separated by logic. The logical journey from the question to the answer has been cherished by analytical minds, leaving behind a legacy of robust theories and models. Anyone with the unique question would then follow the modeled journey and end up at the unique destination – the answer.
The question of reality was tested by logic and conclusively answered by the model: Reality appears as a dynamic perception within the self.
It means that at this moment- I receive information through my senses and the ones that I register and recognize becomes my reality and this reality continuously alters.
The consequential question was: Who is this I – this self that perceives this dynamic reality?
The answer to this question was: I am where my awareness is.
This seemingly simple and straightforward answer opened a Pandora’s box and spawned a plethora of philosophical models expressed through general social behavior for centuries to follow. Most interestingly, this answer when experimentally extrapolated to their extremes by those adventurous minds who sought the unknown, resulted in a conclusive postulate that was interestingly a psychological contradiction: I am a simultaneous superposition of everything, something and nothing. The experimental technique that was used to arrive at this conclusion was to simply observe the thought. It was noted that thoughts were constructed by language and thus they could be clearly observed by listening to the mind. This experiment led to:
1. A clear identification of the mind as a programmable multidimensional continuum within which clouds of identity and character form the concept of the psychological self that associates with a body. When awareness assumes this identity, the self is perceived to be a psychometric something with a life story, and the dynamism of this something is perceived as time.
2. A clear identification of an independent, exclusive, and objective observer to which the mind and all physical forms appears and dissolves.
3. When awareness includes the observer as well as the body-mind psychometric organism, reality appears as an unfragmented continuum. Reality in this case is indistinguishable from the self that is perceived as everything within which somethings arise and dissolves like waves in an ocean.
4. When awareness completely withdraws and identifies with the observer, the self is perceived to be without any character and is experienced as nothing ….and the reality of forms appear to it as a dynamic purposeless illusion.
Psychosomatically the three states of something, everything and nothing have been described by those who experienced them to be powerful states of ego, love, and peace. The observer was recognized as a global reference but unlike logical references it did not have a frame and was the void itself. However, to consider its existence as a reference was essential for a direct and undivided experience and understanding of reality. This void… this nothingness was represented by the symbol zero which transformed and empowered mathematics to its holistic potential.
Ubuntu paused for a minute and again a deep silence engulfed him. Within it he could hear his ears buzzing with a background static syncopated by the beat of his heart. He sat quietly on his Thonet rocking chair and observed as within his meditative stillness a new realization of the interconnectedness of all things emerged as an epiphany and assembled into a logical form.
On the planet Digit, Uno’s eyelids opened softly. His body had mutated during his dream. In an instance he experienced the entire life story of Dr. Ubuntu Ramanujan and for the first time he experienced an emotion that arose from his navel and rose to his chest as sorrow. The first drop of water on Digit emerged from his solitary eye and glided down on the brown gravel. Uno imagined an unseen flower and a plant sprouted from where the drop had landed. Flowers bloomed as tears drops flooded in his eye.
Digit was about to experience its first spring.
A Technoyogi's Notebook 