The Beauty of a Point

I have spent a good amount of time thinking tonight. This book just inspires reflection on my part. I spent a long time thinking on the space between when a photon hits my eye and my seeing. I did not say time and I did not say distance, I said space. It is not a physical space that I am talking about it is the separation between science and emotion. And where those two connect. Much of Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig has to do with that junction. It is more than the junction between science and emotion, many things meet at this point, two in particular I want to focus on, the future and the past. The “present” in which you can never truly live because it is not there. It is always just out of reach. This point is where it seems that all my indefinables exist; Love, God, Truth, Reality, and so on. I can not define them because I can not reach them. And that is exactly their propose. There is a beauty to the fact that we call this point between future and past the present. It is a gift. A gift that allows for the world to perpetuate itself. It is where the mystical happens. It is where rules do not matter and where the rules come from.

This point is the point that truly baffles the human mind. In physics there is such thing as a light cone. To those of you that are not into math, it would be two cones placed point to point. Along the axis of this cone is time (or space but then it would not be a light cone it would be… something else). This light cone helps physicist to say what is possible to describe in the past and in the future. And it all comes together into the reality at that point that the future and past touch. I find this interesting not because of the physics but because philosophy has created the same thing. A point that the past and future meet. The difference is that philosophers have realized that all realization occurs slightly behind reality and that point that can never be reached.

This point…this indefinable point that is always right in front of use but just out of reach, like a carrot on a stick, it is reality. The problem is that we can not exist in reality because nothing can exist in a point. But like the Big Bang, everything can come from a point. Perhaps the origin of this universe where, God put his finger into the nothingness and everything formed, perhaps this moment… this point is not in the past but just out of reach in the true present. God’s present. God’s gift. One of many.