After reading this item, it reminded me of when I was taking a programming course in college. On relatively simply program assignments, a class of thirty-five would have nearly as many programs of about the same number of lines. The variations were the interest.
x = y/z where y = 3 and z = 12. That x = 4 is true both in the way my mind finds the solution and in the algebraic form—but my mind does not use the algebraic, nor does it rely on memorization (as it did when I was eight years old). My mind will hold “four” in an instant after some one tells me to get a third of the dozen eggs before me. In fact, my hand may well pick up four eggs from a carton without counting or thinking of the word, “four.”
I did not always do this, of course, but a third part of twelve is now intuitive.
Emotionally and spiritually, the intuitive answers begin to outweigh the thoughtful reasoning in interpersonal relationships just as grabbing four eggs when asked to obtain a “third of a dozen” no longer involves any math -- at all. The same is true in spiritual matters. I have learned from a life-long and disciplined experience with the spiritual, and my soul's intuition serves me well.
A long story would probably help connect that to what follows, but it is too long a story and I trust intuition will kick in for the reader, here:
Last night, I watched the “Mythbusters” proving that two objects of equal mass and traveling at equal speeds in opposite directions is the equivalent of either moving object hitting an immovable object at the same speed. Of course. The argument centered upon two similar cars at 50 mph having a head-on collision, and some, erroneously, assumed that the result was the same as a single car impacting an immovable object at 100 mph.
Before they began an experiment, my mind had formulated, “No! To get the impact of a 100 mph, the head on collision between two vehicles traveling, head on, at 50 miles per hour, would require that the other object would need to have an infinite mass." Math was useless because infinity was one of the factors.
Then the logic kicked in:
To have infinite mass would mean that such an object would be stationary, by definition, and any measured speed would be relative to an arbitrary and moving point of reference. The result is that the only way to get a 100 mph collision from two moving objects when one is limited to half that speed is to have the other be traveling faster than 50 mph, and the amount of speed over 50 mph would be dependant upon the mass of the faster object. While true, that is not what the experimenters were out to show.
I changed the channel.
But then, I was also thinking of the concept of zero-point energy in a vacuum, and the statement “Only if the opposing team can prove that the material world of our perceptions is real, and not an hallucination, do they earn their right to have their arguments considered on their merits” (see “kritik”). Both were thoughts triggered by reading blogs (BoingBoing and Metafilter), and both had spiritual consequences for me—at an intuitive level.
My very first blog entry, here, still haunts me with the fact that it means something. I am referring to both first blog entries: The painting of the Missionary’s Report (which was originally an old myspace entry), and the entry first written for this blog—a memory of a crop duster when I was very young sitting in a place which would become known to me as a place where spiritual reality met material reality.
I still have not expanded on that crop duster experience. There is more to it, and I have an entry concerning that place next to be published here.
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