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Zero in Time.......

Zero, A Point of Origin, From Out Of The Blue

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....9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0...

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During the course of any day,

A variety of thought flows through my 'way'.

As I view the world from my vantage point:

My family, friends, coworkers;

All of the activities of my day.

This causes thought to bounce around,

And then my 'Point Of View' comes out to play,

This 'point of view' is really me,

'It' looks at more than I can see,

Knows more about the world

Than eye alone could ever see.

One day when thoughts about a book I'd read,

Crept up from deep within my head,

I asked a question: "Zero is an abstraction?

That makes no sense to me.

Zero is a number, but not like 1 or 2 or 3.

Those numbers represent a 'thing'.

How can a number be a 'no thing?"

And then "It" answered me!

"In counting and in calculating,

You must make a start.

Zero marks the 'point' where you depart.

The 'point of origin' you might say.

When 'zero' is behind then you've begun.

You're on your way from 'no thing',

And moving on to 1.

This small rhyme I give to you,

As 'It' passed through to me.

Answers to questions

From out of the blue,

In words and pictures,

From 'It's' remarkable brew.

The book that triggered the thought about 'abstraction' was The Imagined World by June Goodfield.

I had not thought about 'zero' until I'd read the book in which a 9 years old girl wondered to herself about multiplying by zero.

I don't write poetry, and I didn't write this one, it just came out of my hand one day at work utterly spontaneously. My hand wrote it; obviously it came from somewhere in my mind/brain/body.

My hand reached for a pencil and paper then wrote this poem down without pausing or hesitating at any point. After it was written I read it, quite amazed and highly interested because so many ideas came to mind immediately, concerning 'points of origin'. One in particular had nothing to do with mathematics, it had to do with Time itself and a nontangible point in experience, perhaps beginning with a state of ignorance then a sense of 'gaining' something which would be '1'.

What a trivial seeming idea that Zero is a point of origin of experience; a marker for a new change that is nonmathematical but possible because the idea of mathematics has been accepted!

One day at work what I'd read came into my mind because I had to write a poem, and I'd never written a poem before.

I was required to write a poem then discuss how I'd written it to a Toastmaster's Group I'd joined but I was thinking about skipping the meeting because I'd not written a poem. The incident in the book came into my thought and I wondered to myself, exactly what the young girl could have been thinking when the idea that 'zero is an abstraction' occurred to her.

The year was 1986 as best I can remember that I first read The Imagine World by June Goodfield. It's about a young woman whose lack of prior knowledge caused her to recognize a fact about thymus gland cells that nobody had ever paid attention to although what she saw was right in front of everyone. (There were empty spaces in them and everyone who had studied them accepted them as normal) Because she had no preconceived notions about what was'normal' in mouse thymus glands, she caught a glimmer of possibility and began to question what had been accepted as normal.

The words that I read on the jacket of that book, were already in my mind, dimly sense as words, but I recognized distinctly, the words on the jacket matched exactly word for word with unspoken 'thought content'. I thought nothing about this, but I remembered it later.

Anna Brito in the book,was about 9 years old trying to understand multiplying by zero when the idea that 'zero is an abstraction' became clear to her. I had wondered to myself what she meant. It had always puzzled me that 1 apple times 1 apple = 1, and 1 apple times 0 apples = 0.

I had my own reason for taking the Toastmaster class: I had become aware that I'd lost personal volition and this condition had bothered me when I became aware that loss of volition included words coming out of my mouth thatdid not seem to be my own words. There was a terrible personal situation in which this fairly sudden loss of control over what I said really became obvious. I felt helpless but I did not realize at that point I was speechless, inarticulate and unable to speak about, or from the level of mind that had begun to 'watch and listen' to what my body was doing.

Every word, every action that my body did seemed to be observable to me in a new way and I had difficulty speaking predictably. It was not possible to say what I intended to say and I could see that words coming from my mouth were not what I intended to say, although this circumstance had not always been my 'normal'. This change had begun so gradually. It was several years after 1984 that I realized I was having to 'search for words', to really have to 'reach' for them, struggle to capture the word I needed, and hold it in mind long enough to write it down. Eventually I saw myself hesitating, stuttering the way I'd observed some toddlers do yet I was 57 years old.

The idea about how a certain birth inserted '0' into Time, creating a Cartesian like graph in mental space came to mind, But the idea itself had begun to build when I finished a book, The Lord Of Thought by Dougall and Emmett. It was not a new book. The authors intent in the book was to identify what was different in the life of Jesus. After I'd finished the book, I had a kind of mental event occur that had happened a few times in the past: very few times. A thought bundle occurred that caused me to realize the authors had not mentioned the most important details about that particular life: the effect of that life in Time, had marked a point of beginning, a point of origin in Time. But a long string of information from other books I'd read were essential because the idea would not have occurred to me without the foundation formed frombooks I'd read and experiences I'd had in my actual life.

Prior to reading THAT book, I'd joined a Personal Communication Class and read in it that what we were going to learn had been written in the oldest known documents, the Kagemni fragments, which were 4500 years old.. The teacher said that 4 of the most important facts about personal communication that we were going to learn had been in the fragments.

That 'bit of information ' caused me to wonder why I was just now going to learn that information. After wondering about how old the information was, and impulse paused to calculate how many seconds has passed between 4500 BC and 1991 AD.

Why would that occur to me? Another event had happened that caused me to notice a level of Time I'd not thought about previously: In 1989 I'd gotten a printout of the news of the day, month and year I had been born when I was in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry. Printout of news of birthyear 1932 It contained the information that I'd been alive for 20, 956 days. It had never occurred to me that I could calculate the number of days I'd been alive! How odd I thought! Then an old habit I'd had, (which at that point I didn't realize was due to an something I'd learned from an impulse, not from person) caused me to become aware of 256, since this habit 'adds numbers across and ignores 9's because they don't change anything, in the 20, 956 days I'd been alive. (I did not look for nor search for this information, that 256 was the numerical content, it just came into focus at that point.) Patterns in number.htm

The point is that I, personally did not think about such ideas in 1986 when I wrote this poem, or rather when it wrote itself automatically . Every 'bit of information' came forth automatically, and in trying to write about it I realize there was a long string of experience and books I'd read that would be necessary to write about before anyone else could understand what happened.

Anna Brito, in the book had been told by her teacher to 'think about multiplication by zero', which puzzled her very much. Finally she thought about zero as an 'abstraction' and was enchanted forever afterwards with the idea.

At that moment I realized that when 'zero' was inserted into Time, as well as when certain 'new ideas' had begun to emerge into my mind, with a strange new kind of visibility, that a new kind of 'point of origin' was created in a new kind of nonphysical space. The idea that the Earth is a 'zero in space' from which space exploration has finally been initiated grew steadily more comprehensible from that moment.

I had read P. D. Ouspensky's book, Tertium Organun and several other books he authored in which he wrote about a search for the 'fourth perpendicular'. The term 'perpendicular' was strange to me for some time, since I didn't immediately link the term to the x and y on the algebraic graphs I had so much trouble with in freshman year high school.

On the Cartesian graph moving in either direction, zero is the point of origin for x and y perpendiculars. Until the 'point' where x and y met was recognized to be the 'endpoint' of another perpendicular, z, mathematicians knew only about and worked only with plane geometry.

I grew up in a small town, lived with uneducated people, and even my teachers, being females knew nothing about the way mathematical ideas had evolved and grown, slowly in Time. I struggled with algebra, and avoided difficult subjects like geometry, chemistry, physics because I could not understand arithmetic.

It seems to me that the reason I avoided the 'difficult' subjects may have been instilled in me so that when I was in my early 50's I would not have been exposed to many ideas that I could have easily learned about much earlier in my life.

I am saying quite forthrightly, that my life has been lived by a design that cannot have been my own design and I came equipped by actual real world life experience to recognize the real Designer's 'input' into my life.

It came in this case, as an 'avoiding impulse', which turned around later when I was in my fifties, into a 'search and find impulse'.

I saw my mind go to work with whatever happened to capture my attention and try to make 'sense' out of even the most trivial things. I noticed it first when license tabs began to come to my attention. I saw the letters and numbers which I had not noticed at all previously and for some reason I could not choose to NOT SEE them and even be aware of an attempt to 'read' something into the letter combinations. This became extremely irritating and bothersome.

Then one day, this new and unwelcome habit caused me to see the license tab on a car I'd just bought, ETW 651. The same function of mind that had already been at work (which I did not at that point recognize as a 'function of mind') generated a 'meaning' immediately: Extra Terrestrial Woman 651.This amused me because it did not seem I had 'chosen' to think Extra Terrestrial Woman, the words occurred into my mind the way For Your Information occurs when I see FYI.

This was a new thing. Then a few months later a van that crossed in front of me had a license tab that startled me because the letters in the license tab reiterated, or 'echoed' a word I had just said. That story is told in this site. These incidents happened in the very early 1980's and I wrote the poem in 1988. By then I had begun to get the 'gist' of what my mind was trying to do: teach me a new language.

What a difference a completely new idea makes when you understand it!

And what a small seed is a new a bit of information that makes you stop and notice it. I'd read An Imagined World by June Goodfield three years prior to the morning something I'd read in the book came into my mind. A young Anna Brito is told by her teacher to think about multiplying by zero. She has learned to add and subtract by looking at real objects and counting them. Multiplication by zero cannot be done with real objects, so she understands 'zero as an abstraction' in a flash of insight that led her to become fascinated with abstractions. Her idea of 'zero as an abstraction' came into my mind, a stray thought seemingly as it meandered about in my mind one morning at work. As I've written, I had joined a Toastmaster's club and was required to write a poem, give a speech about how I'd written it and recite the poem. I'd never written a poem before, ever. As I thought about 'zero as an abstraction' some will other than my conscious will made me reach for a pen and paper, and without effort or thought from me, my hand wrote the words of this poem. I was startled to say the least, but pleased.

A simple idea can germinate without my conscious intents involved in it into a completely new to that person, I have experienced it myself, as something to be looked at and understood, given to me by a will other than my own. It can open the doorway to a completely unsuspected large idea, one that has gripped the mind of man for centuries and thousands of years but which woman has only just begun to try to figure out with her own mind and memories. The past of woman and man is very different, that is something I can say in 1997 that was not really as visible in 1984 as it is now. History was quite literally his story ,his view of every detail on Earth.

Any woman will immediately recognize as I have begun to do, that the hidden world of the unconscious that psychiatry tries to address contains a very different past for the genders. Any woman that has heard a son express the grief mine did when he found out he wasn't ever going to be able to make a baby in his tummy the way I had done, knows there is an opposite to female penis envy. But thus far only the male of the species has spoken of such things.

Envy, if you consider the letters ENV has a particular relationship to what this 3 years old child of mine poured out when he expressed his sense of grief. I had just brought home his baby sister, and he'd mentioned something about how he was going to make a baby in his tummy when he grew up. I'd gently told him he couldn't do that. His response was immediate: "You mean not ever? NOT EVER CAN I MAKE A BABY IN MY TUMMY?" I remember his white face, and the way the words were packed with strong feelings. but I was a young woman then and I didn't think of framing what I saw into words the way I do now.

It isn't easy to do.framing what you see into words when there is no object involved. What happened to me when I began to do it, i.e 'describe what you see' is what this is all about: the words I needed seemed to know where on Earth I was located. They found me, one by one but in a very chaotic way and I had only to recognize that they were coming to me, in two forms. One in books that caught my attention, and another through 'thought' that occurred in a very new way: as a regeneration of thought, a replay in the most literal use of the term.

I just bought a book yesterday that is about a man who scanned George Orwell's book, 1984 into a computer and reshaped the words into a new view of the world George Orwell described in the book 1984. It was a dreary war filled, hate filled world and everyone was observed every minute, even ones' thought was monitored. But this new view, created by reforming George Orwell's words was filled with the opposite: hope and new freedom.

The title of the book is Orwell's Revenge, The 1984 Palimpsest. The title of the book and the outline of the book describes very accurately how the words that found me in books that I chanced to buy and read not at all willingly at first, were shaped into what clearly became a description of what was in front of my eyes at the time, of some detail of my life.

Overall, the form of this man's book and I just bought it yesterday, I've not read it yet is a description of the real 1984 palimpsest that I've been decoding along with every other human on this Earth, even prior to 1984!

This is astray from the poem, but it is relevant to the 'point of origin'.

Two genders that were united and bonded from the beginning were split asunder when man and only man began to conceive mentally: the concept itself bonds information together but words are required for any bit of information to be understood. Words are required even in thought, and some 'thought' is such barely there content as feeling, emotions that need to be formulated in speech to another person. This was not something I knew about prior to 1984 when I began to try to describe to another person a new addition to my life, something I thought was added after a severe blow on the head and drastic surgery .

The causes of these new effects, were fixed in my mind as the results of visible things, the blow on the head and surgery until about 5 years later. Then I had a new set of causes and effects, and two completely different views of all events in my life. Two completely different and very separate view upon every word I read or heard or thought.

When I read the number of days I'd been alive on a printout of the day, month and year I was born, that incident inserted an idea about time in my mind that was new to me. It grew beyond anything I could have imagined when I read the bit of new information. The printout said I'd been alive 20,956 days on May 18, 1989, the day I got the printout from the Museum Of Science And Industry in Chicago.

I'd never thought about counting the days I'd been alive until then. although obviously all that was lacking was the impulse to do such a thing. Anyone can calculate number of years they've been alive by the number of days in a year but I'd not thought to do it.

Besides there were many other distracting bits of information in that printout, that meant more to me at the time than the number of day's I'd been alive on May 18, 1989. What I noticed first was the date, which was exactly 9 years after Mt. St. Helens blew her inner content over my home

And I noticed that the winners of Nobel Prizes that year were honored for discoveries related to particles inside the atom.

But what most interested me in a new way was that a Nobel Prize was given for discoveries of the functions of neurons in the brain that year also.

This is the bit of information that fitted into a flow of experiences I'd had after July 31, 1984 which seemed to me to have the attribute of forming a sort of conversation aimed at me. I had been reading books that were not typically books I found interesting, but I couldn't choose books then because they were interesting. Something inside me, and it was a new thing, did all the choosing for me.

I merely watched body, unable to choose, and unable to NOT read the books chosen for me in spite of the fact they were not interesting to me because I couldn't understand them.

A definite loss of personal will and volition had been replacing the content of my habits with new content.

I'd always read very much but I'd not read nonfiction books. That was the change of content, the habit of reading almost constantly remained the same.

But it was very difficult to read because I couldn't remember anything I read, The words seemed to fall into a black hole in my head. Who would read even a page if you couldn't remember at the end of a paragraph what you'd read? It baffled me that I was forced to read, and couldn't choose NOT to read the books that caught the interest of this new part of me, and which impelled me to do what IT wanted to do whether I found it pleasant and interesting or not.

But I did begin to notice, quite gradually that a few words I could remember reading crept into thought, so it was obvious to me that what I was reading was being latched onto by some part of my mind because it was present in thought.

Still yet another thing became noticeable: There was a definite addition to my thought very rarely, of a few words that I had not yet read or heard anywhere. Yet I came across these words almost immediately in a book I was already reading.

For example, the word numinous came into my thought in this way: "The numinous is hard to bear." The thought emerged spontaneously and I wondered to myself what the word 'numinous' meant. Within a few pages I read the word 'numinous' in Contact, by Carl Sagan which I was reading for the first time.

I wondered about much of my own thought content by then, little aware that I had begun to watch and listen in a new place: to my own thought the same way I would read and listen to the words on a book's page!

***************

A child learns to add by seeing an object and another just like it, 1 + 1 = 2. Zero is no problem in addition and subtraction but in multiplying a strange thing happens when zero enters. 1 apple + 1 apple = 2 apples, this is easy to see. But multiply one apple times zero apple seems to leave an apple, how to make sense of multiplying an apple by 'no' apple, or one thing by no thing?

Getting the object out of the way and working with ideas enters the life of a child when multiplication by zero enters. The form of concepts is invisible, yet at a very young age the child enters the level of abstract thinking about concepts. I was a very poor arithmetic student, although I was always fascinated with numbers and took several courses after graduating school because I wanted to understand mathematics. When my children learned the 'new math' so did I. What a revelation!!

1 + 1 = 1 is as reasonable as 1 + 1 = 2 if you think about 'binary units'. And you have to have a definite idea about what '1' is. It can be a great number of things lumped together because they are 'alike', a single unit.

And 1 + 1 can equal 1, very reasonably: 1 horizontal line that doesn't end or begin anyplace + 1 long vertical line that doesn't end or begin anyplace meets in only 1 point unless they lay upon a sphere:

And that 1 point where the vertical and the horizontal meet is '0' on the Cartesian graph. And that one 'zero' creates four quadrants. From the 'flagpole center' of the graph, movement is possible in any direction.

When '1' infinity' could be added to 1 other infinity it began to be possible to enter into a completely new dimension, where 1 was many, as many as infinity.

Complex numbers and infinite series began with a small point in the center of human knowledge, a horizontal number line, then a vertical number line overlaying.

This was a great change, a point of origin that took a very long period of time to be made real. And just about 2,000 years ago a certain birth occurred that inserted a zero into time on Earth, which is itself a point in an apparently endless universe.

From which space exploration is under way at this point in Time.

The two coordinates, one in time and the movement of a person or an object on an Earth that is also moving in a double orbit requires calculations so difficult that computers will need to do it but we have been caused to create the computers that can do it!!

All ideas begin with just a seed of information, sitting around ignored until one person becomes flamed with interest and lit up with passion to understand what exactly is being looked at.

The invisibility of such numbers as 'irrationals' is just one example of how the obvious is ignored for often centuries and thousands of years.

Soliton waves came into being when one mathematician was riding along the shore; he noticed a wave that moved along solidly, refusing to dissemble when it came into contact with an object. It retained its shape, moving along as a unit and although the rider followed it as far as he could, it kept moving without doing what a wave always does, break up.

Solitons showed up in certain complex mathematical equations of a very high degree.

The facts of yesterday influence too many people who do not question, do not evaluate anew and with fresh uncontaminated perspectives their own experiences. And there are many attempts made by others to tell each individual what to think.

It may be that nature preserves such persons as those who are energized to 'describe that you see', late in their life, the way I have been required to do. There must be some protection from 'old ideas' that keep new ideas intact, , keeping them in what might appear to be an 'abnormal' state until the time is right. When the situation is right and then the person who can see what needs to be seen is called into service.

The call is very strange, its very personal and its not a glamorous call. The most ordinary and mundane situations often need to be looked at 'for the first time' by some new eye/ear.

If Anna had been afraid to talk about what she saw after the first rebuffs, she would not have prevailed, although its likely some other person would have made the discovery eventually that she made.

The freedom to disagree with what has been established to be 'normal' is the greatest freedom on Earth. If there should ever be a heaven on Earth, it will be the day when every person uses the unique experience that no other person will ever have, their own, in the way Anna Brito did and as I have tried to do.

She isn't famous, she has not been awarded the Nobel Prize but in her own way she made the contribution she was born to make. If it become outdated sometime, as all ideas are supposed to do, that doesn't alter the important contribution that she made. She left tracks that somebody else could see and follow, taking perhaps new directions but only because she went as far as she did.

Any person can do the same. Every person is a new eye/ear on the events of the Earth.

If its possible to have the freedom to explore and learn without unreasonable restraints imposed by ideas of what is 'normal' every person has something special to contribute, it makes sense to believe this.

When the call comes, it comes in just the way it came to Anna Brito, in a sudden flash of understanding, that sets in motion a long line of endeavor. No other person will ever be able to hear that call, except the one to whom its aimed, the pathway is clear to only that one person.

When 1 infinity of persons clearly see the pathway, a chain reaction should occur that lights the path permanently and the path will not become obscure again, it will not have to be discovered anew.

It once was pristinely visible and it seems likely it will again be.

We are not alone in the universe. The call comes from another world, right in front of our eyes.