Letter to David Harris and David Balenson (April 2022):

Hi David … a typical night for me: up for a while in the middle of the morning.  Below are my notes from what I spoke of earlier that I wanted to share.  About two weeks ago I woke up about  2am with an obsessive idea (as I do a couple of times a week). A brainbug: a dream about a mystery entitled “The Hebrew Letter” –an Agatha Christie-like story where I assumed was in search of a mysterious letter written about some deep secret that could help one decode the universe –but after sitting in front of my PC I suddenly realied that, “NO!”  “The Hebrew Letter” was simply a single letter of the alphabet!  It was Aleph, the first letter of the alphabet in Hebrew.  It looks like this:  א .  So, now awake & in an energized problem-solving mode (like many mornings) I burrowed into all available resources, reviewing earlier experiences, ideas, notes, and doing some new research:

• “Aleph is the subject of a midrash that praises its humility in not demanding to start the Bible. (In Hebrew, the Bible begins with the second letter of the alphabet, bet.) In the story, aleph is rewarded by being allowed to start the Ten Commandments. …  Aleph also begins the three words that make up God’s mystical name in Exodus, I Am who I Am (in Hebrew, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh אהיה אשר אהיה), and aleph is an important part of mystical amulets and formulas. 
• Aleph, in Jewish mysticism, represents the oneness of God. The letter can be seen as being composed of an upper yud, a lower yud, and a vav leaning on a diagonal. The upper yud represents the hidden and ineffable aspects of God while the lower yud represents God’s revelation and presence in the world. [I like to compare it with the up-pointing and down-pointing of the triangles that merge in a magen David—shield of David star, a kind of yin-yang—although there are many interpretations] The vav (“hook”) connects the two realms.
• Jewish mysticism relates aleph to the element of air, and the Scintillating Intelligence (#11) of the path between Kether and Chokmah in the Tree of the Sephiroth” (Wikipedia).

Then quantum physics raised its head:  Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story (attached to this e-mail… you would love his short stories if you’re not already familiar with them) in which “… the Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion. The story traces the theme of infinity found in several of Borges’ other works, such as “The Book of Sand“. (listening to the story provided more connections than the wikipedia text: e.g., the Monad of Leibnitz; The Divine Comedy of Dante- (name of the poet (Daneri) in Borges’ story)  also: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/aleph  

Borges’ story resonates with a short story I wrote in high school about the boy who built a chair in his parent’s basement that was embedded in multiple gyroscope-like rings that could move to compensate, if only for a second, with every known movement of the earth in the universe.  When he sat in the chair and pushed the button, the universe collapsed in on that spot and no longer existed.  I’m sure I wrote it out at least once & may look for it…

There is also some of this feeling in the motto MULTUM IN PARVO as the “Much information condensed into few words or into a small compass,” (Oxford reference); or “essential aspects of something” which even inspires critical thinking in medicine   https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28523336/ (speaking of posttraumatic conscious state evaluation scale)

Other connections (in my mind at least):

• A belief of Zen Master DOGON^[1]: “As [Dogon] says in ‘On The Endeavour of the Way,’: “The zazen^[2] of even one person at one moment imperceptibly blends with all things and full resonates through  all time …. Each moment of zazen is equally wholeness of practice, equally wholeness of realization.”  (Norman Fischer, introduction to Zen Master Dogon (2004) Beyond Thinking: A Guide to Zen Meditation. Boston, Shambhala. (p. xxx)) 
• Albert Einstein once wrote: “People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Time, in other words, he said, is an illusion. Many physicists since have shared this view, that true reality is timeless.” –Albert Einstein, May 17, 2013 (from “Resetting the Theory of Time” … also Quoted in Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, 2008)
• SIMULTANEITY versus SEQUENTIALISM? HOW DOES THIS RELATE to the venerable idea that all things have happened before… an eternal cyclical repetition (as in Ecclesiastes 1:9-18 and in “Chronicles of Kobol” (Battlestar Galactica, in episode Number Six: “All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.”) https://neilgreenberg.com/deep-biology-development-disintegration-renewal-and-the-ship-of-theseus/ )
• TS ELIOT:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past

            –T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

My own teaching often touches on the idea that a thing (even one’s self) has meaning in proportion to its connections –but connectedness may have different rules at different levels of organization which are revealed through emergence:  Do you have some connections to add to this?  Some distant resonances on the tip of your tongue?  

Cheers, Neil

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“aleph-null,” the smallest infinite cardinal number was called to my attention on 16 April 2022: 

“Jain mathematicians in India in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC believed that infinities come in more than one size, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that mathematician Georg Cantor really started to grasp infinity’s true, slippery nature.

To get a handle on his thought process, imagine drawing a number line. The first numbers you might add to it would be the natural numbers – the counting numbers that go 1, 2, 3 and so on. Although mathematically imprecise, the “and so on” means you could continue the counting process forever. You will never run out of natural numbers; their number is infinite.

That is where the weirdness starts, however. Now think of the even numbers: 2, 4, 6 and so on. Intuitively, you would say there are fewer even numbers than there are natural numbers – half as many, perhaps. But that “and so on” makes plain that there is no end point to them, either. In fact, you can pair up every natural number with an even number and vice versa – (1,2), (2, 4), (3, 6) and so on – so there must be the same “amount” of each. These two infinite sets of numbers have the same size. This size is written ℵ₀ (pronounced aleph-null) and these sets are said to be “countably” infinite.” (Timothy Revell reporting in New Scientist 16 April 2022)

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25433822-900-infinity-has-long-baffled-mathematicians-have-we-now-figured-it-out/#ixzz7R6YRsvlT