Back to Gaffney St General at Pascoe Vale, having just dropped off Z at the train. It’s a hard choice between this cafe, with David the very loud proprietor, and his penchant for Ibiza club classics, vs Ferrazio round the corner, which is pokier, and with inferior coffee. First world problem. The wind is promising rain soon, but we managed to walk down dry, and I hope to return before the weather visits.
I’m starting to think about life overlays. Life is hideously complex, which has caused us humans to develop sophisticated pattern searching capabilities to simplify life interactions. It could be as simple as recognising this wind as a likely precursor to rain, based on past experience. But what I’m thinking about lately are the overlays we use to make sense of less tangible life aspects. The engineer in me was always fascinated by imaginary numbers, which are a mathematical construct that posit the existence of numbers that can satisfy the square root of a negative number, eg the square root of -9. In a conventional world, this is a preposterous notion, as there is no real number that we can multiply by itself to make -9. And when the idea first came about (1st then 15th cent) is was discarded as silly. But now….well the modern world runs on them, as the backbone of modern science and technology, powering everything from electrical engineering and signal processing to quantum mechanics.
So I’m thinking we can extend this idea, of something absurd, but yet, incredibly useful to advance ourselves. I’m thinking most faiths drop into this (to some extent):
“Faith is a broad concept generally defined as complete trust, confidence, or a strong belief in something or someone, often without the need for logical proof or empirical evidence”.
Zee talks of various aspects of the body within her yoga tradition. They help our own healing, and our own search for connection and fulfilment in the universe. To the engineer in her life, it can sound quite wacky and woo-woo, and yet…. It’s not as if my own tradition of a (sometimes) benevolent being in the sky is more “sensible”. And yet, both of these traditions often lead to good things, and the advancement of our humanity to greater things than instagram (the paradox is that they often do the reverse too).