As Above So Below
As Above So Below. This is the
motto of the most
ancient school of wisdom from the earliest lost reaches. This one phrase is essentially all we have left from a race
that came before perhaps fifty thousand or seven hundred thousand years ago.
What does it mean?
Here's what it means to me.
Imagine if the most profound bit of wisdom to arise so far in this cycle is to be found in the a skit in the movie
Animal House where the freshman was smoking pot with his professor.
- Larry: [to Jennings, while high] Okay. That means that our whole solar system could be, like one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being. [Jennings nods] This is too much! That means one tiny atom in my fingernail could be--
- Jennings: Could be one little tiny universe.
- Larry: Could I buy some pot from you?
The idea is universally pooh-poohed, laughed off as the classic example of marijuana induced deep insight, where you are convinced you have
just discovered the greatest theoretical breakthrough since
relativity only to realize, after you sober up, that you have uncovered
only a most duh inducing obvious, if not outright stupid statement.
Except that this one has stuck with me for a long time, and the more I learn, and the more human knowledge advances, the more reasonable
this idea seems.
Consider infinity. Ha Ha, It's impossible to do what I just asked. I'm serious. It is literally physically impossible
to really even begin to contemplate the word. Infinity and Eternity. Imagine the biggest thing possible, for example a giant organism
of which the entire solar system is but one part of a cell wall under its fingernail. Now double that, and double it again forever.
The organism in which we are but an atom floating around in its pancreas is itself but sitting on a planet which is but an electron
spinning around in an atom that is but a part of the cell wall of some even larger (much larger) organism. And
next to us is another hair folicle of a universe much like our own.
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