ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE POWER OF ZERO

By Michael Priv author of The Fifth Battalion

Michael Priv

Zero is the most fascinating sibling in the numbers family. To start with, zero does not even exist. If you subtract one apple on the table from one apple on the table you do not end up with zero apples, you only end up with no apples on that specific table at that precise instant in time. The apple remains intact, as it had simply been moved. If you incinerated that apple, the atoms would remain or the heat or other forms of energy. Even the vacuum of the interstellar space is not a complete emptiness. Pure vacuum does not exist and had never been achieved even in a lab. No science or technology had ever been able to make anything truly vanish. Just think, all the subtracted apples and oranges, all the objects we lost, anything or anybody else we thought we lost still exist somewhere in some form. Yes, I know, the entropy raises its ugly head, but the point remains true: zero does not actually exist.

Sumerians had to invent the concept of nothing, zero, to make numbers work. Mathematics is a symbolic representation of the world, but it doesn’t work without zero, which does not exist in the world. Interesting, isn’t it? Complete nothingness had to be invented to symbolically represent the existing universe. What does that tell us? Zero is not of this world.

My claim is that zero is the symbolic representation of the point of contact of the spiritual universe with the physical universe, bringing the physical into existence and making it persist. Zero is the symbolic representation of a supremely powerful influence, the power of nothing, the power of non-physical. As the turning point between positive and negative, zero is complete stillness. That stillness is infinitely powerful, it belongs only in the spiritual realm to which this world is a subordinate realm. Not a part of this word, stillness impinges on this world from the higher realm.

Zero introduces some strikingly unique and magical phenomena, such as any number in the power of zero is equal to one. In other words, you take any physical value and enter the power of zero and you go back to the basic beginning of the tangible world.

You divide a finite physical universe into the spiritual zero and you do not get any physical value at all, no number in existence will satisfy the equation. Just think, such number does not exist in the physical universe. On the other hand, if we divide zero by zero, as in dealing with nothing but spiritual, nothing but stillness, nothing but the creative thought, then any number we can think of will work just fine as the result, any number at all. Wow, right? Magic.

Now, calculus is where it gets really awesome. Let’s set the limit as zero (lim x–0). In life, we cannot divide by zero but we can divide by a succession of ever decreasing numbers tending towards zero:

10 / 1000=0.01

10 / 10=1

10 / 1=10

10 / 0.1=100

10 / 0.01=1000

10 / 0.001=10,000 etc.

Mathematically, the closer we get to zero as the factor, the closer our results approach infinity. The closer we approach stillness, the more power we generate.

There you go, Gandhi was right, to be more effective we need to cut way down on animosity. Jumping up and down and tearing somebody’s hair out for having opinions different from yours is counter-productive. Now the definition of enlightenment makes sense: being immersed in and surrounded by peace.

Read Michael Priv’s newest book, The Fifth Battalion, available on Amazon.