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Back | Current News News Archive 5/1/08 TJP News Update  The philosophic position in Sky's book "All Is One" is ancient. It has been reported in both the eastern and western philosophic traditions that ancient wise ones would make this enigmatic utterance as if it were a great truth.Based on the cosmological fact that the stars in the central cluster of our own galaxy are estimated to be about 200 million years older than our sun, Sky was intrigued by the possiblity that this statement was a 'leakage' of important knowledge to us from extraterrestrial civilizations millions of years ahead of us in evolution and technology. In the early 70's, feeling like he'd considered every other possibility and that none of them would complete the ontological/epistemological circle, Sky began to work on the hypothesis that reality is inexpressible, either in words or equations. This is a quite ancient Taoist position, with the consequence that the most accurate description of reality is a contradictory pair of statements (ontology) 'pointing' to an inexpressible truth (epistemology), which can only be grasped through the experience of that truth. Studying for a class taught by a Buddhist priest in the University of Hawaii graduate sociology department entitled "The Heart Sutra", Sky had an insight. Excited by his discovery, he went to the next Heart Sutra class early, before anyone else was there, and wrote on the chalkboard: Nothing is everything. When the other students came into the classroom, they didn't notice anything, and began talking and taking their seats. But when the teacher walked in the classroom door, he immediately looked at the board and, without missing a beat, said to the class, "Who knows what this means?" Sky said nothing. The rest of the class said nothing. "It's the Heart Sutra," he said. Motivated by what he now realized was a new translation of the Heart Sutra, Sky began working on the All Is One position with the goal of drawing out the consequences of that position as thoroughly as Wittgenstein had expressed the 'particles and forces' reality of the "Tractatus." By the mid-70's, he had worked out what he thought was the core of the position: Everything is nothing. Nothing is everything. Everything changes. Nothing changes. Everything returns. Nothing returns. After working on the position for about a year and a half more, Sky had amassed a list of about 150 sentences that he thought expressed the All Is One position. About six months later, he had edited the list down to 49 sentences. His original intent was to create a book with a picture on the left page of every pair of pages, and with a single sentence of text on the right page. To date this hasn't been done. Since there was no e-mail in those days, Sky wrote down the 49 sentences on one sheet of paper and, feeling like Martin Luther, posted it on the philosophy department bulletin board. It looked a lot like this: Wisdom has been forgotten. All is one. Everything is real. Space is real. Nothing is real. Fantasies are real. Thoughts are real. Words are real. Logic is real. The truth is real. Liars and cheats are real. Think for yourself. Search for the truth. Memory is a veil. Everything changes. Love remains. Nothing changes. The truth changes. The truth does not change. The truth both changes and does not change. The truth neither changes nor does not change. Words are a veil. The truth is a part of reality. Logic is a part of reality. Logic is a part of the truth. Logic is linear and hierarchical. Logic is circular and coherent. Logic is both linear and circular. Logic is neither linear nor circular. Logic is a veil. The truth is logical. The truth is not logical. The truth is both logical and not logical. The truth is neither logical nor not logical. The truth is a veil. The truth is greater than logic. The truth is greater than words. Life is sweet. Reality is greater than words. Life is suffering. Reality is greater than logic. Reality is greater than truth. Reality is a veil. Everything is nothing. Nothing is everything. Open your eyes. Everything returns. Open your heart. Nothing returns. Since the 49 sentences were posted, Sky has come to the opinion that our common word 'space' is a naive, misleading word. It appears that reality is not 3D as we naively perceive it to be. Although the mathematics of string theory suggests that reality is possibly ten or eleven or even twenty-two dimensional (hyperdimensional), the human nervous system seems to be 'hard-wired' to perceive events in four dimensions (including time). This is the reason why gravity and relativity are so hard for us humans to comprehend, and also why understanding an analogy on a lower dimensional level is the best we can do to explain our equations. Sky also suspects that our common sense notion of 'time' is seriously flawed. He guesses that just as the common sense notion of a 'flat Earth' missed an understanding of gravity, our naive, common sense notion of 'time' misses some great truth, either as yet undiscovered, or perhaps revealed by relativity, but not yet fully appreciated. In the more than 30 years since posting the 49 sentences on the bulletin board, the following additions to "All Is One" have been made; Reality is unintelligible. Reality is greater than words. Reality is inexpressable. Reality is hyperdimensional. Reality is incomprehensible. and In time, everything becomes nothing. In time, nothing becomes everything. reflecting the notion that reality is ever-changing and better regarded as 'becoming' rather than 'being'; and Reality is non-linear. Reality is both linear and non-linear. Reality is neither linear nor non-linear. integrating chaos theory into the position; and the equation showing the basic relationship between energy, mass, time and distance; and  Et2/md2 = 0 the speculation that the difference between being alive and being dead is somehow expressed mathematically by the difference in these two equations; and finally, the mathematics of birth and death: 1 = 0 Grief is real. and 2 = 3 Joy is real. Back | Current News News Archive
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