[MD] New Model Army, Mystic(DQ) Experience, and Religion (SQ) as Power

[Case]

dmb says:
Hmm. I guess I don't know what you mean by "heaven" or "unmanifest reality".

See, I think the word  "eternity" is one of those metaphors that very oftern
get misinterpreted. I think that in a religious context, that word is
supposed to point to an aspect of the mystical experience wherein the
distinction between the past and the future becomes meaningless, like lots
of other common sense concepts inherited from the mythos. The word infinity
is the same way. From the standpoint of conventional reality, the only thing
we can rightly call infinite is the universe itself, and even then we should
say its virtually or practially infinite. But, again, I think this word is
supposed to refer to an aspect of a mystical experience where the
distinction between percieved and perciever becomes meaningless. To put it
crudely, being at One with the universe means there are no borders between
things, they no longer finite, no longer have definate edges, no independent
existence. That's infinity. That's eternity. In this way we can,
paradoxically, experience eternity in this moment and we know infinity in
this place. Again, this is not percieved with the eyes of flesh, but it is
natural.

[Case]
Eternity is one of those words isn't it? It's spiritual opposite is "The
Void". We are creatures trapped between them. All religions, theistic or
mystic address eternity and the void. "From dust thou art and to dust thou
shalt return." 

But these are not purely spiritual terms. The have precise mathematical
meanings: Zero and Infinity. In Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea,
Charles Seife traces these ideas historically. Zero was totally rejected but
the Greeks. They through it was evil and abhorrent. It was not used in
western mathematics until after the Middle Ages. Descartes went far enough
to include it at the center his coordinate system even though he did not
include the negative bottom half of the grid. Zero was one thing negative
numbers was going too far.

Great chunks of math and physics revolve around the tension between Zero and
Infinity. They both play weird tricks when you try to divide by them.
Newton's version of the calculus was only able to handle zero through a
trick. It was accepted and used on faith until a French mathematician
refined Newton's work almost 50 years later.

The speed of light is unattainable because as speed approaches it, mass
becomes infinite. The same thing happed as the temperature of an object
approaches absolute zero. But it is not as though there is only one infinity
as gets stated here over and over. There are just as many numbers between
zero and one as between Zero and infinity. 

Perhaps the most beautiful example of the tension between zero and infinity
is the Mandelbrot set. This a basically an infinitely complex line composed
of points that go through a series of repeated calculations and neither fall
to zero nor fly off into infinity. The set itself looks very organic.

I have mentioned several times that zero is the ultimate static quantity
while infinity is the ultimate dynamic quality. Quality is the ever changing
harmony between them.

In short: Eternity and the Void are mathematical terms not a mystical ones.