The Power of Zero
This article is about a number, zero, to be precise. At the first glance it is not related to politics, business, personal relations or life in general but it is. This is the mathematical representation of the concept of the softer measures, softer rhetoric, softer attitudes being more effective. In our time and age, and especially in the last year or so, we may all have experienced a spike in our urge to insult and punish. I'll be the first to admit that I haven't been above some virtual head-bashing and had lost some friends and relatives in the process. "Lost" I said. A funny concept.
Nothing is ever lost in that nothing had ever vanished. Zero does not exist in the universe. 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 table at that precise instant in time. The atoms remain or the energy, or the entire object remains as it had simply been moved out of sight. Vacuum of the interstellar space is not a complete emptiness. Pure vacuum does not exist in the universe and had never been created even in a lab. No science or technology had ever been able to make anything truly vanish. Complete nothingness cannot be achieved. Just think, all the subtracted apples, all the objects you lost, anything or anybody else you thought you lost still exist in some form! Yes, I know about the entropy but the point is: there is no zero in this world.
Sumerians had to invent the concept of nothingness, a zero, to make numbers work. Mathematics is a symbolic representation of the world but it didn't work without a zero, which does not exist in the world. In other words, there had to be a nothingness to symbolically represent the universe but there wasn't one. Why? Because zero is simply not of this world but it heavily impinges on this world. Without that impingement, nothing works.
My claim is that zero is the mathematical representation of the point of entrance of the spiritual universe into the physical universe, bringing the physical into existence and making it persist. Zero is a symbolic representation of a supremely powerful influence, the power of nothing. As the turning point between positive and negative, zero is complete stillness. That stillness is infinitely powerful, it is not of this world, it belongs only in the spiritual realm to which this world is a subordinate realm.
Zero introduces some strikingly unique and magical phenomena, such as any number in the power of zero is equal to 1. 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, if we deal with nothing but spiritual, nothing but stillness, nothing but the creative thought, any number we can think of will work just fine as the result, any number at all. That is the way to get anything we can possibly want, no limit at all to the values that satisfy the equation. Wow, right? Magic.
Now calculus, where it becomes 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 we spiritually approach stillness, the closer our results approach infinity.
Gandhi was right, to be a lot more effective we need to cut way down on animosity.