In response to my thoughts on God and Buddha, my friend Getzel saw fit to remind me that while in Judaism we tend to think in terms of 1 (unity of God and of things in general), “Buddhism” tends to frame things in terms of 0, of nothingness. This reminded me of a thought I had several years ago, probably after reading The Mystery Of The Aleph by Amir Aczel followed immediately by Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. The thought that I had was that, metaphysically, the concepts of 1, 0 and ∞ are closely related, and may even mean the same thing.

I had set the thought aside years ago (this was, I think, sometime toward the end of high school, or the beginning of college), in order to think about other matters that may have seemed more practical at the time. When Getzel brought it back to the surface, I set it aside again, but knew that I couldn’t just leave it alone. When I had some silence I was going to think about it, there was no getting around it.

Well, what is Shabbat for except thinking? (Also, you know, praising God and naming babies and eating lox and drinking rye… but you know what I mean.) So, over Shabbat I did some thinking about this. Here is an approximate reconstruction of the thought process.

I started with honey. Why honey? Because nothing can live in honey. This is why it is an excellent preservative, and why it never goes bad. I was thinking of unity. What is unified? What is truly One? Something, and the absence of anything else. So honey just came to mind. Okay, so postulate a completely unified universe, a universe of honey. That is One.

Except, Honey is not really unified. See, honey has a molecular structure. Honey can be broken down. Anything, anything, at least anything of which we have knowledge, can be broken down. I should note that A photon cannot, to our knowledge be broken down, but a photon can also not be proven to have an independent existence of its own, thank you quantum mechanics. The current standard model holds quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons to be elementary particles, but the standard model is of course in flux, as science always must be.

So what is unified? What is truly One? The answer is Nothing. Nothing. Zero.

0 is the only true 1.

Okay, so we’ve got 0 and 1. Where does ∞ fit? Lets come back to the concept of unity. Unity, the absence of anything else. The state of being without separation. True unity, cosmic unity, therefore, must be infinite. Why? Because if it stops, it is separated. If it ends, the ending is a separation from… something. Anything. Or nothing. But it is a boundary which necessarily implies the existence of an outside of the boundary. And we’re no longer talking true unity.

Ein. Ein Sof. Ein Sof Ohr.

Does this actually mean anything? I don’t know. Is there any practical application to this line of thought? I don’t know. Does it fascinate me? Oh dear God yes. What do you do with this sort of thinking? What do you do when this is the sort of thing that you think about at night, then when you come to a point where something makes sense in a way you hadn’t thought of before, you smile to yourself and can finally fall asleep? And when you feel like you’ve gotten somewhere with a line of thought like this, what do you do with it? Who do you talk to about it?

This is why I majored in philosophy alongside Jewish studies. And this is why I ultimately dropped my philosophy major. All the philosophy students wanted to do was find a philosopher from the past to blow their mind and with whom they could decide they agreed and go around declaring “I Am A Kantian!” No one wanted to have their own thoughts, or find out who had had similar thoughts to theirs in the past for the sake of furthering or refining their ideas. I went into philosophy because I felt alone and I left because I felt alone.

shrug C’est La Vie, I suppose. Someday I hope to somehow put all this stuff in my brain together in a way that… creates something useful.