The wholeness pretends not to be

We can try to embrace the whole in our mind starting thinking about ourselves; then, the place where we are, the things that could be within a kilometer... cats, dogs, TV’s, trees, the whole planet, the other planets of the solar system... until getting an abstract space. Seems easy, huh? We have to conceive it in any way.

Well then, lets notice that before our birth and after our death, the whole did not have us and it won’t have us again. But, how? Everything should not lack anything, otherwise it would not be “the whole”. That take us to consider the matter of Time.

Another relevant thing is Space. The mass of our body uses in a beautiful irregular way some quantity of space, as the other objects. Since we all and the other objects don’t occupy the same amount of space, we have different shapes. Shape also matters.

Time and space take us to the main contradiction of the whole: movement. To make something move we need space, that is to say, an object “this one” will stop occupying a place “here” to occupy another place “there”, which presuppose that in the place “there” there’s nothing at all: an eternal void ready to content anything (like my wallet, haha!) On the one hand, the void is inconceivable, on the other, we’ve said “the whole must not lack anything” As for time, if we consider the movement of “this one” object, we have to take into account the relation between the “this one” object when it was “here” and the “this one” object when it got “there”. That relation is only perceived by conscious beings capable of memory like us humans; in other words, is something subjective.

Hence, the whole must be immobile as there’s nothing (space, void) in which any element can move apart and take another place. For the same reason it has not shape. It may not have time either since there’s no way to compare a before of after because nothing has moved: what is time if not a measure of movement?

Yet we all know from experience that “everything moves”; something very peculiar if we notice that every movement and every thing that has taken its own shape from that movement are all a constant denial of being. In fact, a delicious pizza IS NOT... a daily ration of rice and vegetables, and the creature we were yesterday IS NOT the corpse we will be tomorrow. When we say two things are different we state that they both lacks each other’s attributes. In totality there’s no absence.

How is it possible this contradiction between a timeless immobile everything and what our senses perceive? The secret is in appearances. We, our senses and all they perceive are the same thing just looking different. (“differentiated existence” as I would translate what I think I read in master Lao Tsé’s Tao te King)

True? real? No, that’s not the case as there’s no fake nor unreal to make the contrast. The thing is: the wholeness must be as inconceivable as nothingness. While nothingness has no referent, the wholeness (the whole, everything... which word would be right?) could not be defined as “something” because doing so makes it “something besides another something” which is the same as saying “it’s this and is not that” and that implies a lack. Therefore, to be conceivable, the wholeness must pretend to be fragmented, differentiated, “full of voids”, named in opposition to a resource of expression called Nothingness.

Of course, the whole itself does not need to be conceived. The wholeness has no need of anything. We, on the contrary, need to conceive ourselves and everything around... and we do thanks to that “ontological Internet” called Reality.

Oct. 13, 2005 - El jardín lúgubre