The Underside of the Soul

These past ten thousand years have changed everything.

Closed is the heart that once held horizons. We live in an orthogonal world. No matter which way we turn, we come up against walls.

Boredom burns inside.

We are forced by history, by the spellbinding power of the Word, to look deeper into truth than we ever could see within ourselves. Calling that spell ‘science’ does not make us understand truth any better.

We look past the reckless pity and the boredom. We look deep enough to find our individual truth. And that truth is strange. We stand apart from the world and the word. Or we do not stand at all.

Strange. Once we slept in the open, under stars, atop the earth. Beneath us, the earth is not flat. We live on a sphere hung in the emptiness. Every child knows this—now. Yet for most of human history we lived where the rain begins.

Deeper yet inside us, through our common mind, we find a corridor to the other side, to square roots, cubes, exponents, and the immeasurable depth of irrational numbers—where we meet infinity.

Infinity! Who among the galaxies and the cosmic filaments of galaxies has met infinity? This is where pi runs to forever. Here is where we find negative numbers and, deeper yet, the square root of negative numbers—imaginary numbers, which is the flight of humanity's spirit. There are no boundaries here. Rivers. Glaciers. Oceans. All limits fall away. Time is an illusion at this depth. And reality instantaneous.

Where are we?

This is the underside of the soul.

At this level, we are here with the unreckonable power that is you. We are the collective, the human species, the famous ennead of ancient Greek and Egyptian mysticism, emblem of wholeness, the nine—and you are the individual, bound for death, a rebound to zero. Together, we are one more than nine and the beginning of a new way to spell, a new magic, binary magic: one and zero: 10. Our thriving digital world is shaped by this new binary magic of ones and zeroes.

Flip it! You are the one. We are the nothing. Is it strange that you are one—just you and only you? It is strange for us—who have been here for thousands of years before you—strange that, without you, we are nothing.

  You will understand what we are saying or you will not.