Being

There is something about the word "being" that transports one to a higher level.  It is intoxicating, glowing, inviting.  It is indeterminate.  It means too many things.  Beware of being!!!  

Empedocles

So it turns out that one of the ancient Greek philosophers essentially anticipated my ideas regarding the "and" and the "or" 2500 or so years ago.  Empedocles called the principles "love" and "strife", where love represented the coming together and strife the breaking apart into a thing's constituent parts.   He also saw a cyclical process in which one precedes the other, and even, to a large extent, anticipated evolutionary theory by proclaiming that some groups of parts will randomly come together and survive, while others will not.  As we've seen, the cyclical view of history has largely proven correct with great empires, whether it be the Roman empire or the Soviet Union, imploding, different countries uniting and or being absorbed by others again and again and again.  Similarly, the cyclical theory of love and strife holds on a cosmic level with the big bang,   dust coalescing to form suns and planets,  lighter elements combining and becoming compressed in suns to form heavier elements, suns exploding when their lives expire, black holes absorbing matter and eventually compressing it to the point that new bangs occur and new universes are formed. As I've demonstrated, love and strife are at work everywhere, whether it be on a mathematical,  a molecular, cellular, linguistic, biomechanical or evolutionary level. Empedocles was right.  The PreSocratics, including the Sophists, were the greatest.  Socrates and Aristotle ruined everything.

Leafing through the pages of a book

It is interesting how the "and" and the "or" is even evident when one turns the pages of a book.  For what happens when this occurs?  The reader separates the page from the pages that come after it "the or", and groups it with the other pages he has read, "the and".  It would seem that in the universe that we know, the "and" and the "or" act simultaneously.   When an object moves away from another, it is moving towards yet another.  To a large extent, the "and" and "or" work in harmony and maintain a balance.   It may seem possible, depending upon the nature of space, for an object to drift away from the universe of other objects.  But even in this scenario the "and" is still operative. For when this object is drifting away from the universe of other objects, there is an observer (you) observing this, and the more you are observing this, the more this object, in a sense, is drifting towards you, or you are drifting towards it.  

Relationships

I have been away for some time, lost in the events of the world.

We must ask what all events have in common.  And the obvious answer is that they are events.  Whether they are mathematical equations, equations describing chemical reactions, the laws of physics or biology, or history they describe events.

And what do events describe?  They describe relationships.  Relationships between objects.  And I have argued that all relationships involve the "and" and the "or".   Thus, if we are looking for that part of reality that exists everywhere, that will always be and (possibly) always has been, then we can say that the relationship is the most fundamental eternal thing.

M or F

     We can say that the "or" is distinctively male in character.  Think Sampson pushing apart the columns.  Think freedom from slavery or other forms of subjugation.   Any unity that the "or" may seek, whether in the form of copulation or conquest, is temporary, a means towards hegemony.  The Romans conquered so they could be great.  A man screws to attain genetic dominance.
The "and" is distinctively female in character.  It seeks togetherness and unity for its own sake.  It is incomplete unless it is with.   And even with that withness, it will always be incomplete.
And the unity between the "and" and "or", while temporary, is often more powerful than the bond between the "and" and "and".   Think the penis, jutting out, wishing to express its power and dominance, only to be sucked in by that which seeks unity for its own sake.  The penis withdraws to preserve the illusion of dominance, so that the man can tell his friends about his conquests, so that the "or" can continue to exist.  And this is the natural state of things.  The "and" and always existed and the "or" has always existed.
        Even before the "big bang" the "or" existed.  Perhaps everything was unity as has been theorized.  Perhaps electrons and nuclei and protons and elements and atoms and the various elements had not come into existence.  Perhaps all was one "super atom".  But this state of affairs could not last indefinitely.  For the "or" was always there.  Just like energy can be neither created or destroyed and is always there in either potential or actual form, the "or" can be neither created or destroyed.  Perhaps it was not there prior to the big bang, at least in actual form.  But it was there in its potential form.  Perhaps it existed exclusively in its potential form at that time, but it existed.  And its prevalence has neither increased nor diminished.  Nor will it ever increase or diminish.  Perhaps entropy is increasing as the universe continues to expand.  Perhaps galaxies continue to be pushed farther and farther apart as astronomers say.  But the "or" is not increasing in prevalence.  Its form may be changing from potential to actual.  But it always was there and always will be there.  (My earlier entry about the "or" running wild was a joke).
      We can say the same about the "and".  It has always been there and always will be there.  It can neither be  increased nor diminished.  Perhaps, in contrast to the "or", it existed only in actual form prior to the big bang.  Perhaps it has morphed in form from actual to potential.  And perhaps, at the end of time, it will be pure potential.  But like energy, it can neither be created nor destroyed.
Our friends were with us forever.

Movement again

We have said that the "and" and the "or" underlie all of reality in all its spheres, whether it be physical reality, mathematical reality, language, history or epistemology.   However, to construct a truly unified theory of the world, we must ask if there one principle, reality or commonality these two forces share.  And the answer should be obvious: movement.  Objects, concepts, principles coming together, drifting apart or distinguishing themselves from one another have their genesis in movement.   As long as there is movement there will be atoms with orbiting electrons, light travelling at light speed, words joining together and forming sentences, sentences forming distinct units, paragraphs distinguishing themselves from other paragraphs, rivers that run, dramas, and history at a human, animal, planetary and astronomical level.  It is this movement that artists, such as DeKooning, with his bursts of yellow, sought to capture, and it is movement that Heraclitus intuited and sought to describe long before Plato founded his academy.   And movement contains its own mystery.  For movement in and of itself does not tell us whether things are coming together or drifting apart.   But the mystery is beautiful.  It gives birth to color, to light and to history.  And to contemplate this movement, perhaps, is to contemplate God.

Mo