Referencing Leonard Cohen’s song “A Crack in Everything”. He says “that’s how the light gets in.” Various books seem to have cracks in them. And I don’t necessarily think that the writers are on the Advaita bandwagon. I suspect that it’s kind of that “hero with a thousand faces” thing. The waves of the Ocean of Singularity move across the entire ocean, not just on a solitary beach.

I hate reading books that tell me what to think or how to be. But I do get a kick out of it when someone sneaks something in on me.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series is seriously cracked.

Today, one of the characters got hit in the face with the knowledge that he is a character in another book. And it is tearing him up. “It’s not a story. It’s not a story, it’s my life!”

Ha!

We are Here and this is Now. After that, everything turns toward guesswork.

– Philosopher Didactilus (Small Gods, Terry Pratchett)

(Made me smile.)

Attributed to Wynton Marsalis in A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore:

Jazz was a zen art. Controlled spontaneity. Like sumi-e ink painting. Like haiku. Like archery. Jazz wasn’t something you planned. It was something you did. In jazz, every moment is a crisis and you bring all your skill to bear on that crisis. It’s all right there. No future. No past. Just that moment and how you deal with it. Art happens.

Page 9.

from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson:

How to Build a Universe

No matter how hard you try, you’ll never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small. A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom which is itself, f course, an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on a printed “i” can hold something in the region of 500 billion of them. Rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years. So, protons are exceedingly microscopic to say the very least. Now, imagine if you can, and of course you can’t, shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small it could make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter.

Excellent.

You are ready to start a Universe.

I’m assuming of course that you wish to build an inflationary Universe. If you prefer to build a more old fashioned, standard Big Bang Universe, you’ll need additional materials. In fact, you will need to gather up everything there is, every last mote and particle of matter between Here and the Edge of Creation, squeeze it into a spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all. It is known as a Singularity.

In either case, get ready for a really big bang.

Naturally, you will wish to retire to a safe place to observe the spectacle. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to retire to because outside the singularity there is no Where. When the Universe begins to expand, it won’t be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.

It is natural, but wrong, to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot, hanging in a dark, boundless Void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has noaround around it. The is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can’t even ask how long it has been there, whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn’t exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.

And so from Nothing our Universe begins.