Symbolism in Motion.


“The only constant is change…” So says the famous adage we have all hear a million times.

But, to my mind, change is really a movement. In order for something to change it has to move from one state to another.

All things move. Life is, in many ways, an experience with movement. Not only do we move through time, aging, and experiencing, but the senses themselves work by perceiving movement. On the atomic level all is vibration. The senses are vibrations sensing other vibrations, creating electric potentials that move currents we understand as feelings. As a stylus can transform the roughness of a record to music, so humankind can use their senses to make meaning.

A particular meaning we make of this endless movement is the idea of Time. Time is a reference to motion, and motion to distance: Time is the experience of motion, and motion the experience of distance.

Man is a movement that knows he’s moving.

But if all is motion, what doesn’t move? The Mover.

If I pick up this pen, I have moved it. My hand moved it, but muscles moved my hand. The muscles were moved by electric charges issuing from nerves that move stimulation from the brain. What moved the pen? The idea to move it! And yet an idea can be changed, so in this limited analogy, the idea is the Mover, but the idea is not ‘immovable’.

Think of a tiny seed able, by an immovable, invisible principle, to assemble from the soil the necessary elements to make a large tree. The tree moves. The elements move. The seed, too, is comprised of motion. But the ‘idea’ of the tree—the code that makes a tree by assembling some elements and not others—remains constant throughout its growth.

This potential to become a tree is unmoving.

So movement breeds change, change allows decision (we often say we have moved our position when we change our minds), decision breeds character, and character can learn.

As a movement, can we learn to be still?

Learning creates meaning. If we have taken time to learn something, then we can understand its meaning. We can discover—subjectively understand—qualities like beauty in moments.

Does beauty move? What is beauty?

Think of a rainbow, the covenant between Noah and God after the flood. A rainbow is formed in rain drops that move. The light waves move through the falling prisms of the moving drops. But the rainbow, for the moment it arises, remains unmoving.

Anything that doesn’t move can’t ultimately be sensed by and of itself. It needs vehicles to illustrate its existence. Matter is really energy in a type of motion. But the Immovable lies beneath the senses, beyond sight—God, the Immovable Supreme Good that underlies all things, can’t be seen, but He can be known. The Invisible is made evident through the visible things.

For example, man takes an infinite distance, and makes ‘miles’. Miles he breaks into ‘feet’, and feet into ‘inches’. Each is used as a handle to grasp the experience of distance, and communicate its meaning. What is a mile, a child may ask? It is 5280 feet a parent might answer. What is a foot, a child may persist? It is twelve inches, perhaps we answer. What, then, is an inch? 1/12 of a foot. Thus we assign mutually dependant variables and create a formula. The variables change, and thus our measuring changes also, but the distance remains constant.

In the same way we make meaning, and fabricate our lives.

We are a movement that can understand our motion. We are a record that can hear its own tune.

Going back to the atomic level, even the process of vision is motion. Photons bounce off a substance, lets say that same tree, and enter our eye. They stimulate neurons in the retina, and electrical impulses carry this information along the optic nerve to the brain. Here an image is made. What is the substance of this image? Can I move the image? I can change it, so in a way it can be moved, but it is completely intangible, and completely personal. If I cut open your head, I won’t find a tree in there. And I can’t share this ethereal tree with others without a vehicle, such as words, to elicit a similar (but not identical) image in you.

We, as conscious beings, assemble what we recognize as a tree from a flux of charges. We create an image and make meaning—we can call this a tree, and talk about it. We can see flowers. And we can see bees. We see them as discrete and separate entities.

Now, in our reading from Ecclesiastes, King Solomon was heard to say ‘everything is meaningless’. He meant this, to my mind, to refute worldly ambition. What good is anything when the world has already been everything, and will be again, why bother ‘chasing the wind’ when there’s ‘nothing new under the sun’? He also says ‘the eye never gets its fill of seeing’, or something to that effect. And here is what I am trying to say. We get caught up—distracted—in our senses, in believing what we see, and not penetrating beneath it. We don’t ask ourselves, what is it that makes the image of an object in the brain? In many ways we take the miracle of being for granted because of the familiarity of our environment. And something as large as God, something that cannot be put into words as an adequate vehicle to share, is the most hidden image. Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, seems to say all that is important is contemplation beyond the senses.

For example, despite their appearance, the flowers and the bees are not separate. They are mutually causative. The fig tree in Borneo cannot exist without the wasps that pollinate its fruit—and the wasps cannot exist without the trees, they are utterly integrated life-cycles. In biology this is termed an obligatory mutualism. One day, perhaps, the two species will be classified into one ‘super-species’. The fig tree is the wasp. The wasp is the fig tree! The flowers are the bees, and the bees are the flowers! The appearance of separateness can be overcome to see a symbolic ‘super organism’ larger than its parts.

As the bee is to the flower, so is man to God!! Man can know that which does not move, just as God can be known by man. Perhaps this is what it means to be able to make meaning? Perhaps being human is to come to know God?

This brings me to our reading from Isaiah. ‘We shall see the glory of God.’ While this is perhaps a reference to the Last Day when God reveals Himself to all, it is also perhaps an allusion to the potential for God to be known by man. The truth in the Bible is one that resonates with many meanings, a million interpretations. The voice calling in the wilderness isn’t just a prediction of John the Baptist—it is also the song of the world! Can we hear the song of the world, which continually calls out praises to God? If only we know how to look.

So how can we sense that which is ‘beneath the senses’? How can we perceive something that doesn’t move—or rather is immovable—when our senses are stimulated by movement?

1 Corinthians says to be fools, that the wisdom of man, like Solomon says in Ecclesiastes, is meaningless. (Interestingly, Socrates was the largest fool of all. He was one of the most intelligent men that ever lived precisely because, as the oracle at Delphi reportedly said, “he knows that he knows nothing.”)

To be a fool, in this sense, is to see the world anew. Your children are the most wonderful fools. Be like children, and have novelty with the world. Ask questions constantly, to yourself and others. Give up doctrines that make it all too familiar. Don’t accept the tree as a tree!

Our wisdom, our science, is an empirical science, one built on observation and proofs evident in nature. There is a theory in Physics called Logical Positism, that states if something cannot be proved between people, there is no point in discussing it.

And yet the idea of a tree, that ‘program’, that ‘principle’ within its seed is something that can only be witnessed as the tree itself. It isn’t mathematically determined. It isn’t empirical. And yet the tree exists. That’s empirical, that there are trees, but you can’t predict anything about a tree—other than its species—from a seed. You can’t even guarantee a seed will germinate. Much like quantum mechanics, at this level, you can only talk about probabilities. Science says ‘how’ it doesn’t say ‘why’.

Why? Why? Why? How many parents get a barrage of ‘whys’ from their kids? That is another immovable constant, it seems, the curiosity of the young!

Our reason that makes us curious is both the light to penetrate the darkness, and find God, and the distraction from God. We must be careful not to become familiar with everything, and satisfied with ‘logical’ proofs. Why is the sky blue? Because of Wein’s law, that light scatters proportionate to the inverse of its wavelength. Shorter wavelengths scatter more. A great description of a phenomenon, but little more. The sky is blue because blue light scatters most. This probably wouldn’t satisfy an earnest child, although it may shut them up… for a while. It is akin to answering the question ‘why did that painter paint the sky red?’ with ‘because he used red paint.’

If, as children, we want to be satisfied, we must learn to see symbolism, because God is a personal experience. God can be proved, personally, but He can’t be ‘solved’.

The material forms of the earth connote, continually, a larger theme. Just as inches move to feet, and feet necessarily move to miles as our experience of distance increases, so does nature move toward God.

Job 12: vs. 7-9: “Ask the animals and they shall teach you; and the birds of the sky, and they shall inform you. Or speak to the earth and she shall show you; and the fishes of the sea shall declare to you.’

Let’s quickly look at these fractals I’ve printed out. They make for a good allegory. A fractal is defined as an image that is self-similar through scale. If we zoom in at any point on the boundary of this image we get a perimeter exactly similar to the overall whole.

If we start with a single triangle, like in this one (Serpinski Triangle), and we add half-sized triangles to each side, we end up with this interesting image, whose perimeter is vastly different than a triangle, even though it is made up of triangles. This ‘non-triangle’ shape is termed the ‘strange attractor’ by chaos mathematicians. Well, using this analogy, God is the strange attractor to the universe. All things ultimately combine to reveal Him. Like in this one (Mandlebrot set) each piece is an image of the whole. Or we can reverse the analogy, and say that God is the triangle, and the increasingly complex shape formed from the repetition of a unity is nature becoming itself. Or we can say God is the other side of the perimeter, that he is the black triangle (in this example) and nature is the white triangles formed from the existence of the black ones.

All these analogies work, symbolically, to convey a description of God, the mover who is made evident through everything.

These shapes cannot exist without their successive parts, each which is an image of the larger shape. No matter what scale we travel to, the image is always constant. This is much like the cosmos. Does not Paul tell us we are Christ, and Christ is God?

God cannot be moved. He is the mover. God sends things out that they may return to Him. God has given us motion that we can learn stillness.

(Meditation is a stillness made from motion.)

So, finally, a personal analogy. God is everywhere, He reveals Himself constantly, if we know how to look. One morning the frost was heavy on my car’s windshield. I couldn’t find the scraper, and I had time, so I turned on the heat and waited for the frost to melt. What had appeared as a unity, unmoving, and opaque to the day’s light, began suddenly, with the application of heat, to break into a multiplicity of parts. It fractured along interesting boundaries, began to move, broke up, the pieces turned to liquid. With the application of heat—a movement—the unity had become a plenitude, had transformed to a different state—liquid from solid—back to a unity once more, and ultimately left me with a clear view of the most beautiful morning.