Approaching Zero - A Sunrise Journal on Riemann Sums, Epsilon, and the Sacred Whole

 

July 14. Early morning, haven't even had coffee yet.

I was pacing around the room, re-reading what we jotted down in the journal last time. You know, I feel like we're just tangling ourselves up in our own threads. All this talk about modern science, about how it has become warped and vulgarized - sometimes we make it sound so complex and academic, but the problem is actually incredibly simple. And very human. We vulgarized it because we stopped living it, turning it instead into a survival tool, a dry trade for money and a false sense of security.

I look at how everything is split into pieces today. Everyone has fenced off their own little plot of land, shouting: "I'm a psychoanalyst, you're a biologist, that guy over there is a physicist, don't step on my toes." It's complete nonsense. Science is one. It has always been a single breath, a single attempt to understand where and who we are. There are no signs in nature that say: “This is where chemistry ends, and this is where the soul begins”. Everything bleeds into everything else, just like the night is fading into the morning outside my window right now.

And this is where I realize how blind I was last time when you wrote to me about this less than one (< 1). I got bogged down in some psychological lack, when you were actually thinking about Riemann sums. Now everything clicks into place. It’s the purest metaphor for what’s happening. We have this beautiful, soft, continuous curve - life itself, reality, God, call it what you want. And because our minds are too small and terrified to grasp it all at once, we slice it up. We chop the space beneath it into infinitely many tiny rectangles, into intervals smaller than one.

Each rectangle is a separate discipline, a narrow specialty, just another little project. And then we add up the areas of these isolated, hollow boxes and imagine we've understood the whole. But the boxes either overshoot the curve or leave empty gaps beneath it. They never touch it perfectly. This is the great distortion of modern thought - we've locked ourselves inside rectangles with a width of zero-point-something, and forgot to look at the line itself.

Why do we actually do this? Out of pure fear. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the continuous terrifies us. It is like that oceanic feeling from childhood, where there are no boundaries and your Ego dissolves. So we fragment reality to domesticate it. The little box gives us the illusion that we are in control. When you study just one block, you're the master there. But the price is massive - you lose the motion. Life flows, while our boxes are static and dead.

And I think it all started with a very tiny deviation. Just like the butterfly effect. Somewhere back in time, the wings of rationalism fluttered ever so slightly; we shifted our focus from why we live to how to use the world, and today we find ourselves in total spiritual isolation. We ignored epsilon (epsilon) - that microscopic value so close to zero that in rough calculations we simply round it off and discard it. But in life, it is precisely within this epsilon that our free will is hidden, our right to make mistakes, our sense of wonder. Modern science wants everything to be certain, clean, rounded to zero or one. But human beings are not numbers.

We try to shove infinity into tight boxes and immediately run headfirst into Dirichlet's principle. You know how it goes - if you have more pigeons than boxes, some will have to crowd into the same cage. Our spiritual searches, fears, and experiences are infinite - they are the pigeons. And we stuff them into five or six drawers of academic empiricism. Of course they suffocate. Of course everything becomes gray and distorted.

And the scariest part is that this carving doesn't stop with science. We fragment time into hours and tasks because we are terrified of the bottomless "Now." We slice space into borders. And above all, we fragment people into "othernesses." We desperately need the figure of the Other to project our own shadows and traumas onto them, to analyze them, to protect ourselves from them, or to use them. But in the silence, when the mind finally quietens down, you realize that there are no othernesses. Everything is the same single breath. Separation is just an optical illusion of our frightened Ego. Every wound we inflict on the Other, we inflict on our own heart, because nothing is separate.

How do we get back then?

We can't just break the boxes of the Riemann sum with a hammer. The way back is hidden in the limit process itself. For the sum of the blocks to become a true integral, the width of the rectangle - our little dx - must begin to approach zero.

This is the spiritual law of self-emptying. We must shrink our tools, shrink our ego so much that our boxes become infinitely thin. Then, infinity simply starts to shine through them. It means looking at the tree outside the window without instantly slapping a label on it. Loving someone without analyzing them through their childhood traumas. Bearing the anxiety of not knowing, and simply contemplating.

When the blocks disappear, the sum finally dissolves into an Integral - into one shared, continuous whole.

The sun is already rising. The sky is a fading blue, so pure. I close my notebook. No more equations needed. Today, I am just going to let the day happen to me like one continuous, living line.