- I want to talk to you about someone.
- Alright.
- Or rather, I don't. I'll get at what I'm interested in this way. What would you do if you were dropped from space down to Los Angeles, someplace affluent, and affluent, at least in appearance, yourself.
- How old am I?
- Fairly old. 60, 65. You've fallen from space to sitting in a chair at a cafe, in a shopping center.
- Where do I live?
- You live nowhere. You just dropped from space.
- So I know no one?
- You know no one.
- Then I'll make friends.
- That isn't what I want to ask you about. In fact, I mean, in our hypothetical, you can't make friends.
- Why not?
- Because it seems to others that you've just dropped from space.
- They don't understand me. I'm not human then?
- You are.
- But I must be different if they don't understand me. How am I different?
- You sit at the table in the shopping center and look at the baby held in its mother's arms at the next table. The baby looks back at you. You ask yourself, how long can this go on? The baby looks away, and a few seconds later, looks back, locking on your eyes. This repeats a few times and you withdraw your attention because now you're interested in the general question, what does the baby see when it looks into your eyes, is it the same you see when you look in its eyes? You answer, you think it is, it is contemplation, a recognition of being in a good place, a place you can rest in that no action is required to remedy. You've arrived. With no need to do anything, nothing in the world stands out from another, you see the world as a whole. And yet, after a while, you look away. You, dropped from space, an old man...
- I'm a man, am I?
- You are. You've been dropped from space at that table, knowing nobody, and you can't make friends because you're too different, and you're too different because you are perfectly happy to sit at the table and watch this baby look at you and look away, trying to understand why when what the baby sees when it looks your way is perfect and whole, it nevertheless looks away.
- This old man I am, dropped from space would look at the baby, and when its mother takes it away, he'd continue thinking of the situation in general. He wouldn't look to get whatever kind of job an incomprehensible old man could get. He'd more or less drag his old body around, looking and thinking. Until what? He makes a friend or dies?
- He wants to solve this problem which he expresses to himself thus: if the baby looks at me, and I look at it, with complete and satisfied attention, with a sense of wholeness, therefore no sense of will - will involving desire for taking action - why does the baby take action and look away?
- Why does it?
- The old man thinks he knows how to begin his search for an answer: will he decide to get up from his chair and look for means to keep himself alive, or will he not, and remain in contemplation of babies and whatever else that his attention grasps hold of?
- Doesn't he feel the urge to look away?
- No, not immediately. But hour after hour passes and he begins to feel the cramping of muscles and the onset of hunger and thirst. He understands himself well enough to know that his appreciation of the world's beauty requires the physical underpinnings of perception. His body is holding itself in relation to the world. He understands that in time that hold in relation will weaken and ultimately fail.
- So he's solved his problem.
- He's made only a start, for he asks himself, once he looks away, how will he be able to return to contemplation of a baby contemplating him? He looks at the affluent people around him, well fed and at ease with their bodies...
- And there is no looking-at-babies-looking-at-them in their lives.
- None. Now, in our hypothetical, we provide our old man dropped from space without a friend in the world with a laptop computer connected to the Internet. He's realized he has no idea what connects the physical aspect of himself with the mental. He opens the computer and types into a search engine the phrase 'physics mysteries'. He taps the link to a video, and he can hardly believe it: he seems to have found an answer. The video is about an observation made by a Russian astronaut during his stay in a space station in zero gravity. A wingnut had come loose and was floating in the air, continuously rotating around one axis. After every few seconds, however, the wing nut would flip over on a second axis, and then continue as before. It seems magical, this on and off of movement of a solid piece of metal.
- Did our old man actually see a clip of this happening?
- Yes. Do you have an explanation?
- No. Tell me.
- The video presents another physics mystery, a cylinder sliding down an inclined plane, then stopping, then resuming its slide, then stopping, and so on. The mystery is explained: inside the cylinder partly filling it is a viscous fluid that as the cylinder as a whole moves forward, slides towards the back of the cylinder, cause it to stop, the fluid then recoiling from the back to flow forward, causing the cylinder to resume its forward motion.
- But the wingnut you said is solid.
- It is. But if you looked carefully at the video clip you could see that when the wingnut was apparently spinning on only one axis, on the second axis it was after each flip already slightly wobbling.
- And that wobbling built up until it flipped the wingnut completely over.
- Yes. Our old man...
- Wasn't I the old man?
- You didn't seem to want the job. Our old man thinks he understands: the movement produced by one force is being modulated by the movement produced by another force. The baby looks at him, impelled to do this by one force, but looks away, compelled to do this by another force.
- But looks back again when the first force reasserts itself. No act of will required for either exit or entrance to its state of contemplation. Nice and neat.
- The old man closes his computer, sits at the table at the shopping center and thinks. It's not food and shelter his body needs, but a counterforce to contemplation it already is in the care of. How is he going to find that?
- I don't know. Not by getting whatever job an incomprehensible old man dropped from space can get?
- And in off work hours look for what in life he should be doing to produce the required counter-force?
- Yes.
- He considers this, and thinks. Maybe. But it would put him in the grips of extraneous forces and complicate matters. Better first to find the counterforce, come to know the movements it produces when he sees them.
- How is he going to do that?
- He sits there and thinks. His limbs cramp, he feels hunger and thirst. The stores close. Shopping center guards escort him out to the street. He stands on a corner, still thinking.
- Doesn't sound good.
- He thinks like this: mathematics can account for the sloshing back and forth of the viscous liquid in the cylinder, and the wobbling on the second axis of the wingnut. If he can find a similar mathematics in the activities of life when not resting in contemplation, then wouldn't he have what he needed to work on making a life that would as expeditiously as possible return him there?
- To rest and beauty.
- Yes.
- Then what? What happens to him?
- He goes back the next day to the shopping center.
- Where mothers often come with their babies.
- Yes. He begins his studies.
