Threading the needle

Threading the Needle

Threading the Camel Through the Eye of the Needle.

Kate poked through her sewing kit, looking for a red thread to finish repairing a tapestry of a fortress at sunset. Within minutes, she relaxed. Her skill, discipline, and special touch brought life to the ¾ stitch, that looked like the symbol Lambda, λ. The habitual action let her mind wander between emptiness and flashes of thought.

She drifted to a lifetime ago, when Robert was still alive. They met at breakfast, when a friend who was hosting Robert as a guest lecturer, introduced them. The conversation was lively. “Robert is a physicist of some distinction. He has a unique, intuitive way to follow a red thread through physics. Robert, tell Kate how the universe began.”

Robert, always a literalist replied, “I hesitate to use string theory, however, I can follow the red shift.” They chuckled. “Following the thread that leads through the labyrinth holds potential complications. Theseus ended up killing the Minotaur of Minos, and treated Ariadne poorly, after she had given him the thread as a token of her love.”

Kate quipped, “So, why do you think folklore says that the red thread offers protection and wards off the evil eye?”

Robert did not miss a beat, “Thankfully, the event led to her marrying Dionysius who gave her a crown of stars.” With a twinkle in his eye he added, “Japanese myth says the matchmaker god places a red thread that runs from the heart to the pinkie finger, connecting lovers destined to meet through time and space.”

Kate felt the pull. She fell in love with Robert. They found ‘Nimisha’, the moment, where they glimpsed at Utopia, defined as an imaginary good place, that is no place. They tied the knot a year later.

Robert believed in being well-schooled, according to the Latin derivative, ‘schola’, meaning leisure devoted to learning. He said, ‘When your job is a hobby, you never work a day in your life.”

He deeply understood and wanted to share knowledge of symbols that reflect nature and have shaped society over thousands of years. Robert asked impossible-to-answer questions, about the origin of matter from fluctuating, invisible forces in the vacuum.

She remembered him explaining, “Lambda describes a unifying force. Variable waves hold a transcendent and immanent power that can enter the material world. Lambda, the symbol for wavelength, measures the maximum displacement that a wave or massless particle vibrates. Lambda is called the Cosmological Constant, the energy density of space or vacuum energy but it operates differently at large and small scales.”

Kate looked at her stitches. They reflected the interference patterns of vibrating three- dimensional sigmoidal standing waves that maintain, destroy or transform smooth, round curves to sharp, pointed tips.

Robert had explained. “The motion of nature’s energy vibrates at many levels. Forces move in patterns of probability, attracted and repulsed through random regions of no charge. The mathematical curve of periodic oscillations of sinusoidal wavelengths, viewed in cross-section, form a vortex of two helices spinning in opposite directions. Waves are swinging pendulums, that synchronize over time and space. In the quantum world, the energy of waves moves through the electromagnetic spectrum, that makes up the fabric of space and time. Waves hold the quintessence of matter, and can tunnel with and without the transit of particles. If a particle and antiparticle unite, they annihilate into light energy or leave the memory of light.”

Robert’s knowledge was beyond Kate, but he planted ideas. The bifurcations of the forked branches were Kate’s dowser’s rod. Kate imagined the forces resonating throughout the universe, by harmonic generation and intermodulation. Waves intersect, forming the sacred symbol of a two dimensional Vesica Pisces, based on the divine proportions.

Kate accepted that fact is stranger than fiction.

Waves travel through the living and nonliving. They carry messages from the past in the red shift. The brain uses photons that enter the eye, or that are internally produced, to create memories stored in the hippocampus that Arantius called a seahorse and white silkworm.

The subconscious retrieves afterimages and spins them into threads adapted to the heartbeat of the Earth’s natural Schumann Resonance. Theta waves are used for problem solving. Alpha waves creatively make unexpected associations. Fast, high energy Gamma waves, meld phantom threads into a gestalt, more than the sum of the parts.

Recent discoveries confirm thread-like filaments, with repeating magnetic field lines, stretch across 50 million light years, forming tensions as they tangle around giant voids connecting disparate clusters of galaxies. Regular, fast, radio bursts rhythmically pulse through the cosmos. The gravity of the Sun controls the orbits of planets. The outer core of the sun and inner core of the Earth are the same temperature. Communication through symbiotic networks of fungi connect 90% of land plants. Dowsers attempt to locate Ley lines, associated with vortices of tellurium found in bedrock veins.

Kate recalled another conversation when Robert shared ideas about a chapter for his book. ”Zeno (430BC) started the dialectic method of reasoning using logic, physics and ethics that removed the division between science and literature. Zeno’s paradox mathematically proves objects approaching each other never touch.”

Kate had interrupted saying, “The Zeno butterfly must be named in his honour. Butterflies hold cellular memories of their genetic origins and what they learned at earlier stages in imaginal discs.”

Robert patiently replied, “Fitting. Butt means to give a push. ‘Bhuta’ in Sanskrit, means a spirit, ‘Butha’ means to weave‘ and Buttha’is a ‘collective group’ or ‘corn’. Buddha (560 BC) was enlightened and awakened. He used reason and logic to understand the physical world.”

Robert continued. “Science is built, standing on the shoulders of giants. Aristotle (350 BC) wrote Metaphysics Lambda, about divine energy that moves through either/or possibilities. His student Eratosthenes (3oo BC), used two opposing points of view to measure the diameter of the Earth and developed a prime number staircase. Concurrent with the Indian poet and mathematician Pingala, they established musical ratios of harmonics using a binary system.

Boethius,(500 AD ) applied mathematical principles to unite wave patterns that moved from the universe to the body, soul, musical compositions and instruments. Fibonacci (1300), Schütz and Kepler (1500) and Bach, Faraday, Gauss, Euler (1700) applied the harmonic theory to planets, light, sound and elements that resonate with beats. Leibniz and Newton, independently developed the logic of Lambda calculus, to examine limits of the rate of change that Alonzo Church (1900) applied to computer logic. Now this logic applies Zeno’s paradox, to slow time in the infinite gap, and view a quantum state.”

Kate refocussed on the camel kneeling under the sunset. Stoccatoed, stochastic events had attracted her to this tapestry. She recalled a piece of Mola art, said to reduce empty space that evil spirits can fill. At a museum, they had examined the face of a crucified Christ by Claude Mellon, made with a single line of different thicknesses.

Robert had a Dreidel. She had pointed out the symbol of lambda. He explained, “It is a gimel. If it turns up, the winner takes all. The symbol denotes a rich man running after a poor man to rectify his soul by bestowing charity, a reward or punishment. Iranian Pahlavi literature (3AD), suggests the gimel has a fixed shape and joining behaviour that controls an underlying sequence.”

Kate had been intrigued by the bifurcated symbol that resembles the Chinese and Japanese script for humanity. In the Shang dynasty, divination used dragon bones inscribed with symbols, that formed typical morphological fracture patterns of lambda, and the letters H, U or T, when thrown into fire. Symbolic treasures are protected by a serpent-dragon.

In myth, the dragon Ladon guards the Golden apples in the Garden of the Hesperides, where the daughters of the evening called the three graces, the Moirae, or three fates, held the power of song and could spin, measure, then break the thin thread of life. Jason subdued the dragon Colchis, to steal the Golden Fleece a symbol of authority. In the Ring of the Nibelung, disasters follow when the dragon Fafnir is slain and the treasures that promise happiness are removed.

Cadmus, the father of alchemy, killed the dragon Ismenios that guarded the sacred spring, and buried the teeth that grew into warlike men. In alchemy, the death of the dragon leads to the nigredo or blackening phase called the shadow, known as the Raven’s head and precedes enlightenment, when the razor-sharp wit of the wild beast transforms and connects to the well spring of life that passes between the earth, the gods and the dead.

In Hebrew, Gimel means camel. The Iranian name Zoroaster means ‘owner who can manage the golden camel’. The camel transforms fat to water within its hump and represents the primordial venomous viper, and the guardian Indian Naga spirits of renewal. The camel is believed to contain all the states of a soul’s evolution: from a brute animal who has desires and appetites to a thinker who holds the breath of god.

In scriptures, Mathew says “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than someone rich to enter the Kingdom of God.” Biblical history reports that a camel could only pass through the smaller gate of a fortress at night, called the “needles eye” by kneeling, with the baggage removed. Ammonium chloride salts from the waiting camels' urine and dung were used to make liver medicine. Prometheus, reputed to have crafted writing, from Egyptian hieroglyphics, was cursed for giving fire and language to humans by having his liver, (said to hold the soul), eaten each day. Cadmus, also known as Hermes,was a Phoenician Prince of the sea, a merchant and interpreter, hailed as the inventor of language and speech and reputed to be a liar, thief and trickster.

Greeks replaced the gimel with gamma, the letter G, said to represent a camels neck, a staff or the action of throwing a stick, and a group of animals gathering at a water hole to drink. Freemasons use the letter G to represent the builders square and compass, used by the Grand Architect in the geometry of nature.

In physics, gamma represents the shortest wavelength with the most energy. The Gamma factor measures the time, length and relativistic mass change for a moving object. A gamma ray burst from an exploding star slings energy into a four dimensional double spiral pattern in a Matrix, that has resonance with exponential relationships that unfold in harmonics in octaves of phi, the Golden mean. The gamma function determines the probability of recurrence. The Psi symbol, found in the trident carried by the god of the waves Poseidon, and the Sun god Shiva, represents the wave function that describes the ratio of simultaneous, coherent superpositions within a quantum mechanical system, that approach the super golden ratio.

As Kate finished her sewing, she remembered the joy of sharing her life with Robert. She was grateful for the brief moments, when faint whispers of Robert’s timeless spirit were shuttled as a vector force through the heddles and loops of the loom of her calcium metal-boned frame. Following the path of the red thread, she had experienced the Zeno effect. Time slowed down the currents of what she learned and imagined of Robert’s life force energy so her brain could harness the fluctuating chaotic waves from the vacuum of her subconscious. Her thought and no thought formed the woof and warp, that gave strength and vigour to the intricate and delicate fabric of the tapestry, and her soul.

Robert had often restored treasures he bought for a song. Now, as a bard in unison with the Moirae and Sirens who tell of things which were, that are, and will be, she had repaired the unravelling tapestry as a Pindaric ode and elegy to her beloved. Crafting had let her resonate in peaceful harmony with the theory of everything of the cosmos, and thread the camel through the eye of the needle.