I began thinking about it.
Most of you won't be surprised that I think small business owners are some of the most evolved people on the planet. They are the risk takers, the job creators, the problem solvers... they are the same people who have been called crazy, out-of-touch fools, and stupid-and-ignorant of basic facts. In spite of the harsh judgment, they persevered and proved people wrong. They moved us all forward.
I am especially keen of people who take on the biggest ideas that reach into the very first principles of life. Jack Miller is such a person. Remigus Shatas is as well.
Ever since I was about five years old, I have had a fascination with inventors and people who literally create things just from an idea. Early on I made the study of creativity a quiet passion which carried me throughout school and beyond. In 1994, I discovered a simple truth about our lack of intellectual curiosity (and our lack of understanding the brain-mind connection and the very meaning of basic structure). I decided to share these simple insights with my old friend who was convening some of the most evolved people on the planet.
This is what I wrote:
Hi Craig,
Three simple questions tell us how unenlightened we all are. These are questions kindergarten children should be able to answer but we have not created the environment for understanding interior things.
Interiority is little discussed. People sleep every night, they dream, they close their eyes and meditate, and they pray, but we hardly have a clue what goes on within. It is on the other side of the Planck constant; it is where the 0,1 become the Janus face of universality.
The three simple questions are:
1. What is the most basic structure of the universe. The answer: The tetrahedron. That is true for physics, chemistry, biology and a host of others.
2. What is perfectly enclosed by the tetrahedron? For that answer, we must go inside it. Half the six edges (three coming down and three on the base) and we discover there is a tetrahedron in each corner and an octahedron in the middle. A bunch of people, yet probably less than .000001% of the population knows this simple interior structure of the most basic structure on earth.
That's blasphemous. It is intellectual nincompoopery... a disgrace within the history of scholarship.
The third question perhaps is obvious by now, but it is:
3. What is perfectly enclosed by the octahedron?” Again half the twelve edges and you discover the eight tetrahedrons in each face and the six octahedrons in each corner. I have asked literally hundreds of people that question over the years, and only John Conway of Princeton had a quick answer. Yet, his answer did not come as fast as 8-times-8…. He said, “Let’s figure it out," and of course, he did rather quickly.
Here we have the two most basic structures on earth and throughout the universe and we do not know them. What riches there are to be discovered within them once we awaken from our dogmatic slumber!
So, my question to you is in the form of a verbal survey of those who are some of the most evolved people on the planet. I wonder, “How many would know the answers to those three simple questions?”
If you find this to be a lot of foolishness, shame on me for not being clearer.
If you find it a bit intriguing, perhaps we should be talking about it sometime!
Warmly,
Bruce
PS. The answers do have many functional applications. Even some of the greatest achievements in intellectual history, such as the double helix, get put into a new light. Not much is known about the “other side” of Max’s constant. Yet, the wonderful physicist, David Bohm, did a calculation back in the ‘60s about quantum fluctuations at that transformation point. He said that within any cubic centimeter of space that the fluctuation energy is approximately equivalent to 14 Hiroshima detonations. When I read that in Causality & Chance in Modern Physics as a student in the ‘70s, it became a source of great fascination.
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As a footnote to my letter above, in 1980 I started my doctoral dissertation entitled, “Perfected States in Space-time.” All my professors thought I was crazy. Yet, in thinking about that little discovery in 1994 I wrote this little summary about the nature and meaning of life and business: http://search.smallbusinessschool.org/page869.htmlI would like to think it moves me closer to my earliest goals to understand creativity. Perhaps those simple notions (within the page linked above) are a first principle for people who are among the most evolved on the planet. Perhaps... perhaps.
