You Cannot Understand Unless You Go to Space

The Prelude to Miyazawa Kenji’s poetry collection Spring and Asura (Haru to Shura) begins like this.

The phenomenon called “I”
is a single blue illumination
of a hypothesized, organic alternating-current lamp
(a composite of every transparent ghost)

A Composite of Simple Principles

Seen cosmically, things are composites of simple principles. As soon as we look at them locally rather than comprehensively, they stop making sense. Science is absorbed in explaining one thing after another, but its explanations are, to put it kindly, far from beautiful. It invents all sorts of technical terms and develops theories that are hardly well ordered.

Scientific papers are not literature that everyone can enjoy, the way a poet’s poems are. When a boy or girl brimming with curiosity and the spirit of inquiry reads Nature in search of the truths of the universe, all they come away with is the feeling that it was dull and “boring.” The solutions science produces are always shortsighted and symptomatic. For many people, science feels dull not because they cannot understand it, but because it does not express the underlying order of things.

Grasping the Energy Cycles of the Universe

The workings of things can be explained by the energy cycles of the universe. Energy is geometric, and it appears in nature as patterns. If we grasp the various phenomena as geometric patterns that include time, the explanations become concise and beautiful. They become theories that truly discuss the order of things, that is, theories without exceptions. A theory in which exceptions are found has fundamentally misunderstood the universe.

In this respect, Miyazawa Kenji grasped the energy cycles of the universe. Without a heart that feels the universe, the meaning of this poem cannot be understood at all.

Together with the landscape and everyone
flickering busily, busily on and off
and yet most surely staying lit,
it is a single blue illumination
of the karmic alternating-current lamp
(the light endures, the lamp itself is lost)

You Cannot Understand Unless You Go to Space

You cannot know Earth’s color and shape unless you go to space. To know the truth of what happens in the universe, you need to go to space. As long as you cling to your own position, or to the common sense of human society, the true form of the universe will not come into view. Only by becoming one with the universe and seeing things from there can you touch their essence.

In that sense, “enlightenment” (satori) means becoming one with the universe. This is not a figure of speech. It is written in the Prelude to Spring and Asura too.

These sceneries, simply and surely recorded,
are these sceneries exactly as they were recorded,
and if they are nothingness, then nothingness itself is just like this,
and to a certain extent they are common to everyone
(just as everything is the everyone within me,
so it is everything within each one of everyone)

The Workings of the Heart for Exploring the Universe

Humans have a special ability: they can take the universe inside themselves. Just as we look up at the night sky and find constellations by connecting the dots of the stars, we can extract what is common from the “particular patterns” we experience through our bodily senses and discover “general structures.” We abstract concrete experience to discover principles. We do this with the heart.

When we minimize the work of the head and maximize the work of the heart, we become able to see what is happening in the universe: that stars, like living things, are born and die; that over a star’s life, heavier elements are produced from lighter ones; that supernova explosions scatter the heavy elements accumulated inside into the universe; and that this changes the distribution of elements in the galaxy.

If we apply this cosmic way of seeing things to life on Earth’s surface, technology will evolve cosmically, and everyone will be able to live far more comfortably than now. This is not a small comfort built on someone else’s great sacrifice. It is an abundance that all life can feel. That is true wealth.

Making Cosmic Study (Cosmic Exploration) the Norm

When we live in a world where every child naturally knows the relative abundance of the elements in the universe and the reasons for it, our human civilization will evolve to the next level. To that end, we at Polymath Research will keep preparing environments for growth in four-dimensional space as the real world, not a virtual one. By making children’s Cosmic Study (cosmic exploration) the norm, humankind will become a multiplanetary species. We are now at that turning point.

All these propositions
are asserted, as the nature of mental images and of time itself,
within the fourth-dimensional extension

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