The God of Math

…and Why Some Square the Circle

Let’s do some math.

Circumference: The outside boundary of a circle. A line, in a loop, with no beginning or end.

Diameter: The width of the circle at its widest point. An invisible line with a beginning and an end.

Ratio: The number of times one number contains another number. For example, if in a bowl there are 12 lemons and 6 oranges, the ratio of lemons to oranges is 12 to 6, or 2 to 1.

Question: What’s the ratio of the circumference of a circle (its outside loop) to its diameter (its width) How many diameters are there in its circumference?

Put differently and metaphysically: How does infinity (the circle’s loop) relate to finite (the circle’s width)? How many finites are there in the infinite?

The answer to the mathematical question, is “pi” - an irrational (cannot be expressed exactly) and transcendental (can’t be the solution of an equation involving finite things) number.

Dividing any circle’s circumference by its diameter always produces the same unique number that never ends nor repeats a pattern within it. When written, it is abbreviated as 3.14, but the true calculation produces an endless stream of digits without a repeated pattern within. It’s not a conventional number.

That “number” “3.14….” is called pi.

Trying to create a logical connection and relationship between the infiniteness of a circle (its circumference) and its finiteness (its width) is inherently paradoxical, and creates something that is both finite (consisting of numbers) and infinite (which never ends). Pi, therefore, represents an intersection of finite and infinite: a finite representation revealing an infinite manifestation.

Our reality – that which we perceive with our logic – is linear, causal, time-bound, and inherently includes a beginning and an end. We instinctively ask: How did something anything and everything get here? When?

Embedded in our reality is something not of our reality’s rules – the circle. It’s got no start and no end. It’s something beyond our reality, within our reality. I think it actually reflects a deeper reality of the universe. While our reality seems to require a beginning - because our linear minds think that way and can only grasp a notion of start and end - I think there is no beginning or end of the universe. The essence of the reality of our reality as we can’t know it, is circular, including “time” itself. It expands and contracts continuously. There is no start time.

Our mind might resist this, since its tools are Why, Because, Before, and After, so, for everything there must be a why, how, and before. The mind’s tools are all it knows. We assume our tools can address all of reality. We project our “truths” – as determined by the limitations of our thought apparatus – on to domains inaccessible to our cognition, where even the concepts of “truth” or “reality” may not apply. We apply our logic, reason, and words to unapproachable areas.

The painful (to the ego) truth may in fact be that reality has no beginning and that time itself is circular. The big bang may have been part of a repetitive cycle, the tightest point in a time loop, the end of a contraction and the beginning of an expansion. Fractals - an endless repeat of a pattern that appears completed, until we look closer where we see it repeated – mimics this. The universe seems to echo this as well. Structures appear self-similar across scales: galaxy, solar system, molecule, atoms…. all repeat patterns, at least visually, suggesting cyclic or iterative organization.

Our mind, if we teach it to apply its own rules of logic to itself, can understand its limits and might acknowledge the possibility of there being something beyond its grasp - without the ability to sense or even discuss that.

The image of a circle and its unique mathematical manifestation can be a hint or shadow of the infinite, for our finite minds.

Some of us might have a gnawing and frustrating sense of another reality in our reality - the infinite - without anything to perceive it. Societies and cultures prefer to fabricate certainty rather than confront not knowing, which is painful to the egocenter whose raison d’etre is understanding, knowing, predicting… Some chose to call this shadow of the infinite, god. (They then personify, worship, and create narratives around it, and consider it part of the self, trying to convince themselves they know the shadow, the infinite).

Perhaps instead we call god “Pi” – the shadow of the unknowable to us.