Later that evening I happened to catch an old movie I really enjoy- The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension. Despite having a long and more than a little silly title, it's actually not a bad movie. Peter Weller, later of Robocop fame, plays the soft-spoken and likable title character, along with a few later to be famous actors- Clancy Brown, later to appear in Starship Troopers, and the voice of Mr. Krabs on Spongebob, as well as Jeff Goldblum. It focuses on Dr. Buckaroo Banzai, kind of a Renaissance man of the scientific world and neurosurgeon, as well as something of a superhero, acting for the good of the world at large. This made me realize something I hadn't before- back in my younger days, when I was an avid fan of string theory, chaos-vs-complexity, and all that fun, nonlinear mathematical type stuff, I realized that in the midst of this something that I doubt I'll ever be able to prove in this lifetime- that the universe is organized. We first saw this with people doing similar work to this movie- the results, or attempted results, were called GUTs- Grand Unified Theories. The intent of these scientific heretics was to provide a way to understand the universe and everything in it- to explain it away and to remove the mystery, in other words. The death or proof of God, depending on which side of the fence you're on. Mathematics is said to be the universal language (and here I thought it was French), but this has greater implications beyond being able to communicate ideas. Anything, as you probably know, dear reader, that can be quantified, that is, assigned a numerical representation, can then be understood in terms of mathematics. The degree of understanding depends on the accuracy and completeness of the numbers designated to represent it. To simplify- everything operates according to mathematical principles- you do, I do, machines do, subatomic particles do, the past, present and future do. However, here's the rub, as Shakespeare said- we simply don't have the mathematics, let alone the capacity to understand the sheer complexity of these mathematical operations. It's like someone who knows how to drive, but can't fix an engine- you know it works, and can observe the end results, but the internal mechanisms, what makes it work, remain a mystery.
So by extension, someone or other once said any sufficiently advanced technology (I'm drawing kind of a rough parallel here) will appear as magic to someone who doesn't know how it works. Enter the Tarot- here, I found, is a system to take a kind of cross-section of this larger mathematical pattern. A kind of GUT without the science. In non-linear mathematics, one can take any cross section of the results for a given equation and determine that equation. This in turn allows you to perfectly predict results. Again, we may not know exactly why this equation is in place, but we can understand the mechanism behind it, and harness that mechanism to provide the results we are looking for. I admit, I don't fully understand the exact mechanism of how it works, but every part of the greater whole reflects that pattern present in the whole. The implications go very far beyond what may be readily apparent here- basically, grasp the pattern, make it work for you, and you become God. Some of us have less lofty (not to mention saner) goals, simply wishing to make the world a better place, and to cease being, also as Shakespeare said, fortune's fool. Nonetheless, the world continues to turn, whether or not I happen to be aware of it at the moment.
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