Holes in the Number line and Shavasana
Consciousness and Number
Shavasana
Shavasana is corpse pose in yoga. It is when you lie down, relax, and breathe.
Whenever I settle into shavasana, I feel connected to all the other times I’ve done this —on yoga mats, in studios, in quiet living rooms. Each moment connects across my lifetime. I imagine that when I come to the end of my life, this will be the feeling that I experience.
I imagine Shavasana as the rest in a musical composition, and as the hole in a number line.
The landscape of the real line
Maybe you remember the number line from grade school.
The set of real numbers include:
Rational numbers (fractions, countable)
Irrational numbers (uncountable)
Countable
We can define ½ or ¾ easily, but we cannot define √2 — its decimal expansion never ends. If we think about discrete mathematics, which is the foundation of the digital computer, the number line is disrupted by these numbers that never end, we cannot smoothly move from an irrational number to the number immediately after or before it.
Rational numbers are countable; we could theoretically list all of them.
Irrational numbers are uncountable; we cannot list them since each irrational number itself is infinite.
(w)holes
When we use calculus to graph a curved line, sometimes we encounter a hole, a point in the line that expands to infinity.
We see these holes in the line that graphs √2x.
The Rest
It feels there is something here that connects the holes and shavasana. Shavasana is itself is a hole in experience, a moment of rest amongst all the doing, all the countable things. There are a limited number of activities in modern society that feel like holes -moments apart from everyday life: psychoanalysis comes to mind. These are uncountable, infinite spaces. Spaces that cannot compute, where you cannot deduce the outputs from the inputs, the results cannot even be calculated - they are infinite.
Perhaps the thing that really connects our experience is the moments of incomprehensible infinity - the holes and the rests.