THE STRANGE MACHINE
JUNE 28, 2011. Let us suppose we are standing at a table, and on the table is a machine. We have experts with us.
They turn on the machine, and they turn it off. They take it apart and examine and examine the pieces, and they put it back together again.
They say, “This machine is constructed in a very fine and complex way. We can see that. All the parts are coordinated and their functions interlock. The machine works. There is no doubt of that. But we have no idea what it produces.”
And as hard as they try, they come back to the same conclusion. They know it’s a machine. It works. It works very well. But they haven’t a clue about what it turns out, what it accomplishes.
So they turn on the machine and they leave the room.
The machine runs, without any interference, for ten years.
It’s obviously producing something, but no one knows what that is.
The output of the machine is invisible.
And suppose at some point ten years, 20 years down the line, it becomes apparent that the machine is changing reality. It is introducing new realities.
These new realities aren’t visible, but they are felt very strongly.
And one of the experts comes back to the room and looks at the machine and says, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but keep doing it, because you’re proving that reality can change at the most fundamental and profound level.”
The expert wasn’t sure such a change was possible. He believed something basic about reality was absolutely permanent. He was unhappy with that conclusion—but he had long ago accepted it. Now, though, he feels a rising hope. He was wrong.
He realizes that reality was indeed a series of boundaries. However it had been generated originally, that’s what it was.
And now it is disintegrating.
He feels great joy and anticipation.
Why should the former (and now evaporating) reality be permitted to last forever? Why were people disposed to accept that? What made them satisfied with that?
Finally, he feels his own hard dedication to the former reality slip away. No reason to maintain it.
JON RAPPOPORT