Codex of the Synapse: Folio C5.2
The Mythic Elevator and The Building of Halves
- "Yes, but how many gods are there really, Yajnavalkya? "
- "One and a half"
- Briharadanyaka Upanisad III, ix
A Synapse dream:
340 Riverside Drive, New York City. Every
day I take the elevator up to my apartment, in a building I know
intimately from childhood. On the panel, there are buttons, a
whole number for every floor of the building. There is no part
of the building that cannot be reached by pressing one number
or another.
One day, as I turn to face the panel, my reflexes falter. There are extra numbers on the panel. The familiar integers are there, including mine, but between each of those numbers are new ones ending in odd halves (1 1/2, 2 1/2, 3 1/2, .... ) Out of curiosity, I press one: 7 1/2. Common sense tells me the elevator doors will slide open, revealing the concrete wall of the elevator shaft between floors 7 and 8, and perhaps a bit of the doors belonging to the floors above and below the odd place I have stopped. Instead, the doors open onto an entirely new floor, 7 1/2, that exists in a building of floors just like it, discreet from, but contained in the interstices of my own whole-number building. The building of the halves is complete in every way, and there is no part that cannot be reached by pressing one half-number or another. If I leave the half-building, I step into an entire half-world, as vast and varied - and solid - as my own.
And there could as easily be an elevator of numbers ending in 3/4 or 7/8 or 15/16 (or .1, .01, .001, ....). An infinite number of buildings may exist in the fractional interstices of my own building. In each of these buildings, the tenants can to any floor of their own building, but they can never get to the in-between buildings.
This is the vision of the Synapse that the Keepers call the Mythic Elevator. It is only through the Synapse, the elevator of fractions, that one may reach all the buildings (the neighbor-worlds) in the hyper-building (the Continuum).
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