The Illusion of Movement

On a number of occasions I have come across the argument that movement is impossible. It goes something like this:

In order to move ten feet you first have to move half that distance which is 5 feet. But in order to move five feet you need to move two and a half feet. But in order to move……etc. So in order to move any distance it follows that you must always move half the distance first and since you can go on infinitely having the numbers it follows that you can never begin to move so movement must be impossible.

Is this true or is it merely a thought exercise?  Maybe movement itself is a thought exercise! So I ramble on, as is my want…

Imagine a lighted candle. Now, with a small pair of tweezers on which is fitted a small wick, you snuff out the flame. As this happens the small wick catches fire producing a flame which you carry over to a new candle. The flame lasts just long enough to light this new candle then extinguishes. So to the observer you are moving the flame from one candle to the other, but is the flame on the new candle the same as the one that was on the old one?

I came across a very thoughtful animated story many years ago I which a scientists creates a teleportation machine very similar to the way it was done in ‘The Fly’. He stepped into one pod and was teleported to a second pod, where he emerged.  He demonstrated this to the scientific community then to the world at large many, times and proved it was a safe way to travel.

However, the awful truth was soon discovered, and that was the fact that he had not invented a way to teleport matter but a way to clone it. The second pod created a perfect clone and the first pod disintegrated the original. This idea has also been used to some extent in a recent movie but I won’t tell you which in case you haven’t seen it as it would spoil the ending for you.

This whole idea raises some very interesting questions concerning the nature of reality and the self. All I would say on this is that Oneness consciousness gets round the main problem concerning self, but I digress.

If I watch a man cross the road from one side to the other, is the man who started off on his journey the same as the man who completes it? Are all the occurrences of the man in between, the same man? I find myself thinking back to my old analogy of reality being like the pictures on a TV screen. The screen is made up of millions of pixels that are all basically the same; points of light. ‘Things’ are created on the screen by patterns of these pixels changing colour so creating the illusion that there is something different there. The illusion of movement is created by pixels on the leading edge of the image changing form to match the image while pixels on the trailing edge change to match the background. This happens over and over creating apparent movement though nothing actually moves – it is perception that changes.

Buddha Boy - ‘Do not try to bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead only try to realise the truth’

Neo – ‘What truth?’

Buddha Boy – ‘There is no spoon’.

Neo – ‘There is no spoon!’

Buddha Boy – ‘Then you will see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself’.

Now extend the idea of the TV screen into the apparently three dimensional world we live in. There are no real things just instances of the same stuff appearing differently, guided by consciousness through the effect of self examination of Oneness.

To be continued……

Shenarah