This morning, I broke a plate by sheer accident. I was about to fix my simple fruitarian breakfast with homegrown papaya and pineapple. Fingers still slippery with fruit juice I tried to grip the plate. Ooops !! It fell and was smashed into a hundred pieces!! (See the picture).
A moment of embarrassment with some flashback memory of parental scolding! Then I bent down to clean it up, but got totally puzzled. Where are all the shattered pieces of my cute plate-friend of a decade? All the sad bits and pieces I saw on the floor do not add up to make my lovely companion! I even brought a similar plate from the kitchen just to compare.
“The whole is greater than the part”, states the 5th axiom of the great Greek mathematician Euclid. Yes, but what happens when all parts are put together? Do they make the whole? We are so used to dividing birthday and Christmas cakes that we might say yes too.
A scientifically meticulous person may be able to restore my plate quantitatively from its scattered bits. But for me it wouldn’t make the whole anyway.
Great philosophical and spiritual visionaries go beyond Euclidean geometry and tell us that the parts don’t add up to make the whole. It seems all religious dogmas and scientific theories are seeking the whole. But in the case of religions, most of them seem to proliferate laws, rituals, and taboos by indulging in more and more sectarian bits and parts that fragment the humankind. In science they are in unending search for the bigger and bigger dimensions as with James Webb Space Telescope or the infinitely smaller and smaller building blocks of matter as with the Large Hadron Collider beneath the snow-clad Alpine mountains. But what about the Whole? Do all the fine- tuned parts add up to reveal the Whole? It simply slips away both at macro and micro levels?
Incidentally, for the first time in about ten years of my friendship with the broken plate I looked closely behind the spare plate and read the tiny inscription: “Break & Chip Resistant…Made in USA.
∎
