My Father is a Balloon, or V = (4/3)πr³

Part four. Superstition to Magick. Writers Are Witches series

My father was once a welder, but in the evenings, after dinner, while the rest of us were watching TV, he would sit at the kitchen table and study math, every night for hours. He delighted in math. When he started teaching himself calculus, it changed his life. He told us kids it was beautiful and elegant, and every time he had an unexpected insight into the magic of numbers, he would get so excited that he had to share it with someone. During commercials, when I was going from the couch to the refrigerator, I hoped he wouldn’t notice me and stop me so he could explain math.

Sit here! he’d said, all excited. I want to show you something.

I whined and said noooo, but I had no choice. You didn’t want to piss off my dad.

Look at this:

V = (4/3)πr³

Do you know what this is?!

Math?

It’s how you describe a balloon! Four-thirds pi r cubed!

That’s stupid, I said. Just use words. The more air, the bigger the balloon gets.

These are words, menso! Volume equals four-thirds pi r cubed. That’s what you just said. Math is a language! And there are secrets hidden inside, secrets of the universe. If you can learn how to translate the numbers into meaning, you can understand anything!

Commercials over! I said. Can I go?

The equation made no sense to me then, and it still doesn’t. Today I’m so bad at math that I can’t help our teenager with her homework, and haven’t been able to since she was in the fifth grade.

I need to outsource all my mathematical needs to devices or other people, and just take their word for it, like the equation above, V = (4/3)πr³!

Ain’t I smart using it?

Four-thirds

pi r

cubed

Whenever I try to do even simple math, frustration fills my chest like air forced into a balloon, and then I deflate.

For most of my life, when it came to any science, I had the same bad feelings. Too complicated. I wanted nothing to do with any hard science, so I ended up believing in a false duality that restricted my intellectual life. I was good at writing and speaking, but I sucked at math and science. I was right-brained, not left brained, another science metaphor that people believe to be true and that can impede, justify, or explain our abilities.

When trying to comprehend something scientific, I have the tendency to start with a duality, but this isn’t unique to me. There’s something about human beings that causes us to begin our understanding of a complex system with a duality, effective tiles when you’re building a framework, but in themselves are false, or at best, metaphors that on their own are too thin to allow for a deep understanding of the system.

I had no idea what I was capable of, because I believed I was stupid at math, an idiot, and those are the words I used to use to describe my left-brain abilities. I would say, I’m an idiot at math.

After decades of saying that, imagine how I must have encoded that into my nervous system as true, so anytime I saw even the simplest equation it would go from my visual cortex to the release of neurotransmitters that will be processed by my brain as danger, fear. I would panic, call myself an idiot.

Now, as I'm older, I see how it would have been more beneficial if I hadn't told myself over and over again how bad I was at math and science. It made me hate them.

I struggled to get my bachelor’s degree because of the math requirement, but graduate school was easy and fun. I was able to focus on what I cared about, literature and creative writing and conversation.

Today as I go back into my memories of my father bent over his books writing equations on a note pad and getting excited, I realize how connected his desire to learn was to his future success. He never got rich, but he was able to quit welding and get a better job as an electrician for the government, fixing things like generators, machines of all kinds, lighting infrastructure, which he would do with a mathematical focus, able to look at and understand the hidden minutia of a system, to figure it out. This wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for his love of learning, which is expansion, flourishing. My father is a balloon!

Now, here I am trying to write about the science behind superstition and how it can lead to magick, and how that in turn can lead to control of our own organism, and then that can lead to seeing the connections we have to a larger organism, one that can be called Unity or any number of terms, God, the universe, the All-There-Is. There is a science behind it. There is an equation, like Wattle’s writes, "There are certain laws which govern the process of acquiring riches, and once these laws are learned and obeyed by anyone, that person will get rich with mathematical certainty."

This is a true statement, but. . .

The science isn’t expansive enough. It’s too thin. It doesn’t consider Laplace’s demon.

We’ll focus on the demon in the next segment.