The Pendulum of the Mind: Between Sense and Nonsense

by Gary Z McGee

“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” ~ Carl Jung

Out beyond notions of possible and impossible there is a mysterious space where radical creativity is free to take place –I dare you to meet me there. Between Time and timelessness there is a third thing: imagination. In this sacred-between, within this transcendent space, even the impossible is possible: squared circles, four-sided triangles, two plus two equals five. Indeed. On a long enough timeline, the probability of anything is everything.

What’s faster than the speed of light? Thought; imagination; vision. You can imagine light moving between Alpha Centauri and Earth quicker than the light takes to get there. You might ask: well, so what? How does any of this matter in the “real world?” Good question. Or rather: good question perceptually; bad question actually. Perceptually, things need to make sense; actually, they don’t. At the end of the day, we must be okay with making an extremely low percentage of “sense” out of an exceedingly high degree of overwhelming nonsense. Make sense? Pun intended.

Perhaps one way to make sense out of the universe is to embrace nonsense. Maybe imagination is more powerful than knowledge, as Einstein suggested. After all, it did take him imagining himself riding a photon through space in order to come up with the theory of relativity. It makes no “sense” that Prometheus could steal fire from the gods and bring it back as a gift to us mortals.

It’s nonsense on top of nonsense. And yet, it somehow makes sense. Perhaps the only reason the “pendulum of the mind” oscillates is because of the illusion of the clock which contains it. Between sense and nonsense there is a third thing: meaning. And with Meaning we can create and destroy gods.

Sense:

“We are all scientists, trying to make sense of the stars inside us.” ~ Christopher Poindexter

The thing is, the universe is not obligated to make sense to us. Really, it makes no “sense” that things should ever make sense. It’s more like they make sense and don’t make sense at the same time, intermittently, in the throes of each other like a wave with its trough. Even if we could reach a point to where we believed everything made sense, there would still be some nonsense, real or imagined, that would inevitably creep in and muck up the sense of it all. Oh the futility of it all.

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