Coming soon:

Inflammation, Chronic Illness and the Brain. I’ll report on an advanced seminar I recently attended involving the latest research in these areas.

Five Keys for the Future of Dreams. What will be necessary if dreams are to inform our collective fate in the coming time.

John Woodcock has recently reviewed an important film and he has graciously given me permission to share it with you. For access to John’s many published articles and books, log into his website at:

http://www.lighthousedownunder.com

THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY: A Review by John Woodcock

I’ll begin with the official synopsis.

In the tradition of The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything and A Beautiful Mind, The Man Who Knew Infinity leaps straight from the history books to the big screen to deliver an amazing true tale about the genius of one man. The story of self-taught mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan teaches us not only a story of numbers, but one of determination, passion, spirituality and the power of love & friendship. Driven by his destiny for a greater calling, Ramanujan’s life was turned upside down when Cambridge professor, G.H. Hardy discovered his talents and plucked him from obscurity in his homeland of India. The pair would go on to become unlikely friends and make up one of history’s most bewildering and productive collaborations. As mathematicians they worked on the most complex problems known to man and much of Ramanujan’s work is still relevant in math and science today.

A self-taught mathematical genius! What kind of “teaching” could this be? When Ramanujan finally reveals his secret to his Cambridge collaborator, Hardy could not believe it, and refused to believe it, being a dedicated atheist. Can any modern person believe it? Ramanujan said he received the formulas complete, from the goddess, claiming “to dream of blood drops that symbolized her male consort, Narasimha, after which he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.” His long-time English colleague Hardy put it this way:

they (the formulae) were "arrived at by a process of mingled argument, intuition, and induction, of which he was entirely unable to give any coherent account." He (Hardy) also stated that he had "never met his equal, and can compare him only with Euler or Jacobi." (Wikipedia)

He simply spoke what the goddess told him. He had gaps in his knowledge of the various methods of mathematical proof developed laboriously in the West, and yet could deliver solutions to the most complex pure mathematical problems in the world. Hardy knew that, as brilliant as his Indian colleague surely was, nobody would accept his formulae unless he could prove them to the satisfaction of the skeptical (and envious) mathematical community at Cambridge. Hardy therefore set about teaching Ramanujan how to prove his formulae in the traditional way and so they collaborated until his work was acknowledged and he was accepted as a Fellow of Trinity College at Cambridge.

This review is not another celebration of genius, however. While seeing the movie I apperceived a “background” movement as reflected in the “text” of the movie, one that speaks to an urgent issue of our modern times. So while I will be using the language of the art form, I want to simultaneously say what spoke to me through the vehicle of the art form, i.e., this remarkable movie.

Hardy lamely describes the core of the phenomenon of Ramanujan’s genius as inspiration mingled with argument and induction, lacking any coherent account. Yet Ramanujan’s account is perfectly coherent when understood from within its terms, i.e. as a thought of god. Accompanying this self-presentational thought is a mood of devotion, surrender and humility, and a non-acquisitional attitude which we could call gratitude. Ramanujan spent many years from about the age of ten learning the language of mathematics and this work prepared him (with the appropriate concepts) to become an adequate vessel for the “inspirational” message from the goddess, in the form of 3 complete formulae that were independently verified by others subsequently. Ramanujan’s cultural practice of devotion to the goddess could not be understood let alone received by the Cambridge dons. He was forced to learn their accepted cultural practice, which is rooted in skepticism and the principle of falsifiability. There is a ruthless aspect to this kind of “testing the claims to knowledge,” even a sadistic pleasure, in seeking not merely to falsify but to destroy Ramanujan’s impertinent, unproven claims. This was portrayed so well in the movie. As a result of the onslaught of unmitigated attacks, Ramanujan’s health began to fail. Although medical reasons were found for his early death at 32 years old, the fact that Ramanujan was uprooted from his own culture, separated from his child-bride, and forced to assimilate uncompromisingly to another, alien cultural practice that had nothing to do with love, submission, humility and gratitude—these facts are enough for me to conclude that Ramanujan was, in fact, killed.

A vessel for Love is killed off! No one is to blame. It is a matter of privileged cultural practices! Love and innocence are a deadly combination today, in a world ruled by Power. Ramanujan was inducted, if you like, into a modern culture that says, in effect: Oh, you think you can bring Love innocently into our world. Well, let’s show you what happens! And he was shown—envy, greed, exploitation, power, resentment, downright hatred was all presented to this Innocent. Hardy, his only friend there at Cambridge had no idea of the human catastrophe in the making. His response to the attacks was to show Ramanujan how to toughen up: learn how to prove your results. They will listen to you. I will make them listen to you. He is right, of course, but he could not see the human price of such a demand. Ramanujan’s results were greedily appropriated to the Western “Cause” (e.g. his formulae are being used to study Black Holes today) but nobody seems to have noticed the dead body, or to care how it got that way.

The speed with which the gift of Love seeking entry in the world today is appropriated by Power and/or destroyed by Hatred is breath-taking. Yes, we have the gold but the vessel has gone missing. Too bad, let’s just go on with what we have and use it for our own purposes. No one asks if the goddess has another purpose in mind i.e. other than exploitation by humans, for their own purposes, in so gifting this young man Ramanujan with her exquisite formulae.

Does Love have another purpose in seeking incarnation through the human vessel?

We can get a clue from this profound movie. In one scene of his early life, Ramanujan describes his relationship to his inspirations. His passion and engagement with mathematics lay in a love of Form. Now, as it happens, I studied and taught mathematics and I know this kind of love. I could do algebra easily because it was never a matter of calculation but a matter of recognizing form. For example, I could “see” the binomial form appearing from within the most complex arrangements of symbols.

It is beautiful!

Ramanujan could perceive this beauty of the mathematical world on a scale that only Euler and Jacobi could match. Beauty is Love made visible in the phenomenal world, in this case, the world of mathematics. Suppose the goddess, or as we might say today, the other, wished to enter Creation through the vehicle of Ramanujan’s psyche. He wanted only to serve and so Love was able to emerge as Beauty in his chosen cultural practice of mathematics.

But what happens when this innocent Love seeks to enter the modern material world 4 as represented by Cambridge? It collides almost immediately with Power and its institutional interests. Ramanujan met this force with no defenses, and was destroyed by it. The level of hatred aimed at him and his “methodology” was portrayed in all its menace and destructive power. The damage went to his body and he died a year or so after becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society, at age 32.

You might say that Beauty was ravaged where a being of love might have been created. Can you imagine what might have happened if Ramanujan had been received with human love and understanding and allowed to become the spokesman of Love that he truly was? He could have initiated hundreds of students into the discipline of mathematics as a form of Love incarnate in the world, displayed carnally as the real person, Ramanujan! Hardy loved mathematics too, but his love was decidedly disincarnate. He lived in a world of Platonic Forms, an ideal world that preempted the human world of appearance and error. So, for example, he could not relate to Ramanujan as a human individual. He barely noticed that Ramanujan was seriously ill and failed to notice entirely that British racists had beaten him up, leaving bruises over his face. There is a split in Hardy’s kind of love. It is the split between a preferred ideal or perfect world of mathematical form opposed to a devalued world of appearance now ruled by Power that can treat people brutally, without feeling. This split in the West killed Ramanujan.

What is the background movement that is “shining” through the text of this movie? Love is seeking incarnation into material existence. This “innocent” love does not know about the loveless, power driven conditions of material existence today, even though this existence is Love’s creation. Keats put it exquisitely when he asked, and answered, the question, why this world of suffering or vale of tears: “Call the world if you please ‘the vale of soul making’ then you will find out the use of the world … Sparks of the Divinity are not souls until each one is personally itself” (abridged). For him, the world and its suffering and death is the agency that brings the pure and innocent intelligence into full incarnation as the transformed individual, who is now able to speak for Love in the real world, even as it is today, so driven by Power’s purposes. Ramanujan was crushed by this real world. Yes, his formulae remain, abstract idealized things of beauty, to be used as tools by others, gladly. But the human vessel was destroyed and so Love could not complete its descent into a personal soul identity, i.e., the individual Ramanujan, as Keats says.

We lost a living incarnation of Love in the realm of mathematics and only a living incarnation can initiate others into the realm of Love in a personal, human way, so that actual humans begin treat one another lovingly, valorizing beauty over efficiency and utility in the pursuit of their chosen cultural practice, while at the same time being well equipped to deal with the machinations of Power in this world.