A Thought Experiment: The Largest Prime Number

While in some teachings the mind—and especially identification with thinking—is seen as a source of suffering, clearly science has accomplished a great deal in making life more “livable” on many levels. I also believe that it is through a sense of awe as we decipher reality that we can open to a relationship with much higher levels of being and intelligence. Try this:

Even the worst math student knows what a prime number is – it’s a number that can’t be divided by anything but itself, and the number 1.

Throughout history prime numbers have been deemed sacred and special, but recently with computers and later supercomputers, the largest prime number has been calculated, each time as a result of more processing power. The record is currently held by 2^43,112,609 − 1 with 12,978,189 digits.

If you try to conceptualize this it may give you a headache.

As far back as the time of Euclid, it was known that the number of primes is infinite—there must always be one larger than the one discovered—and that the limits of our knowledge or discovery are set by the ability of our brains and to calculate mathematically—and ultimately by our surrogate brains, the computer.

But then it can be speculated, isn’t the power of Mind itself—the ability to know or calculate, also infinite—vastly beyond our own limited intellectual capacities whether cranial or computer?

Isn’t the ability to conceive or calculate a number that is infinitely large a Mental Property—and since such a number must exist, so must such an mental capacity also exist beyond our comprehension ?

When we begin to fathom that everything is information (as scientists are now ascertaining) or energy based on frequency, the meaning behind such a realization becomes profoundly powerful.

Existence is literally an infinite mind.

Look at it this way. No matter what you call a circle, or what size it may be on a two dimensional plane, the relationship between its circumference and diameter will always be pi – a mathematical constant that in our civilization we note as 3.1416.

The Egyptians encoded this number, as well as the constant phi – 1.618 – which is the ratio of the famous Fibonacci sequence of numbers where each equal to sum of the previous two numbers – probably because they understood that this related to infinite Mind – it was part of the foundation of all existence.

No matter how the number was signified (we use Arabic numerals) the mathematic relationship is an absolute value in space-time.

Space-time is a function of intelligence.

Philosopher Ken Wilber calls this Higher Level of Intelligence “Big Mind.” Eckhart Tolle refers to the Infinite Intelligence that runs our bodies – our breathing, circulation, digestion and so on.

We have now discovered that the instructions for these organic processes of Life (DNA), is also a logical system based on a code that has been partially deciphered by supercomputers. Like a computer code, DNA can be decoded according to the pattern of four letters, A, C, T and G, representing four chemicals that actively perform tasks according to the instructions of the program.

Beyond Life itself, then, in its almost infinite complexity, is an Order that works mathematically—the programmer may not be “a being” (God as He or She is frequently thought of through our anthropomorphically conditioned religions) but rather Being (or Existence) itself.

In other words, when we deeply consider that just as the infinity of the universe is beyond our mental comprehension, so too the reality of a mathematical entity (the largest prime) must actually exist, but is beyond our capacity to ever know with our own limited mental faculties (even as extended by our growing capacity to compute artificially).

Although we experience a limited rational mental faculty through our brains, compared to “what is” in terms of the vast Intelligence behind Existence, we know very little.

Existence will always be beyond our rational minds to know, and yet it too is ultimately infinitely Intelligent, and not haphazardly random.

As Einstein famously said, he could not believe that God plays dice with the Universe.