BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE WEDNESDAY MARCH 18, 2026) — THE PLANET has sculptured the tea leaves (Barry’s Gold). We have extracted the future from the present using now as the compass and the past as it needle. The traffic said it all.

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” — Douglas Adams

The more I wrote, the less I knew, and yet, deeper insights followed. The topic proved inexhaustible — Dan Valenti

ONE DIVIDED BY ZERO

I don’t know. Neither do you.

You may believe or disbelieve because of evidence or faith, but you will never know. That is the existential crisis, innit? 

The best analogy arrives from mathematics and the bizarre situation of dividing by zero: What is 1/0? Ordinary understanding easily dismisses the question. Serious mathematicians know that 1/0 is undefinable. It also brings about strangeness in its results. 

Zero: an even number sequentially placed between -1 and +1. Dividing by it produces infinity, since dividing by a series of smaller and smaller denominators produces ever larger (longer, actually) results. This is easily proven with the numerator 1 as the constant and the denominator successively smaller units < than 1. As the denominator shrinks, the result gets bigger. Divisors 0.1, 0.01, 0.001, 0.0001 … to infinity under 1 will equal ever-lengthier results.

A human determination of God’s existence is like one divided by zero. Believers and Atheists follow the same thing deductive argument differing only in an initial assumption they hold to be true. Most remain fixed in their positions, closed to further inquiry. However, those who sound the depths find that the undefinable pushes one into the discomfort and disquiet of what they have held as immutable.  

In such a conundrum, only one place produces a valid starting point: within. Our interior lives of emotion and feeling, dreams and spirit, have been evident since the beginning of … well, let’s just say The Beginning. From the baseball manager playing a hunch to the Feng shui when one enters a room, our inner life exists, experienced as immersive subjectivity. It’s the reason we dance, daydream, laugh, cry, anger, and hope. IT’s also the reason we give up.

Life isn’t totally objective and can’t be because of each person’s intimate sense of self-awareness. The only way it could be otherwise is to dismiss the entirety of the human experience, specifically, its interiority. In fact, we can posit an akin process going on in every material thing based on the findings of atomic and subparticle motion, electricity, and gravity. In other words, the rock that I hold in my hand contains some kind of residual “awareness.” It can be no other way.

And that’s where religion and science unite. “Even the very rocks will cry out.”

Let’s see how many comments this one draws.

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“Our greatest glory is not in never failing. It is rising every time we fail” — Oliver Goldsmith.

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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