What Alice Knows

“Every adventure requires a first step.”
~ The Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland

I love math. I’ve always loved math and numbers ever since I was a child, and would love any game that would challenge my mind and even logic. Even as a wild teenager playing drums and going to rock concerts I’d still take pleasure solving complex formulas and attending calculus competitions. I loved math so much I got myself a Master of Finance and did the CFA. And while naturally life took me on my true soul’s path of mysticism, spirituality and creativity, I still love doing “what’s next” math logic exercises before bedtime.

As a spiritual astrologer I can tell you that astrology and astronomy are all about math and the mysticism of numbers; and as a poet, dancer and artist, I can tell you that creativity too is actually very closely linked to math. Poetry has math with lyricism, dance has math with rhythms, and numbers too carry songs within them! Some of the greatest mathematicians, scientists and astrophysicists were very creative and musical in their every day life – they would see numbers and formulas as songs and musical notes stringing together.

For example, Albert Einstein was a scientist and theoretical physicist, but what many people may not know is that he was also an accomplished violinist. He said many times how music helped him with math, and it inspired some of his greatest scientific ideas and inventions. And a famous thing he said was, “I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.” Being so closely involved with the scientific complexity of music, he was able to bring an uniquely aesthetic quality to his theories; and he wanted his science to be unified, harmonious, expressed simply, and to convey a sense of beauty of form.

Another example is Brian Cox who is a wonderful physicist and musician also – he loves playing the guitar. I actually learned so much about astronomy from him! His way of expressing the beauty of the language of the universe and how all interconnects is inspiring and it is precisely this beauty that opens us when we have the creative mind, the beginner’s mind, the mind that isn’t afraid to move past boundaries and limitations of the rational and currently known.

This is what I love about math: math knows that despite all the numbers it holds within itself, there is a little thing called the infinite.

And today, as part of my Story Thread series, we’ll dive into the creative lands of another mathematician – one who wrote a story for children as much as for adults to offer us an opportunity for creative expansion through the gift of imagination.

To those of you new here, welcome dear fairy tale lovers, this is part of my Story Threads series, which you may read in my folklore, myth + literature section, where I share beautiful stories from around the world, and we unveil the wisdoms found within their worlds. 

I don’t remember the first time I read this tale, and was never really emotionally connected to it, so I enjoyed diving deeper into it when I began this exploration as part of my Story Thread series on tales. What I do however remember is that I never thought of it as strange; if anything, I found it funny and curious, but then again, I have a witty sense of humour, and I take delight in non-sensical stuff, mainly because I find it delightful to see other people’s reactions to it. This is why I love The Little Prince – it is a perfect portrayal of how as adults we can lose ourselves and how we need to remember our playful sparks. Back to Alice.

You see, the only strange thing about this tale for me, wasn’t the tale itself, but rather the ignorant remarks by some people that the tale is about drugs. These remarks usually don’t get much reaction from me, because they are more a reflection of the state of mind of those who say them; however, most recently, someone was going on, and on, and on, and just as I was about to roll my eyes so hard almost rolling myself out of this universe, I just said, in a very sensical manner, “No. That’s just not true.”

Look, I get it. A caterpillar smoking a mystical water pipe, a cat disappearing leaving only an enigmatic grin behind, a girl drinking potions and eating mushrooms to change her state of mind, and a rabbit and mad hatter running around like nutjobs while then sitting down being all posh drinking tea in fancy cups … The whole atmosphere is a bit too profoundly and concretely detached from reality, so surely, dude must have been trippin’, right? No. I’m sorry to burst the bubbles – he wasn’t. He was just a mathematician, logician, a brilliant creative with a gifted imagination and understanding of a child’s mind and what children need to learn and be open to learning.

To people who are a bit rigid, or are themselves into drugs (because these statements and “theories” are more a reflection on the people who make them rather than the tale itself), or just don’t understand funny plays on logic and math, the dialogues in Alice in Wonderland can sound like drugs. There has never been actually any evidence that Carroll was interested in nor ever using any recreational drugs. The drugs theory came about mainly in the 60s and 70s as this was an era of legal widespread opium usage, so these perceptions about the tale say more the people making them than about the author and actual tale.

Alice in Wonderland is about math, logic and reasoning, but more importantly – it is about the vast importance of imagination, creativity and expansion beyond the boundaries of our known in order to create change in life. It is actually a tale which if approached with the beginner’s mind can reveal many interesting questions and curious insights.

So let’s dive into the worlds of Wonderland and what Alice knows.

The curious world of the author

Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was an English author, poet, Anglican priest and mathematician teaching at the Christ Church in Oxford. He wrote poetry and short stories ever since he was a young boy, and you can find his poems still online – most are actually quite romantic and dreamy.

Carroll was a deeply spiritual man, and raised and lived with traditional values; and he loved theatre and photography, which is believed to be one of the main reasons he didn’t take the holy orders because that would have meant he’d need to give up his creative pursuits during that time. He did however remain celibate to the best of scholars’ and historians’ knowledge, and stayed in the church for his math and logic teachings, as well as writings and worshipping.

He was also interested in many other areas, such as being a member of the Society for Psychical Research, which was a non profit organization interested in understanding psychic and paranormal events and abilities; and he also wrote some studies of various philosophical arguments.

In 1895, he developed a philosophical regressus-argument on deductive reasoning in his article “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles”, which appeared in one of the early volumes of Mind, and for those of you interested, I’d encourage you to read it – because surely, you will see a version of Alice in Wonderland dialogues, which will make it clearer how his famous tale is a play on logic and reasoning.

In summary, “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles” is a brief allegorical dialogue on the foundations of logic, and alludes to the Zeno’s paradoxes of motion. It shows that regress problem arises because a prior principle is required to explain logical principles, and once that principle is explained, another principle is required to explain that principle. Thus, if the argumentative chain is to continue, the argument falls into infinite regress.

In Alice in Wonderland, in one way or another, no matter how seemingly twisted the way may be, each of the characters have their own “logic”, which makes sense to them, and their own inner world, even if not to the other. When Alice says they are all mad, the Cat says, “Yes, I am mad, you are mad, we are all mad.” Alice says, “No, I’m not mad!” The Cat, logically, replies, “Well, if we are all mad and you are here, then you too must be mad.” That’s a logic, even though we can’t conclude it’s the world of Alice also. So if 2 + 2 is = 4, but I remove the possibility of +, what happens next? Would the 4 change? What else would I need to get to 4? All evolves and expands, knowledge expands as perceptions expands even within the “math and logic worlds”, and eventually, all reach the level of that which they call God, the infinite, the unknown, just like Einstein did, we all reach the humility we’ll never know it all.

Carroll was an Aquarius Sun with his Ascendant ruler Jupiter, who is also his atmakaraka, in his natal third house also in the sign of Aquarius. He was meant to write that tale – and it was going to be pushing the boundaries, with bursts of innovation and quirky ideas and dialogue that most people would not understand. That’s the Uranus waterfall of electric innovative quirky energy meant to create sparkles in mind. He was very spiritual and probably very intutive, as he was very sentitive as well; and it was this kind of expansive spiritual self that infused his inspired creativity; and his life’s work had to do with reaching his hands across the lines that separate us and offering a way for new insight of bringing seemingly non-sensical things together in unison. If one reads more closely the tale, one would see there is logic in the non-sensical; and there is search for self, and an initiation towards discernment and maturity.

Some view the narrative of the book as the idea of grappling with a sense of self. Carroll led a very controlled life and existence, often struggling with self-identity, which is a recurring theme in the book as Alice regularly expresses uncertainty about who she is after she enters Wonderland.

As human beings we usually interpret books in a logical way as we do dreams. We want it to have meaning. We search for it. We want something defined to make sense of – defined by lines, like a box, so that we can walk around it and study it, and hopefully make sense of it. As human beings we are terrified of the unknown and seek stability in the knowing, to comfort ourselves in this uncertain thing called life. This is why we like control. This is why we need it. This is why we like categories, labels, names, definitions – we need to understand. But Alice is not about that. She is not to be read as a logical book, because her logic is in the unholding of our hands and just allowing ourselves to let things sometimes not have specific meanings.

The birth of Alice in Wonderland: The golden afternoon, child’s play and irreverence 

The tale of Alice was born on a golden afternoon on the 4th of July 1862 when Carroll and Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed up the river Isis with the three young daughters of Carroll’s friend Henry Liddell: Lorina Charlotte, aged 13, Alice Pleasance, aged 10, and Edith Mary, aged 8.

During the trip, Carroll told the girls a story that he described in his diary as “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”, which his journal says he “undertook to write out for Alice, who was one of his math students and he’d often use some stories in his teachings to keep the children entertained and express the math and logic ideas better for them – in a way they’d understand it. Alice loved the tale so much that she asked him to write it into a book, so that she could preserve it. And he did.

It took quite a while for him to write it, and he’d give it to other children to read to see their reactions and response, because he did indeed meant it for children. He eventually prefaced the novel with a poem he had written about the golden afternoon that inspired the tale.

Alice was written with quite a few mathematical jokes, and perhaps some fancy scholarly math people didn’t appreciate those jokes at the time – it was Victorian times after all – but he didn’t write the book for them anyway. The jokes were based on logical fallacies, and those were based on how some real people thought and spoke; and there were elements of parody, allegory and satire on the logic of even some politics occurring at that time around him in Oxford where he taught and lived. He participated often in mathematical debates also, where he’d write parody pamphlets expressing his views on the logics and opinions on matters.

Reading his biographies and diaries we find that he shared an understanding and openness to the curiosities of a child’s mind – and it was through this understanding that he was able to teach math to a child in a way that the child would understand it and be curious enough about it to stay open in learning.

You see, during those Victorian times a child’s world was very rigid, formal and even abrasive at times – children were boxed up, subjected to endless rules, they could never even talk back and were often beaten and punished every day, and so they desperately craved some sense of irreverence. If you read Dodgson’s books on mathematics, you’d often find that he used funny and silly examples; and he knew what children were entertained by because he had ten siblings, and took care of most of them throughout his own childhood; he’d often create plays and write little newsletters to share with them. He didn’t lose his connection to that childlike mind, so he knew children needed some freedom from rules and boxes – and that the way to them would have to come through some playfulness in learning rather than rigidity.

He’d often entertain the children he was tutoring, and Alice was one of these children. He came up with various puzzles and challenges for her through these wonderland tales, and after her great amusement and wish for him to write them in a book – the book was born!

The book makes a play on how we can become strange creatures with strange logic as adults, and how a child can view us – as piping caterpillars who refuse to become butterflies, as rabbits with clocks and then trying to be posh drinking tea, while still acting like toddlers. But sometimes it’s all just a deck of cards, and when one of those, calling herself a queen, says “off with their heads”, we need to kind of grow up and say, “no, that’s just not right”. And then we wake up and mature, and realize our own code of morality perhaps shaped within the worlds of the meetings with others’ sense of morality and logic.

Irreverence is closely linked to satire, and satire is closely linked to poetry, and poetry is close to logic and numbers and math just like music is close to numbers and math, and as we know, logic and numbers and math and poetry and creativity were all very dear to Dodgson’s heart and every day life.

Truth is sometimes a subtle thing. It’s not loud nor on big stages nor social media accounts. Sometimes need to stand up, dust off, turn away from the sandbox and go towards the swings. Swing high.

Sometimes we are so deep in some wonderland that we have forgotten how to think, how to discern, and how to see true from false; and unfortunately, not all creature from wonderland make it to the surface.

Free thinking makes society fertile and creative; this is the key to expansion. We need to constantly challenge our perspectives to see something new, and we need to devote to learning and expanding. Who we are matters now. Our values and integrity matters now.

Discerning a truth from a lie is an initiation process. It is almost a ritual of the mind and our spirit in which we initiate finding out. To do this, we need to have a very strong spiritual core because as we dig in deeper, we will eventually find out, among other things, that the external world doesn’t define us.

To do this you can develop your own cognitive edge. It’s kind of like a yoga pose – find the uncomfortable pose while still standing; it is the point where you are uncomfortable enough to stretch further than before and yet you are not completely lost in it, not hitting the ground, not abandoning yourself. Once you develop this cognitive edge and you are also standing strong in your core – you will be better at discerning, sensing truths right away and then moving forward.

The problem is that as a collective we have fallen way too deep in Wonderland, and just prefer our sleeping states. We prefer to live in our lack of self awareness, self deceptions, illusions, delusions, compulsions, addictions and seductive inner lies that feel so sweet; and so, we as a collective, just as the caterpillar, smoke the pipes of illusions keeping ourselves stuck in just an immature state of being.

We don’t want to grow up, we don’t want to take flight and become butterflies. We want to stay in our hookah smoking states of rigidity, intellectual numbness and even degradation, emotional immaturity, self deception and amazing lack of self awareness. 

Change requires imagination

In the book, the White Queen punishes Alice for insufficient imagination, telling her that expanding her imagination requires daily practice, “My dear, sometimes I think six impossible thoughts before breakfast.”

Perhaps our imagination deteriorated somewhere along the way. Somewhere along the way we became a little too comfortable and assumed that everything would be predictable, underestimating the other’s imagination. We underestimated those who paint the roses red.

Global problems are moving faster than ever. Their wicked interconnectivity and interdependence are more complex than ever. Our thoughts haven’t yet caught up with the impossible. And just like Alice, we haven’t yet figured out how to think about the strange new world into which we have fallen. Ideas matter, but outdated ideas can be dangerous.

Despite the wide access to information, humanity has become a bit too rigid, a little too closed-off, a little more lazy, a little too overwhelmed with contradictory facts that then leads to the choice to detach completely and escape into fantasy. The information overload has led to short attention spans, quick assumptions and judgments, and an overall lack of motivation to learn anything. We don’t want to learn. We don’t want to discern. Perhaps we don’t even want freedom and free thinking, because this then means self-responsibility for our own decision making, which then means, self-accountability for the consequences of our actions.

Imagination goes beyond the boundaries of the known. It understands that it doesn’t fully see the big picture, that it doesn’t fully know and perhaps it never will, and that truth itself is a subtle thing.

What’s fascinating about Lewis Carroll is his balance between his left and right brain – his math and logic side, as well as his deep spiritual self because his belief in God and Christ were essentially about opening our palms and hearts and putting our trust and faith in someone whose face we’ll never fully see, someone who defies the boundaries of the known and science. Poetry too is mysticism. At the same time though, math is part of the universe, it is its language, just like the music notes and tones, it is all math. Astrology too is about math. And nature too has its magical patterns.

When it comes to change making imagination is key; and we this happens when we open our perception organically. We can’t solve a problem from the same consciousness, or perspective, from which the problem was created.

So have we fallen too deeply into Wonderland? Or do we have the humility to see the world as it really is? And if we do choose to see it, would we then have the audacity to imagine how it could otherwise be, and the courage to take the necessary steps to change it?

Change isn’t logical nor easy – it demands imagination. But it starts by first accepting things for what they truly are – to see beyond the veil of roses painted red.

What Alice knows is that a man wrote a tale to inspire learning and expansion – and the path to that is through our openness of mind, because this is what opens our imagination and creativity; and creativity is about a certain dissolution of the known and our inner limits. What Alice knows is that to nurture our childlike innocence and openness of mind, approaching all with awe no matter how many times we walk along the circling staircases is key to our fulfillment in life. What Alice knows is that maturity matters, and we need to be able to grow up, knowing right from wrong, and having the courage to stand up for our values and follow a moral compass.

What Alice knows is that sometimes it is all just a deck of cards, but we have a voice. We can tell the non-sense from the true, and we can choose to wake up when we need. And we can also still nurture our imagination, childlike purity of joy and love, and make friends with all creature, small and big, logical and non-sensical – for each one may have their own wisdoms to teach us. Sometimes paths aren’t straight nor direct, they are full of twists and turns, but Alice knows, because the Cat told her and because she found this out for herself, that we’ll always get somewhere; perhaps even to where we want to, but at the very least, to where we need to.

In a sweet passage at the end of the tale after Alice wakes and tells her fantastical adventures to her older sister, her sister gently reflects on how someday Alice too will be a grown woman, yet how she hopes that Alice would, all through her riper years, still keep the simple and loving heart of her childhood, and how of that purity within, when she gathers up other little children around her, she’d make their eyes bright and eager with strange curious tales also.

I love this final passage, because it most beautifully shapes it all together: that when we are able to keep that inner childlike purity of heart, the inner flame, the inner thing which is ageless, we’ll see and feel great pleasures in the simple joys, such as a happy summer day, running or rolling around in the fields, adorning ourselves with flower jewellery, and just taking in the sweet sweet sun warming our skins!

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Cover art is from my book Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, special edition illustrated by Salvador Dali. 

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