Each of us exists and more or less persists within our own mysterious unitary journey. One symbol, above others, tracks how paradoxical our sovereign persisting is — the ouroboros.

From Tutankhamen’s tomb, the ouroboros-encircled boy king’s bust in full garb.

The tail-eating snake, or in some traditions dragon, is a now timeless symbol — an alive circle, if you will. Looking at history, we witness the ouroboros, a marker as ancient if not more than the first enumerations of the constant pi — ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference. History-wise, the ouroboros and pi in many ways track.

Through the alive practice of trial and error, humanity’s earliest tinkering led, though often inexplicably, to various technical convergences. Pi was one. A utilitarian, aiming at unitary, expression of a fascinating mathematical constant, one that became denoted and widely-recognized using the Greek letter π.

Only one interesting thing about π is that it is the ratio needed to calculate numeric properties of circles. Consider there are at least five distinct ways to calculate it that are valid and precise. Also π is indirectly related to other functions, such as in trigonometry sin and cosine and in complex numbers to natural logarithm.

Grounding real-life physical phenomena with the clarity and precision of π, in the often abstract intellectual milieu of engineering, is largely taken for granted today. It’s indisputable that, over centuries now, π-ness vastly enhanced the comprehensive utility of cyclic phenomena in real-life applications. More mysteriously, humanity’s relationship to the aliveness of circles accounts for an array of timeless phenomena. The collective embodiment of mastery over time for instance, including in recent history the transition from analog to digital timepieces.

Still today the mystery-affirming, alive-encircling ouroboros persists, a unitary mystery all its own. Here I present a different way of approaching the value and meaning of π that is geometrically novel and brings the unitary mystery of the ouroboros into peak clarity.

Our unique mysterious selves must among other things grapple with the stark observation that, as individual humans, what we share with others, without exception, is the ephemerality of our journeys. We each in our own ways take our first and then last breaths, passing from womb to tomb. We appear and recede, with existential extras consistent with both persistence and change, lasting in perceptual integrity anywhere from one minute to more than 100 years and even beyond in memory.

One question puzzling philosophers has been, What specific piece of an object is essential in order for that particular object’s identity to be unique and persist through time? This despite the possibility that, like cell turnover in the human body, every part is interchangeable with its likeness.

The endless mysteriousness of small “u” unitary identity — in OKIC-speak, the mirror object of one’s own changing observer — is a pursuit quite easy to belabor. In philosophy, observed resembles a ship in disrepair (Theseus's); in modern physics, an undoubtedly unhappy, trapped-in-the-dark cat (Schrödinger's).

The timeless tail-eater remains — its other layer of capital “U” universality returning us to the following puzzle. Natural circularity seems likely not limited to the symbolic or the mystery of identity. Standing in the way of that addressing that inquiry straight on is one important if annoying-to-the-math-gods question about the utility of circular phenomena.

From whence does the alive, fascinating value 3.14 come?

Let’s do a thought experiment slightly different than philosophy and physics. Imagine the (dis)appearance of a collection of edible pies. The Feast of Persistent Reality starts with a large gathering. Many courses of food are served and many guests fed. The final course is dessert pies of various shapes, sizes and flavors. As in the picture below, when the last piece is eaten and all the pies are missing from their serving plates, why and how does reality (analogously The Feast) persist? The last morsel of what can feed to the guests is gone.

To wit, there is a greater downfall of naive reality than the perils of self-doubt to effective participation. We let naive reality stop our inquiries about reality-as-participatory at the amusing if tragic absurdity of solipsism. Unfortunate still-hungry guests, no more food to be had among these empty plates. They’ll have to search for a different Persistent Feast. Different than reality? That’s absurd.