Sunday, March 03, 2013

Constellations of Universes

"In reality, every ego–so far from being a unity, is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. As a body everyone is single, as a soul never." (Hermann Hesse)

This quote made me think about a letter that was attached to one of the trees on the hill outside the Pentagon after the bombings on Sept. 11th. It said something to the effect that the person who had died was filled with a million universes that the world would now never have the privilege of knowing or exploring. I wonder if the author of that letter had read Hermann Hesse?

As I think about the things I am learning about quantum physics, I realize that Hesse was much more correct than he may have realized about this idea of multiple worlds, inheritances, and potentialities. His comments regarding the soul are also interesting to me because I have realized that it is only in relation to other people--in service--that we can discover who we really are, and that our souls yearn to connect.


Success

So many people operate from this philosophy:

"Success sanctifies the means" (Gilder, 2008, p. 43).

Yet it begs the questions, "What constitutes success?"  How we define it changes what qualifies for sanctification, no?  And then there is the small problem of "the means."  The connotations could take us into the realms of mathematics, or people of "small or meager means," or into "instruments, paths, processes, and tools," or into unkindness.

References

Gilder, Louisa. (2008). The age of entanglement: When quantum physics was reborn. NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

A String of Happiness


A string of happiness
Draped itself
Around her life

A row of 5 shiny days
Glittered
Like tiny blue moons

Pulling on tides of probability.

- Cherice Montgomery