Happy Monday Friends! May the forces and gravitational fields be with you this week!
http://www.sevenbrieflessons.com/ <——Click on this magnificent long-form book blurb.
“Amid the infinite arabesques of forms that constitute reality, we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes.” (Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics)
Just as the earth is not the center of anything––it’s one grain of sand among billions and billions of other grains––we as humans are not special, or better, than other beings. We just are, along with everything else that is. If that’s true for all of humanity, it is especially true for you as an individual. You’re unique but you’re not special. The less you understand this, the more anguish you’ll create for yourself and for others. The more you understand this, the more ease you will experience amidst all the difficulties.
“There is so much space up there that it is childish to think that in a peripheral corner of an ordinary galaxy there should be something uniquely special. Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe. Our very soul itself is only one such small example.”
“Our moral values, our emotions, our loves are no less real for being part of nature, for being shared with the animal world, or for being determined by the evolution that our species has undergone over millions of yours. Rather, they are more valuable as a result of this: they are real. They are the complex reality of which we are made.”
You are not a separate being in reality. You are reality. Treat it with care and reverence––it/you are all there is.
What are the seven lessons?
A. Space is not a box we live in, but a material component that flexes and shifts and curves wherever there is matter.
B. Light and electrons are made of packets of energy, like building bricks of reality. They appear when they jump into interaction with something else.
C. There are billions of billions of billions of galaxies and stars and planets like earth.
D. Reality is made of up tiny moving wavelets. There are also forms of matter that our senses can’t perceive.
E. There’s a paradox: big reality appears continuous, while little reality is made of discrete building blocks. Both appear right yet contradict each other.
F. Time emerges only in the context of probability and heat moving towards equilibrium. Its flow is an illusion of our limited senses and limited contexts. Past, present and future all exist simultaneously.
“I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. There are frontiers where we are learning, and our desire for knowledge burns. They are in the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, at the origins of the cosmos, in the nature of time, in the phenomenon of black holes, and in the workings of our own thought processes. Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it’s breathtaking.”
If you take reality to heart, how does it change your perception of who and what you are? And what you can do to help heal rather than damage the world?
Bonus extraordinary song:
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