The amazing thing is that even though we will never really know what it is like to be another creature or another person or any chemical configuration and opportunity other than ourselves, we are made of the same matter as the granite that will mark our graves and share 98% of our DNA with the moss that will cover it.
The amazing thing is that we share with every atom on earth the wild luck of taking the universal lottery, this world of birdsong and waterfalls and spring algae, none of which should have been, all of which could have been and will always be otherwise.
To know this, to put a strong hand of the mind on this barrier of truth, to be steady in the midst of the shocks of daily life. To feel it is something else entirely – to press this decaying hand against the beating heart of the universe that has made it vibrate and beat in your veins.
That's what Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) offers in a beautiful passage from his journals, written after visiting the famous botanical garden in Paris just as its new mineralogy gallery was being built to house six hundred thousand rocks, gems, and fossils.
A century after William Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand, before William Henry Hudson saw “the eternal beauty and mystery of life itself” in the nautilus, before Charles Darwin invited us to see nature as a living library of “an infinite variety of the most beautiful and wonderful,” wrote the thirty-year-old Emerson:
The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever, as you look at this bewildering series of animated species – fuzzy butterflies, carved shells, birds, animals, fish, insects, snakes, a life cycle that changes everywhere we start, the very organized species of rock aping. It is not the worst, the cruelest, or the most beautiful kind but it is the expression of a certain property found in the human observer, the spiritual relationship between them and the scorpion and the person. I hear centipede in me, cayman, carp, eagle and fox. I am moved by a strange compassion.
Feeling this universal relationship gives us a kind of moral obligation to live our lives as fully and rightly as possible – something that Emerson would describe nearly a decade later in his essay “The Indemnity”:
The universe is represented in all its particles. Everything in nature contains all the energy of nature. Everything is made of one hidden substance… Each new form is not only the main character of the type, but a part of all the details, all the goals, the progress, the obstacles, the powers, and the whole system of all the others. Every work, trade, art, transaction, is a corollary of the world and a relation of everything else. Each is a perfect symbol of human life; of its good and bad, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each person somehow has to accept everyone, and tell all his fate.
The world changes with a dew drop. A microscope cannot find a perfect animal because it is so small. The eyes, the ears, the taste, the smell, the movement, the resistance, the food, and the organs of reproduction which cling to eternity, – all find a place to unite the little creature. Thus we put our life into every action… The value of the universe causes us to throw ourselves at every point… Such is the living universe.
Couple that with quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger on how to know the universe within you, then revisit Emerson on transcendence, authenticity, how to trust yourself.
