A Metaphor for The Universe

© Alexey Kljatov

How much we could learn from snowflakes, if only we were paying attention. Here we have a very simple thing, water, and yet it allows for this incredible complexity. It's like saying you could take a mud pie and have it magically transform into the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Or in fact like you could take the simplest atom in the universe, hydrogen, and have it transform into galaxies and stars and planets and people and chocolate and New York and poetry and sex and all the rest. Which in fact happened. Such incredible complexity, emerging from simplicity. What universe is this, where such a thing could happen?

Another thing we can learn from snowflakes is reflected in a quote from the Daodejing:

"The Universe is ruthless
it treats the ten thousand things as straw dogs."

"Ten thousand things" means the innumerable individual things in existence. Straw dogs meaning empty forms, the manikins used in Chinese religious rituals.  

From Wikipedia: 

Su Ch'e commentary on this verse explains: "Heaven and Earth are not partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_dog)

 What is the universe going to do with all these billions of tiny pieces of art? It's going to melt them. ;) Almost all will go unnoticed by human beings, who will be forever deprived of the wonder of that form that melts on the top of their woolen cap, with them oblivious. And that is the way the Universe is also. It spits out all these marvelous things that fade away. People and pterodactyls and ivory-billed woodpeckers and gods-know-what might have arisen under some alien star, and it seems recklessly shamefully extravagant with these forms and the wasting of these forms but there are always more coming. Snowflakes are probably more individual in appearance than people are, unknown billions of configurations. And except for a miniscule percent of them, they go totally unnoticed by human beings.

Tree seeds and fish are notable examples in the biological world of this seemingly wasteful explosion of entirely expendable forms. A tree can dump thousands of seeds for the sake of one seedling that will survive. Fish throw thousands of eggs onto the waves, most of which will be eaten, for the sake of having one or two survive. Such a view of the universe, one in which we are spewed, erupted like lava from a volcano, into creation in a kaleidoscope of forms by a Nature that is neither particularly invested in our lives nor particularly grieved by our deaths, is not a view that is very flattering to human desires or human conceits. It is however the real universe, and we have to understand that in order to understand what sort of cosmos is behind all that. It is a universe capable of endless, seemingly frivolous, explosions of creativity for its own sake, the forms of which rise and fall and new ones arise perhaps endlessly, and perhaps in more universes than just this one. It is as if not being boring is the highest good, and all other things are secondary. Stasis is death.

And so, snowflakes. Billions of tiny pieces of art that go almost totally unnoticed, are born and melt and some day become other snowflakes. Because while the form of the snowflake changes, the water in the snowflake continues. Neither matter, energy nor information can ever be destroyed. And so it is with us all.

There is another thing we can learn from snowflakes, a human thing we can learn. That we can go through life completely surrounded with such marvels as they, and live completely oblivious to them. Probably everyone has viewed snow as this nasty bitter stuff you have to shovel off the steps and which makes your toes cold. But if that is all you know snow as, you are sleepwalking through life. You want to grab ahold of someone and shake them and say, "You are surrounded with billions of fabulous creatures and things, works of art are falling on your shoulders, wake up!" To not become dead to such things, I would think, would be the highest possible human priority next to survival perhaps, and yet people seem dead to them all the time, and only concerned with the human noise around us.

It is a magical, mystical, mysterious universe. It is not the universe you hoped for perhaps, and not the universe that flatters human psychology, but it is still magic. And I would think that delving into that mystery would be a very high priority in life, because in the end you are it. You are not separate from this strange mysterious mess. You are just the form that this strange mysterious mess is taking at this place and time. ;)