Riots. Rockets. Fires. Con­stant reports of esca­lating violence. 

Can we make a dif­fer­ence by praying “for” peace? 

Gregg Braden explains that we should rather pray peace “onto” the affected areas, and leaves little doubt as to the poten­tial effec­tive­ness of this kind of prayer. 

Con­necting every­thing, YouTube then sug­gested watching this video:

That got me thinking. Cre­ation is fractal: the same func­tional prin­ci­ples apply to the micro- and macro­cosm. It’s just a ques­tion how far we’re able to zoom in and out in order to appre­ciate this. Researchers used to say that quantum physics “defied” the laws of physics as observed in the macro uni­verse, but now we learn that this is only due to a lack of under­standing of the processes involved. 

It is not far-fetched to apply the prin­ci­ples of this exper­i­ment so excel­lently pre­sented by Ver­i­tasimum above, to the soul of humanity: we all gen­erate rip­ples around us by our thoughts, words and actions. And it’s all entan­gled. At the big bang, the moment HaShem opened his mouth to utter the first words, יהי אור, just as the first breath was to come over His lips¹, every­thing was in one place. Since then, the uni­verse is expanding. (Into what? אין סוף - dif­ferent topic, though related. as every­thing.) All sep­a­ra­tion is just a bubble gen­er­ating the illu­sion of space and matter. It may be hard to transmit a clear thought via telepathy, but our thoughts are influ­encing the world around us, because of the entan­gle­ment. How much more our words and actions! 

There is a con­stant infi­nite energy all around us. In the exper­i­ment this is the speaker that drives the whole process by the power of sound. Our Cre­ator spoke the world into exis­tence, and this is a speech that never stops. If HaShem were to stop speaking for just one instant, the cre­ation would imme­di­ately revert to the state of non-exis­tence, as if it had never been². The sounds is always on. Some people are appar­ently more in tune with those fre­quen­cies than others, but the blessing of cre­ation is con­stantly raining down on us (or tra­versing us, or how­ever you want to visu­alize it). 

The impact we have on our sur­round­ings can be small, but even if we remain static, we gen­erate rip­ples. We can also learn to let our­selves be pro­pelled by our own rip­ples. This requires a fine sense of bal­ance, like surfing. As we float through life, we leave a trail of influ­ence, cre­ating a pat­tern that, in the best case, forms a beau­ti­fully sym­met­rical shape and har­mo­nizes with many other bouncy balls. In the worst of cases, we fall back onto the path we came from and cancel out the pat­tern we cre­ated so far (as Derek, the gen­tleman behind Ver­i­tasimum, men­tions at the very end of the video). Teshuva, repen­tance, becomes very con­crete then: if we take some wrong turns, we end up undoing the good we achieved so far, and missing out on the good we have the poten­tial to gen­erate. Yes we have that power. 

The hurt and injus­tice we receive from other bouncy balls, from the sub­strate, or even from the speaker can make us bitter, and we can turn into a black hole, a funnel that sucks up other droplets into our vortex of resent­ment. In the case of the speaker, we may per­ceive that “fate” is blowing us into cir­cum­stances we do not desire. Yet there are no hurtful or unjust sound waves. This is where the metaphor breaks down a little bit: yes sound can be too loud and dam­aging to our hearing, but HaShem’s cre­ational energy is never over­bearing, never out of tune, never wrong. It is us often not being able to res­onate with this blessing adequately. 

Our task in this life is to do Tikkun, to help repair and restore. As in the famous quote by the upbeat Zig Ziglar: “it’s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts.” All par­ti­cles resound in their own unique way. If we feel out of place or dis­aligned from pur­pose, we need to start tuning into our Cre­ator’s sound waves. 

To me, learning Hebrew plays a big part. 

Happy bouncing!

—=•=—

Notes

1. On using body parts for HaShem, see this excel­lent video of Manis Friedman.
2. So explained in שער היחוד והאמונה (“The Gate of Unity and Faith”), the second part of the Tanya written by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi. Sev­eral teaching series are avail­able on YouTube, I went through this one with Rabbi Tzvi Kilov and can rec­om­mend it warmly - mind-blows and world­view changes guaranteed.