Not Big Enough

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It's not just in some of us; it is in everyone.

And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
Marianne Williamson

It probably could have stopped at the first two sentences. What would you do? Try to fix the world, treat it as a puzzle to be kept up with? Tweak here or there? Try not to interfere? How to exert one's power in ways that, given our short sight as humans, seem least likely to be, in the end, harmful?

The base assumptions behind that point of view... I'm not sure I accept. Too small.

I recently read "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers", subtitled "The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth" and it's striking a good chord. Mathematicians routinely question the basic premises of mathematics in the search for new correlations. What if all apparently parallel lines actually converge? What if the sum of the angles of a triangle only approach 180? What if some rules are removed from a logical system?

In essence, that's what I've been doing for the last year or so.

[possibly to be continued]