need, then, is the net for all things. —Rumi

   

Paris at night, from the International Space Station

huge image, click on

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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. 

Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. 

At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.


—Alan Lightman, American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Einstein’s Dreams, London, Vintage, 2004. 

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We cannot live only for ourselves.

A thousand fibers connect us

with our fellow men;

and among those fibers,

as sympathetic threads,

our actions run as causes,

and they come back

to us as effects.


—Herman Melville
(1819 - 1891)

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