Bits and Qubits

Once I took part in a seminar about the use of stories in therapy. For me it was an excellent learning experience. The speaker was Baruch Shulem from Israel. In the beginning he told us a story:

In the forest, under the tallest of all trees there was a solitary, whining baby eagle, obviously fallen down from the nest. It was deemed to death, unless a miracle happened.

Expectations are the gate miracles use to materialize. If a miracle is expected to happen, it normally does.

A farmer happened to be walking in the forest. He saw the miserably whining baby eagle, felt pity for it and wondered whether he could do something to save its life.

He remembered that he had hens and chickens in his farmyard in the open air. There was just a fence to stop them from running away. He could easily place the baby eagle in there. And that was what he did.

Day in, day out the hens and chickens lived their normal life running around looking for seeds and grain to eat and running away from any presumable danger. Leading their normal life new generations of chicken learnt to find eatable seeds and to escape somebody having seen any shadow of a hawk. Doing the same everybody else did the baby eagle learnt what was proper chicken behaviour, which aims were correct to aim at and what was worth fearing.

One day there were some children playing on the farmyard. They got interested in the chickens and gathered at the fence. Chicken life was interesting to look at. Some deviations in it were even more interesting. "Look, at that one. It´s not any chicken! It´s an eagle!" one of the children exclaimed.

Everybody heard that. For some strange reason the eagle paid special attention to the words. They somehow stuck in his mind. He got a curious thought: "Who do they mean? If it´s anyone of us, it might as well be me." He knew that eagles fly high. They have wings. He had wings as well. He moved them. There they were! He flapped them. They hit the air with force. For some curious reason they lifted him up a bit. Then some more. Then he found out that he could really fly.

He flew over and above the fence and the farmyard. From above he could see what the life at the farmyard was like. He could also see the forests, lakes and rivers around the farm. He could see the beauty of the world and he knew that he was free to choose.

Life among the chickens and hens had been good enough, but it wasn´t by any means the best life he could lead. If he just used his wings, he could fly free. He could fly high...

Having told the story Baruch Shulem started talking about eagle behaviour and chicken behaviour. Everybody in the audience understood what he was referring to.

A couple of days ago I heard a radio programme about information. A telephone catalogue may have the equal amount of letters as Shakespeare´s plays do. Anyhow the information value carried by the letters in Shakespeare´s plays is much higher, because they are not the letters that carry the information. The information is carried by the relation of the letters to each other.

It´s not your resources that play the decisive role in your life. It is the relation between your resources and your environment that is decisive. Our life is not determined by the opportunities that exist. It is determined by the opportunities that we happen to pay any attention to.

Dreams are the stuff life is made up of. However, in the course of the years our ordinary, normal life makes us believe two things - we have no wings and if we had there´s no need for them.

If we ever had dreams, our normal life makes us shrink their size and soften their motivational power.

If - all of a sudden - you heard somebody say "That one is not a chicken. It´s an eagle!", would know that it is you the words refer to?

The world of bits is digital. It is an either-or world. In that world you are either a chicken or an eagle.

However, there is another world of qubits. Instead of either-or, it is governed by and.

In the world of qubits you are both a chicken and an eagle. Which of them "is on" depends on your desires and expectations and they are determined by your normal life, by the surroundings you have experience of.

Expecting any nice change lately?