1. Blank Verse. Until I was about 14 the idea of poetry left me cold, if not actually cringing. To me, whenever someone started reciting poetry, it sounded like a drill whining away. The drill generally seemed to have some kind of fault which caused it to whine slightly differently in a repetitive and tedious manner.

Then of course, I fell in love. I also became vaguely aware (only vaguely because this event happened at school and I was rarely present, except in physical form, at school, and then not always physically if I could find a way to escape)...I also became vaguely aware of somethinng called blank verse. Years later I realised that this was poetry without the whining sounds. I was for a while, paranoid about iambic pentameter and whether I was sticking to the rules or not, but then I came across Charles Brokowski and realised that there are no rules, just people who say there are.

2. The Universe (soon to be known as a uni-verse) is defined as everything that physically exists - all forms of matter and energy. Of course this does beg the question what is there that exists that does not exist physically, and that leads to a debate about what we mean by 'physically', which takes us into the realm of metaphysics and one of the weidest poets in human history, the metaphysical William Blake, who clearly liked to rhyme things (although he did do blank verse as well).

Hmmm. I think if you are going to make up rules you should stick to them and not fudge them. This is a classic example of force-fitting that does not work. Force-fitting is where you take some random idea or concept and force something else to fit with it. It can be incredibly productive and creative, but it can also end up with pretending that eye and symmetry rhyme when clearly they do not.

More positively, Blake also had his own unique version of The Universe. In his universion of reality, which one has to say was somewhat idiosyncratic, Blake placed great emphasis on personal symbolism, imagination and creativity. He created a whole mythology of his own and was constantly at loggerheads with the established church, particularly because he objected to their attitude towards curbing earthly passions. In Blake's universe, body and soul were one and the same and therefore bodily energies and passions were not to be curbed, but understood,

'Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern'd their Passions or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory'.

When he wasn't engaged in infernal rhyming I think I may have quite taken to William Blake.

3. The multiverse (soon to be known as The Multiverse).

Clearly, Blake's personal mythology with all its weirdly named characters and symbols was his own universe rather than The Universe. This presupposes that there can be more than one universe, except, I hear you cry (if any of you are actually reading any of this stuff, I hear you cry), that The Universe is real, whereas Blake's uni verse was just a figment of his imagination. 

I have two objections to this.

Firstly, if you take the definition of The Universe as being everything that physically exists - all matter and energy - then William Blake's thoughts and imaginative concepts all existed as electromagnetic and chemcial energy interactinng in highly complex ways within his brain. That energy, though changed now (he's been dead a while) still exists, and in its original form was represented in Blake's art, poetry and writings - nearly all of which still exist.

Secondly, though, there is now mounting evidence of the existence of 'other universes'. Sasha Kashlinsky, cited in new Scientist 24 January 2009, has discovered that there are clusters of galaxies 5 billion light years away, racing towards a single region of space at speeds of 1000KM per second. One explanation for this bizarre finding (clusters of galaxies normally move in fairly randomly distributed ways along with the expansion of space) is that there is something gravitationally attracting them to this specific region. This phenomenon has been named 'dark flow'. Cosmologists like dark things (dark energy, dark matter, murder in the dark).

Mersini-Houghton has independently calculated how other universes scattered at random around our 'bubble' universe would alter the gravity within it. 'When we estimated how much force is exerted on the clusters in our own universe, I was surprised that the number matched amazingly well with what Kashlinksy observed.'

So although this is not conclusive evidence, it does support the idea, which was originally implied by certain solutions to Einstein's equations in the theory of relativity, that on the ther side of a black hole lies another universe. There is now evidence that there are trillions of black holes dispersed throughout space. This is not the time to go into black holes (and you should check with your mum before doing so because it can be dangerous), but the suggestion that our 'uni-verse' is just one of an infinite set of bubbles of space and time, frothing out in all directions like the foam on top of a pint of beer, is not new. In fact, the idea that we are all living in the head of a pint of beer does have a certain appeal.

4. Version versatility. Given the above, you might  like to reconsider your position. Any position you have ever adopted about anything is very clearly questionable, whether this is your  attitude towards rhyme, metaphysical poets, metaphysics, cosmology or beer. Versatility is the process of entertaining the infinite Multiverse scenario (but preferably not in rhyming couplets, thank you). Personally I love the idea expressed by Blake, above, that The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory and I intend to find out a lot ore about Blake in the near future.

The fact is, any attitude you adopt towards anything is just based on your current version of reality. As both Blake and Kashlinsky have demonstrated in two radically different fields of human thought, there is a limitless number of attitudes you can adopt and hence unlimited versions of reality. This leads to the often asked question in the HBT Newsletter, 'How well is your current version of reality serving you?'

5. This  Week's exercise:

• Take one issue that has been exercising your mind for some time - a problem or opportunity
• Now write down as many different possible explanations of this issue as you can think of
• use 'force fitting' to generate more versions of reality (i.e. ask yourself what your problem/opportunity has to do with your socks and come upm with as many reasons as possible as to why changing your socks will improve the situation - see Win Wenger 'The Einstein Factor' for more on force fitting)
• Now decide which version of reality is (a) the most useful (b) the most fun and (c) the one you are going to adopt for the rest of today
• Repeat as required until life seems wonderful all the time