Heaven Helps Those Who Help Themselves

Among the sayings we know is "Heaven helps those who help themselves." When Newton discovered the laws of motion and universal gravitation, and people called him "a great scholar and scientist," Newton responded: "I've done little. It's as if I was merely given one shell among countless shells scattered on the beach. I didn't discover these laws. I neither created something from nothing nor found something hidden."

Why did Newton say this? Upon deep reflection after his discoveries, he realized he hadn't really discovered them - they had come to him in a moment, like something slipping through a tiny pinhole in his consciousness.

Similarly, Curie experimented with various materials, combining and splitting them, searching for 'X'. Yet at the moment she felt closest, through some pinhole in her consciousness came not X but something that would be named radium. That's how radium was discovered. Thus they understood: "Heaven helps those who help themselves."

Thomas Edison felt all his numerous inventions, while successful in their making, were failures compared to his initial intentions. When he reached the point where he felt there was nothing left to fail at, something decisive seemed to slip into his mind through a pinhole. Hence Edison's saying, "Heaven helps those who help themselves." He added that for heaven's 1% help to manifest, 99% of blood-sweating effort is needed.

Today's psychologists, approaching psychological reality from a human perspective, must use human terms. When we struggle to remember if Young-soon's phone number is 1 or 2, then suddenly recall "Ah, it was 2!" - if we call this consciousness, then the cosmos might have a similar consciousness. When it perceives, "Ah, this one's working hard! We should help Curie now," and threads something through the pinhole of Curie's consciousness enabling the discovery of radium - we call this cosmic consciousness.

Whether it's cosmic consciousness or something else, for humans to discover the most complete truth, we must burn away all human elements. Then something seemingly insignificant comes to us from the cosmos. Indeed, an apple falls whether seen by a dog, an insect, me, or you. While we might only wonder "Is it sweet or not?", if we can look beyond the human dimension, our insight opens to understanding Earth's gravitational pull. The persistent force driving us toward such insight is what we call purpose.

Thus, without necessarily using terms like cosmic consciousness, we say "Heaven helps those who help themselves" because when we dedicate ourselves fully to our purpose, the cosmos somehow permeates that person. Like water seeping into a punctured rubber balloon floating on water, something seeps in from outside only when we reach our breaking point.