He's got a whole new world in his hands

Yesterday, November 17, I taught some very young students. One of the exercises in their English textbook had this rather confusing comic:

This reminds me of the ending of Men in Black (which I've never watched, but I know the ending by cultural osmosis), where the Earth and indeed our whole galaxy turns out to be inside a marble in the hands of an alien -- an alien who obviously must be unimaginably large.

The relative scales here may be unimaginable, but they are not incomprehensible. We can understand the concept of another cosmos so large that our own is contained within one of its marbles. The textbook comic, on the other hand, is much more confusing. The alien is so large that he can hold the Earth in his hands, but at the same time considerably smaller than the human astronaut he is talking to, who is presumably from Earth. What happened here? Did the alien somehow shrink the whole planet, but the astronaut was not affected because he was off-planet at the time? Did the astronaut down an industrial-strength version of one of those drink-me bottles from Alice?

That comic, whatever it might mean, reminded me of two things. First, since the Earth is depicted as blue and green, and the astronaut asks if it is "a ball," it naturally made me think of the Blue Green Crystal Ball. Second, the imagery made me think of the old Negro spiritual "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands."

Several hours after that class, I received an email reporting, among other things, a dream in which the person heard the single line "A whole new world" from the Aladdin song and understood it to have some relevance to me.

The comic has a blue-green "ball." The Aladdin song supplies the missing word crystal:

A whole new world

A dazzling place I never knew

But when I'm way up here, it's crystal-clear

That now I'm in a whole new world with you

It also of course adds the word new -- from "the whole world" to "a whole new world." This gives added relevance to the fact that this world is in the hands of an alien, as if it is showing or offering it to the human. This is an excerpt from a 1997 conversation between Paola Harris and Colonel Philip J. Corso.

Corso: In a gold mine, I met one of those things. I pointed a gun at him and he wanted me to shut down my radars so he could leave and then I put it down and asked, "What do you have to offer me?" Do you know what message he gave me? I'll write it down for you. He said, "A new world if you can take it."

Harris: Was it like a Grey?

Corso: Yes. He asked me to come aboard. I said to him, "I know what you can do to my people." Then, he asked me to shut down my radars for ten minutes. I said to myself, "If I shut down my radar, ten minutes could be an eternity." How did that thing know that I was the only man that could give that order? I asked him, "What do you have to offer?"

Harris: "A new world if you can take it," you said.

The fact that the offer of "a new word" takes place "in a gold mine" is also synchronistically interesting. The title of the book I've just finished reading, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, is apparently a reference to "weird scenes inside the gold mine," a line from the Doors song "The End."

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Note added (9:45 p.m.): This evening, I taught a much higher-level English class, for adults. The textbook we are using has at the end of each unit a topic or question for general discussion. Today it was this:

Think about discoveries. What do you think is the most important discovery ever made? Or that may be made in the future? Share your ideas with the class.

One student's idea was, and I quote verbatim, "I think maybe in the future scientists will discover a new earth where we can live." This syncs with the "whole new world thread" but instead of world says earth, the word used in the comic with which this post began. Also, unlike "new world," "new earth" is a scriptural phrase, found in both Testaments of the Bible, as well as in the Book of Mormon and Doctrine & Covenants.