Oh, this is the animal that never was.
They hadn’t seen one; but just the same, they loved
its graceful movements, and the way it stood
Looking at them calmly, with clear eyes. It had not been. But for them, it appeared
in all its purity. They left space enough.
And in the space hollowed out by their love
it stood up all at once and didn’t need existence. They nourished it, not with grain,
but with the mere possibility of its being.
And finally, this gave it so much power that from its forehead a horn grew. One horn.
It drew near to a virgin, white, gleaming –
and was, inside the mirror and in her.
Rainer Maria Rilke
‘The Unicorn’
The unicorn has always been a special symbol in Western culture, a beast conjured up by longing and the human capacity to dream. In Rilke’s poem quoted above he is conjured up by love, and given a space to be by those who dare to believe in the possibility that he might exist. In the vision of quantum science, the whole of existence is a field of unicorns – a set of possibilities plucked out of the quantum vacuum’s infinite sea of potentiality. Each of us is a servant of ‘God’ or the quantum vacuum, a servant of the manifold potentiality at the heart of existence.
Spiritual Intelligence – Danah Zohar