There is a fuzzy white wall hanging in space. You may come up against it when imagining a beginning, no beginning, or the absence of time entirely. You may reach it when asking the question "where was I (and was I) before I was born?"When I set off to imagining what it is like to be someone or something else, I am pulled out of my individual vantage point just a bit. I may feel a sense of wonder and, eventually, reach the glow of the fuzzy white wall.
For example, I can imagine myself to be a bat. It's easy enough to imagine myself flying, but the creature we call a bat senses the world through sonar. (update: apparently a bit of our type of vision too.)
Who is to say if our towering buildings mean anything to this creature as it blurs on by? What quality does the bat associate with such structures?
Do the structures of civilization possess the same relative integrity as rocks or hills? Or are they of lesser resonance, something substandard, like fake wood flooring? Moreover, is night even night to a bat?
Bat is a tiny icon on a laptop screen. I can see it. I can zoom in on it. I just can't click on it, really journey into it. Here lies the fuzzy white wall, so bright with uncertainty that I can't comprehend what's behind it. I can only assume that we have something in common, since we are both conscious, sensing entities. Different players in the earth game.
When I zoom out from the icon and imagine myself swimming in the black of the greater universe, I reach the fuzzy white wall again. I contemplate a tiny earth, a marble hanging in space, within which is compressed and nestled all the complexity that is happening on earth right here, right now...
One has to wonder if this planet is a sort of Gia computer chip, if smaller is always possible, if everything that is everything is stored on nothing, which is everything to begin with. In which case, what then, deep down, don't we already know?
And maybe that's part of the dilemma. To search for answers within the logical mind is to start off already encapsulated in a world. How, as separate observers, staring at this little earth, could we touch upon the hills and valleys of even one tiny being's grand ideas?
I can only assume our intelligence would be hidden to a distant observer (or even to one who flies right by us, along its own trajectory through life. From the place that things are divisible, we may seem (to one another) to be invisible.
To ourselves, we seem anything but. Anyone here typing this could easily be the center of the universe, assuming that s/he has a sense of space fading out equally from him/her in all directions.
The catch, of course, is that we each peer out through our own eyes. Collectively, our particular ancestors assumed the earth to be the center of the solar system. We can imagine ourselves there too, or perhaps, once upon time, walking across a flat world... peering up to see the stars clearly revolving around us. Who would have thought?
At a certain point, like the main character from the movie The Truman Show, we sailed to the end of the world and opened a door... The door didn't open so easily, but ultimately the collective world view was left to shift. The truth of the time was revealed as a relative truth, and the earth became round.
And where, on the outer edge of our experience, is the next door? Resting upon our once flat, now round, earth is a mountain of subsequent discovery. We may be tempted to gaze down from a neat and clear staircase that has risen up from our past.
However, we may want to hold tight, because there is always the potential to have our current world view suddenly turned, revealing another aspect or dimension.
Our current truths may be like clothes we eventually shed--as new perspectives on life reveal themselves. We can stand up a little higher on that stack of old garments, but we've got a long ways to go before we are naked, and, in a sense, our concept of earth may still be flat yet.
When I was a kid, I watched Michael Stipe (lead singer of REM) walk up to the mic to accept an award. He took off his shirt, only to reveal another. He then took that shirt off to reveal yet another shirt with another message. Reality can be like that sometimes.
There may be no end at all and every vantage point or relative truth may be true because it works at a given time in a given framework, in a given pattern of being, serving as a given set of rules for a game that pure existence can lay itself down upon and have some kind of stage and props for its presentation.
In our apparently upward climb, have we even indeed surrendered the idea that we are the center of the universe? An unspoken (collective) assumption has been imprinted on me. I, like everyone around me, am a part of the we, out of all known creatures, that is the most intelligent.
Perhaps, less obvious, is the assumption that we, out of all cultures, are the most intelligent culture. Like a lump in a blanket, the world fades out from us in all directions, so therefore we are the center.
Less quietly, we may think that technology, as it progresses, is the leading tip of this arc of brilliance. We may go so far as to define ourselves as the evolutionary tip of everything that is happening right now on the whole planet.
People into technology often believe we are special. Schools of religion and schools of science both hold us to be special. People in spiritual communities believe we are special in our evolution.
Technology may be the most obvious reason to 3D us out from the flat pages of the book of species. (It is a tiny book, by the way, on a tiny earth, hanging like a marble in the black of space.)
With regard to intelligence, are we the brightest and the best, of the little tiny specs, from that marble hanging in the black of space? At the very least, these are some bold assumptions for one culture out of thousands, and one species out of 8.7+ million species, to make about itself---while looking out through its own eyes (which are themselves limited and relative to its individual beings.)
The portion of light we perceive with those eyes is projected to be one ten-billionth of the electromagnetic spectrum. Relativity is a very big thing, relatively speaking. What aren't we perceiving?
Isn't it reasonable to question the accuracy and value of the previously described world view and its implications?
Many of us never do, because it is so deeply and quietly ingrained in us. We therefore operate, in most everything we do, under the assumption that we are the cutting edge of brilliance.
It's obvious to many of us, however, that for being so brilliant, we are not exactly in harmony with the world we are interwoven with and upon which we depend. Therein lies the point.
Consider these popular (or once popular) assumptions: the earth is flat; the earth is the center of the universe; humans are superior; civilized humans are superior; plants do not feel; fish do not feel; evolution is a pyramid, and we are the top; technology = advancement; technology = intelligence; written culture is superior to oral culture; smaller is of less value; if we can't see it, it doesn't exist; knowledge of indigenous people is just stories; our knowledge, however, isn't a story; science is a different type of belief system; the scientific community is not a religious community; wave-particle duality doesn't apply on the scale in which we live; time is linear; one thing causes another, because it happens first in a linear unfolding of time; by understanding the parts, we understand the whole.
If we shake the staircase just enough, we may tumble back to earth, where we may reconsider its texture and the depth and interrelationships of its inhabitants.
Perhaps someone in a meditative or altered state would do something like that. Words can blow apart worlds. Though on the downside, one may miss out a quieter, wordless conversation with a patch of woodland moss. It would seem there are many ways to talk with the world, a world enfolded within me... that I am simultaneously folded within.
Maybe true knowledge of the world equates to a feeling, a letting go of our identity for a moment. We fall into the fuzzy white wall--just far enough to set aside our assumptions. We don't have to know everything to key into reality, to be present--and to be in the mystery.
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