There is a fuzzy white wall hanging in space. One may come up against it while imagining a beginning, no beginning, or the absence of time entirely; one might 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 something else, I am sucked out of my individual vantage point just a bit to encounter a sense of wonder and, eventually, the glow of the fuzzy white wall.
For example, I can imagine myself to be a bat, with black wings swimming in the air on either side of me. 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 towering buildings even 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 an icon on the laptop. It is small, I can see it and I can zoom my attention to it; but I just can't click on it, really journey into it. There lies the fuzzy white wall, so bright with uncertainty that I can't comprehend whats behind it. I can only entertain the assumption that we are conscious sensing entities and we have that in common. Different players on the earth game.
When I zoom out from the icon and imagine myself swimming in the grand black of the greater universe, I reach the fuzzy white wall again, in contemplation of 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. Still. How, at least from the vantage point of being a separate observer staring at this little earth, could one touch upon the hills and valleys of one tiny being's grand ideas?
I can only assume our intelligence may be hidden to a distant observer or even to the one who flies right by us, simply traveling 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 may seem anything but. Anyone sitting 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 even, 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 Truman show, we sailed to the end of the world and opened a door... The door didn't open so easily, but ultimately the 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, and 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 way to go before we are naked, and the earth may still be flat yet.
When I was a kid I watched the lead singer of the rock band REM accept an award. He stood at the mic and took off his shirt to reveal another shirt, only to take that shirt off and reveal another... and another. 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 more quietly hides 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 popular evidence for popping 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, the brightest and the best, of the little tiny specs, on a marble hanging in the black of space? At the very least, these are some bold statements for one culture, one out of 1.5 million plus species, to make, looking out through its own eyes, which are themselves relative to its individual being.
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.
Please don't take me too seriously if I engage in the lost cause of being correct, though I do find it reasonable to question the accuracy and value of the previously described world view and its implications.
Many of us question this current world view all the time, even as a common sense given, but because it is still quietly ingrained in us, we therefore operate, in most everything we do, under the assumption that we are the cutting edge of brilliance.
It is obvious to many of us however that for being so brilliant, we are not exactly in harmony with the world upon which we depend, which we are in relationship with. Therein lies the point.
Consider these 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 exactly 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 some meditative altered state would do something like that. Words can also blow apart worlds. Though on the downside one may miss out on a stellar in depth 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.
