Seeing & Hearing
The Hidden Worlds of Life
The practice of life as we do it today is a failure compared to what it could be.
The reason is simple: we are closed to seeing and hearing what is there and there are reasons for this which I will get to later.
We know that our character is a combination of nature and nurture. Nature is essentially identical for all of us. We are all Africans who migrated north some 50,000 years ago and then east, then to the rest of the world, arriving at the tip of Sourth America about 12,000 years ago.
The further north, the less sun and natural selection chose those with lighter skin in order to get enough vitamin D. So much for white supremacy.
Nurture is everthing that happens to us, or rather has happened to us: every word, hug, calamity, rain drop, sound, friend, teaching. It all adds up. If you want a quick idea of what it might be for any given person, ask where they were born. It will get you started. After that you must know the details.
The most important details are what creation gave you in the capabilities of your mind. I have not yet met a person who comprehends this and it is so startling, so amazing that I think it is a miracle comparable to the creation, the Grand Singularity, itself. So the picture is from infinitely small, though a few billion years, trillions upon trillions of stars, black holes, galaxies (and much more) only to end up with a small space in each human head that is sentient, that can experience the universe and all that is in it.
However, you must wonder how we know of this Grand Singularity that gave birth to everything including space, time and the energy that eventually became the matter that is the universe. The best evidence is what is left of the big bang itself for the leftover energy surrounds us. It is called the cosmic background radiation. It was discovered by two Bell Lab scientists in the mid ninteen sixties. It has been pictured in ever increasing fdetail by three incredible satillites parked between the sun and the earth. The last round of measurements lasted years in order to separate out the weak signal form random noise. Below is the latest and most detailed satillate image. The various colors indicate galaxies and galactic clusters. I like the symbolism of the shape bbeing that of an egg, for it is a picture of our birth.
Eyes Wide Shut
Experiencing Experiencee
I find nothing more difficult than explaning “experience” and how utterly amazing it is. You are experiencing the world at this instant (sentience) through two small images on your two retinas and two small membranes at the end of your ear canels. That is it (leaving out touch and smell for the moment).
How bundles of synapses and neurons in the brain can create experience is unknown. Somehow we do not realize that there is a conceptual gap (also known as a “hard problem”) for there are no clues. From chemical, electrical signals in the brain we get experience. From my point of view, this gap in understand is a trillian Grand Canyons. (Various scientists have different views on this. You can track these down on the web.)
For my purposes I (not believing in miracles) call it a miracle. It is the product of the Grand Singularity (Big Bang, very small) leading to the extremely large (the universe) and back to the extremely small, that part of us that is sentience. Shut eyes and blocked ears are a tragedy at least partly as a result of not knowing how stunning is this experience. This is life.