Speaking of reality: one of the premises of this blog is that reality inheres in the connections we have to each other. Our concept of reality is defined by the consensus we share with others of our species. We agree to a common language – or set of languages – and accept without question the existence of a reality outside of ourselves that consists of concrete, tangible objects. Most of us agree. Those of us who don’t accept the consensus are remanded to institutional care or increasingly left to wander the streets muttering to ourselves.
In my effort to connect, I need to talk about the weirdness of this consensual reality. There are billions of species on this earth. Not a single one of them, other than ourselves, so far as we know, has entered upon a path anywhere near the kind of path we are on. In fact, there is no evidence, Star Wars notwithstanding, that any other species in the entire universe of trillions of galaxies has embarked on such a course. There are many characteristics that define this path: walking on two legs, using fire, wearing clothes, cooking our food, music, writing, TV, cars, Uzis, atom bombs – or for that matter, burying and/or cremating our dead. Call it the development of a material culture for short. And, we have been on this path for an infinitesimally short time by geological or even biological standards. A million years maybe since the first humanoid stood up on its back legs, but only 35,000 years since the weirdness began accelerating, one supposes since the last ice age.
The anomalousness of human development is highly disturbing to me, and even more disturbing in that it doesn’t seem to disturb many others.
Are humans out of sync with nature? Yet how is this possible if we are in fact products of nature?
Of course, I needed to add the caveat “as far as we know.” It is entirely possible that ants, say, have this incredible body of literature written in carbon molecules on grains of sand. How would we know?
Something else that is both disturbing and reassuring at the same time: most of our “knowledge” of the universe, of what we agree to call “reality” comes only within the last 500 years. 500 years ago, the consensus was that the earth was flat, at the center of the universe, and the sun went around it. What’s hopeful about this is the sense that what we think of as reality now is obviously just as “inaccurate” as the previous metaphors.
Metaphor is a good word here. After all, the world does look flat. It does look like the sun goes around the earth. All of our so called knowledge is merely a metaphor for what seems to be true. In “reality,” if I can use that term, our view of the universe even now, is no better than that of a flea on the back of an elephant. Or a louse in the hair of a child, as depicted in a recent South Park episode. In short, despite the apparently geometric expansion of our knowledge of the universe in recent decades, we know next to nothing about what is really going on. I think it might be useful to start with the sum total of all human beliefs about reality and the universe and assume that all of them are true, and yet describe less than a fraction of a percent of the truth. God is highly inaccurate metaphor. “There is no God,” is equally inaccurate. For people to get oh so exercised over whether their particular metaphors are anymore accurate than anyone elses’ is just – what – stupid. And yet so many do get so exercised. What’s up with that? How can we get beyond this inane quibble over the relative accuracy of our wholly inadequate metaphors? Here is another theme of this blog: how do we bridge the gap between the folks on spiritual path that somehow think that what happens in this world – all the suffering and death, much of it caused by this argument over metaphors – is insignificant, that “reality,” the world’s most popular metaphor, is an illusion – and the political folks attempting to take responsibility for what damage humans do to each other and to the planet.
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