Always remember that your perception of reality doesn't follow time or distance.

(from http://www.andrewlipson.com/escher/relativity.html  which weirdly enough got me thinking to the point of writing the following)

Think back to all those times you've woken up in the middle of the night not in your usual place of sleep. Your mind was conditioned into through force of repetition of the experience of waking up in the same place day after day, yet often you wake up in a different place, like this new place you just moved into, or after a party at a friend's place on the couch at 4 in the morning still feeling alcoholized, or in a foreign country on the opposite hemisphere of the world, or in someone else's bed with them cuddled up next to you. At least a few of those times if not the majority, I'd be willing to bet that in the dark with no perception of your surroundings that you thought you were in your bed at home, in the home that you used to live in, or possibly you were thinking that you were cuddled up not to who you really were but perhaps with an ex of 4 months past. You turn on the light or let your eyes focus and adjust to take in more of whats actually around and all of the sudden it hits you like a ton of bricks. I've asked a few elderly folk about this kind of event which they all agreed happens yet never in their long lives thought about except in the moment right after this phenomenon happens and they doze right back off to sleep, and one of them even thinks often when this kind of thing happens that he's in his bed that he lied dormant in from 40 years past across the world.

Try another one. Go outside, take a look at the moon when it's near the horizon. You know how it looks a lot bigger when it's near there, right? Like, you can even perceive more details, picking out more craters and other features, as if you're looking at it through a weakly magnifying telescope. Now try looking at it upside-down, just forget about looking like a dork for a second and look at the moon by facing away from it and dropping your head to look at it between your legs. It's amazing.



It's not any bigger, closer, or magnified through some trick of the earth's atmosphere, but just through the power of how your sensations developed to perceive reality from birth until now walking on the hard part of the surface of the earth, always seeing that horizon. Your mind actually perceives it as larger and with more detail when it's near the horizon due to it telling your eye to focus on the celestial object in a way that actually magnifies it slightly, your eyes acting like a sort of weak pair of binoculars based on what it's looking at.

Your sense of reality is not based on completely solid grounding. It's also not completely fluid - Some of it is crystallized. Maybe like chunks of long-term memory ice floating in a sea of unsure yet abundant waters.

If you don't do this already, chronically and habitually consider on a very, very regular basis that your sense of reality is based more upon conditioning through relation and connotation to all that external stimuli than what you think you are choosing it to be. It can be pretty intense when you realize that you're not in complete control of it, but even more intense when the realization of the nature of the reality of your sense of reality over time, time after time, seems to yield a certain special kind of degree of control over the icy waters of your mind that you probably did not have before. I won't bother describing this sense of control, it's one of those things that you have to try for yourself to fully appreciate it. Telling you how it is would be as rude as spoiling plot elements in a movie or book which doesn't follow a straight timeline.

( edit / delete )  Fri, Jan 18, 2008  Permanent link

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