Reality Inside Reality

From the film Baraka

How can we ever see through another's eyes? How is it that people understand each other, know what the other is thinking, feeling? In reality it seems as though we merely trust our own judgments. We have an idea -- usually coloured by our personal experience -- of what it must be like to live in places outside of our familiar realms of everyday experience. Van Halen's Right Now comes to mind (as much as I may or may not want it to). Right now someone is desperately searching for a crack rock, obsessively spilling change into a payphone and looking over their shoulder in a cold sweat. Right. Now. Right now someone is searching for food in the crevice of a sidewalk, and right now someone is trying to figure out where to spend and/or invest all their money.

And right now a lion sits on top of a rock with the hot sun at its back, knowing nothing of payphones, or the stock market.

In a sense, we are all isolated. We can never truly know how another person feels unless there is some kind of transmission invisible to the naked eye. There is the transmission of sound and light waves, and our body's nerves tend to let us know whether we're interacting with something tangible -- but our perception filters the senses, and there is much more going on around us than our senses manage to pick up on. There's an old Buddhist parable: if a rope is taken as a snake and it affects you, it is true. There is a reality and we are part of it, but we all view it differently -- what we see is not what it is. To see like a lion would be to experience a different version of the same reality. We are a species tuned to a certain radio station, yet not completely fixed to it. We can be versatile with our perceptions, and choose to create various modes of reality, but we are always confined to our own minds, our own limitations.

Sure, anything is possible. We can create the most complex gadgets and mammoth steel-laden mega-structures. We have the ability to genetically modify various lifeforms and shoot rockets into the vast. We can affect the external world, but in the end it is the external world that affects us. By affecting our surroundings we affect ourselves. So in another sense, we are not isolated, but instead somehow dependent on everything in our environment. Insofar as we depend on ourselves, we cling to the environment for a sense of identity. It is our environment -- whatever that may be -- that gives us comfort and a sense of importance instead of having to live with the vulnerable feeling that often follows from not knowing what the hell we're doing on this rock, not to mention air to breath and food to eat. This, after all, is the case. We are vulnerable, floating, trying to interpret multiple folds of reality, and simultaneously at the mercy of the cosmos with the illusion of complete control. See it like it is? Probably not. Adapt, search, and reach for a clearer experience with little or no expectations? Yes. Remain vulnerable. Open minds. Grab all of the nothing. Try to understand how others see things. What you see is what you get. What you get is what you see.

Blah blah blah, sha sha sha, nah nah na...

Right now, someone is wondering how they got to where they are, and they are wondering where they are going.