The art of deception

We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see with, not through the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light
—William Blake

The eye does not see. I see. The eye is a window that allows us to receive sensory data. No matter what an extraordinary organic machine the eye is, it is not really an "I." It is not us; we see through it. Seeing is not believing. In fact, to see clearly and fully is to see many sides of a thing, to encounter contradiction from every angle.

Deceivers in politics and the media maintain control and influence by carefully selecting what they want people to see, depending on natural subservience to received sense impressions. And the belief principle, touted as it has been by fundamentalist religion as the way to salvation, becomes a handy accomplice in the subversion of independent thought. Belief follows seeing and thus guarantees subservience to the masters of the world at any given time. So as we turn a blind eye to the manifold injustices and atrocities, taking refuge in the good news and good views allocated us, we miss not only the sordid realities of our worldly condition but also the entire principle by which we can truly understand the world and ourselves.

From here to here

Which is farther: the distance from here to here, or the distance from here to there? I say it is from here to here. Because in order to get to here from here you have to go there, then come back to here. Whereas if you're already there, all you have to do is come here.

But why, you ask, can't you just stay where you are if you're already here? Because here refers to a spacetime location. If you are in space you are also in time. There is no purely spatial reference. That is basic relativity: we live in a four-dimensional universe. There is no "getting here" without going through time. So however close to here you designate there to be, it will always take you twice as long to get from here to here.

Two wrongs make a left

Everything that people agree on cannot be real. Or to put it more bluntly, nothing that they agree on can be real. Since we can only know what is in our own minds, we are necessarily outside the reality that is beyond our minds. Therefore any beliefs or perceptions that we can share with other people just multiplies the misperception, which is why masses of people, and of course their leaders, behave uncommonly stupidly.

Our conception of reality is based on a panorama of perceptions and interpretations that originate within our thought-producing apparatus. For that reason, people tend to trust or give credence to commonly held beliefs as opposed to those that stand outside the norm. But these shared assumptions about reality are the first things we should discard if we are interested in truth.

Two wrongs do not make a right. If I am wrong and you are wrong, together we make a left. The composite of individual awarenesses projecting their illusions in concert constitutes a left turn from reality. Leave it all behind, for God's sake.

A shift in time

The overarching project of downloading the future presents itself as what's hot right now. Global warming is coming down the pike, on a collision course with humanity's pride, but that's not all. A many-tentacled tomorrow is grasping at us on many fronts, and one might speculate that these are cosmological imperatives and not merely earth changes. What they impel is a shift in the techtonic plates of the mind, forcing us to change focus from the labyrinthine paths of the past, pulling us into the perceptual matrix of the present, so that the compelling and ardent heart of the future can have its way with us.

Freevolution

Now that the American public has definitively rejected the theory of evolution, with 51% saying that God created humans in their present form and only 15% believing that God had no role, scientists should perhaps be well advised to rethink their approach to promulgating their theories, as they do not seem to be convincing many these days. Some of the antipathy towards evolution seems to be an uncomfortability with the idea that natural processes could of themselves yield an intelligent result. Yet there is nothing in nature that does not reflect intelligence, from the mathematical symmetry of seashells to the distribution of matter in the universe to the checks and balances inherent in the biodiversity of species. It is not these kinds of examples of an underlying intelligence, however, that evolution's dissenters seem to care about. Rather they see God's hand in the social institutions and norms that define humanity in its present form. They are idealists of the first magnitude, to believe in belief itself as the principle that saves the appearances of nature from the self-referentiality of secular perception.

That 51% proves a democratic mandate for abandoning all notions of the democratic structure in nature, where organisms might slip out from under the control of an all-powerful boss. Evolution, in substituting a possibly random, unknown force for the intelligent design of a creator, is a dangerously radical departure from the simple, orderly vision that informs the mass mind. The freedom inherent in this idea is the ultimate threat to the God of the 51%; even though they trumpet freedom as their political raison d'etre, it eludes their grasp and manifests as radical ideas, showing the unpredictability of the creative force. Freevolution even eludes God, or any God we could possibly imagine, and the creation is indeed a continual thorn in God's side, a constant reminder that to dream, even divinely, is to risk devolving, putting on the mantle of Creature and riding into the great unknown: a journey which might, in due course, evolve God into something greater than even It could possibly imagine.