Some people faint when overloaded with new things. The resulting stress they don’t assimilate well. Their meaning is being lost, and they often screen the reality of the new experience out all together. Blue screen of death, does not compute!
Now imagine a person who triggers that in people even in their formative years. Routinely seeing that blue screen of death in peoples eyes. What would their resulting world view be like?
“You shouldn’t be”
Neuro-plasticity varies widely. I have a developmental disorder that makes things too mutable. It allows for new ideas to be incorporated, to a degree, and permits radical change. People describe me as a shape shifter. So give this person excellent neuro-plasticity, a self absorption as they call it, well developed meta cognitive awareness. They know what they think, and feel, and why. So they have some mobility in this nothing, this non being. What would they find?
“More nothing”
What happens when someone spends enough time in a sensory deprivation tank, even their whole life? Meaning matters so much that even contrived meaning is a survival imperative, and if there can be no bridge to the consensus then what? In a mild version, when you come out of it all, meaning seems to change, and if you can’t come out of it? Let’s say this person is aware of their own reality and it’s separation from the consensus. They want desperately to connect.
To live without meaning to who you are, depression results? The person in that bubble reality has a very pliable mind. Can see out and has been. I have said this before. Even if you give no place to an underlying universal reality, the virtual reality, the consensus that people live in is amazingly consistent. No continuity editing needed. This is how much meaning means. A grand edifice is built from it.
In the Bible, they say heaven has many mansions. Again continuity. The mind itself does something, even without you trying, called reality checking. It takes what impressions were made on you about life and cross references. Makes certain they “fit reality” and rejects what doesn’t fit. Or if it has enough force (and it has to have a lot of force, I dare say crisis) it adapts to the critical contradiction, but there is no willing acceptance. Even psychology now says that a belief that is widely shared does not constitute a delusion.
Now at one point, this behaviour of the mind served a purpose and still does for more simple animals. They can’t gain by processing much more than what they do. They won’t survive. It still exists in humans, but it makes their world very weird. Off center.
In sharing a house, consensus reality allows for communication and interaction. Are there just too many houses? No, but the houses are crypts. No windows. The realizations of brotherhood, of commonality, and how surprising that is for most, is a big bridge for the crypt dwellers. There are no windows, and they don’t leave their minds so there is a lot of focus on transcendence. They keep going up inside the house. I think they call that “climbing the walls”. I guess it’s normal. They deify the world beyond the crypt, call it God and cloak it in sophistry. Then nod to themselves that they are wise and have dealt with the mystery of outside the mind.
We could just open the windows? In theory, yes. They could produce windows which is really more of an unboarding the widows. In Buddhism, they call the windows the senses. To remove the screen from the sense. People get a trigger when they try to do that. The mind, like the body, seeks to maintain a homeostasis. The idea of removing the screen from the senses threatens meaning. Even those who like nebulous mystical answers still don’t want to remove the screen from the senses. Now imagine a person had no choice. The screen was never over the senses. What would that person be like? They would have to adapt to other things wouldn’t they? The stasis, that security wouldn’t be there.
Would security even be a concept? Not really. It becomes more a matter of function. They might even seek to embed themselves in another paradigm. How well would that work? Constant free fall.
This reminds me of a Sufi saying, something about us being who we are but dressed in a cloak of law. I’m naked! This is why I have no choice but to see myself, and it is a constant freefall. The world shifts so very much. It is like spending every day watching the world die.
In my experience, despite all the decay, there are meanings that do endure. Perhaps unspoken, though I don’t think unspeakable. That strikes me as a cop out. On this planet, there are cultures whose language did embrace abstract or mystical meanings, but many religions don’t take well to “questions”. Same reason politicians don’t.
“I have two hands on the sunshine. I have one foot in the grave.” Song lyrics. This isn’t true though. People in general have two feet in the grave, and one hand on the sunshine, and they are shading their eyes.
The house in which they reside is decaying from the inside out, and they only allow themselves to see marginally out of that box? Those whose house is in that shape, yes, and even those don’t thank the destructive force. I’ve heard it said that the whole 2012 thing will be like a wrecking ball to those decaying houses. I feel I grow more alive and yet also more dead as these recent years pass.
Something always dies to give life? Perhaps that is true, but it seems ultimately the gap grows bigger and the isolation remains.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~