Change Your Day Day

Hola Everybody,
How’s everyone doing? Shit is getting real now, folks. LOL Fuck it -- whatever happens -- happens.

How to Change Your Day

 

You can’t perceive what you can’t conceive.

Read carefully because the following can change your day... 

Here’s a scientific discovery for you all to ponder: Ninety-six percent of the universe is stuff we’ve never seen. More precisely, the cosmos is 23 percent dark matter and 73 percent dark energy, both of which are invisible -- unseen and unknowable -- to us humans. All the stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, nebulas, and gas clouds all together make up the visible four percent.

So, where is the other 96 percent? No one knows. It’s not only concealed from humans, it’s undetectable to the instruments humans have devised, and its whereabouts can’t be predicted by any existing theories. Scientists know how much dark energy there is because they know how it affects the universe's expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery.

Knowing this, how does this change your thinking? If the vast majority of reality is invisible to you, how should you adapt to that knowledge? How certain can you be about anything? Maybe one way to adapt to this fact is that we should maintain an open mind.

Seventeenth century church authorities refused to look through Galileo’s telescope. Why bother, they scoffed? Christian dogma made it perfectly clear that moons could not possibly circle Jupiter.

But before you scientifically minded folk get too smug, consider that most of today’s scientists refuse to consider the possibility that unidentified craft might have been flying around our skies for years. It’s absurd to think that beings from other star systems could travel these vast distances, they tell us, as they look down their noses with contempt. They say there’s no valid reason to examine the evidence. It’s a ridiculous proposition. Their certainty contains a major bias: that sentient beings from other worlds can only have ships that are limited to the means of propulsion we have discovered here on Earth.

I’ll insert my patented blank stare here -> ::blank stare::

And please don't get it twisted: I'm not saying that UFOs exist, only that we shouldn't be so smug about our assumptions about their existence or lack thereof.

To the ancient Greeks, electricity was as bizarre and unfathomable as telepathy is to us today. Yet electricity existed before anyone “believed” in it. It’s just that there was no theory that proposed its existence and no means to gather evidence for it. Before electricity could “exist,” the culture had to change in order for people to be able to know where and how to look.

Today we’re aware of electricity as well as black holes, x-rays, and infrared light because we have the instruments to extend our senses. I have to question the wisdom of a mindset that assumes we have developed every sense-extending technology that will be ever be invented.

When Columbus’ ships first appeared on the horizon, First Nation people saw them as floating monsters. They didn’t have the conceptual knowledge or experience to know them for what they really were. You can’t perceive what you can’t conceive. An adult who has been blind all his life and through surgery is suddenly given the gift of sight takes a while to be able to interpret what he’s looking at. The eye alone doesn’t see. The mind and the cultural prejudices it has internalized interpret and shape what we see (and don’t see).

So what the fuck does all this have to do with your day, let alone changing it, you ask? Give me a moment and I’ll try to bring it all home for you.

Some of you may have heard of Einstein’s theory of relativity. I won’t try to explain it, but his theory changed the very way in which we perceive reality. It has influenced (and continues to do so) every sphere of science. This elegant little theory almost single-handedly changed our lives in so many ways I can’t begin to count them. One admiring journalist asked Einstein how he arrived at his theory. “How did you do it?” the journalist asked. “I ignored an axiom,” Einstein is said to have replied.

To be clear, the revolutionary scientist didn’t say he ignored an opinion or a theory, but rather he ignored an idea so well established that it was regarded as self-evident. Furthermore, he didn’t say he rebelled or fought against the axiom: He simply acted as if it weren’t there.

And that’s it in a nutshell, if you want to change your day (or even your life), you have to stay open to the realization that even the most accepted assumption can be wrong. Begin by learning the rules and then break or at least deeply question all of them. Or at the very least act as if the limitations don't exist.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

White Blindness

Hola mi Gente,

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton, who has never supported the $15 per hour wage movement, used one the movement’s biggest victories as a photo op. No shame whatsoever. 

* * *

Blindness

Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn't mean he lacks vision.

 -- Steveland Wonder

Some of my readers will recognize the title of today’s essay, which is lifted from Blindness, a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago. The novel was made into a film (click here) that was released a few years ago. Blindness is the story of a city hit by an epidemic of “white blindness” that spares no one. Authorities round up the blind and incarcerate them in an empty mental hospital, where a criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women. The story is a brilliant allegory of the loss of the ability to envision and confusion, and a stunning revelation of the horrors of the modern world. However, while Blindness captures the reader with its commanding rendering of humankind’s worst appetites and weaknesses, it’s also an exposition on humankind’s ultimately indomitable spirit.

Sounds like an election year to me! LOL!

My topic today is difficult to explain, though it is certainly something with which we are all familiar. The difficulty lies in the fact that it’s so obvious. There are, it seems to me, vast swaths of our lives that are missing from our awareness. We share a similar experience with the characters in Blindness: we all suffer from blind spots, literally and figuratively. The difference being that our blindness isn’t caused by an unknown plague, but is due internally to causes deep within our consciousness and externally by a vast media apparatus that manufactures consent. Our failure to experience fully crucial aspects of our reality results in gaps in the beam of awareness that defines our world from moment to moment.

My topic then is how we do not notice. In other words, my topic is about the pieces missing from our awareness – the holes in the fabric of our attention.

I’ve always been fascinated by the physical blind spot. I find it an apt metaphor for our inability to see things as they are in reality. In physiology, the blind spot is the gap in our field of vision that results from the way the eye is constructed. At the back of each eyeball is a point where the optic nerve, which runs to the brain, attaches to the retina. The point lacks the cells that register light coming into the eye. Therefore, at this one point there is a gap in the information transmitted to the brain. The blind spot registers nothing.

Usually, what is missed by one eye is compensated for by overlapping vision in the other. That’s why we don’t notice our blind spots. But when one eye is closed, the blind spot emerges. Seeing the blind spot is fascinating to me because it offered a concrete example of a more psychological parallel. As an example, many adults of alcoholics relate that in their families there were clear “rules.” One being that there is nothing wrong and the other was “Don’t tell anyone.” Families in the grips of addiction are extremely secretive; no one must talk of the monster that lurks in full view. These tacit rules teach us something -- it teaches us to create a psychological blind spot. Moreover, it’s not just families of alcoholics, I sense that there are many things kept hidden in families -- the shameful secrets, the unspoken failures. 

In some ways, this type of blindness is a defense mechanism. Our psyches need protection from the full onslaught of a cruel reality. This form of personal self-deception helps defend us from unnecessary trauma or psychological pain. However, when it becomes a societal pattern it serves to blind us to inequality and social injustice. 

One of the cruelties we inflict upon ourselves as a society is by limiting the boundaries of the possible. In a society in which the media is controlled by perhaps four or five corporations, the national dialog is seen mostly through the prism of capitalism. Anything beneficial to corporations is deemed possible and good, but benefits to the 99% of the population, issues such as free higher education or healthcare as a human right, are seen as ideological nonsense -- or “unicorns and rainbows” as supporters of neoliberal candidate, Hillary Clinton, like to put it.

As I look around these days, I see much in the way of blindness. We all welcome blindness: we don’t want to face the harsh realities of a politics bought and paid for by the power elite, so we turn our attention away and buy things or watch “reality” shows on television. We don’t like the tension of political reality, so we step away and ignore those inner tensions that exist anyway. Unfortunately, those tensions don’t go away, they fester in our bodies and we either try to feed them (obesity) or starve them (anorexia), but try as we might, the plague of blindness persists.

Not all dialogs are pleasant, or even polite. However, dialog we must if we’re going to emerge from our collective blindness. We must awaken to a coherent vision of the kind of society we desire or condemn ourselves to stumble in our blindness as slaves in a society created by those who would rob us of our very humanity.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…