We used to get high when we got high. I remember a time, before I ever had a cell phone, before there was such a thing as high definition, before 9/11, back when reality TV was new and interesting and not gross. I remember those days, and I remember taking drugs to get high. I took drugs to warp my bored mind. Now I am afraid to take anything, lest things get any weirder. I noticed a big sign today advertising some new special flat screen television, as a man stood next to me talking on a flip cell phone, which was ultra thin, with a clear plastic flip top, and I thought to myself, I've never seen anything so mind warping as this modern moment on even the strongest Acid. It was a moment which was both awe inspiring and sad.
Things are moving so darn fast now in modernity. We don't just have electricity ( a pretty strange thing to begin with), which has led to these things called phones, computers, the internet, and lights at night, but we have wireless phones, wireless internet, super high definition televisions, everything we even conceive of seems to materialize by our hands. It might sound like i'm on acid right now, but is anyone noticing that we have planes flying through the air with us on them? We have submarines, deep beneath the surface of the sea. We have fish farms, cow farms, we have big, strong guns. We have tasers, tear gas, laughing gas, prosac, and valium to mellow it out. We don't sell LSD over the counter, but we do sell a pretty altered sense of reality. THIS REALITY.
Look around. We are being sold, and we are selling, this altered perception of reality, this modernity. As if it were real, we are selling it and buying it all the time. We make it real with our perception. We are raised in it, and as we are raised in it, it seems like the norm. It takes a few years to catch up to us that things aren't quite as they were.
I took flying for granted as a kid. I didn't really think, "wow!! I'm getting on a big piece of metal, and it's going to fly me through the air." I just assumed that it was normal, just like phones, cars, gas ovens, microwaves, skyscrapers, nuclear weaponry and power, and the myriad other oddities that were just there from my first breaths, and therefore, like the sky being blue, like the fact that bears shit in the woods and Popes are Catholic, even before you learn what a bear is, or a Pope is, they just are, and it doesn't seem weird. Then the cell phones landed, the internet landed, wireless landed, and suddenly the newness of it all, the Brand Spanking Newness, just whacked me.
When I think about it, I am forced to acknowledge that nothing is real but what we make real. The ever-changing nature of reality forces me to believe this. We are talking about the earth going from round to flat, from flat to round. We are talking about the possibility that human perception is truly the creation of realities. And these realities actually affect human beings, their lives, their experiences, and therefore, their perceptions, which in turn affect the perceptions of their off-spring. We are reality creating machines.
What does a cell phone mean? Maybe it simply means that I can talk to another human being who is on another continent, at the same moment, in a different "time zone," without any wires connecting us. But what does that mean?
If we were alive 20 years ago, and were having a conversation, and I told you that you could go stand alone in a pasture in China while I went and stood alone in a pasture in Wisconsin, and then we could put these plastic, battery powered devices up to our heads, and we could talk to each other as if there were only a curtain between us, you would have told me I was wrong, and you probably would have thought I was crazy; and you would have been right. But when I tell you that it's true today, you just say "yep, I know, it's just reality?" What does that mean?
It suggests, I think, that the world is more than flat or round, or inhabited by people who speak different languages, who are black, white, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Catholic, Christian, who are Americans, French, Iraqi, or in any and all other assorted ways "different" in terms of perception....
It suggests, I propose, that we don't have a clue what is really going on. It suggests that the greatest thinkers at any one moment are most certainly as blinded by their preconceived notions of reality as those contemporaries of Columbus who "knew," by way of fact, that the world was flat.
So my friend. What does that mean?
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