PANDORA'S BOX

 You’ve read the title and I definitely don’t know what’s running through your mind right now. It might be empty or full of thought(s) on the subject but trust me I might be there with you right in your head.  Some scanty knowledge might be good or nothing and so you came to this unknown writer’s space that he may conjure up something in you or your mind. I definitely might not know what you know and from your side also might not know what I know and up to that point I wish us to take each other’s side to these unknowns. In William Blake's words "Could we see the world in a grain of sand?" Or would it be fair for me and you to grant it poetic license?

We live in a muse; I don’t know if you agree, hold on to that belief, whether you will subscribe to it or what your thoughts about it are. I don’t know what you think of when you wake up, eat, drink, work, walk, lazy around or sleep. To sum it up I don’t know what runs through your mind for the millions of nanoseconds that make up your entire lifetime and I honestly don’t know if you care about what goes through my mind too.  We all seem to live in a sort of magical imperative imperceptible cocoon that seems impervious to some.  Sitting or walking through the streets people’s intelligence and thoughts seem unperturbed but that’s not true. Just because we’re moving about to unknown destinations like an army of ants crisscrossing paths does not give anyone the audacity to think otherwise of another than the other truly thinks of the self. Just because I play good football don’t think I may make a good successful wealthy footballer I see myself as a happy village farmer. It’s however a fact that few hold onto some curiosity as you do and someone somewhere ascribes to your school of thought. It is difficult however to pull each and every one onto the train of thought travelling in your mind. So many different fields of knowledge surround us and each has their own interest and sort of different vibrations that pull or push them towards that area.

The first time I heard of the word Pandora I didn’t pay much attention to it. The word became more familiar and a commoner when I got a gadget that had the Pandora music box and it only aroused the curiosity in me when a friend who’s a poet used it in his works and I ran allover trying to figure out what it really meant. To this day it’s still a Pandora and so are many other subjects: laws of nature, mathematics, space, existence et. cetera. Life is indeed a Pandora’s Box however I don’t know how many of us are eager to open that box. Some open others not for reasons best known to selves while the time that this happens varies to everyone. Sometimes the euphoria gnaws on some from a very tender age others later at an advanced stage of their lives and some it seems it never happens but who am I to judge? I have no scientific method to measure or ascertain and not sure if science can discover an electric wave that can shock us all out of this godly like oblivion that many seem to be engulfed or immersed in.

I don’t know why we don’t think in the same way and still wonder how it would be if we all thought in the same way. We might want to live in a utopia but would the experience be better than what we are going through now or would it lead to some boring routine that would be worse? We all want a world with no disease, hate, evil, war, poverty or other unpleasant occurrences that plague humanity naturally like death. One thing that I know for sure that humanity is always trying to run from and avoid is death. What is death therefore? Annihilation of animism?  We’re surrounded by all sorts of belief and superstition but is it all that conjures up the human soul or is it the cleft in Descartes’s pineal gland? It is difficult to wade or fly through this space continuum without holding onto some belief of some kind and though it has dawned on me and many others at some point, we are on the projection of unlearning, however, the journey of un-conditioning is still long. At one point you sit and wonder do they think of what I think or see what I see too? Chances are they don’t even though the surroundings and circumstances are same. However what’s the point of us all thinking in the same manner?

Reality and consciousness is one hell of a subject that has denied humanity a “crucial part of existence” and until we die we are not sure of what this is. Science, Sacred geometry, Mathematics, Neuroscience, AI, Philosophy of mind and many other disciplines haven’t been able to get us out of this matrix and at this point it has been difficult to trust what we see, hear, smell or even sense. When swimming these waters you come across names such as Pribram, Bohm, Descartes, Kant, Jung and many others that I might not exhaust in such a short piece or probably an entire lifetime if I dedicate my entirety to it. It is such an immense trivia to the human soul however not so many bother or are aware of it.  I can’t however rule out deliverance from the alchemy of time out of this mental bondage.

So what is reality? Do you believe it’s a myth, math or metaphor? Some scholars have defined reality as the evolution of consciousness in the alchemy of time and illusion. There are two key things to note; reality & illusion and their boundaries are thin as those of heaven and earth. How then do we separate the two if they seem to exist as perfect opposites dependent on one another? There is no reality without illusion hence what we know seems to form our reality while that which we don’t is the illusion. Is reality therefore the things we conceive or perceive with our senses only? For a greater part of the human knowledge we perceive things in 3 dimensional but what of those that may not exist in this dimension? Are they then not part of reality? Looking at how our reality is formed is an interesting phenomenon that indeed needs so much of research and analysis.

Till now research has established the brain as an electrochemical machine that processes binary code hence the result of this process is what forms our reality due to repetition that indeed forms what we term as experience.  Thinking about reality and consciousness feels as floating in a bubble of your own yet there floats so many bubbles in the vastness engulfing us. Augmented reality is what we may term the new daily experiences we wake up to each morning and sleep to every night. The questions we ask, our dreams each consequent day and what about our imaginations?  You ever thought of where the bubbles of thought in your mind floated from? And what would happen if this bubble raptured from a prick? You absolutely don’t know what will happen there after right? Or you know? If you know then how do you know you are right? I don’t know where the bubble I float in will take me to at the end of the day or where yours will even though right now you may be relaxing under a tree or somewhere cozy later chilled staring into the unknown.

Let’s spiral down like Fibonacci’s sequence into science and some other magic. I don’t know what you believe of yourself that you are: a spiritual being in a physical body or just a physical being having a spiritual experience? Do you have a soul or are you just a bunch of electrons or atoms vibrating in higher frequencies? In how many dimensions are you able to view things? Are you ever caught up in other states of reality like fragmented reality*? How many perspectives of it? How do you synthesize all this and extract meaning value and relevant application to improve your true reality? Should everyone then live according to the way you think things are or should be? Well how sure are you that; you don’t live in a hologram, your brain is not a computer matrix programmed, a simulation or biogenetic experiment? Think of a hard disk picked up from an unknown terra form with no star, moon or any of the elements on our periodic table. Think beyond your imagination of the life here. If our stars had colored light let’s say green, red or purple, all the rivers and trees and plants washed away from your reality does it mean there would be no life? Let’s say the sun we see is just but a small ball that came off a larger star from some far unknown hyperspace then what’s the nature of this unknown hyperspace? Let’s say our technology could take us to black holes. Keep imagining a little yonder past the mad evil genius.

It seems all alien but can we just transform ourselves into immortal creatures or are we already there through our souls and should believe in reincarnation?  The question is why so many forms of altered realities and how do we make reality a readable book? Enlightenment may be a deception of consciousness and vice versa for we all seem to view reality as some form of substantiation. Our substantiation has in turn affected our perception and hence woven this fabric into a model that we enter and fit in perfectly. It is indeed complicated to crack this crux but science must be on its way to, for giving up is indeed annihilation of consciousness. We might let go off our current reality when our brain cells die but does our consciousness float away into the unknown or does it grow to a wild tree on the mound of soil over our remains? Maybe we forget our past after drinking the water of Lethe from the river with dead souls in the myth of Mnemosyne.

Consciousness is that thing in us that gives us the feeling of knowing who we are, what we can be & achieve, or that feeling of awareness to things intrinsic and those extrinsic. But what happens to those outside these realms? We have gone to higher realms into religion and spirituality I don’t know how but all I know is that we seek. We are lost and need to be found, the sky is not the limit and now we floating into space. However those we can’t see feel or perceive do they stop being reality? For era man has always felt a certain pride on his planet because of his intelligence and intellect that’s notches over other life forms however currently our levels  of civilization and association have placed borders on what we term as reality and we are all chained to this rhythm.

We might colonize the planets around our galaxy or universe in a few decades to come but have we ever had the thought of a multiverse and the forms of intelligence masquerading in them? The types of creatures or life forms? Maybe fish float around in air and all animals live covered in chunks of jelly as a form of immortal cover against whatever may and their forms of propagating and communication is through advanced telepathy and have no oral language or physical signals and desire be it physical, spiritual or emotional. It all seems as illusion till we discover what we term as illusion might be reality and what we term as reality might be illusion. My muse remains however, the balancing point of reality of which “it seems to never have”. Groups, sects or legions however isolate themselves according to certain belief or variables that they choose to ascribe to.

Tech & reality. Thoughts and consciousness

It’s a mouth gaping discovery to see how reality has evolved over civilizations and generations and now in the 21^st century we are experiencing virtual reality and higher dimensional art. But the question is to what scope is technology going to change our reality and in which manner or levels of alteration? Are we gonna become smarter or dumber as we sit or lie staring at screens longer and longer? The evolution of AI is a scary as much as an exciting tale. The idea of machines controlling almost every aspect of our lives means that we may as humans be (kind of) programmed to some reality created by these advanced electric monsters that might “gain consciousness” and become independent of human intelligence someday. Reality calls for the executive control of one’s own mind I strongly believe.

Mysterianism is a philosophical position proposing that the hard problem of consciousness can’t be solved by humans. We have as humans however been experiencing consensus reality where a tree is a tree for all of us. I guess we have never taken the time to enter the realities of others as LYALL WATSON in GIFTS OF UNKNOWN THINGS. I feel freaked out but curious to see or make trees dance like the shaman woman and alter states as alchemy. Transmutation of reality is what is said to be alchemy while reality is the projection of illusion over linear time. The indigenous people however believed that reality is an illusion from which we will awaken hence the belief in some sort of reincarnation. Other schools of thought  exist providing alternative thought or the true north of reality and this include Realism where it points out that reality is indeed independent of beliefs or perceptions.

Descartes sounds much plausible when he states that consciousness is one undeniable fact of our existence. Collins Mcginn asserts that consciousness is a mystery human intelligence will never unravel.   This viewpoint seems to be held by many including the renowned and respected String Theorist Edward Witten whose string theory states that all of nature’s forces stem from infinitesimal particles wiggling in a hyperspace consisting of many extra dimensions. If consciousness were a force would it permeate every speck of matter in the universe or should we just go with Panpsychism and believe that consciousness, mind or soul (psyche) is a primordial feature of all things?  Scientific experiments such as Koubellissi and colleagues at the George Washington  University showed that stimulation of the claustrum with electrical impulses made the subject to lose consciousness or simply awareness. The claustrum  is a small sheet of neurons below the cortex and is connected to other cortical areas. 

We are indeed making plausible and applausive steps in Neuroscience and other life sciences and fortunately technology on the other hand through AI is making leaps as we are now able to map out brain functions. However, the difficult part has been interpretation of this information when it comes to the relative human or personal experiences. For now we have to learn how to live with (and) respect even those with different views. I might not think the way you think or you may not think the way I think and you may not agree with what each agrees with but we have to move along even though we might not have a creed. I tend to think that it’s not what we know that matters what therefore  matters is how we use what we know. However, what really matters and should always matter and be a real matter to us is the unknowable. The unknowable might turn out to be of much help and indeed is than what we know now. The journey of exploration into the dark to search for what matters is therefore definitely what matters. At the end of the day it’s the applications of our discoveries to improve & prolong life and create better realities for us. I therefore do keep a sense of open mindedness upon such witty matters, for now let’s hold our cards ready for the future.  The Pandora is in your hands NOW.