PART FIVE, TAKING IT TO ANOTHER LEVEL
MODES OF PERCEPTION
APRIL 9, 2011. Let’s say we have a very large piece of light blue paper, and on that paper are a hundred shapes in different colors.
There is no clue what this is.
A person enters the room, where the sheet of paper is laid out on a table under lights.
He examines it. He figures out what kind of paper it is, where the paper came from, who the possible manufacturers are, what inks were used to make the shapes.
Another person comes in. He looks at the shapes and says they are code. So he begins substituting letters and numbers for the shapes.
A third person enters. He claims it’s a form of compressed information. He examines the shapes and begins to catalog the various ways in which they are similar. He looks for common features. He finds many.
A fourth person walks into the room. He says the whole collection of shapes is a representation of DNA sequences.
A fifth person comes in. He states the shapes are shapes on a piece of paper.
A sixth person enters. He states the shapes are meaningless.
A seventh person walks in. He says the shapes are symbols. They stand for a cosmology of an ancient culture that predicted the end of the world.
An eighth person walks in. He doesn’t say anything. He looks at the shapes for a long time. He is imagining what they might be. He knows he is imagining, and he also knows the shapes are already there—so it’s a kind of interaction between the shapes and his imagination. He knows he can see the shapes in many different ways. He can see them as people, as objects in a landscape, as a hundred different kinds of entities. He catches glimpses of realities he never considered before. He’s exhilarated.
Now the artist enters the room. He was the one who made the shapes on the sheet of paper.
He tells the first person where the paper came from and what inks were used.
He tells the second person the shapes are part of an arcane code the Chinese used in 1949.
He tells the third person he worked very hard embedding similarities among the shapes. In fact, that’s how he created them. Through a list of similarities. The shapes are compressed information…and unlocking them would give the viewer access to the entire contents of the New York Public Library system.
He tells the fourth person the shapes are a visual representation of junk DNA isolated during the Human Genome Project.
He tells the fifth person the shapes are just random shapes printed on the paper by a machine.
He tells the sixth person the shapes are meaningless doodles.
He tells the seventh person the shapes are symbols that were once inscribed on a spacecraft that flew to Earth from a star system a billion light years away.
He looks at the eighth person, says nothing, and leaves the room.
Oddly, each of the first seven people only heard what the artist said to him, not what he said to the others in the room.
The eighth person yawns and leaves the room.
The people left in the room begin to argue. Another person walks in, watches the argument, looks at the shapes on the paper, and proclaims the artist is a secret agent tasked with creating chaos, destabilizing society, and eroding traditional values.
Outside in the street, the eighth person catches up with the artist.
He says, “Why were you spewing all that crap in there?”
The artist says, “You kidding? Those people are fundamentalists. They can only see one thing. Either you feed people like that what they want to hear, or you don’t feed them anything. Today I felt like feeding them.”
Yes, THE UNIVERSE IS WAITING FOR IMAGINATION TO REVOLUTIONIZE IT DOWN TO ITS CORE, BUT…
MAYBE THIS HAS ALREADY HAPPENED…AND THE PEOPLE ARE STILL DETERMINED TO SEE UNIVERSE AS IT WAS.
BEFORE IMAGINATION REVOLUTIONALIZED IT.
They’re very good at that.
JON RAPPOPORT
Visit the site, sign up for the email list, receive free articles, and order a copy of my e-book, THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL LIFE, in pdf or Kindle format.