you know, everybody thinks there’s just one world. there’s this world we all live in. but they’re wrong. there’s an infinite number of different worlds we inhabit. there’s the world you live in and the world I live in, and make no mistake: they are not the same. there’s the world men live in and the world women live in. I’m sure I need not belabor that one. the world you knew as a child and the one you know now — your experience of it, were they the same?
and there’s the world the trees are conscious of — rain and sun, and earth, and the need to grow and reproduce. we share some of that, you and I, but the tree is unaware of so much. sometimes I think the tree’s way is better somehow. simpler, uncomplicated, true. the trees aren’t fooled by a false spring. they stand and wait past the last frost before they shoot out their precious buds. trees in my mind are wise that way. but trees’ experience of the world more often seems somehow less complete than ours. but I am sure it is at least experiencing something.
how unlike the rocks and the energy waves that permeate us even now — as far as we know, completely unconscious. they are eternal, yes. but eternity without consciousness — what is it worth? do you ever think of that? maybe the waves that you and I are being bombarded with all the time — light, radio frequency, microwave — maybe it has a consciousness of which we are completely unaware. it is a fact that radiomagnetic energy keeps us alive, and of that we are mostly unaware. yet we have learned to harness that energy to carry music, and information and propaganda. you use your mobile phone, and cook your frozen dinner, but as you do, do you really understand what is happening?
there’s no wonder primitives worshipped the sun. if I was a primitive, I’d have to go with the sun worship. as opposed to what? maybe fire if I lived in a northern lattitude. but the moon? I don’t think so. what good is that? the connection between the lunar cycle and menses would have to cause the primitive mind to ponder. hard not to notice it. hell, it makes the modern mind ponder, if anyone can still wonder in this day and age.
but that’s the thing. before they discovered radio, there was no such thing. there was no concept of radio, and there was this world without it. and then they discovered it, and then the world changed. and now we modern folk are exposed to the concept from childhood, taught about it in school, and we think smugly to ourselves how stupid the primitives were for not knowing about this obvious thing, I mean its right there in the dashboard of your car, for crying out loud, how could you not notice it?
and yet how much that is fundamental and important remains undiscovered? there’s no way to know, but do you not think we have barely awakened? that we’re barely aware of what’s right there in front of our faces, compared to what’s really going on out there in the universe?
I’ve recently been thinking and reading about some of the findings from quantum mechanics, and there is a big, giant question mark there. I mean not just because I don’t understand it, but because nobody understands it. really smart people have been looking really hard at some of these observations, like the famous double-slit experiment, but when you boil down all the goobldygook and long impenetrable equations, the truth is that no one has any idea what the heck the universe is trying to tell us.
you see, we’re just like the trees, maybe even more so, in that unlike the trees, some of us labor under the misapprehension that we actually understand what is going on around us.
because if you do not think that, then you, my friend, most certainly do live in a different world than I.