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Even employing the finest minds, the administration of such meager sensory input is ever going to provide an incomplete and misleading estimation of "reality." |
Reach Exceeding Grasp
(and a Good Thing, Too!)
by Alfred Lehmberg
We'd only ever aspire to "reality," actually. ...Really fret about it, our reach far exceeding our meager grasp, farther and more meager as we go! We insist, ironically though, to get lost to any thinking on a "destination" and so miss even important parts on the "journey." ...Miss them or confuse them with something else... Ironic when no one really knows where they're going in the first place...
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...Too, there are some of these, seemingly immutable, realities, really real, key, and de rigueur for the day to day! It's just that they are not really useful to us in our corporeal extentialities as flawed meat-puppets! These realities won't float in "meat space" forgetting they compose "meat-space."
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Moreover, the reality of any reality we'd perceive changes, and this writer would bet substantially, just for our taking it in our regard! Mere passive observation is a change agent! No? Does the reader change behavior when they find they are being observed. Does the reader slow down for a cop?
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See, the reality is that one's "reality" is a myth where it pertains to what we must find important to us as human beings... ...or any other entities suspected and lurking. We're not served not observing these just mentioned. That actuality has had a recent official announcement, but I won't digress there, just yet.
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Sure, base reality has its spin, rate, charge, and vector... all very necessary and important, I'm sure, but where are those things (apart from making all the proceeding possible in its way) on one's pleasure of achievement, one's personal satisfaction, or one's experience with seven grades of love? These three may be the same thing.
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In truth, reality can only ever be a personal fable replete with talking animals... which are of course required as they are in any fable... and you do talk with your animals... they do "talk" back... of course, they do!
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Oh sure, there's enough overlap of consensus in language and situational definitions or we couldn't remotely survive... we'd go stark and/or raving mad, each of us, not knowing which mouth to put food in or which hand to slap. Though, it remains uncomfortably: the reader has been in enough affairs ending up 180 degrees out from where the reader thought those affairs were, right? The solid ground quickly turns to substanceless mist and freefall flutters one's nonplussed butterflies. Abrupt instability! Plan for the one but get the other? ...Usually unfun.
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So, apart from a rough plan to navigate strange or familiar frames of existence in one's life, days, nights, and all-weather, what is one's personal fable? Is our personal fable how we plug into our "agreeing" mother society? Of course.
See, our agreed-upon "cultural fables" mean something—mean anything at all, actually—because, individually, the individual makes those fables mean something! We do with our fable just like we do with our money. Consider... our money is entirely valueless but for our shared agreement that it is not. Lost faith means lost value. That's the way everything works, nes't ce pas? From monotheistic religions to the purloined money becoming their lifeblood and raison d'être. "Faith" in something. Faith, if it doesn't make the World go round, it at least keeps it whole when it's not shoving a sword in its own spokes.
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...Only, you have to be able to test it! You have to be able to test it... and it has to pass muster. It has to pass muster and do so positively in an efficacious manner! There must be unfettered peer review and a defining cultural consciousness to let the "better idea" rise up!
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How boring would your verified and validated estimation of a causal reality be, given time? Aren't you glad no one was sitting around waiting for you, reader, to invent, say... the jet engine or the quantum computer? This writer's own estimation of reality, made true, would be insufferable after the most minimal amount of time! Like Vogon poetry, right? ...And he has already gotten that comparison! [Heavy sigh...]
Seeds (purposely) misplanted are denied any growth at all. Consider the impertinent deconstruction of a W.B. Smith, Golden-age UFO (There it is!) dean! This is by persons even most times more canted than they are ridiculously impertinent given current events linked to above. There is much to distort an observation prosecuting an adjacent agenda than is admitted in the proclamation that it be "scientifically unbiased." It isn't because it says so, eh? Science won't cheat. ...But scientists will.
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Observed in the light of homocentric cant, as Spock and Kirk were, Smith's positive hope for future-hurtling humanity is obverted and falsely invalidated. This, presumably, is so we "talking monkeys" can hold on to our cherished if baseless and unlikely dreams of cosmic solitude. This writer's intuition is that there are better dreams. Smith thought so!
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Eight or eighty? Blind, crippled, or crazy? Walking, crawling, or stinking—sociopath or sociophile... the "center of the universe" is a different experience for everyone... for every living thing... It's not only true that you can't step in the same river twice! You don't even do it, once!
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You, the reader, frankly. You're the dead-lock nut securing a "reality" working for you... or not. A lot of that is going to be obvious luck of the draw. Remains... choices. Sacrifices. Advancement. Just don't be overly surprised that your "step forward" resolves as "two steps back."
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Verily, see oneself at the center of "everything" while realizing that very, very little of that "everything" is about oneself... and maybe the lesson has been learned. Responsibility is required of ANY power. The writer learned that in two years as the Senior TAC at the US Army's Warrant Officer Candidate School in 1989...
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We fight for our dodgier convictions out of some weird pride of authorship, or ownership—made whole cloth out of "self-centered convenience," only. Consider Fred Hoyle. The Steady-State Universe is a habitation for unicorns. Get over it. "Steady State" seems abundantly dead. Panspermia makes sense, still!
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See, some of these convictions are seen as "dead right," others as "dead wrong." We end up on one side—or another—of this transient meaninglessness... and despair. See, there is no "side." In a Yin Yang illustration, it's not the opposites perceived, it's the edge between them, ignored. That's where the action is! The bordered EDGE!
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Do these persons bring their treatment upon themselves? Do they? Or is it brought upon them out of mean ignorance, intolerance, or indifference to one's more ethical compassion and good common sense ever ignored as too difficult! Not a question, reader... an observation.
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Imagine a, let’s go nuts, $25,000 annual boost or subsidy in that working-poor-woman-single-mom's hand for her trouble... 25 x 7 is $175,000... or, the CPM only clears $825,000—the next year, of course, he recoups his loss, plus, in the hotter economy, “but what the hell...” the millionaire somehow reasons, “...a bird in the hand...”? That's psychopathy you can smell AND see.
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What could be wrong with a living wage and not being thrown out of your home a result of a minor illness! Why is the CPM the sole entity blessed to be absolved these things?
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Admitting that you are wrong (...when you admit it?) is, still, a step up. This is where we will find our salvation—in tolerance, hard (at first) uncomfortable truth, and then its incandescent light.