Reach Exceeding Grasp

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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Oh, how can you be

Two places at once...

When you're not anywhere...

...At all?

                                       Firesign Theater

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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.

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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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No, the aforementioned cultural fable—replete with the inevitable and unethical complications of unregulated corporate beasts currently braying their pecuniary infidelity like white-privileged ghoul-weasels—is only a best, and perhaps not best educated, ...guess at an interpretation of how we have told ourselves, instructed ourselves ... convinced ourselves that *the way things are*, are truly, the way *things* are! 

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They're not. You know they're not. Don't freak. It's good news. 
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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...]

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So... Not to be blamed entirely, then, are the unelected governments, non-accountable agencies, and the duplicitous institutions we tolerate now at peril. See, we individuals still have to "buy-in," mote by errant mote into the "official concurrent reality." We're required to buy in under "penalty"... or it all just evaporates away! That evaporation may be a good thing, see? Travails are not omnipotent and unending. They bleed. They pass. Our will makes that so.

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Moreover, if unsettlingly, and with greater frequency, the aggregate fable changes for the observer, as already mentioned, just for the observer observing the fable. Metacognition can make that change for everyone! Seeds planted can grow exponentially. Consider the aforementioned jet engine and computers.

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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W.B. Smith? He was a quality human instrument in the tradition described by Allen Hynek. Smith gave us evidence of high government ufological involvement, the "quadrature" concept, and the now much-touted "non-interference doctrine," astonishingly. Kirk and Spock's concern that the prime directive is observed at all comes directly from Smith... and not Gene Roddenberry, who only knew of Smith and pirated the Smith-revealed philosophy of those "topside," ...is this writer's understanding...
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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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The truth changes... or does it...?

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Government is "real"? Our loves are "real"? Our hates are "real," and it wouldn’t all just disappear with the first asteroid, viciously consuming prion, or at the first scurvy whim of "the man"? 

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*Reality* is nonsense. Reality... is what we impose on ourselves or is imposed upon us. We make it up as we go, and as we go, the manufacture of that reality accelerates. Our societal curve goes asymptotic... recline seats and fasten belts. Gird loins. Just passed the knee, now, of the illustrations' curve? We accelerate more and more vertically, if precipitously, on these curves... both good and bad...! Hyperspace looms. 

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...See, one's reality is nonsense, good reader! Why? ...Because we have no idea where those just described accelerations are headed! Moreover, perception, condition, and situation are wildly different for wildly divergent people all over our planet...
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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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What now brown cow? Over our shoulders yawns the fathomless multiverse like a sentient beast, eh? We feel its icy breath in the exotic exhalations of brother and sister entelechies "out there"... out there precisely BECAUSE we're "down here" (nothing happens once)... those of the "known unknown," breathing on neck napes... and finally, it rolls around to toll for the reader, too, another good thought! See, the moments of now become more important and better appreciated... even as the universe may yawn. That's then, you see. This is now, and everything HAS changed...

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Is it more than blind luck, good and bad, that you are where you are at present? It's not what we think! For some, surviving that just conjectured asteroid strike is a step up, and still, the individual is at the extreme dead center of it all … The Center. Of. It. All.
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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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~"You"~ is (sic) the center of the universe, period, reader, it remains. Me too, see? Me too and the other guy... but that's beside the point. That there must be responsibilities and mindfulness associated with that centrality; that is the point.
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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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Cozy America... forgetting the blessings (equally momentous) for a moment, entirely... there are horrors "out there," reader, beyond our contrived and ineffective borders, for which we are liable! Consider the production of your child’s soccer ball, or those long fat bananas mom buys down at the store... and these are a couple of the most (seemingly) innocent (...both of the preceding have real environmental horror stories) ... Cathy Lee Gifford knows what I’m talking about! "K"-cups? Hamburgers?  Don't get me started. Who pays so you can play?

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Once we think we have the deadlock nut on something, though, we are loath to let that solidity, even ~if~ an imagined solidity, go; this is even as any "lock" was an illusion or a... personal fable. 
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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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All too soon, though, we are entrenched in some destructive belief system out of sheer momentum. This is how Christians bury Muslims in swine offal when they fight the Bosnian wars (It happened!). This is how homosexuals are beaten (...stoned? Dragged behind cars?) until they're dead (It’s happening!). This is how blacks are being filmed strangled in the streets by the authorities sworn to protect and serve them (Happening, now!). WTF!
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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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All this dissolves upon a search for the un-stretched mechanics of why conditions are as they are—the AlienView. When the chips fall as they may, and we all cop to *conditions*, those *conditions* improve real fast... even if it means the, ah... ...*best*... having to give up the *best* champagne ...for a while! Even if you have to be a little ashamed ... just for a while... one ultimately cops to pragmatic personal responsibility... or despairs!

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Example: the raw numbers say the ratio is a ball-parked seven to one: working ~honest~ poor at or just above the poverty line, to Clear Profit Millionaires (CPM) in these United States. We're just spitballin' here, ...'K? ...'K. Work with me...
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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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This is how he (the man) treats people who build his house, keep him warm ... heat his water... shovel his shit! With Corona, we lately discover how important these people are!
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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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Nothing is the way we fallible humans think it is. This is why we have to detach, move back ... see proverbial forests for proverbial trees; be able to re-evaluate positions in the light of new evidence... and grow. Grow or die. Die... or be wished dead! That's got to ring a bell.
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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.

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Sincerely, if you didn’t have *stock* in one position or another, like an alien might not, would you even hold the positions that you hold? Don’t be too quick with your affirmation; it’s very likely wrong. Restore John Ford.