been here before

[rva_jeremy]

This is not the density of understanding. In order to be harvestable an entity must admit that it doesn’t understand. Yet here in our experience we all claim to understand....that we are on a spinning sphere that looks like a globe. It sounds like maybe someone doesn’t want us to keep thinking about what’s going on.

This essay really helped me address my thinking about understanding. 

Let's take the flat/sphere earth debate as an example.  In the Western tradition, we have this approach to reality that draws from the ancient Greek's law of identity: that A is A.  A thing is only what it is, no more, no less.  A thing cannot be two different things at once.

But the scientific method flies in the face of this approach.  In order to investigate reality using this method, we invent hypotheses and then test them.  If the data proves the hypothesis correct, then strictly speaking that doesn't tell us what something actually is; it only tells us that the hypothesis was useful in making certain predictions about reality.  The hypothesis is a lens through which we view reality, but we don't mistake the lens for the reality itself.

To the extent that we can juggle multiple different models of reality, we can maintain a flexibility towards our experience.  I don't believe in a round Earth; it's simply a useful model for explaining why the sunset and sunrise behaves a certain way.  Most of the time, I behave as if the Earth was flat, and that model serves me well in other contexts.  I don't know what the Earth, the ding an sich as Kant would say, actually is.

In my experience this is a really good way of dealing with what the Confederation tells us is an illusion.  We construct these models of reality in our head, but they are conveniences, shortcuts that we take.  They are not the way things are, only the way things seem given a particular lens.  Change your lens, change the reality.  Timothy Leary called this a "reality tunnel", where we use our minds and perceptive capacity to reduce all of the trillions of signals coming from the universe at any given moment to a tiny fraction so that we can cope with it.  But all those other signals that we're ignoring are reality, too.

And this, I think, is the secret to ritual magic: changing your consciousness at will results in perceiving a different subset of reality.  Science, in a manner of speaking, is just one particular form of it.