Sunday morning alchemy
The fact that our eyes are specialized organs which focus visible light into images doesn't mean that the rest of us can't 'see' also. Our skin is sensitive to temperature, to infrared light which we perceive as an entirely different dimension of sensation. When a piece of metal is heated until it glows red, nothing has changed in the metal except that the energy in the metal is now at a slightly higher pitch and begins to register in our visual system. Everything warm is glowing infrared, and I imagine that everything glows with it's own unique signature of frequencies from the entire e-m spectrum, as well as a quantity of gravity (if not a quality).
Our entire human existence is lived out within an envelope of biochemically mediated perception of biomechanically manufactured sensation. Energy touches the eye and the high-resolution nerves there read it as light. The same energy touches the skin and the nerves there feel it as warmth. Since nerve cells are really only specialized versions of single celled organisms, it makes sense to imagine that primitive life has an undifferentiated, but possibly more inclusive perception of energy than we do. An amoeba sees-feels-hears-smells that which promotes survival and growth as attractive to it - whether the trace is a resonance of visible light, temperature, acoustic vibration, or chemical reaction, or who knows what other forms of gravitational, magnetic or unknown forms, there's a chance that it will be detected in an instinctual way and sought out.
Even within the animal kingdom we can see tremendous variation in the senses - a snake's sense of smell and temperature are thousands of times more powerful than ours. It's forked tongue gives it a high resolution, stereoscopic image based on more explicitly predatory efforts to sample the environment. It has Meatvision - it 'sees' in carnivorous vistas which can extend for miles. For such sensitivity to develop, there has to be a universal potential on some level for all cells, all substances and energies from which more elaborated specialization can be developed.
There has to be an underlying lexicon of recognition between all patterns in the cosmos which appears to us as nothing - a background condition. Just as color seems to us something added to 'pure' white, the silent void of the undetected and unconscious is counterintuitively the totality of possible patterns and order. It's there, we just only see a little bit at a time, because that's what our consciousness is, dynamic prisms of order.
The energies in the universe may be infinitely saturated with integrated information, maybe extending beyond our fragmented experience of time and memory, space and material. Time travel may be simply a matter of developing a sensitive enough 'nose' for time which can pick up on longer, lower gravitational resonances...chronochemical interference waveforms from 'the' past and future breaking upon an arbitrary collective 'now'. There is no question in my mind that the 'actual' universe 'out there' would be as unrecognizable to a human organism as the smell of chocolate would be to an eyeball. All of our reason and experience derives from our memory which itself is a kind of sense - a psychic sense modeling the past to enrich the present and inform the future.
This is where the astrology pitch comes in. Because the solar system, whether by virtue of the repeating cycles of a small number of objects of timespace-warping mass orbiting in relative proximity to Earth, or simply that the observation of their regular motion by humans is a universal first step to the understanding of time and natural order, is arguably THE primary influence in the development of civilization, if not reason itself. In seeing these orderly cycles and symmetries, these relationships between substance and change, are we uncovering the grand cosmic schema, or are we merely projecting onto it the threads of our own material bindings?
As a snake demonstrates it's particular mastery over it's external environment, humans express mastery over a different, and no less 'real' aspect of living existence. Our thoughts and experiences, memories, connections, comparisons, language and imagination are like internal eyes with which we see ourselves and our time...these eyes are lit not just by the sun, but by the entire radio-telescopic-gravitational dish of the solar system, which itself is a dynamic node in the galactic net, passing packets of analogs and metaphors from infra to ultra and macro to micro - instructing substance and energy, setting the local pace of the cosmic metronome, not merely a uniform continuum of measured ticks, but a complex mathematical-astrophysical cocoon of momentum and synchrony which is the cradle of all we've known.
There is a point which the greatest and the smallest meet. In our condition of being human bodies, we see the universe through an extreme fisheye lens which explodes the importance of those things in relative scale and speed to ourselves. Our senses have specific limits, ranges of sensitivity in frequency, intensity, distance. If we see our mind as a kind of sense organ for order itself, for pattern recognition within the context of a human body on this planet at this time, then it's sense is bound on one end by physics (teleonomy) and on the other by symbols (teleology).
Our entire human existence is lived out within an envelope of biochemically mediated perception of biomechanically manufactured sensation. Energy touches the eye and the high-resolution nerves there read it as light. The same energy touches the skin and the nerves there feel it as warmth. Since nerve cells are really only specialized versions of single celled organisms, it makes sense to imagine that primitive life has an undifferentiated, but possibly more inclusive perception of energy than we do. An amoeba sees-feels-hears-smells that which promotes survival and growth as attractive to it - whether the trace is a resonance of visible light, temperature, acoustic vibration, or chemical reaction, or who knows what other forms of gravitational, magnetic or unknown forms, there's a chance that it will be detected in an instinctual way and sought out.
Even within the animal kingdom we can see tremendous variation in the senses - a snake's sense of smell and temperature are thousands of times more powerful than ours. It's forked tongue gives it a high resolution, stereoscopic image based on more explicitly predatory efforts to sample the environment. It has Meatvision - it 'sees' in carnivorous vistas which can extend for miles. For such sensitivity to develop, there has to be a universal potential on some level for all cells, all substances and energies from which more elaborated specialization can be developed.
There has to be an underlying lexicon of recognition between all patterns in the cosmos which appears to us as nothing - a background condition. Just as color seems to us something added to 'pure' white, the silent void of the undetected and unconscious is counterintuitively the totality of possible patterns and order. It's there, we just only see a little bit at a time, because that's what our consciousness is, dynamic prisms of order.
The energies in the universe may be infinitely saturated with integrated information, maybe extending beyond our fragmented experience of time and memory, space and material. Time travel may be simply a matter of developing a sensitive enough 'nose' for time which can pick up on longer, lower gravitational resonances...chronochemical interference waveforms from 'the' past and future breaking upon an arbitrary collective 'now'. There is no question in my mind that the 'actual' universe 'out there' would be as unrecognizable to a human organism as the smell of chocolate would be to an eyeball. All of our reason and experience derives from our memory which itself is a kind of sense - a psychic sense modeling the past to enrich the present and inform the future.
This is where the astrology pitch comes in. Because the solar system, whether by virtue of the repeating cycles of a small number of objects of timespace-warping mass orbiting in relative proximity to Earth, or simply that the observation of their regular motion by humans is a universal first step to the understanding of time and natural order, is arguably THE primary influence in the development of civilization, if not reason itself. In seeing these orderly cycles and symmetries, these relationships between substance and change, are we uncovering the grand cosmic schema, or are we merely projecting onto it the threads of our own material bindings?
As a snake demonstrates it's particular mastery over it's external environment, humans express mastery over a different, and no less 'real' aspect of living existence. Our thoughts and experiences, memories, connections, comparisons, language and imagination are like internal eyes with which we see ourselves and our time...these eyes are lit not just by the sun, but by the entire radio-telescopic-gravitational dish of the solar system, which itself is a dynamic node in the galactic net, passing packets of analogs and metaphors from infra to ultra and macro to micro - instructing substance and energy, setting the local pace of the cosmic metronome, not merely a uniform continuum of measured ticks, but a complex mathematical-astrophysical cocoon of momentum and synchrony which is the cradle of all we've known.
There is a point which the greatest and the smallest meet. In our condition of being human bodies, we see the universe through an extreme fisheye lens which explodes the importance of those things in relative scale and speed to ourselves. Our senses have specific limits, ranges of sensitivity in frequency, intensity, distance. If we see our mind as a kind of sense organ for order itself, for pattern recognition within the context of a human body on this planet at this time, then it's sense is bound on one end by physics (teleonomy) and on the other by symbols (teleology).