blue light special
I've tried to keep up with reading LiveJournal during this last week, but I've been lax about writing either new material here or replies to other people. Mental distractions abound. I mentioned earlier that I might post some "iffy" material here, and... well, here's one of the topics now. I think that I have the right words and references to explain it properly. I started writing this piece back in 2004, but maybe now I can finally finish it.
I think that a lot of people require either/or answers when mysticism and science meet. I, however, accommodate both/and answers instead. Each metaphor provides a different perspective, and I find myself accepting each one simultaneously. I review and act, if necessary, using whichever perspective offers the most thorough predictions about the future. Certainty seems less valuable in these decisions than thoroughness. I mean, the theory in question gains reputation when it has an interconnectedness (thoroughness) with other observations from my own life. I guess reliability in the animal mind has more to do with familiarity than it does with logic. Familiarity, after all, is the accumulation of trial-and-error knowledge that hasn't yet killed me. Mother Nature's experimentation in action. Logic by experience.
Anyway...
Mystic Metaphor:
When I was about 12 years old, my father went through his brief but goofy new age phase. The only benefit I found from it was the realization that there's a word ("aura") for the blue light that shows up around everything that I see. It's a dim feature, easily ignored, but I couldn't remember a time when I had not seen the light around everything. Once I encountered the stories, I had to experiment, of course, to test them out. I realized right away that I was unable use it to determine the emotional state of a person. The stuff that I saw never changed; it wasn't the multicolored ever-changing stuff that I read about at age 12. Instead, the light was always blue, about 1cm wide, and only occasionally had an even smaller yellow band right by the outer edge of the aura. It was many years later (around the time of my own goofy new age phase: paganism) that I learned this effect was described in many old texts and labeled the "etheric aura". The descriptions matched precisely my own experience of it. Yay!
The stories suggested that a "third eye" was responsible for seeing the light which emanated from the source body. Of course, I experimented and tested that claim too. I sat in a dark closet in a dark room, as lightless a condition as I could create. I waited a while for my eyes to adjust and then tried to "see" the blue light bordering my body. I couldn't. As I opened the door and let in more light, though, then I could just make out the effect again. I determined that there was NO radiation emanating from my body that I could detect directly. There was no "inner light". The blue haze appeared only when there was ambient light.
The stories also sometimes claimed that only living things had etheric bodies. My eyesight plainly showed me, however, a blue haze bordering any object, living or not. My experience differed slightly from the story.
Still, I was glad to have some external validation of my experience. The folklore seemed to account for something that persisted across generations of humans.
Scientific Metaphor:
A few more years passed before I found what I considered a reasonable scientific account for my experience. It is conceivable, for instance, that some people see light in wavelengths other than the typical red/green/blue. Some creatures see in infrared, some creatures see in ultraviolet. There's no reason those mutations couldn't also appear in humans eventually. Farfetched, yes, but I still wanted an explanation for the blue stuff.
It was sometime in June 2004 that I realized that "borders" are a significant visual feature. Computer programs use borders to distinguish "this" from "that" in images. If the human brain has a similar process, and if that process happens to occur in a brain structure near the color processing structure (a series of "if"s)... then it's possible that the signal for border crosses over into the signal for blue. Similar to what the author (also autistic) of "Aquamarine Blue 5" experiences with numbers and colors. So perhaps a kind of visual synaesthesia is the answer that I've been looking for.
Recent studies leave me thinking that I'm correct on this scientific metaphor. There is evidence of brain mechanisms for boundary detection and surface segregation. There is also evidence that everyone experiences synaesthesia, even if only subconsciously. (I wish I could find the video from the researcher who did the Kiki/Bobo shape naming test. I can't find it right now though. *ARGH*) So it is, at the very least, plausible that the experience of seeing an etheric aura can be explained as a visual synaesthesia effect. No mysticism required.
Mixing Metaphors:
Maybe some folklore is self-fulfilling. Take an average Joe, then tell him that he has mystical powers because he experiences the world in a way that is different from most people. Will he believe the story? The evidence is right there in front of his own eyes, after all. In a world that allows only one interpretation of events, the conclusion seems obvious. It would be natural for Joe to pursue matters of religion in an attempt to understand his own place in the story of life. The storytellers (folklorists) lay the mantle of destiny upon his shoulders, and Joe accepts the responsibility of his paranormal abilities. Mystics are people with special abilities because people with special abilities become mystics.
Maybe science will eventually compartmentalize every experience so thoroughly that any given human is the expression of just one permutation out of all those possible experiences. What will we (society) do when we finally realize that there's no such thing as normal? When each individual is recognized as an experiment by Mother Nature, a unique exploration of possibility, then how do we make rules to govern everyone? Will we have to give up on the concept that "All men are created equal" in such a world, when we talk about the many ways that we are in fact unequal in our creation?
I rather like the mixture of ideas, personally. I realized long ago that storytelling is the purpose of consciousness, as most people do it. In my world, mysticism and reductionism are complementary perspectives in crafting these stories. Each has its way of validating a subjective experience. I use whichever is more thorough in its explanation for the needs of the day. Perhaps they will always be irreconcilable. Laws of individual behavior (person, particle, etc) do not always reconcile with laws of systems (societies, fluids, etc). I know about radioactive decay, and I consider it a truth. Amongst the particles in a sample, half of them must decay within a given period of time. How a particular particle will behave, though, obeys no such law.
Choose the explanation that's appropriate for the need. Getting them confused leads to all kinds of trouble.
I think that a lot of people require either/or answers when mysticism and science meet. I, however, accommodate both/and answers instead. Each metaphor provides a different perspective, and I find myself accepting each one simultaneously. I review and act, if necessary, using whichever perspective offers the most thorough predictions about the future. Certainty seems less valuable in these decisions than thoroughness. I mean, the theory in question gains reputation when it has an interconnectedness (thoroughness) with other observations from my own life. I guess reliability in the animal mind has more to do with familiarity than it does with logic. Familiarity, after all, is the accumulation of trial-and-error knowledge that hasn't yet killed me. Mother Nature's experimentation in action. Logic by experience.
Anyway...
Mystic Metaphor:
When I was about 12 years old, my father went through his brief but goofy new age phase. The only benefit I found from it was the realization that there's a word ("aura") for the blue light that shows up around everything that I see. It's a dim feature, easily ignored, but I couldn't remember a time when I had not seen the light around everything. Once I encountered the stories, I had to experiment, of course, to test them out. I realized right away that I was unable use it to determine the emotional state of a person. The stuff that I saw never changed; it wasn't the multicolored ever-changing stuff that I read about at age 12. Instead, the light was always blue, about 1cm wide, and only occasionally had an even smaller yellow band right by the outer edge of the aura. It was many years later (around the time of my own goofy new age phase: paganism) that I learned this effect was described in many old texts and labeled the "etheric aura". The descriptions matched precisely my own experience of it. Yay!
The stories suggested that a "third eye" was responsible for seeing the light which emanated from the source body. Of course, I experimented and tested that claim too. I sat in a dark closet in a dark room, as lightless a condition as I could create. I waited a while for my eyes to adjust and then tried to "see" the blue light bordering my body. I couldn't. As I opened the door and let in more light, though, then I could just make out the effect again. I determined that there was NO radiation emanating from my body that I could detect directly. There was no "inner light". The blue haze appeared only when there was ambient light.
The stories also sometimes claimed that only living things had etheric bodies. My eyesight plainly showed me, however, a blue haze bordering any object, living or not. My experience differed slightly from the story.
Still, I was glad to have some external validation of my experience. The folklore seemed to account for something that persisted across generations of humans.
Scientific Metaphor:
A few more years passed before I found what I considered a reasonable scientific account for my experience. It is conceivable, for instance, that some people see light in wavelengths other than the typical red/green/blue. Some creatures see in infrared, some creatures see in ultraviolet. There's no reason those mutations couldn't also appear in humans eventually. Farfetched, yes, but I still wanted an explanation for the blue stuff.
It was sometime in June 2004 that I realized that "borders" are a significant visual feature. Computer programs use borders to distinguish "this" from "that" in images. If the human brain has a similar process, and if that process happens to occur in a brain structure near the color processing structure (a series of "if"s)... then it's possible that the signal for border crosses over into the signal for blue. Similar to what the author (also autistic) of "Aquamarine Blue 5" experiences with numbers and colors. So perhaps a kind of visual synaesthesia is the answer that I've been looking for.
Recent studies leave me thinking that I'm correct on this scientific metaphor. There is evidence of brain mechanisms for boundary detection and surface segregation. There is also evidence that everyone experiences synaesthesia, even if only subconsciously. (I wish I could find the video from the researcher who did the Kiki/Bobo shape naming test. I can't find it right now though. *ARGH*) So it is, at the very least, plausible that the experience of seeing an etheric aura can be explained as a visual synaesthesia effect. No mysticism required.
Mixing Metaphors:
Maybe some folklore is self-fulfilling. Take an average Joe, then tell him that he has mystical powers because he experiences the world in a way that is different from most people. Will he believe the story? The evidence is right there in front of his own eyes, after all. In a world that allows only one interpretation of events, the conclusion seems obvious. It would be natural for Joe to pursue matters of religion in an attempt to understand his own place in the story of life. The storytellers (folklorists) lay the mantle of destiny upon his shoulders, and Joe accepts the responsibility of his paranormal abilities. Mystics are people with special abilities because people with special abilities become mystics.
Maybe science will eventually compartmentalize every experience so thoroughly that any given human is the expression of just one permutation out of all those possible experiences. What will we (society) do when we finally realize that there's no such thing as normal? When each individual is recognized as an experiment by Mother Nature, a unique exploration of possibility, then how do we make rules to govern everyone? Will we have to give up on the concept that "All men are created equal" in such a world, when we talk about the many ways that we are in fact unequal in our creation?
I rather like the mixture of ideas, personally. I realized long ago that storytelling is the purpose of consciousness, as most people do it. In my world, mysticism and reductionism are complementary perspectives in crafting these stories. Each has its way of validating a subjective experience. I use whichever is more thorough in its explanation for the needs of the day. Perhaps they will always be irreconcilable. Laws of individual behavior (person, particle, etc) do not always reconcile with laws of systems (societies, fluids, etc). I know about radioactive decay, and I consider it a truth. Amongst the particles in a sample, half of them must decay within a given period of time. How a particular particle will behave, though, obeys no such law.
Choose the explanation that's appropriate for the need. Getting them confused leads to all kinds of trouble.