Sailing on a Sea of Thought

Imagine going back to a time when the Earth was relatively unexplored by man. When we built large wooden structures with great sails that harnessed the power of the wind to take us to places unknown. Of course this is mostly from a western civilization perspective I am writing and so hopefully you will forgive me the bias of my upbringing, but looking past that can you feel the excitement? The wonder, the uncertainty, even fear? Exploration is a tantalizing concept, a seductive and unforgiving pursuit. It is far from safe and does not make any promises of return or glory, though it has no qualms with offering these succulent morsels of temptation. Can you feel it reader? The cool ocean spray on your face, as the waves break on the dock. The steady sway underfoot as you walk the boarding ramp of the looming behemoth. The great white sails seamlessly stitched to capture the forces of the air flowing around you as you move towards the horizon. Oh and that sweet horizon, a glimmering jewel of freedom, priceless, for its worth is measured in the countless new experiences it has to offer. Yes to embark on an adventure like no other.

               

Well I will grant you that even I don’t believe such things were ever so glamorous. Indeed sea voyages must have been rather brutal affairs, away from solid land and fresh food for weeks, even months on end. The only company, your fellow male sailors, who likely don’t want to be there anymore than you do, but are nonetheless coerced by circumstance to climb aboard. Still the idea of exploration rings clean and crisp in my mind undiminished, nay even invigorated by reality.

True, we still do explore new territory to this day. Science allows us intrepid explorers to embark on all sorts of interesting experimental journeys and in many ways these journeys are much more comfortable and fruitful that the ones of old, if slightly less romantic. Yet there is a problem with science and indeed with any real institutionalized thought or belief system, including most religions. Namely, all of these systems run the risk of and often fall into the whirlpools of dogmatic thought. Which take us round and round, until we’ve been going in circles for so long there’s no clear way out. Now, to be fair I believe science has better safeguards and methods of extraction from these dark abysses then religion for the most part, but that doesn’t make it any less guilty of steering into them, nor does in ensure that we will alter our course. 

Behold another grand illusion: the everyday experience of reality. It seems like for as long as humans have been sentient we have sought to establish and explain the world and universe in which we inhabit. We have only so many tools for doing this, namely our senses. And thus is born the everyday experience of our lives. It has become our nature to fall into a level of acceptance. That is to say we accept certain things about reality based on what we see, hear, touch, smell and taste. Whether this tendency of acceptance is evolutionarily or socially derived is not entirely clear to me, but suffice is to say that it exists. Let me give you an example. When I am typing these words I accept that they appear on my computer screen as words. Now, through my knowledge of technology I know that this is not actually true at all. In fact, each of these words is made up of hundreds if not thousands of pixilated dots, which appear on my liquid crystal display screen based off a complex interaction between the hardware of my computer and the word processing software along with, I can only imagine, numerous other computer programs, which position the dots on the screen just so. We can even go further than that and discuss the electromagnetic emission of light that my eyes and mind receive and interpret into an image, or why not discuss the interaction of atoms and molecules at play here. Well obviously I can go on and on, but I cannot very well live my life constantly thinking on all these levels, it is enough for me that I type and “poof” the words are there. So perhaps I am living an illusion of sorts, in that I can only see a small fraction of what’s really going on.Which, as it happens, is incredibly fortuitous since it allows me to see things at a level where I can affect them in a meaningful way. However, here is where dogmatic thought can become harmful (by dogmatic thought I am referring to any entrenched or well held idea or belief, that is for all intents and purposes unassailable from the perspective of the collective or institution that holds this belief or idea)While this is method of viewing the pixiliated dots as words is very practical and I can go about living my life just fine typing away at the computer, if I didn’t allow myself to understand what was happening at a deeper level, I wouldn’t be able to create anything new (not counting my writing of course). That is to say, if I and everyone else just accepted that when we typed computer keys, words popped up on the screen and we forgot everything else about understanding why and how this happens, than we couldn’t very well make any new computers. Indeed we would be stuck just using keyboards, screens, and word processors without ever creating any new ones, or improving current ones, or even fixing them when they broke down. In a similar way dogmatic thought leaves us stuck and unable to create new ways of understanding our universe, or even improving or fixing existing ideas, simply because we cannot get past the current level of understanding, the entrenched belief.

Let me offer an example from the world of physics. Now must physicist, believe it or not, think they’re pretty hot stuff, they know their way around the universe so to speak. In the beginning of the twentieth century it was widely accepted that the major physicals laws had all been fairly well established, and all that was left were measuring things to the fifth decimal place. Enter Einstein with his theories of Special and General Relativity, followed closely by the discovery of quantum mechanics, and it turns out the physics community couldn’t have been more wrong, they had only a very, very limited understanding of how the universe really worked. Now in this case we were lucky in that the dogmatically held belief of the maturity of the physical sciences did not have the power to keep these new theories at bay forever. Indeed, it would seem that eventually, given enough time progress will overcome any resistance. But, my point is, why does their need to always be such great resistance?

If we could let go of our tendencies towards dogmatic thought, if we could allow ourselves and each other the freedom to question the foundations of our beliefs without fear of the changes it might bring, then we could open ourselves and our species up to potentially limitless possibilities. We could become superconductors of thought, with no internal resistance. I know that we fear the unknown, and because of this we fear change, but it is high time we muster our courage and embark on a voyage. Not necessarily by questioning everything or always maintaining an open mind, because if we were to do this we would run the risk of never believing or accepting anything. Much like how I cannot always view the words I am typing at the atomic level. Rather what I suggest is allowing our minds to freely sail across a sea of thoughts and ideas, to fully explore them and go where the winds might take us into the exhilarating and illuminating unknown.