Only Echoes, Endlessly Repeating — Scale
The relative size or extent of something.
The first thing you should consider when you ask yourself how something works is at what scale. A grain of sand is the same as a rock or a planet, it is our specific experience that renders it minute. Our sense of proportion, rooted in our own size, makes some processes obvious and others obscure, we can only perceive things based on our own scale. Our mind has a broader view, but it too is limited. We are range bound to the things we can observe, either through our own senses or through the use of instruments. There are things in existence we can never see, not even when given all of time and when eliminating all of the limitations of space: things from before the universe began, things that wind up so tight that even time and light can’t escape them, things from places that are not reality, if they exist.
The reason we don’t know the last fact for sure is that the scale of the thing we are observing, existence itself, makes it impossible for us to see outside it.
We live in a flatland of perception, where things, speeds and concepts that are very large or very small do not exist. Take, for instance, our perception of time: things that move at speeds faster than of our range are invisible and things that move at speeds much slower than it we consider still. Nothing is really still, even the North Star moves.
Our experience of motion is relative to the velocity of our lives. If we could speed ourselves up, we could see the wings of a dragonfly in flight. If we could slow ourselves down, we could experience the growth of a flower, the way it unfolds in the morning, from a closed bud to an open corolla. We understand that this is happening, very slowly, by the intermediate states within that slow motion, which we observe throughout the day, but we can never experience the process itself, which for the plant is fluid, in the same way we could, for instance, watch a horse gallop across the field. Those two kinds of movements are the same, but one of them happens within the frame of reference of our own life speed, whereas the other one does not. Things that are slower than our speed feel like a sequence of still frames spread out over a long stretch of time: plant movements, the phases of the moon, the rise of the tides. Things that are faster than our speed we don’t see at all: the wings of a dragonfly in flight, the movement of light, the spokes of a wheel in motion.
Now back to the scale of space. When you look inside a timepiece, you can see how the gears inside it act upon each other, and you understand why the movements and controls are the way they are. Everything acts upon and is being acted upon in perfect clockwork fashion. Imagine that the universe itself is just like that time piece, at all of its scales, great and small, and that it is guided by precise rules, just like that time piece. Sadly, we can’t peer inside it to find out how a leaf takes pure energy from the sun and transforms it into its nourishment, or into more of itself. Maybe if we were small enough, we could see the whole sequence of pieces and parts bouncing into each other and moving each other out of place, in a whole chain of actions and effects mesmerizing in its intricacy.
Then, say we could become even smaller, so small we would fit in the space between matter, where everything becomes so rarefied, even in solid form, that it would take years to travel the distance between one fragment to another, it would feel like moving between distant stars. What would you then be able to find in that empty space, what would it look like to you, at its own scale? If you were small enough and fast enough, would you be able to see inside nothing?
We have five senses, which means we can see, hear, touch, smell and taste. Life performed this amazing act of magic and gave us the ability to interact with it, but only in these five ways. Does that mean that everything we can not perceive with these five senses can not be sensed? How about the birds, who can sense which way is north so they can find their way home? How about the bats, who can conduct themselves in the dark guided only by their own echoes? And these are poor examples, too close to our own range of perception to illustrate the vast gap between what our minds can muster and the full scale of conscious intent. If the universe were a finely tuned timepiece, we’d be stuck inside one of its gears, range bound to its speed and unable to see anything outside its boundaries. We’d also be confused about what makes up the rest of the timepiece, because we could only perceive reality as something made of a certain metal; we could not conceive of any other material for it, or any other state of being.
If I told you that there were components of existence for which everything feels like it’s made of air, for which there are no barriers they can’t pass through, you’d call me crazy. If I offered the possibility that there may be entities who could see the inside of our bodies in every detail, as well as you can see my face now, you’d find that too far-fetched. But those entities would be just like the birds that can feel north, and that ability would come naturally to them. They wouldn’t be able to explain it to you, just like you wouldn’t be able to explain to me how you see.
What if there were entities so small they could live inside the smallest pieces of your being, oblivious to anything that is not the small piece they call their world and unable to exist outside it?
What if this body you can see because you have a sense to see it with was not a singular, independent thing at all, but a giant ark filled with those tiny living entities, more numerous than the grains of sand, all feeding from and interacting with each other?
You would be your own living world, moving around and experiencing things, while its tiny inhabitants went about their merry lives, content with their limited status and interacting with existence differently than you.
Human perception is a range inside the scale of perception in the absolute, and some things are outside our capacity to understand, just like we can reason and perceive things that would be beyond the capacity of a mouse or an ant.
We always forget, in our human hubris, that our instruments, our senses and our reason, are limited in scope, and even so, those instruments are a lot more sophisticated than our ability to figure them out.
In every way that matters, reality is infinitely smarter and more complex than us.
We think we can extrapolate on the way it works by relating it to the way our minds work, but reality doesn’t function that way.
It doesn’t follow a script, a rationale, the timeline of a story, it just reacts to the choices laid before it during every single moment, makes those choices and then redefines itself to keep itself consistent within the change.
What makes us so sure, for instance, that because we can only experience time going in one direction, that is all reality can do?
Think about this perception of time we have as coming from a being so small, and whose life is so short, that when it gets caught in the breath of an enormous monster while the latter inhales, it believes that air can only go one way: in.
[We find this interpretation of the theory of the clockwork universe confounding.
The master is embracing a straightforward view of the mechanistic nature of reality, but he also seems to hint at the presence of a universal consciousness, a subject he touched upon earlier in this manuscript, but on which he never stated his opinion.
We can’t discern whether he assigns anything of a divine nature to this type of sentience. He seems to be clear on the fact that it exists as an intrinsic quality, an emanation of the construct of reality, very much like thoughts are to a brain.
If he suggests an all-encompassing intent, which in many people’s minds is as good a definition of God as any, he doesn’t believe it to be external to the system, but integral to it, the life inside the body of the universe.
The concept of panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories and it enjoyed renewed popularity during the master’s time, so there is no surprise to find it reflected in his teachings.
His reference to the universal consciousness being completely different from what we define as intelligence is intriguing, however.
This kind of consciousness would have to reorganize itself down to the last detail with every passing moment.
It would be like the spirit of being erased existence completely and recreated it from memory, barring minor variations, one second at a time.]
Can I elaborate on the scale of consciousness?
Am I trying to say that we are inherently incapable to understand some aspects of reality?
Yes. There are aspects of reality so incompatible with the underpinnings of our thinking we will never be able to grasp them.
Our level of understanding depends on our ability to create tools that help us perceive the things that are beyond the boundaries of our senses.
Our minds can stretch much farther than scientific instruments allow, but that is both a blessing and a curse. We can develop models and theories about the world, sight unseen, but the problem with these theories is that they are always biased towards our previous knowledge. We always shift to the fields of thought we’re familiar with. Sometimes we’re lucky to find what we’re looking for there, but frequently we must seek the knowledge elsewhere.
That other place is always weird and unfamiliar, its landscapes seem alien and contrived, like they couldn’t possibly fit with what we can see in front of our eyes. What leads us safely through that other place? Surely it can not be reason, since reason is what tells us the information we received is too chaotic to fit into a working theory. Empirical findings supply the bulk of the evidence and after painful doubts and much second guessing we have to accept them as true, we have to bow to the way reality is, instead of the way it should be, if it made any sense at all. By reality making any sense we mean it making sense to the human mind. It makes little sense at the scale of our consciousness, because it doesn’t function at the scale of our consciousness.
Our job is to figure out the workings of a giant and unfinished clock we can’t see. I’m fairly certain we can never figure out the clock in its entirety, no matter how much time and capacity we manage to muster. Some things we can’t have access to, just because of how existence structures itself.
Can I give you an example of a thing I don’t believe we will ever be able to know?
Here is an obvious one: what happened before existence came into being? Since time only exists in the context of reality, no amount of it would help us grasp the nature of being before being itself. This seems like a case of circular reasoning, but it is very much the state of fact. Existence as we know it began at some point, and with it came time. Going back in time to the point where it all started will not answer the question and going back in time past that point is impossible, because there was no time before the beginning of existence. So no matter how much time we have, it would do us no good. You say that if the beginning of existence is also the beginning of time, there is no such thing as before, but that would be wrong, because if you have a finite point in time, no matter which one, it implies a before and an after. This is what human reason will lead you to. I don’t think this specific example yields to logic.
Another example would be trying to anticipate the nature of existence even a second from now.
We may be able to guess it correctly in almost every respect, but there are always random variations, inexplicable aberrations impossible to fathom, which alter the fabric of reality from one moment to the next.
Even in a day the cumulative effect of these minor shifts adds up to the true essence of reality becoming significantly different from the model we created.
There are just too many details to take into account, way too many for our ability to keep track.
Another thing we can never know is if there is something outside reality and if so, what does it look like? Try to imagine what you would be like if you never existed. You can’t, it’s impossible to imagine the absence of a state from inside that state. You can’t get the wetness out of wet things. Will we ever find the boundaries of reality? We may, but if we do, whatever we find beyond those boundaries will instantly become more reality, the boundaries will just keep expanding to include the new.
There is no outside to reality, isn’t that incredible?
If you can always push the boundary to include the new reality you found, then there is no boundary to existence, it just stretches out forever.
Existence is infinite, a very unpalatable concept to a mind that was raised on what it can see and touch.
You will tell me that infinity is a well-defined concept and human beings have no difficulty grasping it, but I beg to differ. We get it in theory, at an intellectual level, but not in the way we understand that if we stand up and walk fifty paces, we will move our bodies from this room to the other room. We know what a room looks like, we have no trouble with the concept of walking and we understand the difference between ‘here’ and ‘there’. We don’t really understand ‘no matter how far, take one more step’.
