My playlist at work contains a lot of podshows, so while I'm crunching numbers and interweaving Excel formulas, I also have a constant stream of stories and facts running through my head. This arrangement of programs -- which include NPR's Fresh Air, Cracked, Nerdist, Love & Radio, Snap Judgment, The Sound of Plaid, and Radiolab, among others -- have this week conspired to talk about how the world around us, and reality itself, is dictated by the attitude we bring to it.
For a while now, I have been stumbling across references to the idea that our consciousness somehow shapes the reality we see and feel. Not just our perception of it, but reality itself. I first came across the idea years ago with the work of theoretical physicist Brian Greene, who revealed to me that the Universe is a pretty ambiguous place. Energy, particles and waves are constantly interchanging, never really deciding where they are or where they're going until someone pays attention. As weird as it is to think about, it's been experimentally proven that you can make light behave differently just by checking on what it's doing.
On a seemingly unrelated subject, I've been hearing a lot about the color blue... specifically, how people didn't really decide that it was a color until recently, historically speaking. If you go back into ancient writings as current as Homer, you'll find that he did use color to describe things, but never the color blue, even when he was talking about the sky or the ocean. This happens across all cultures, apparently; first they name the colors of red and yellow, and not until they've defined all the other colors do they entertain the concept of blue. And thus, until then they don't even notice it exists. I recently learned that Russians, who have more words than we do for the color blue, can *see* more blues than we English-speakers do. They actually can tell finer differences between shades. Our mental definition of something defines our reality.
Then there's the hearing-impaired population of Columbia. When the government first started sponsoring state-run schools for the deaf, the students created their own homegrown version of sign language. As the system got more complicated and intricate over the years, they found that the students actually started thinking more and more elaborate thoughts. They weren't just getting better at signing, they were getting better at *thinking*. The two skills developed in tandem.
So already you can see how developments in language and rational thought seem to move in some weird sort of parallel. Next there's the case of Jill Bolte Taylor, who had a massive stroke and took eight years regaining full control of her mind. She writes in her book "My Stroke of Insight" about how her stroke not only knocked out a lot of her language capabilities, but also her "inner voice", those strings of word-thoughts that start running through our heads the moment we first learn speech. She talks about what a blissful existence it was for a time, living quietly, being fully in the present all the time, to not even have words to separate herself from the world around her. When she put her hand down on a table, not being conscious of the labels "hand" or "table", she only saw the combined object as part of a continuum, like two waves rolling along on the ocean -- without language to differentiate them, it was pointless to try to determine where one ended and the other began.
And maybe that's the right way to look at the world, even if it's not the most practical. After all, the bodies that we inhabit aren't in any way permanent or static. In his book "What Technology Wants", tech writer Kevin Kelly calls our bodies a "river of atoms", turning over their component particles in entirety every few years. It's an exponentially higher version of the old question of whether a car that's had all its parts replaced is still the same car. Taken in this light, you can see how the way we choose to delineate items in the world -- for example, when the ceiling stops and changes direction it becomes a wall, my phone is fundamentally different from the table it sits on, you and I are completely separate entities -- limits the way we think about all these things, by putting them in isolating little boxes.
It seemed like all these bits of insight were leading me toward something greater, and it came together when I heard a quote from Genesis P-Orridge, founding member of industrial-music pioneers Throbbing Gristle. They said "Reality is as real as we allow it to be". Are you wondering why I used the pronoun "they" in that last sentence? Because he considers himself to be merely one half of a "pandrogyne", a single entity made up of himself and his late wife. This singular creature, they say, is represented in this world by Genesis and in the worlds that come after by his wife, Lady Jaye. Now, it might seem strange to think of a singular human in this pluralized way, but after hearing everything that I had already heard this week, my mind was more open than usual to considering his point of view. They (before the "she" part of them passed away) felt extremely close, shared astral projection experiences, and even underwent cosmetic surgeries to look more alike. It's a very strange and kind of beautiful love story, all driven by people who didn't let the idea of their physical and mental differentiation determine what they considered to be their shared identity.
Up until I heard that story on the podcast Love & Radio, whenever I heard about the impermeability of reality, it made me wonder whether it matters or not that our consciousness can change the physical character of the Universe. After all, we still live and die, still get sick and heal, still have to get up in the morning and go to work, still have to make sure the people we love are safe and have something to eat. Does it really matter that the Universe doesn't really decide what it's going to do until we notice it? Then along came the story of Genesis and Jaye, where two people actually worked to make their reality closer to what they wanted it to be, what they imagined it *should* be. Maybe I'm guilty of enabling reality to become all too real. Maybe we all are.
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