Reflections

Did you happen to know you are blind?
Did you happen to know you are deaf?
Did you happen to know that your precious tongue can't taste or that your wonderfully sensitive fingertips can't feel?

You don't believe me? But of course you don't, as you have full capacity of your senses.Though I must ask you, just how much faith do you put in your own perceptions?

• Rattlesnakes are able to detect heat signatures in the dead of night.
• Owls can see up to 150 yards by candlelight.
• Dolphins can hear sounds up to 100,000 HZ.
• Honeybees have iron oxide strips that help them to detect the Earth's magnetic fields,
• Crayfish have hairs that can detect movement up to.1 microns,
• Sharks have electrosensensing receptors along their bodies.
• Ants can see polarized light

In our last class lecture the subject of the "real world" was brought up, along with the frame stories we all live in. Ashley Arcel posted a highly enlightening blog that served to inspire this one, it is her perception of the "real world" that I find most intriguing and I would like to jump on her bandwagon(from a slightly differing perspective however). In her blog, Ashley stated the following:

“I think we need to learn to just let things be. Stop picking so much, stop trying to understand everything down to the last infinitesimal speck of matter. Stop taking things so literally. And most of all, stop entertaining the notion that there's a 'real' world out there that we need to become a part of. We're wrong, I think, to ever hold that idea - this is the real world, or at least - it's as real as it's ever going to get.”

The notion of the "real world" is indeed not something we can entertain. How can we dare to say the we, who's senses fall spectacularly short in the great order of organisms, understand and are able to construct the actual world around us? We squint with our poor eyes and fumble with our sticky, numb fingers for the truth in the universe. And with those half -seen hazy results, we declare that myths are child's folly, helpful to those primitive societies denied to scientific facts. Spiders do not count their origin to poor Arachne, Leda was never visited by a swan and the Laurel tree has no claim to romance.

And yet, what does the honeybee see when it nears a flower? What lies hidden in that spectrum of light we are not privy to? Who's to say the wolf didn't once try to serve the gods human flesh? What, I ask, lies in the half-light of our vision and consciousness?

The world, my friends, is one devoted to science, as it should. But myths cannot simply be relegated to childish rubbish. If the world finds truth in accurate perception, cannot dreams of the fantastic and stories of the mythic be real and truthful? Feel fear and it is real, bite back the sting of pain, and it is real, gaze lovingly towards the thing you care for, and it is real. So if myth and dream inspire those very real emotions, why can't there be truth and "real world" meaning to them?

So yes, as Ashley said; stop picking, stop trying to stop trying to understand everything down to the last infinitesimal speck of matter. "As long as it persists, we can say that modern man preserves at least some residues of "mythological behavior". Traces of such a mythological behavior can also be deciphered in the desire to rediscover the intensity with which one experienced something for the first time; and also in the desire to recover the distant past, the blissful period of "beginnings." -Mircea Eliade, page 193. Myth, then, according to Eliade, is in our scientific pursuits, in our very truths. See paleontologists, psychologists, teachers and lawyers, all in the business of truth.

To see myth, we need only to view life in a different light. The "real world" is only as real and as factual as we make it to be. So the next time you see that flicker in the corner of your eye, or hear a song on the wind, think, if only for a moment, what the honeybee would see.
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Believing what cannot be seen, I think they call this "faith" correct? So then, have faith in the mythic, I know I soon will.