Exercise in Straightline Remote Sensing - Third Installment

Entering The Abyss

Beings, having lost their memories of their origin and yet, paradoxically, yearning for their return at the same time, will attach to anything that will help them to create the illusion of a "home."

They will avoid, ignore, deny, and reject anything that has the potential to trigger even a subtle reminder that their current, perpetually created illusion of "home" is nothing but a self-made prison, a web of silly lies, a house of cards that will fall apart at the slightest tug at its shaky foundations.

In this remote part of the Milky Way, many Beings find their artificial home in bipedal mammals with a rather short life span of rarely more than a hundred Earth years. Equipped with two frontal lenses and two lateral resonance chambers, the organism of the mammal provides enough visual and auditory cues to allow for a crude spatial orientation in its immediate local environment. Even though the limits and restrictions of perception, via humanoid bodies, offer the safe boundaries of a placebo home, the unnatural small focus of the mammal becomes somewhat irritating for many and they start looking around for ways to transcend these limitations.

Being profoundly scared of looking too closely at the exact mechanism of perceptions, because that could remind them of their loss of their original "home", they rather marginally extend the abilities of their mammal bodies by mechanical, optical, and, recently, with electronic tricks.

For example, if one of these Beings looks through the two eyes of the mammal it happens to hold onto frantically, it may conclude that "it is" at the foothill of a mountain. To look out from the top of the mountain, all the Being would have to do is to look out from the top of the mountain.

But, NOOOO!, the Being is so hypnotized by the mammal's vision instruments that it is thoroughly convinced it cannot have another perception concurrent to the ones from the mammal.

It would not want to let go of the mammal, either, in order to have a look from the top of the mountain, because this would, of course, break its illusion of its current identity. Even worse, another Being could snatch up the body in the short moment the Being would not be glued to it. What a dreadful thought!!!

The obvious (!!???) solution is this: move the body of the mammal to the top of the mountain and then look through its two eyes over the landscape. Never mind that this is a real drag, literally, especially since the body has to be moved back into its own proper "home" down in the valley to join the herds of the other mammals.

More recently, the idea is to build systems of mirrors, lenses, and automatic picture copying devices to redirect a visual copy of the original view from the top of the mountain directly to the front of the mammal's body where it can then safely stare at a cheap 2D copy.

Now, enough of this. What happens if a Being gets all its courage together, says to itself, "to hell with this all," and starts LOOKING without the eyes of the mammal?

The vision of a mammal is a reflection of a tiny sliver of the information that is out there and that could be perceived. It is like a radio dial that is stuck in one position, which forces the Being to listen to just one station only. With an ingenious trick of its mind, the Being convinces itself that this position on the radio dial is the only one that receives any station and, to justify its mad decision, the Being will fight any other opinion to any possible extent. If necessary, the Being may even direct its own mammal to crush the head of another mammal.

Now, if the Being is turning on the radio dial of its perceptions, it may happen that the new information is so overwhelming that it quickly abandons it and finds comfort in the stuck, but familiar, position of the dial again. The different "radio stations" are an analogy to the different "domains of perceptions." They are not just different sources of similar information, like the tunes from the "Classic Rock" radio station are minimally different from the "Rock from the 60's" station - no, they are farther apart than opera and Oprah.

What's worse, there is an annoying gap in between the stations or domains of perception. Before the perception of another domain can be received, this terrible gap must be passed through on the dial. This circumstance was apparently known for a long time in human history. The Latin word for this gap was "Chaos," derived from the Classic Greek word "chainein"("to yawn, gape").

In a semantic twist that makes one wonder about the development of human abilities in the last millennia, chaos now stands for "confusion" and "disorder." However, originally it just referred to the emptiness of the gap in between domains of life and, consequently, the domains of perception.

Now, a lot of smart people make a sport of it. They watch the "emptiness," "nothingness," "voidness" just for the fun of it. Some go even further and proclaim that this is the "true nature" of Beings, a frightening joke, that is. For lack of self-confidence they certainly don't admit that this is their own mental creation and they pronounce it to be the miraculous revelation of a super-human such as a "Buddha," in total disregard of Gotamo Siddharto's own lengthy refutation of this very claim in his own times.

It seems certain, though, that the "chaos" or "abyss" between the radio stations of the Universe must be crossed somehow.

In addition to the frightening perspective of "nothingness," there is another phenomenon that comes, actually, very close to today's concept of chaos: if the dial moves out from the void into the range of a "station," the signal is very distorted just prior to the correct tuning of the selected domain. There now, is truly disorder, random movements, lack of stable reference points, confusion.

The Being is not likely to get paralyzed by disordered states as it shunts them like the devil. The domain borders are therefore less of a problem than the potentially hypnotic effect of the "nothingness," the "chaos" in its original sense.

Let us dive into the abyss then, plunge into the chaos to cross to the other domains, let's swim through the abyss.

But which one first?

The natural tendency of Beings is to expand their perceptions and their sphere of influence. After their fall, they have tried for so long and so hard that they are now thoroughly convinced that they can't reach for the stars.

It is much easier to go the other way, however, and this is the Third Exercises in Straightline Remote Sensing.