The Mechanics of Perception—Part One

Presented by Hope Reed & Steven E. Counsell

I. Think back to a vivid incident from childhood, one filled with memorable detail. Alas there will probably be pain in it. Tragic incidents seem to be the most precise, the hardest to exorcize. Begin to expand in your mind the web of incidents —the smell of the air—was the sun out—was there joy—did you give or take—did the moment stop or race—could you remember all their names?

It really doesn’t matter how much your memory fills in because you won’t precisely remember the complexity of time. You have no access to the minds of others who shared the event. What about those watching from a distance? Even your own reactions will lose precision. How after all have your own recollections increased or diminished? How does the existential reality of here and now affect your perception? In short, this remembered reality with all the hallmarks of fact will have all the qualities of myth.

There is no deception here! We are the curators of our own metaphor and myth. A bold-faced lie is marvelous in The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen. And a poorly narrated, narrowing truth, seems somehow shallowly unconvincing. We live in the stories we tell about ourselves! Cultures, cities, and empires do the same. Regardless of the structure they are poured into, they inflect their truth into our affected center. We are an EPIC!

The myths of string theory, Buddha, evolution, Christ, or our own childhood picnics, have huge explanatory power and define the changing complexity of our lives, inner and outer.

II. The way hard-boiled realists and atheists dismiss the mythology that is not their own is the same as theists dismissing rival theisms. It’s curious how fragile our balance can be when other Gods jockey for position in the shifting narrowness of our insecurity.

How will the truths we tell about ourselves seem in a hundred years? A thousand? Will they seem as remote as the Trojan War three millennia ago? To even imaginatively speculate puts you back into the realm of myth. In human terms we need to make this incomparable vastness cozy. Give it a room and a job and a chronology that doesn't make us shake apart at our foundation. Few can look at eternity directly without the secure harbor of story, science, fable, realism or fairy tale.
If you’re hyperventilating at the brief list of myths enumerated above, bear in mind the game is given away by our abstractions: Nature, God, Infinity, Gods, Cosmos, Spirit. Tried defining these terms lately? Tried doing it without a fight, interior or exterior? The multiverse that physicists are beginning to speculate about has been the stuff of fable since man shivered out of his cave. Speculating on how much what, is out there and what comes next. Praying that the yellow spark of eyes beyond the fire will not make us part of the stories these other intelligences tell each other.