"Morning boys!" the older fish says as he swims past. "How's the water?"
One of the younger fish looks at the other and says, "What's water?"
I told this joke to a group of students from a college on the Upper East Side yesterday. This morning the instructor sent me these photos.
The thing to remember is that we all live inside physical systems and systems of thought that we cannot see, because we cannot get outside of them.
If you never see the sun you don't know what it is.
We've all had the experience of feeling an illusion slip away.
We all know what it's like to discover that Donald Trump is real.
LIFE is a process of losing your illusions. Change is the only constant. Each of us must choose in every instant to try and keep our reality the same size, or to let more of it in.
The brain filters out everything it's used to experiencing. It becomes desensitized to a certain degree. But it notices when something breaks pattern. In that moment what do you do? Exclude the new information, or add it to your network?
We are all in a maze.
Alienated from the core realities of life on earth.
The forms of what we were are reflected back at us as distorted mirrors.
We are worked over, like any product.
But we are still human beings on planet earth.
What an incredible bit of luck.
To be a being in the first place, and of all the beings to be, being this being, with its musical tongue and grabby hands.
We are entrapped.
And we can only escape by expanding our individual, and collective maps of reality. That requires a willingness to head off the map into the unknown, and not to fight for old boundaries.
and the best way to do that is to go wandering, like our ancestors did.
