As Below, So Above

For several days now, as I have been taking my dog for a walk around a pond at the local state park, I have been assaulted by a deer fly (family Tabanidae). The fly always starts buzzing me in the same 30 meter (100 feet) stretch of path, where the acacia trees provide some shade and the winds blow gentle puffs of air.

The fly seems to have a very circumscribed territory. Once I get out of that 30 meter stretch, he breaks off his attack and disappears, only to reappear during my next circuit on that path.

I try to put myself into the world of this fly. I am guessing that his world is encompassed in a plot of land that has a diameter of 30 meters. This is all that he knows. This is all that he sees. At random unpredictable times, potential meals move into range, triggering a hunger response. Outside that range, potential meals vanish, as if they never existed.

With my superior vision, I can see the whole pond, and I can think that it is very quaint that the fly cannot realize that simply going outside his 30 meters would give him more potential meals. He is limited by his perception, in ways that I am not.

But then I think, how much are we humans limited by our perception? Many years ago, I met a farmer who had not traveled more than 20 kilometers (12 miles) from where he had been born 70 years previously. Now many of us travel around the globe fairly effortlessly, and we can use electronic means of perception to see what is happening anywhere in the world.

But our solar system is huge, our galaxy is larger, and our universe is larger still. We can’t see anything of what is happening there, with a few paltry exceptions of Hubbell telescopes and rockets sent to other planets.

Like the fly, our world is circumscribed. We can see much more than the fly, but in the larger scheme of things, our perception does not extend out much more than his, in terms of cosmic distance.

To paraphrase a Hermetic saying, “As below, so above.”  We and the fly have much in common. We both can only see a very small portion of reality. And as we delve into quantum physics, we are not very sure what really is reality. Perhaps there are intelligences greater than ours who think that it is very quaint that we cannot realize that by simply going beyond the limits of our current perception we can see a greater reality. Or perhaps not.

I don’t know if the fly worries about such questions. Current scientific thought would suggest that he is not capable of such thoughts.  And perhaps we too are not capable of thoughts that would transcend our reality, allowing us to see a larger world.

So what to do? In my case, I am simply going to enjoy my moment in Nature, and even though the fly wants to suck my blood, I am going to enjoy his buzzing, even as I wait for my steps to take me out of his range.

Comments

[Gina]

Really like the blog, appreciate the share!

[ajf20]

and we can only fly embracing each other.

[art paintings]

Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers - for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.

[arizona accountants]

Deer flies were always the worst at the lake cottage my folks took us to occasionally during summers. They'd bite you especially when you were swimming or something that involved water. It was horrible!

[Randall Johnson]

Every species has the sensory apparatus--and resulting perceptions--it needs to survive / succeed in its ecological niche. And that includes our own. There are sounds we can't hear, light wave bands we can't see, scents we can't smell, and so forth. Unlike other species, we can build devices that extend our senses--at least enough to make us aware that these other sensory ranges exist--but our brains aren't hardwired to perceive them, let alone process them. (And, as Dr; Slobodchikoff pointed out, we can try to imagine how other species perceive their world.)

Now...if we were suddenly able to directly perceive this other range of sensory reality through pharmaceutical or artificial means, we wouldn't know how to process it, how to make sense of it.

And if there are different levels or dimensions of 'reality' that we don't normally perceive, and we were to suddenly become aware of them, we wouldn't know how to comprehend them and thereby place our sanity at risk.

At this point, I would like to go on record as assertng that our "circumscribed, limited" view of reality is a necessary, built-in safeguard to keep us from going off the deep end, as it were.

If there are "greater intelligences" out there capable of understanding /processing more than we can at this moment--and I'm completely open to the possibility of their existence--then they have a central nervous system--or its equivalent--that is capable of processing such input without pushing it to the breaking point. (And that they, too, have limitations.) I just hope that these intelligences would also have more compassion, understanding, and respect for those beings that don't have the same capability than we have shown to other species here on Earth with whom we share so many other things in common.