Coexistence Arising
Coexistence Arising
“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” — Meno “Simply be aware of clouds and wind.” — Gary Snyder It is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware — Albert Einstein
Copyright 2015 Alan Stacy Haiku Productions Ghost Flowers by Yugen Photography
Coexistence Arising
Shadow sense, mind prickle, cold skin ripple,
supernatural premonition.
Human animals, cannot directly experience the entities and forces that are beyond our senses. We can’t
See ultra-spectral colors
as butterflies and bees.
Sense magnetic fields
as migrating birds.
Locate with sonic vibrations
as night-winged bats.
Smell the decaying carrion
across a wide and deep canyon
as condors.
We think of forces beyond our senses as supernatural. Beyond our nature. But we augment our limited inborn senses
with machines,
electronic sensors
deep space cameras,
scanning electron microscopes,
in order to
see, measure, and detect
what used to be supernatural. Arthur C. Clark succinctly stated,
“Any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” A corollary might be: “A sense of the magical, spiritual, supernatural, unexplainable is a glimpse of an essential thread of the fabric of nature”.
When we are unaware
of creatures,
processes, events that we cannot directly sense, it is only an ignorance of perception. If we are not consciously seeking a means to understand something, we do not even consider it to be part of our natural world. Once we get
a whiff,
a taste,
a sense,
a feeling
of the unknown, once we want
to “see�
we set out to build mechanized extensions of our selves.
Machines that extend our senses in a hinted, guessed, supposed dimension. Often uncovering more than we went looking for. The Large Hadron Collider is a machine that extends our senses into the world of
god particles,
quantum strings,
and dark matter.
These mythic symbols of the universe were once unknowable and thus in the realm of the supernatural. But when we successfully define the supernatural, it then becomes part of
our Nature,
as it always has been.
Now it is part
of our world of science.
What else do we currently consider super nature simply because we have not undertaken the task to build a machine to
see it,
analyze it,
understand it?
What exists around us that we have not yet designed a machine that can sense what may lie next to us, as dark matter fills
the space
between spaces?
What exists in the
shadows of our vision?
What wanders
among us
that cannot be heard,
does not want to be heard,
by our flesh and vibrating bones, our layers of retinal cones and rods or our electronic extensions? What coexists between
the spaces
of our senses?