Do You Believe Everything You Think?

“I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.” -S.E. Hinton

Do you believe everything you think?

Today we have the wisdom of the greatest minds in ourstory at our fingertips, yet it seems there is more confusion and ignorance than ever before. 

I’m beginning to remember that belonging is more important to many than truth. A glance at the history of religions certainly shows that about us.

What do you know? 

I once started to tell my teacher, I feel like, and she interrupted me sharply. 

Who cares what you feel? What do you Know!? 

Kinda harsh, yes, but how much of our time are we swept about in the watery tides of feeling without realizing how unmoored we are in reality.

Question reality, for that matter. 

Actually many of us are all too willing to do that. The interweb is brimming with wacky pseudo science that caters to our preference for so called realities that confirm our preconceived biases, fantasies, and fears. It is almost as if one can find some thought to be true and valid upon the mere evidence that someone else out there has also had the same thought and posted it. Anyone else. Especially if they can make dramatic videos about it.

“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” -Niels Bohr

Nor does science itself seem to be immune to this problem. Our culture and institutions, and thus, the internet too, is an echo chamber of convention, even though every now widely accepted notion started out as someone’s heretical theory. Question authority.

Can you believe what you hear? 

Can you always believe what you read? 

Can you think for yourself? 

Can you even believe what you think? 

No, heck no, I wonder, and I hope not. 

“The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.” -George Carlin

There is just too much technical information available now for anyone to know all of it in any subject, much less so in general. There is more information in any field than any one person can know, much less intelligently process.

So this leads some to throw up our hands and just say, hey, we create our own reality, by choosing what we would like to believe. Actually there is some validity to this. We have a limited amount of time and attention, so whatever we pay our attention to is for us, on some level reified. It can and does affect and change how we feel, and so how we act, and so does it change the world.

“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?” -John Lennon

Just because it is true, do you have to believe it? 

Does believing it make it true for you? 

No, and maybe, to some extent.

So truth is sure starting to sound squishy now. 

So does all this mean that we are doomed to be forever fighting over the most basic facts? Oh Goddess, l hope not. But I also do not want to return to the days, the long dark centuries, of just accepting what those in power over us tell us to think.  

There does seem to be some collective wisdom rising from this massive interweb induced sharing of our minds, sometimes known as crowd sourcing. We know more than I do. We need each other. 

But there is a different kind of wisdom that has to guide you in your moment to moment decisions, which depends on the particulars of the situation. You have to think for yourself.

So maybe truth is not absolute, not hard like a stone statue. Maybe truth is a guiding light, ever receding, never reached. Maybe we are each possessors of truth compasses, inner tools that must be used and constantly recalibrated as the terrain rolls around beneath our steps.

Maybe the light of truth is the sun we orbit, or move toward or away from, according to our choices and whims. And just as two different planets can never be in exactly the same spot at the same time, perhaps the same truth is by definition then, always found in a different direction for each one, due to the differing perspective.

So, what do you Know?

Oh, and how do you know you know?

I wonder...

“The more I see, the less I know for sure.” -John Lennon

The Very Cool Bowl

“The minute you walked in the deli... I could tell you were a bowl of distinction!”- (with apologies)

The used paper deli cartons had been piling up for some time. We have been eating breakfast of build it yourself salad at our favorite organic vegan deli every morning after our walk for quite awhile now. The cartons are made from recycled cardboard and are the best the deli could find like that, but to be legal with the health department, they were still single use, and plastic coated at that. My walking partner always brought in their own glass bowl, which is allowed at this deli.

I think it is the plastic coatedness that bothers me first. Here I am eating out of cardboard, which is kind of weird, but now I realize I am actually eating out of plastic which is passing as cardboard, even weirder. And then the heap of used single use containers piling up, which I don’t really want to add to the collective world heap of such.

My partners glass bowl seems wrong to me too though, too fragile to carry around to picnic tables and so on.

Metal bowls do not appeal to me either; they smack of camping and ring out like bells. Anyway, I’m slightly metal averse.

Finally I imagine my ideal morning salad bowl. Wood. Wood is sort of self cleaning. I like that wooden cutting boards actually kill germs as they dry in the air, by sucking the moisture out of the microbes with the tiny straw like structures in the wood grain, the same structures that once drew water up into the tree from which the wood formed. After all, I need to reuse this thing day after day, and I may only wipe it out with my napkin after each use.

So wood it is, and I lumpty jolly off to my local second hand store in search of a meal sized bowl made of wood, one without a plastic coating. I figure I will find many to choose from. 

There are some large ones like that, big enough for a salad for the whole family, but I’m looking for a lovely small, thin one, with clean lines, light and round.

But I am surprised and disappointed. By the third thrift store, I finally find one that is the right size. Inside to the bowl, that is. But it is thick and oval and chunky. It looks as if it has been carved from driftwood with stone implements on some faraway tropical island, and then floated across the sea upon the tides. This will have to do, I sigh to myself, unless I want to hire a carver to make one for me, because apparently the kind I imagine is either very rare or prohibitably costly.

The next day I sheepishly haul this monstrosity into the deli and it weighs in at two and a half pounds! Good thing they subtract the weight of your bowl from your salad cost.

So we get our salads and sit out on a picnic table to have our breakfast. And an amazing thing happens. One after another, people come by, see the dinosaur bowl from heck, and complement it! This has happened every day now for weeks! The average is at least two complements per day. This is probably a better average than having a cute puppy with me.

So now I see my clunky chunk of a bowl in a new way. As a consciousness raising device, in this time when we are all trying to find new ways of reducing waste and living in harmony with the Earth.

 “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.”  -David M. Ogilvy

 

In Praise of Waste

First I want to tell you, I don’t buy a lot of processed and packaged foods. I don’t intentionally throw away a lot of things. I use things a long time, and repair them if I can, and then try to repurpose them, and finally try to recycle them if possible. I try not to need a lot in the first place. I’d rather buy nothing than something made without regard to its environmental effects. I tend to eat nothing when there is no food available up to my standards. I’m certainly not in favor of trashing our beautiful planet with litter or toxic waste.

But. This idea can go too far. We need to also spill some over. Relax a little. Our tightly wired industrial society has given us unnatural compulsions, strange guilty ways of moving through daily life. Efficiency is paramount. Roofs should not overhang too far, because it’s thought to be too expensive to build a generous and secure feeling space. Clothing should be form fitting, budgets tight. Just in time delivery for your factory.

Some people I know who were raised by parents who grew up in the Great Depression or who themselves grew up with not enough, have twisted habits and judgemental thinking that they foist upon those around them. Cheaper is always seen as virtuous and superior. And to seemingly waste anything is not just a loss, but somehow it is morally wrong.

It’s as if you lose points, or money in the future, that will logically add up in some imagined scoreboard of your life, that will you doom you to an old age of want and poverty, or cause a child to die of hunger in Africa, if you don’t eat all of the food on your plate. This is self perpetuating scarcity, reinforced with our powerful minds. My dear friend said she could not live anymore because the money in her savings account was almost gone. As she wished, she soon died!

And our powerful minds are the real problem, as well as the solution. I have watched quietly as those around me demand the uneaten food on my plate, which I had intended to share with my dog. These people easily can go get some food themselves but my dog can’t. They are not preventing waste, they are actually stealing food from my dog, who of course, is a person too. 

They may think they are cleverly saving money by getting a scrap of food they don’t have to buy with money, but instead, they are they are paying a great price by buying into money scarcity thinking. But usually this line of thought leads instead to overconsumption by the mechanism of overeating, the idea being that if they stuff themselves now, with free available food, even when it is not needed, even if it is not very good, they won’t have to spend money later, thus, they will have money. Later.

I have watched in astonishment as people fish out orange rinds as I throw them in the compost, so as to maybe squeeze out a few drops of juice because they think I must be juicing them too fast and missing something. Or pieces of fruit I have cut, leaving some perceived edible bit still on them. These are strong, capable people who can easily acquire fruit for themselves but who will only allot themselves this privilege if they can get it without money. 

“Fruit is an opportunity, not an obligation “- David Sunheart 

Some people have convinced themselves that they can’t afford to eat fruit, it’s too expensive. They believe they can only afford factory made “food products” in boxes with printed numbers that say numbers related to their pieces of paper or man made metal disk piles, which are not even pieces of paper, but computer flashes, telling them what they are allowed to eat. Someone convinced them that money doesn’t grow on trees, but I assure you, fruit most certainly does. Somehow it has come to that.

I’ve seen much creative time and energy go into projects and pursuits of making things with stuff that “would otherwise be thrown away.” This is the root of the problem that later appears as scarcity. Why not front load this process? Why not question an industrial mindset that relentlessly chews up nature and spews out piles of unwanted stuff? We need to design gentle, abundant, “cradle to cradle” systems, of sustainability. Such as the tree.

I once asked a friend who had lived in a poor country why they did not compost their food scraps so they could have abundant gardens, as we do. Their response really opened my eyes. They do not have piles of food scraps. Everything is eaten by someone, people or animals. This is what real scarcity looks like. There is no waste at all, no slack in the system, no room for natural disruptions, not enough extra to cushion the bumps. Yet that same poor country also has a wealthy class that has pushed the poor to this point by over harvesting the natural resources all around them. This is where our maximum efficiency thinking is leading.

Actually, eating more than you need at the moment leads to wanting too much later, thus using, thus wasting more later as well. We have to change that thinking. It is having the reverse effect. The way to do this is to bless this food and be grateful that we do have enough now. If we can’t finish what is on our plate, we can take note of that and maybe next time, put less food on it. 

Or share it with someone around us, but not with a projected attitude of needing to use it up to avoid waste, just to share the pleasure. Also, the dog might enjoy it. And if you compost, perhaps you can contribute to the well being and nourishment of next years tomatoes. 

You are not a human trash can. You do not need to dig around in the refuse bin to survive, and you don’t deserve to only eat the funky parts. And you are not helping unwind a messed up system by being a garbage eater.

Buying or going out and picking fruit to eat and share is an act of love and prosperity. You are supporting the farmer, or thanking the tree for its abundance. Most fruit trees drop far more fruit than anyone can eat. Most plants make far more seeds than they need to have sprout and grow around them. The tree does not regret that some of its fruit rots on the ground.

It is unnatural and frankly, it is rude to use up every little bit, unless you truly are starving. It says to you and those around you, there’s not enough for us. 

Nature teaches us to spill some over. Let some fall to the ground, some blow in the wind, some be planted, some be eaten.  Nature doesn’t think of it as waste. In nature, garbage is food, because some creature finds the waste of other creatures useful, as is not the case with the toxic waste the humans make. Nature allows things to spread out. You are in harmony with the universe if you drop some, spill some, forget some, share some, and yes, pick out the very best bits for this moment. 

I watch the deer graze outside my window. They do not efficiently go along decimating the grass, inch by inch. No. They nibble the freshest points of cool tender grass, and my prettiest purple petunias of the day, and wander on, because that is the most delightful thing of the moment. They are not thinking, I’ll use up this half rotted plant now so it won’t spoil and I’ll save money for later in my food budget.

In this abundant world today it is also good to go without sometimes, knowing that when we have a need, someone will help us. Give us this day our daily bread. Just as mindfully going a little hungry every day, refraining from overeating, brings flavor and pleasure to the next meal. It is an act of faith. It’s an act of tantra yoga, which is to say, restraint. We learn that we actually didn’t need so much as maybe we thought.

Yes, it is true that in the aggregate, the humans on the planet today are wasting something like a fourth of the stuff that they call “food”, a nontrivial fact. But the way it gets to the stage of being called food is the problem, the way we think of it, the way we make it, grow it, package it, distribute it, and share or don’t share it. The same goes for our other needs and items we consume. Scarcity thinking is what leads to the very behaviors that create actual scarcity. This is the real waste, the waste of our beautiful creative and powerful mental energy and time on holding on to such petty, meager, and small minded erroneous concepts. 

Instead, I wonder what beautiful things we could create with our time and energy.

“It is better to do nothing than to waste time.” -Victoras Kulvinskas

Are There Colors You Have Never Seen?

Life as a Tetrachromat and Artist

So, I’m probably a tetrachromat. That is a person who maybe can see more subtle differences between colors than the average person. I haven’t had the genetic test to find out if I indeed have four different types of color cone vision, but my experience in the world leads me to to presume such. I do pass the online tetrachromat tests easily, with er, flying colors.

I see somewhat into the ultraviolet range as well. My wild guess is this has something to do with the way my cones and rods work together.

The way I see things all the time is much like the way color is represented in the impressionist art works. Colors are enhanced, colors glow, there is a richness beyond what photographs tend to show. Whether this is just because of a life spent admiring color as an artist, or the reason I became a colorist artist is almost a distinction without a difference to me in practice. Some artists without the tetrachromat genetic trait have passed tests supposed to find so called true tetrachromats. It’s like some sensitive musicians who cringe at the quality of digital music recordings, and other people who can’t hear a difference from analog recordings.

When I eventually had to start wearing lenses to focus sharply up close, I noticed that the plastic lenses also filtered out some of the higher more delicate colors in flowers and things, darkening them to my eye. I also noticed that my excellent night vision was so greatly diminished that I will just take my glasses off to walk outside in the dark at night. 

I have often heard people express the wonder if there are colors we have never seen before out there. 

I can tell you, I don’t think so, unless one is colorblind. Since color is mostly mental to us, it is mostly a result of comparing one appearance to another with a brain and processing apparatus. As an artist, I know how to create illusions with color.

So if I want to make you see colors the way I do, there are different conditions I can create by the juxtaposition of shadow and light to bend your perceptions. For example, I’m guessing that I see colors in general to look brighter and more saturated, as they say, than most folks. So if I want you to see a reddish pink the way I do, I could put it next to a dark dull green, causing your eye to see the red brighter by comparison, and more importantly, your brain to think it.

Nowadays our devices and cameras have sliders that can do the same things in an instant in real time, right before our eyes. Darken this, lighten that, increase saturation, etc.

The higher colors, as I call them, the higher octaves of color, actually look just like the colors that you already know, except richer and brighter. They are not new or unknown. Flowers have always known about them.

One way to think of these colors is that they look like blacklight fluorescent colors. You really notice them in a dark room as special, but only because they are isolated and amplified by the special conditions. You will still be able see basically the same frequency of a bright orange in a flower in full sun, or bright blue in the iridescent feather of a peacock or wing of a blue butterfly without those special conditions.

The world of light is a constant kaleidoscope of color for me. I do not think I’ve ever seen an hallucination, but I do see very deeply into things, such as the velvet richness glowing in flowers, or the molecular patterning of metals. I have learned over time to recognize artifacts of my visual apparatus, such as the way the appearance of a thing is changed by what what I have just seen. For a very common example, one might see a spot of color appearing over what you are looking at after gazing at a bright object beforehand. 

There are a myriad of other much more subtle ways in which artifacts of our perceptual equipment can fool us, too many to go into here. Suffice to say, I see rainbows dancing in everything. Sometimes this looks like screen static, other times, I see little infinities sparkling in a spot of sunlight on the floor. If three cones times three makes a complexity factor of nine, then maybe four times four makes sixteen; maybe I have more information coming in than the average person, or maybe I’m just more attuned to it. Supposedly tetrachromats can see a hundred times more different colors, but remember, these are simply slight differences between similar colors everyone sees.

vector by Adam Rędzikowski

I do have some complaints living in a world of three coned humans. Like the musicians who can’t stand digital recordings, I do find discontinuous spectrum fluorescent lighting highly irritating. It really messes with my mind. Colors look all wrong. 

Also, as an artist who loves to make art on my iPad, I am limited by the palette of colors available on it. It is calibrated to a three color triangle system of colors, mapped over a geography of colors that I can see, that do not all reside in that triangle. Other four color or more color systems can and have been built, but are not in common use at this time. There are pinks, purples, blues, and especially greens that I simply do not have on my iPad. However, since I do have that bag of tricks that artists use to create illusions, I make do. And besides, most people don’t miss those colors anyway. 

One reason I do love to do art in the fiber medium, dyed yarn that is, is that I do have access to colors not available on my devices. Not yet, anyway.

 
File:Cie Chart with sRGB gamut by spigget.png

For example, there is a deep rich realm of green infused with blue, that is nowhere to be found in the vocabulary of colors on my devices. To represent these colors, I have to add black to green. This fits into the picture and is passable to most people. But to me, it is dull and ugly.

But I can get you to feel that frequency, that direction of light, by adding even more black all around that frequency of color, much like you might see if you gaze into a deep green gemstone. You would see a lot of shadow in its depths, but you would also see a bright dart of pure green light focusing in contrast, and you would have the experience of what we call a jewel tone.

My use of the word frequency is to help explain this with a metaphor of music and sound. You may not be able to hear a C note in the octaves above your natural hearing range, but we know it sounds just like a C note in the audible range, only higher. And were you to slow it down, it would sound like C you can hear. Color is like that. There are no new, never before seen colors, unless you consider a particular color that is infused with more light different, which I do not. It is the same note, sounded in a range above our perception, that is all. The mental color is essentially the same.

A debunking site claims that tetrachromacy cannot be detected by an online test because computer monitors cannot represent all of the colors needed. This is illogical since the test is to see tiny differences between the colors that include those your monitor can show, and the typical color screen can show more different colors than most people can see. 

No matter how many cones you were born with, there are many amazing things you or your descendants may be capable of than you ever thought possible, simply because you never focused deeply upon them. Perfect pitch is an ability thought to be a rare gift until someone pointed out that in tonal languages that require it, most people have it. They cultivate it from birth. The history of words that cultures have given to particular colors seems to mirror the need and relevance to use those colors in daily life. Sometimes we have to give words to thoughts so we can share them, and so pay attention to them together.

I wonder what new things we will think of to do with our old colors in the future.