The world on a diet

The world is hardly a world without someone to call it such.

I'll totally sidestep the issue of society here-- while society certainly isn't moot, it is not what I wish to address here. We all know that we are connected to the world around us through our senses. So, we have nice little adjectives like round, green, smelly, etc. to describe the world around us. Lo and behold, combine those sensory inputs with higher cognitive functions and we have language. We have history. We have a structured way of looking at the world, identifying each part and taking note of how the parts fit together and how they change over time. We know that the sky is separate from the firmament, and that we are surrounded by air. We have even probed the smallest particles of matter. (Never mind that even with all our advanced technology, we still get hung up on silly things like race, gender and creed). We know the difference between two people.

Try to imagine not having any senses-- somehow or another, you can detect motion around you, the direction of your own locomotion, changes in energy in the environment, etc, without your five senses. How do all the parts appear to you now? You would have to do without the superficial identifying qualities like blue, soft, or hot. Limited to environmental properties such as location, energy levels (heat), velocity... you know, the properties identified in physics, you would not only lose the relative value system that your mind assesses your immediate environment with, you would also lose the notions of separateness and distinctiveness.

Go to the beach on a calm summer morning. Breath in the warm salty air. Watch the seagulls frolic about in the sun soaked blue sky. Hear the waves cresting and crashing on the shore. Then close your eyes and remove all the color from the scene in your mind's eye. See only shapes, and then erase the lines from the shapes. Turn the sounds into simple vibrations in the air around you, then remove the air and replace it with billions of complex particles that respond to the sound vibrations. Rid yourself of the smells and detect only the gaseous molecules carried to your nose from various sources.

Last but certainly not least, rid yourself of blue, sun, ocean, etc... words have no place here.

Just what is it you perceive after all this? The honest answer: nothing. But after training yourself for a while, you may just begin to come up with an approximate image. Mine is a near-blackness everywhere, with subtle and blurred shapes moving about. This world, without the filter of perception, has no distinct parts. The area to my left looks slightly different than the area to my right, but everything is all one large system, and nothing is separate. The seagull is not differentiated from the air; Mr. Bird is but a center of activity in the beach-air-sky system. The air and the seagull are not separate, just elements of a greater whole.

In short, the human tendency to name and categorize everything in the universe is an evolved quality. To really understand the real world, you have to strip away the colors and the smells and the words we have all grown accustomed to and take for granted.