Jesse Hajicek

I glanced back at a post from last week, the one where I dissed at length a fellow who isn't here to defend himself. I noticed that I mentioned an insight I'd had 'while eating mushrooms', and realized that sounded as if I were tripping. I have the option of issuing a correction here, to make sure you all know these were just food-type mushrooms, with garlic butter. I also have the option of leaving it alone, allowing a few people perhaps to think that I eat psiloc -- psylo -- *those* kind of shrooms. If I take the first option, someone might still miss the correction, or not believe me. Or maybe no one even read those words, but scanned over them to get to the good parts where I said mean things.

Undoubtedly many people have wrong ideas about me. Verbal stumbles on my part, interpretational stumbles on theirs, rumors, assumptions. And I, certainly, have ditto about them. All our communication is characterized by this noise. All our ideas about each other are, to some degree, warped. This is something we accept, as imperfect beings.

We draw conclusions based on what data we have; even when the data is incomplete, it's impossible to withold judgement. The human brain is set up to make these judgements, these snap decisions. It's part of the pattern-recognition hardware, and if that stops working, we end up in 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat' and similar freakshows. Prejudice is inherent in the mind, it's what allows us to function in the world. It's what allowed our hominid ancestors to survive the beginnings of sentience. "It's a lion, of *course* it's going to freaking eat me, I run away fast *now* and ponder its true intentions some other time."

I hate the lint in the lens. I wish I could bump my forehead to yours and recieve true knowlege of your Self, see you as if from the inside looking out. I also wish I lived in a haunted mansion, could turn tall and sexy at will, and had a tank. We have to live with the certainty of these errors, because the things you'd have to do to get rid of them them would make the error-free data worthless. You would have to focus on another to the exclusion of yourself. You would have to become nothing but a receptive observer of that other. Even then, you would misinterpret.

But here's the neat part. I've said this before, I think. The fact that we can never truly understand each other means that each of us is a universe. There are as many worlds as there are minds. The tantalizing glimpses we get of others' worlds seed the crystalizing of ideas in our own worlds, but the other's world never truly enters.

There are those whose internal world entices many voyeurs; Neil Gaiman comes to mind. And there are those (you surely know some) who sometimes allow an accidental glance into a mindscape of such horrifying banality that you find yourself wondering if ordinariness might not be some kind of disorder. But I think the vast majority of people are far, far richer inside than one tends to assume.

Select at random one night nurse, one shoe-store clerk, one taxi driver, one sixth-grader. With your magic scrying glass, look into their dreams. The vastness of that landscape will overwhelm you. The vertigo of such a revelation could well lead to ego-death. And on this Earth there are -- how many billion, this year?

O God, I see now why you commanded the angels to bow down.