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July 08, 2005
so very simple...
The reflections on the walls felt at times as if they were coming from water in a friendly brook, at times as if a projected express train were rushing surprisingly silently through the room.
The sun was shining onto the highway outside and the windows of the passing cars were throwing back rays of light in a constant repeating pattern... constantly repeating and yet quite irregular and unpredictable after all.
The sun and the earth, clearly very much locked into a predictable relationship, the reflections of light on glass projected onto a wall... about as predictable...
Then the irregular arrival of the reflective cars. Sometimes entire packs of them rushing towards manhattan, sometimes a single one, from time to time... none. Sometimes a heavy truck would slow down on its way to Coney Island, sometimes a motorcyclist would speed up in a way that would lift the front wheel of his machine, aimed in the other direction.
The reflectors in this spectacle were truly sophisticated, engineered, designed machines, burning fuel refined from forests transformed ages ago. The operators of the reflectors were quite intelligent beings, the drivers, with a clear past and a future, on a macro and on a micro level.
All of them equipped with destinations. A symphony of intelligent elements. Playing with invisible and visible particles.
The sun, the earth, the light rays, reflected on windows and other parts of vehicles on their way to or from new york, driven there by intelligent beings...
Here I was on the bed, looking into the corner of the room, following the patterns that somehow returned, were expected, yet were always incredibly different. So many variables were involved in this game of light, no wonder there did not seem to be any measurably predictable pattern.
And yet I knew where the light was coming from. I knew the approximate location of the reflections in time and space... I knew the reasons... to a certain extent at least...
What if I were not given all the information that allowed me to know what was going on on that wall?
What if all I were given were the dancing lights, the reoccurring and yet never reoccurring pattern?
Would I be able to discover the reasons?
What if I did not know what a car is? Or what a highway is?
Would I see a divine expression? Would I see a natural phenomenon?
And what would make me make the decision that it was either... or what would it be then?
Maybe what I was seeing was a natural phenomenon... one that happened to involve some intelligent beings in smart machines with a destination as a factor?
If I knew that these were cars creating the patterns of light... would I still be able to imagine that they were heading to or from New York City?
And would I be able to make any conclusions about the thoughts and plans and intentions that brought each and every one of these drivers to this particular spot in space and time?
It was not really a new feeling but still a feeling very overwhelming... no matter how much I understood of a pattern that I saw, there was always a much larger, much more complex set of patterns I either had no idea existed, or even if I knew that it existed was too large for me to fathom.
It felt as if what allowed us to survive was the ability to ignore the thoughts of the unexplored and the unknown... it felt as if what allowed us to think of ourselves as intelligent was actually the ability to ignore the hints and markers that we are relatively without knowledge and blind and really quite insignificant... probably observing reflections of processes involving some factors that will never become accessible to us... by design.
and i looked at the walls and ceiling for a little longer...
"this is really beautiful," I thought...
and I closed my eyes and fell asleep...