Mary's Room

I was thinking about how there's a lot we know but don't understand. As we know bats and dolphins use echolocation and we know how it works. We know it works like sonar/radar but I don't think we understand what it must be like to experience the world like that. 

During my walk to the shops, I remembered a time I took that same walk high and as I usually am then, I was really anxious. I remembered how different the world appeared. 

I was trying to be in the moment but the presence of other people was throwing me off. So I thought about that reality, it was obviously an altered state of consciousness. I thought about animals that might naturally be anxious or are more prone to what we (negatively) understand as anxiety because we are able to be conscious of it. This animal might just live its whole life in that state, not associating it with good or bad. Just being like that and how (obviously) the world would be different to them. 

So again the experience of having echolocation might be something we know about but it's not something we understand experientially and I think that makes all the difference.

Knowing that they use sound to navigate is most likely not so different to (probably) having a large-scale 3d map of your environment in your head. We use our senses to do the same things, they're just probably nothing alike.

 They can achieve the same goals but to experience such must surely have profound consequences that one can only know after having had the experience. 

So after some time, I was watching a ted talk about a philosophical experiment called Mary's room and I thought about the thoughts again. That was basically what I was trying to say to myself. They explained it. Someone else has considered it too in some way. 

Back to my ideas while going to the shops, the idea that we might be living in a world that's several worlds just overlayed over each other. 

You only engage with the one that immediately concerns you. Like how some animals probably have crap visions so can't see the world in the size we see it in (and now I know factually that vision is our primary sense.) so they can't take in a landscape cause it's just too big in comparison to them but we also can't appreciate the chemical makeup of the very air we breathe and maybe they can and they navigate the world according to it. 

So with that in mind I thought about some mysticism (naturally) and I thought about what if this energy layer, upper/different dimension was real and was affecting us in ways that mean nothing to us because we're unaware and so rationalize our seemingly random actions on this levels but on that macro-scale, up on the energy level there is enough perspective to see the landscape, to see that the things that are random here are only random because we're missing the bigger picture.

For example how roads might be significant in some way cause they see a lot of human traffic and the more busy roads see the most and as such are more charged with something imperceptible to us but no less impactful. How they might possess a sort of current that we can't understand. That we might have built our roads in those specific locations randomly (to us) but something else drew(?) us to those locations for a different reason.

 How we simply wanted to find quick ways to travel and of the many seemingly equal options that might have been available to us, we settled on the ones we did not because it was random but cause we were supposed to or were drawn to them for reasons not known to us. 

And I don't mean that the ground was good for paving but that there was a mystical element at play. Then I thought about crossroads and stories about selling souls.