It’s so strange to think.
Period.
Spontaneously generated sounds and images and words floating in the darkness of our mind.
Singing in the space between synapses.
Fire lighting the corners of imagination illuminating worlds wholly divorce from the collectively agreed upon hallucination we call reality.
Reality exists in thought constructed from sensory inputs and expectations built up by experience. It is but a small part of our cognition. The part through which we engage our surroundings and our fellow occupants.
The interface.
Everyone’s perception is different, informed by different experiences and situations and permutations of observations perhaps accounting for what we call differences in taste.
Do you see green as I see green?
The color blue didn’t exist until a few hundred years ago.
What colors have we yet to accept into our collective hallucination?
Bitter and sweet, what if they were reversed?
Scientists have figured out how to make you taste flavor from electricity. Digital pallets. Can we invent entirely new flavor profiles that don’t exist? Sure, why not?
Umami is a wonderful example. In recent history it has become an accepted phenomenon when not too long ago it was thought only myth. It has entered our collective hallucination.
Don’t ignore thought.
Explore it.
Massage and examine it. Shape it into new forms and experiences within your mind and then express it.
See if it resonates aloud.
Echoes in the minds of others. A new umami accepted into reality.
What occurred when color first started being perceived?
Was the world already vibrant and full of it, if imperceptible?
Or was it monotone?
Not necessarily black and white – that is simply the lack of color information, but rather brown and green or red and gold or shades of yellow?
We already construct devices to allow us to see beyond violet and red, translated into signals we understand.
What will occur when some quirk allows perception beyond the current visual spectrum? When ultra- and infra- shift into organic view? Will those without such sight believe those with? Or if we suddenly see radio waves?
Or perhaps this has already happened but there is no language for expressing it? Without language to frame it, will it go unnoticed like the color blue?
What else goes unnoticed simply because we cannot frame it in current cognition? But I digress.
Thinking is strange. Setting aside reality in favor of pure thought. Turning off our connection to the external world so that we focus on the impulses inside.
Sit in silent darkness and allow fruitful bloom inside the mind.
Undisturbed and undisrupted. No distraction.
Is this dream?
That which exists when you give form to nothing through the framework of your unfocused, unfiltered expectations?
The unused bits generated but unsupported by sensory verification, strung together by persistence of thought to be understood by the reality engine running behind the scenes.
Can we suspend expectation as we do disbelief? Or would it all crumble to fragments?
What exists?
What exists.
-j.e. pittman