What Sense Is This?
Who made this world?
We were born in ignorance, overwhelmed by light and sound, cast into a boisterous and incomprehensible universe. With some passage of time, we learn to separate and, later, evaluate the stimuli barraging the senses. The five human senses capture only a fraction of reality.
Have you felt the scorched air over molten ore, while Bessemer’s process incinerates impurities and refines iron into steel? This is the same furnace Carnegie and the other worldbuilders used to carve out the concrete jungle of this new world order.
Your skin is a buffer from this cold and dark universe, but your heart knows no difference between dimensions of pleasure and dimensions of pain.
Madame Curie received the Nobel prize for the most damning and terrifying terrestrial discovery, radium. The lead coffin containing her radioactive remains is still sealed. Supposed salvations oft become harbingers of destruction.
Have you heard Eisenhower ordering Fat Man and Little Boy to drop? With a word he incinerated hundreds of thousands of innocents, blazing a path to something we called peace. No one can say that he was wrong.
The reverberations of air beat in your ear drums and may alert, inform, or relax. Noise is sound unsorted. The world gets louder each and every day.
Have you looked down the barrel of our leaders’ targeted sights, as they envision con quest—some views overt, others covert? So intent on avenging the past, some take advantage of the present, while few assure a future.
The photons that stimulate your visual cortex are physical particles of the universe that have travelled unimaginably vast distances over the course of billions of years.The visible light spectrum reveals less than a trillionth of the information that physically strikes our bodies every single day.
Have you lingered over the exotic, earthy flavor of a coconut on your lips, contemplating the tens of thousands of miles it traversed across global supply lines to please your eager palate? Do you taste the blood and the cheapened sweat on the husk?
Tongues teach to carefully consume, considering catastrophe, accounting for corruption. Royalty once employed poison-tasters to prevent peril. Will this practice see a resurgence in days ahead?
Can you smell the burning oil that lingers in the nostrils of the North? Unpleasant even at this latitude, it is a stranglehold, a garrote, around the throat of the Global South.
Aromas trigger neural connections, which in turn index an atlas of smells, each tied to a unique time and place. Can you smell the rock that is cooking?
Senses are tools. As refinement occurs, comprehension grows. Great art requires little more than acute awareness. A composer hears music before it is played. A chef tastes a dish yet to be made. A sculptor sees a statue in a block of untouched marble. Few are gifted with this inherent understanding; most spend lifetimes in a continuous search of stones that will sharpen their tools. Even the masters know just how little is knownabout literally everything. about literally everything.
Greek philosopher Parmenides once stated, our senses show the way of seeming, and that only logic and reason can reveal the way of truth. Two and half millennia later, we have lost our way. Anyone with sense will agree.
As physicist Sean Carroll puts it, “we shouldn’t fool ourselves into mistaking the world As physicist Sean Carroll puts it, “we shouldn’t fool ourselves into mistaking the world as we experience it for the world as it really is.”