In people, the condition in which the brain does not recognize that an eye is seeing is amblyopia, and it sometimes referred to as “lazy eye.” Cave fishes of the family Amblyopsidae have the condition in the extreme; they have even lost part of the brain’s vision centers and functioning eyes. It is an ailment for people; for fish, it probably serves an evolutionary purpose, as Damian Moran and others explain in “The Energetic Cost of Vision and the Evolution of Eyeless Mexican Cavefish” (Sci. Adv.,1:e1500363, 2015).

In some people amblyopia means having monocular vision, a condition that responds in part to various therapies, including making the “good” eye blurry to force the “bad” eye into seeing better. There’s no hope for Astyanax mexicanus, the fish in Moran’s study. But no worry. The other senses in the fish have taken over the job of seeing in a lightless cave. Astyanax has larger taste buds and greater pressure sensitivity. Moran and his colleagues even suggest that the adaptations to a dark environment save the fish unnecessary expenditures of energy.

Back to people. Have you noticed that some people are monocular when it comes to seeing others? Is it a matter of energy? It does, of course, take energy to “see” others as they really are, complexes of philosophies, behaviors, and personalities with both strengths and weaknesses. I certainly hope you aren’t suffering from amblyopia just to save energy. That would put you on a level with blind cave fish whose vestigial eyes serve no purpose. Lazy eyes never see others as they truly are.  

That’s the life of most people: Wattle and daub. Make a framework from sticks or whatever rigid materials are available and fill in the gaps with a pasty goop that eventually hardens to make a protective structure. The building can be quite attractive and insulated. You build from what you find. It must be a useful and economical building system; it has been around since the Neolithic Period, and you might live in a home that, with its lath and plaster, is a more modern version. 

As I said, wattle and daub is the “life of most people.” We pick up some relatively sturdy sticks of culture and personality, and we fill in the gaps with a paste comprised of anything we can find along life’s path. The “mud” and “organic matter” we use for filler are varied: Knowledge, experience, and events. Some people keep it simple with rather homogenous “mud”; others combine a complex mixture because of an active search for heterogeneity of composition. Some are content with local material. Some study, seek, and participate. Both make structures of wattle and daub, and on the surface their structures might seem identical. Those who study, seek, and participate, however, have on closer inspection a more interesting goop.

What wattle have you gathered for your structure? What daub have you used to fill in the gaps?

Face it: Because of your busy schedule and multiple concerns, you don’t have time to create formats. Using templates shortens tasks. Anyway, there are so many templates for so many tasks that superimposing your work on a ready-made template is an acceptable form of plagiarism. Need to make a calendar? Look online for a free template. Want to graph your expenses? Again, online stuff does the trick. Trying to devise a clever and colorful report for school or work? With thousands of templates available, what are the chances that anyone has ever seen or used the template you choose?

We belong to a template-driven planet. That’s why I recognize you as a human, and it’s also why I recognize your relationship to all life. Life shares some common templates within DNA. But, let me give you some credit here. Your DNA is a template that no one else, save an identical twin, uses. Yes, parents stamped out the template from which your copy came, but once that template was made, it became yours and no one else’s. There’s something unique about that template, and no future template will be its exact copy. But that’s just a physical matter. In that special template, the one peculiar to you, you have a tool for your life’s work, the point of departure for that part of your life that isn’t merely the product of a physical mold.

Templates for reports save time and add some organization to the reports. They are not, however, the stuff of the report any more than a chalkboard is the stuff of a lecture. You are always in the process of making a presentation. The fundamental template is beyond your control. It was there from the get-go. But the template isn’t the presentation.

I can’t wait to see your presentation today.

No, I haven’t discovered life on Mars. Maybe it’s there. If so, it’s probably tiny. Mars isn’t a tough place for little critters. We have places on Earth that are just as tough, and they house and support life. The “smokers” on the ocean floor pump very hot water—of a temperature you are told to use if you want to purify your water—into the surrounding environment, where you will find rather abundant life, from sulfur-reducing bacteria to tube worms to crustaceans. Harsh environments don’t seem to affect extremophiles. Physically, the extreme isn’t really so extreme.

So, on Earth we have critters living on the edge of the extreme. And that apparently applies to people, also. Yes, humans have the ability to visit and live in extreme physical environments, such as on the snows of Antarctica or the polar ice of the Arctic Ocean. Humans can also be found underground, going about their daily work in mines, and some can be found underwater, again going about their daily work.

Physical extremes seem to pose only temporary or survivable threats to the intrusion of life. Interesting. Social extremes appear to impose a greater limit on the capacity of a place to support life, at least, a greater limit on a healthful life. Look through both history and geography to see enclaves where more dangers derive from social makeup than from the physical environment.

Living in some social environments is very much like “living on Mars.” The extremophiles appear to do relatively well.  

I suppose that people that look to the skies for a living acquired their interest by the mystery of places beyond everyday reach. Those pinpoints of light in the night sky seem to generate more wonder with every discovery made through ever more advanced technologies.

So, distant planets, stars, nebulae, and galaxies provide us with wondrous appearances for which we have some explanations, but still some questions. We know we will never reach the distant objects that intrigue us; the distances are too far for travel at the speeds we can generate in our rockets. We take a passive journey instead. We let the light, neutrinos, and radio signals of the distant objects bathe our instruments, and then we stare at the images, counts, and graphs they produce. Wonders. Some understood, but still wondrous.; some mysterious and very wondrous.

We have closer wonders: The Grand Canyon, Mt. Everest, the Great Barrier Reef. These we can explore and understand, but their majesty is still wondrous, and some parts of what they are still remain a bit undiscovered. They are, however, places that humans can visit, explore, sample.

Among the wonders there are none so mysterious as you. Move a muscle. Wonder! Read this. Wonder! Communicate with another. Wonder! Love. Wonder!

The mysterious wonders of the universe are less complex than you. You have what they all have, from the subatomic to the atomic, to the interacting forces within. You have all the physical wonder that the universe anywhere at any time has. But you have more. Somehow in processes as yet not completely understood, you can wonder. No wonder beyond you can wonder. Your wondering is the greatest wonder.

Before your neighbor plants a stand of bamboo, make sure that you have a barrier ditch and retainer between your yard and the plantings. Otherwise, the bamboo’s rhizomes will wander into your yard, and soon you’ll look to import a panda to control the growth. Unless you keep bamboo in check by careful pruning of the roots or by an impermeable barrier, the hardy grass will colonize and dominate surrounding areas.

Before you let someone bamboozle you, build a barrier of knowledge and skepticism. Otherwise, the bamboozlement will spread throughout your brain and dominate your thinking. There is no better protection against insidious bamboozlement than the barrier of knowledge coupled with diligent pruning. In most instances we can’t choose our neighbors or tell them what to plant in their yards. We can, however, see that the rhizomes of bamboozlement don’t overwhelm us.

Check for the uncontrolled growth of bamboozlement wherever you go. Prune. Prune. Prune. Throughout your life those rhizomes will seek underground pathways into your thinking.

You have a dilemma. The world is running counter to your principles. Why are people you thought were “on your side” adopting principles antagonistic to your own? You know your principles are right, but you have to contend with all these nuances implicit in the principles of others. It isn’t a matter of personality. You like many of those who hold different principles, but you feel almost constant pressure to conform to the principles of others or to blend your principles with theirs. Right and wrong is turning into “Well, it’s okay if that’s what you feel.” Or, “Hey, it’s the way of the world; learn to accept it.”

Trying times, right? But these times are no different from any other with regard to principles. “What could it hurt to eat a piece of fruit from this tree?” The story suggests that even ancient people recognized the dilemma. We have always been “under pressure,” as the lyrics of the song go, “pushing down on me/Pressing down on you.” The Dilemma of Principle: Every ethical principle has its counter principle or set of nuanced interpretations.

So, what’s your choice: Take the extremes or find a blend? Is the blend a failure of our principles? No, not  necessarily; the failure might be what we were born for: A constant search for a common ground, a universal ethics.

Blending is a practical, if difficult, challenge. Finding a common set of ethical principles to guide human life in each generation or age has been the human condition. For brief periods and in localized places, extreme adherence to principles prevails. Then something in the nature of humanity urges a change, a nuance, a contradiction. It’s happened repeatedly. Principles become a pattern for life style. Inevitably, someone or some group adopts a variation, and style is under attack.

Societies everywhere establish a framework of principles. Take the Transcendentalist community of Brook Farm in the nineteenth century. Like every communal leader from the founders of the Order Fratrum Minorum (Franciscans) to Jim Jones of the People’s Temple (whose members all died in a mass suicide), George Ripley believed that a perfect society was possible and convinced others that he was correct. Ripley belonged to a New England society of like-minded thinkers, the Transcendentalists, who took their lead from Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the spring of 1841, Ripley and his wife Sophia moved with 15 others (including novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne) to a farm they renamed Brook Farm. Nine miles from Boston and in the midst of beautiful “unspoiled” countryside, the little community farmed the land and pursued intellectual matters. The principle seemed sound. Everyone understood. The society grew to 120 people. Very rational. Very ideal. The axioms were understood; the theorems awaited the proof.

In practice, theoretical anomalies arose in situ. What if someone simply relied on others to do the farming and the thinking? That’s what happened. So, Ripley, assuming everyone needed some help in following the principles, added a schedule and specific duties. He did what he could, but the society began to fall apart because he could not, at the outset, account for the anomalous aspects. He even tried to redo the society on the basis of social reformer Charles Fourier’s principles. Fourier’s own conjecture, unproven and not so self-evident as a Euclidean axiom, was that people are innately good and that they simply need an encompassing, well-planned social structure. By 1846 Ripley’s perfect society had disbanded. Fourier’s assumption has yet to be proved.

Even the monks of St. Francis underwent a pattern change. They began their society as the “little brothers,” or friars, in the thirteenth century. The principles had to change subtly. Over the course of just its first century of existence the order underwent changes. Some thought the original structure of the community was too lax, and then some thought it was too strict. Strict, lax, strict, lax... Now, centuries later, there are different groups who still claim the name (Franciscan) or its heritage: the Friars Minor, the Friars Minor Conventuals, and the Friars Capuchins in the Catholic Church and three orders in the Anglican Church.

So, maybe your being “under pressure” is not unusual. Maybe, being “under pressure” is the human way. And maybe, as the song's lyrics suggest, the only ethical principle that can give us a chance at reconciling all the different principles is love.

When a place of peace, like a café in Sydney, Australia, becomes a place of terror, we learn the lesson of the last millennium. At no time in the past thousand years was the planet free of war, violence, and anger. A thousand years! War, violence, and anger everyday somewhere on the planet! Three hundred sixty-five times 1,000 years! That’s 365,000 consecutive days of war, violence and anger, not everywhere all the time, but here and there all the time.

What have we been thinking? One little planet with the only species we know of that can actually think about purpose, and the planet is a continuous war zone. Is war, violence, and anger the human purpose?

You are reading this, so, in a way, you are special. The last thousand years of war, anger, and violence closed the trail of heredity for many families. Somehow, your line survived. So, here you are at the beginning of the next thousand years. In a sense, even without your accomplishing much, you are special just by virtue of being here, on Earth, at this time.

Will your hereditary trail end sometime in the next 365,000 days? Road closed, not temporarily, but permanently closed: It has happened before, and the process shows no sign of changing. Some people went to a trendy café in Sydney in the middle of December, 2014, maybe just for a cup of coffee. Not all of them walked out. Seems that no one learns the lesson of the past millennium or the millennia before that.

But you are here, and that makes you special. You might be able to change the next millennium.

Chamomile? Ayahuasca?

Probably every food or drink affects us in unknown ways. From subtle to striking, some teas can even influence mood and mind. Want to relax? Just about every package of chamomile says this is your cup of tea. Want a psychedelic trip into the recesses of your neurons? Ayahuasca might convey you there. But beware.

In an era when people have access to more than 50,000 foods and thousands of drinks, we cannot know the consequences of much of what we ingest and imbibe. Sure, there are some test results. Yes, there are many rumors. Much of what we put in our bodies is derived from tradition and hearsay. Are you suffering from a cold? Try chicken soup. Chicken soup? Where’s the clinical study? Who cares? Grandma said it works; you have tried it, and it appears to work. But no one really knows why, and no two chicken soup mixtures are precise measures of chemicals.

Let’s revisit ayahuasca. Seems this is the rage tea for those seeking an hallucinogenic release from the past: A “cleansing.” The Peruvian tea is a complex of chemicals that enable DMT to get into our brains without breaking down chemically as it crosses the brain-blood barrier. DMT [2-(1H-Indol-3-yl)-N,N-dimethylethanamine] is suspected to be a natural part of physical mechanism for dreams, so pumping more of it into our brains probably generates the dream-like experience. But evolution seems to have built into our brains a limit on the availability of natural DMT. The tea overcomes that limit because it includes a chemical that keeps DMT from breaking down.

So, there are those that seek an unlimited dream state by imbibing the tea. Yet, there might be, as anecdotes are now surfacing, some very real dangers in trying to enter the topsy-turvy world of unbridled dreams. Suicide and schizophrenia have been linked to ayahuasca by parents and relatives of those whose lives have fallen apart because of this “liberating” tea that is, like chicken soup, not a precise measure of component chemicals, but potentially far more dangerous than Grandma’s soup.  

Maybe chamomile is a better choice. You drink. You relax. You dream the kinds of dreams that you have always dreamed, some strange, some scary. And you are assured of waking up sane in the morning just like the person who went to sleep after a warm cup of chamomile.