Reality has innumerable ways of confounding our perceptions of it. Yet, we shouldn’t be surprised by our sometimes frequent, rarely infrequent, and often persistent confusion. Were it alive, the Cosmos would have little difficulty in disrupting the linguistic and sociological contexts of meaning. Heck! If we are capable of confounding ourselves and others, why shouldn’t the Universe be so capable? After all, even when we try to eliminate the subjective elements and immerse ourselves in logical, mathematical, or scientific thinking about reality, cosmos, or universe, we reach a point of non-visualization: "Things" we can’t see because they are too small, too far away, or mysterious in their ability to change as neutrinos change. And we can’t even call such “things” things because sometimes we consider relationships the “things” we study in our attempt to understand.
In thinking of relationships of any kind (between and among particles, or forces, or even people), we always fall back into the linguistic and sociological webs of meaning that predecessor humans passed along. Even so-called paradigm shifts are usually mere reflections, backward versions of what went before, or partly borrowed machinations. As long as we deal with “things” in a particular society and in a particular language, we don’t really overcome the confounding nature of reality. And if we believe we can overcome confusion by slipping into our mathematician’s clothing, we find that we simply replace what we once thought we could somehow visualize with something that we cannot see.
But rather than run this into some discussion about how understanding of reality “in general,” we might try to focus on what is wrong with our sense of human relationships, how they work, how to fix them when they go awry, and how to enhance them. The trick in all of this lies in attempts to visualize the non-visualizable.
Possibly a product of our scientific world and of social science thinking, we have come to believe that we can solve the mystery of human interactions, that we can whittle down the stick of relationships to shapes we can handle. When we look for explication we attempt to quantify or objectively describe. Trying to visualize anything requires us first to assume we can eventually visualize and second to assume that the visualization truly captures reality. So, what’s missing?
Mystery. Yeah! I know. I made you go through all that just to tell you that the best way to contemplate human relationships is to maintain their mystery. Reduce them to understanding, and you essentially reduce them to bits and pieces, all parts of a whole unseen. Of course, we want enumeration. We want objective analysis. We want to visualize. But reality doesn’t let us do that, and we have proof. Every time we attempt to understand the smallest relationships, such as that among the subatomic particles, we reach a barrier behind which the unseen, but real, operates. And every time we try to understand why some human relationships last and others don’t, we run into the same kind of barrier. Behind that wall is some reality that remains un-visualizable. Even when we ask those in a lasting human relationship why the relationship lasts, we get very little that we can apply to any other relationship. Not getting an easily visualizable “thing” on which to focus or to base another relationship, we get frustrated.
We want to explain a world that is ultimately inexplicable. We want to understand relationships because we often think that they involve two (or more) things or conscious entities that we can see. Shouldn’t understanding be a matter of adding up parts? We might think so, but then reality, or Cosmos, or Universe confounds us because it operates on different scales, some larger and some smaller than we can visualize or comprehend. We have access to linguistic and sociological tools, but the toolbox contains dark recesses into which we cannot peer.
Cherish the mystery of your relationships. Avoid trying to quantify and visualize. Some “things” are beyond visualization, and one of those things is the ultimate nature of relationships.
In thinking of relationships of any kind (between and among particles, or forces, or even people), we always fall back into the linguistic and sociological webs of meaning that predecessor humans passed along. Even so-called paradigm shifts are usually mere reflections, backward versions of what went before, or partly borrowed machinations. As long as we deal with “things” in a particular society and in a particular language, we don’t really overcome the confounding nature of reality. And if we believe we can overcome confusion by slipping into our mathematician’s clothing, we find that we simply replace what we once thought we could somehow visualize with something that we cannot see.
But rather than run this into some discussion about how understanding of reality “in general,” we might try to focus on what is wrong with our sense of human relationships, how they work, how to fix them when they go awry, and how to enhance them. The trick in all of this lies in attempts to visualize the non-visualizable.
Possibly a product of our scientific world and of social science thinking, we have come to believe that we can solve the mystery of human interactions, that we can whittle down the stick of relationships to shapes we can handle. When we look for explication we attempt to quantify or objectively describe. Trying to visualize anything requires us first to assume we can eventually visualize and second to assume that the visualization truly captures reality. So, what’s missing?
Mystery. Yeah! I know. I made you go through all that just to tell you that the best way to contemplate human relationships is to maintain their mystery. Reduce them to understanding, and you essentially reduce them to bits and pieces, all parts of a whole unseen. Of course, we want enumeration. We want objective analysis. We want to visualize. But reality doesn’t let us do that, and we have proof. Every time we attempt to understand the smallest relationships, such as that among the subatomic particles, we reach a barrier behind which the unseen, but real, operates. And every time we try to understand why some human relationships last and others don’t, we run into the same kind of barrier. Behind that wall is some reality that remains un-visualizable. Even when we ask those in a lasting human relationship why the relationship lasts, we get very little that we can apply to any other relationship. Not getting an easily visualizable “thing” on which to focus or to base another relationship, we get frustrated.
We want to explain a world that is ultimately inexplicable. We want to understand relationships because we often think that they involve two (or more) things or conscious entities that we can see. Shouldn’t understanding be a matter of adding up parts? We might think so, but then reality, or Cosmos, or Universe confounds us because it operates on different scales, some larger and some smaller than we can visualize or comprehend. We have access to linguistic and sociological tools, but the toolbox contains dark recesses into which we cannot peer.
Cherish the mystery of your relationships. Avoid trying to quantify and visualize. Some “things” are beyond visualization, and one of those things is the ultimate nature of relationships.
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