This is one of my favorite Ted talks yet. If you have followed my blog for any length of time at all, you know I doubt the veracity of our reality. I have always believed we live in a world of illusion. At least since learning particle theory in elementary school anyway. The day I learned that the objects around me contain more open spaces between the atoms and molecules than matter, my mind was officially blown. I began to see the world as a place full of particles, a plasma of molecules and atoms, an enormous cosmic soup. I came to believe that my perception was false. My eyes and my mind were simply filling in the blanks in an attempt to better understand the world. I would sit at my desk in school fascinated by the idea that my arm resting on a desk was an illusion. There was no rest; there were particles of arm and clothes and light and desk and dust all moving at incredible speeds, with incredibly vast distances between them yet at the quantum level indistinguishable as 'seperate'. Never mind the invisible and unseen things; radiation, gravity, electro-magnetic fields! It wasn't until years later that the flip side of the question occurred to me. What aspects of reality have our minds erased from our perception? Radiation is a perfect example, but what else? Is linear time an illusion we are trapped in? What about 3 dimensional space? Or the very notion of space itself? If we are, for whatever survival paradigm it may be, blocked from 'seeing' our oneness with the world around us, what about our relationship with the rest of the universe?
For me, that answer is and always will be speculative, and filled with wonder!
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