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The Big Picture
Donald Hoffman of UCLA Irvine makes the case that humans can never perceive the reality of the world around us. As he puts it, our brains evolved to ensure survival on the savannah, not for perceiving reality as it is…We don’t see the electron and proton soup that these animals are made of because it doesn’t have survival value…even with our best scientific instruments, we cannot see reality. Even the electrons and protons that we observe are only abstractions. Just like we only see pixels when we zoom in ad infinitum on the files and folders on our desktop screens instead of the underlying software running on our computers, we can never perceive the reality of even our own 4D universe.
— Kris Shankar
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The world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.
— Edwin Arlington Robinson
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Before birth, the soul of each of us chooses an image or design that then we will live on earth, and receive a companion to guide us up here, a daimon, which is unique and typical. However, when we come to the world, we forget all this and we believe we have been empty. It is the daimon who remembers the content of our image, the elements of the chosen drawing, he is the bearer of our destiny.
–James Hillman
