Ahimsa

(Source: jacknicholson, via ffriedchkn)

Think about it

I watched a video once of a women describing what it’s like to have a stroke. 

Your brain has two parts, one part which is your senses, it take in everything happening now, all around you. It perceives smells, sights, tastes, textures, and sounds.

The other side is what connects those perceptions to the past, which is how you make sense of the present. This side is why you can read this. The half that controls your senses sees these squiggles,  dots, and lines. The other half takes these images and compares them to past experiences, which is why you recognize them as letters, and words, and meaning. 

When you have a stroke, the side that controls memory, doesn’t work anymore. So you become the equivalent of an infant, you don’t understand anything. You see color, but don’t know that it is color, only an image. You hear sounds but can’t put it together that those sounds are words, and those words mean something. You can’t understand language. You can feel things but don’t know what they are, you wouldn’t recognize the pain of a burn, or the nice feel of a soft bed. You would only feel. Nothing makes sense. You don’t understand what’s happening, you only see and feel what’s happening. 

With the memory side of her brain not working, life took on a whole new meaning. It wasn’t the fast paced life that we know, it was just a still, timeless, swirl of colors, sounds, tastes, smells, and textures. The meaning of “life” the feeling of being “alive” had completely changed.

This led me to realize that “life” is not a thing. Nothing we know and believe is real. Colors are not real, colors do not exist. “Blue” is not a thing, it is simply a perception of how light reflects off a surface. We would not see that light as “blue” if our brains were different. “Heat” does not exist, “pain” does not exist. Everything around us is only the way it is because of how our brains are designed, because of how they work.

If a species from another galaxy or universe were to come to our world, they would  probably not experience the same things that we experience. If they had evolved differently, and their bodies/structures were completely different than ours, they would not perceive things the way we do. They might not have eyes that take in the reflecting light that we do, or they might not have brains that would take that reflecting light, and using the memory side, realize that the light is “blue”. Therefor, their whole experience would be different.

Life is only the way it is because of how we are made. Nothing is real, everything is just a perception of the things around us. Each human experience is just a personal allusion we call “life”. We put the pieces of the puzzle together based on what we see, touch, smell, taste, hear and remember. 

Each person’s allusion is similar to another’s, and through language, we have realized this. We each have discovered that if we dig our nails into our skin, we get a feeling that we call pain. Pain is our brains way of telling us that we are damaging the skin organ. By communicating with fellow life forms, we have realized that they feel pain too. These allusions we have a are so similar and fit together like pieces of a puzzle, and we call these pieces, theses allusions, these perceptions; the human experience. 

Life is not how we see it. Life is not a certain way, there is not wrong or right to life, since each life is an allusion. Nothing you discover through your senses is really how you perceive it to be. Nothing is real.

That is the human experience.