the GOD within (I)

Yet another comment on what was said at TED global, but this time I would like to make a rather unusual connection between two of the speakers: the aforementioned Richard Dawkins, and Rev Tom Honey. In this post, I shall reflect on what Dawkins said. The connection with Honey will be made in the forthcoming post. (sounds rather conceited, doesn't it? - pity me)

Dawkins explains the human mind's limitations, as stated in this BBC News article:

"Our brains had evolved to help us survive within the scale and orders of magnitude within which we exist, said Professor Dawkins. We think that rocks and crystals are solid when in fact they were made up mostly of spaces in between atoms, he argued. This, he said, was just the way our brains thought about things in order to help us navigate our "middle sized" world - the medium scale environment - a world in which we cannot see individual atoms."

In other words, what we think is solid and well-defined, is actually made up of space; nothingness in between tiny little dots. The void is as much a part of everything as its tangibility. This goes for all matter, including us human beings. But as an example, let us think of a straight line that pierces through the sky for instance. The line in a very similar way not only needs that sky, is also consists of it, within its own boundaries. The sky is necessary for it to be (to exist) in two ways. Firstly, it is a means of highlighting the line, functioning as a supporting background; without the sky, the line cannot be seen. Secondly, the sky also pervades the line itself. It doesn't stop at the border, it has infiltrated within. The line is a filter.

This second view is the hardest one for us to grasp. Even my ways of explaining it denote a certain subject-centeredness, as though the sky had distorted the balance of line-versus-sky. The truth is though that they both need each other; there is no absolute dichotomy between subject and object. Existence is a form of mutual (or even multilateral) communication.

Maybe we should stop telling our kids to draw inside the lines. It is what happens when the pencil crosses the lines that we become what we are: gateways. Scribble night and day away!