So peardg posted this photo she took the other day. She was in the Juan de Fuca park in that deep and lovely old growth forest.  The night she came back, I got to see the original photos and, of course, they were evocative – but this one, now she has played with it, now it tells a truth that I sometimes get to experience directly (truth: below the fold if you’re interested).

When my brain veers left, my perception shifts. It usually involves all my senses in some way, but this picture is the best visual representation of what the forest is like for me when my brain jumps sideways.  There is almost always sound involved (I can’t remember a time when there was not anyway) and of course I can’t provide that here but the picture…yes, that’s it almost exactly. Just imagine it moving gracefully around you, dancing almost, and that your skin can feel the colours, and that you know what the trails of light mean.

The large sized picture is here.

The truth: the world is seen through the limits of our perceptual abilities, through the limits of our reasoning about it, through the limits of our evolution. This is not a bad thing, just a limiting thing. What a bat experiences, or a bear, or a human is very different. It is the same earth, and all the perceptions of it are true representations; they fulfill their evolutionary purpose. We do not know it all, nor see it all, nor understand even a small portion of what it is really like to experience the world.

Through science we understand more and more, but to keep learning, to keep expanding the small wedge of understanding we have gained, it helps to try to perceive differently and to try to remember that all of it is true, but that none of it is True. Most importantly, because of our limitations and our evolutionary predispositions, we must retain the foundation of the critical method…question assumptions, test evidence, recognize that all meaning is provisional. Without that we quickly descend into the barbarity of The War on Truth. Never think that just because you got to see the world from some unusual vantage point, that now you know something about the Truth. All you got was another truth. But really, since that’s all there is for us, that’s quite a bit really.