Squeezing the juice out of reality.

We possess five explicit senses: sight, audition, touch, taste, smell. In other instances I would add intuition as the implicit sense, but it is not important for this monologue. Given this, assume four situations:

In the first situation, you are walking down the street, when you hear a whistle blowing at your right. You look to your right and see a thick, brick wall. You assume the noise is coming from inside. You alternately hear a buzz like that of a bumblebee, flying closer to your ear and then disappearing. You wave the noise away, as it comes from no apparent thing. You take a few steps when you hear the same whistle as before blow in your other ear. You try to find its source, staring at the passing cars and across the street at the shops and cafe'. Nothing there.

In the second scenario, you are still walking in the sidewalk in the autumn dusk. The air smells of the dust raised by the hustle and bustle of the day. And the lamps set against the trees set against the pale sky have a surreal quality that catches your eye. You walk down the sidewalk and something makes you trip. It actually does more than that. It cuts your shin, and blood runs down into your sandal; the few steps back to the place of the darned object feel sticky on the left foot. You see nothing where you are sure to have tripped on something. In fact, as you sweep your foot across the sidewalk, it is again hurt by a blunt object. You are surprised to find nothing by way of sight. You seek with your hands and feel the object. You lift it, it is quite heavy, and with your fingers you trace its contour to determine its form. Those who see you carrying it home think you are playing a joke on the world. When you arrive you place it somewhere where it is soon forgotten and never found again.

In the third scenario, you are back out in the city doing what you usually do. In one of the blocks you sense this smell drifting from an alleyway. You pursue it to its source. Again, as the sound, you find nothing, but the smell is so strong and so delicious it makes your mouth water, it infuses your saliva and creates in your mouth something similar to nectar. It is all a mystery. You cannot account for the smell nor the taste.

Finally, after you have satiated your appetite on the invisible feast, and you have gone to bed for the night, and woken up in the morning to work till late, and returned home, you find yourself in the same sidewalk as before, without experiencing deja vu, and in your path you almost step on a strange, curvy, colorful object. You try to stop the step but it is too late. Your foot falls right on it, and through it; it feels like air. You try to pick it up but you cannot grasp it. It just sits still, morphing very slowly, like pudding in heat. You convenientely carry a notepad and pencil, and you depict it to the best of your ability. You wake up the next morning and find the object still depicted on the notebook, and you are quite sure you did not draw it in your sleep, as the level of detail is excellent.

So tell you me, which of these cases holds most reality for you? My assumption is the latter, as we are visual creatures. My conclusion is that we are not getting an equal amount of information (later to be processed as reality) from the world. Were we blind, the primary three would all seem more real to us that the last. If we were blind, I think, we would be able to perceive more of the world. While we see, much remains subliminal. So much myth has been created around the sun, around sight, in order to make some superior and others inferior. The ability to see has often been misconstrued to mean knowledge, when these example show much of what we do not sense. The absolute nature we attribute to the deceitful sight should be undermined, and the other senses exalted. Tis true, sight is not to blame for the failings of humanity, as these arise from intention, rather than sense (i.e. the ability to see skin color in relation to racism); and had we been blind we would not have been deaf to the cries of victims, or the ferrous smell of blood, or the bitterness of food, or the viscous feel of viscera. The main idea, nevertheless, is that the other senses are undermined to favor sight, and that it should be interesting to undermine sight to experience the world in a new 'light'.