Herrington: What Was the Question

I think it’s interesting that we formulate questions in terms of what we believe to be our human experience, and yet we know that humans have had major shifts in consciousness that totally blew our former conceptualizations all to smithereens. We think that how we think about things now is how it has to be. We want our vision of what we think to carry us on forward, just like we did as children, and teens, and young adults, and never imagining ourselves lying on our death beds ready to go.

When Hubble looked out and viewed the Doppler shift at work among the stars and identified the universe as being at various stages of expansion, it exploded the world view of a stable sky. The entire picture, the context of humanity, the pyramids, Stonehenge, all the myriad ways that we have counted on the stars and what we have projected with astrology, all of that instantaneously became a shifting contingency. There really is no stability in the universe.

When Kandinsky, or whoever, first formulated the notion of abstraction, that there can be a deletion of human subjects like tress, and people, and recognizable content and only abstraction viewed, that was a blow to human self-centeredness. It had always been throughout human history that we could always understand in human terms what we were looking at. Even now when we don’t understand the content of a painting or object we say that it is an abstract object. We don’t philosophically understand it. “What can it mean in human terms?” we ask ourselves anthropocentrically.

So, we pose questions to problems and think that our questions are the most sensible things in the world. What else would we have thought about the sky or the subject content of art before 1900? It’s all we knew. We formulated our questions based on our limited experiences. A civil war soldier did not understand unmanned drones from 3,000 miles. Cavemen did not understand light speed. Experience teaches us that our questions limit what we perceive. They filter our perceptions from the outset.

We give ourselves choices that are false dilemmas, and then we argue over them to the death. Is it this or that? Creationism or cosmic soup and monkey talk? 7 days of creation or big bang? This dogma or that dogma? Did Hitler escape to South America? Where is Jimmy Hoffa? Who killed Kennedy? We formulate questions based on limited experience and information and then when we get to the moment where the data reveals the lack of relevance of the questions we always asked to the problem that is set before us, and we regret having wasted all that time on it.

Investments, hobbies, addictions, relationships, contracts, parties, sidesteps, plans, concepts, religion, philosophy, entanglements, decisions, dogmas, getting in the car, shaking hands, glancing to the side, seeing an event, anything and everything is a potential for a shift in our world view. Now, to be absolutely fair, some people are excellent at covering up any changes and at keeping from having to consciously admit to themselves that the world has gone on without them. Stuck in the 70’s. Dresses like a teenager. Still lives at home with his parents. Got a job and thinks he is set for life. Just got married and now they are going to have smooth sailing. That’s finally over.

We pose questions based on our limited experiences. Even experts disagree. There are thousands of versions of every religion. There are hybrids of every thought form. Subject and form switch positions all the time and semantic relationships shift like ocean water on the shore in a hurricane. So, when we ask a question, we can acknowledge that it goes without saying, IMHO. In my humble opinion. If you don’t really think so, wait a while. Is there any time in heaven?

runningturtle87