There is no privileged position to view the universe from. And our agreements and shared perspectives are based on a margin of error around boundaries that allow us to call things with negligible differences the same thing.
The skill of projecting your thoughts is to decide where to allocate your attention: to decide what areas of the world must be seen in fractal detail and what areas can remain block-coloured polygons.
If you choose to look for long enough, any part of the world can surprise you with a new detail. This could be a fact about the universe, or it could be a fact about the way we perceive it: either way, as long as we remain ourselves in the same universe, it remains true.
It seems like there is a budget for novelty: that you have to experience something as new, but not more than something. Not everything can be new at once, even if it factually is. In order to traverse the new space, the understanding of the old has to bear some of the weight.
A favourite pastime of mine is to stare up into the sky, when I can find an open blue sky. I have a skylight in my room above my bed, so I can open it, stand up and tilt my head back until all I can see is totally blue. I take my glasses off and just allow my vision to be filled with something other than the details of the earth or the false void of my eyelids.
After staring at it for long enough a variety of things start to happen:
1) It's too bright and I have to look away
2) My neck hurts and I have to look away
3) If I hold on long enough, the blue starts to disappear
This is something I was starting to achieve with meditation a couple of years ago until it stopped working for whatever reason.
Just staring at the same position for long enough that it starts to turn to grey. Each cell of the eye starting to treat the signals it is receiving as background noise, as no longer even signals.
It's amazing to me that we can stop seeing something just by seeing it constantly.
Yesterday I went to the centre of town for the first time in 5 months and I saw a lot of homeless people.
With the eye exercise what becomes dominant, at least for me, is the eye's refresh signal itself, the waves of updates passing backwards from the neurons scanning for objects to identify. The shape of these waves, whether they originate from the left or right, or up or down or spiralling from the centre. I think it's easier for me to see these patterns than most people because of the amount of psychedelics substances I've consumed. The chemicals leave their signature, slowly but surely, on the optic nerve.
There is something about the eye that I could come to know by transcribing these patterns that I see. But I am not usually that interested in them. I usually just want the content that the patterns are made up of/obscuring. I also don't have any kind of specialist vocabulary that would let me describe them.
I don't know where I would go to get this specialist vocabulary. I don't know who I would tell if I invented my own. I don't know if there would be any point, so I don't do it.
What I am involved in enough to write about is the workers movement.
I was born and raised in Newcastle, in a fairly affluent area by pretty affluent people. I went to a state comprehensive that was good at teaching science and maths, alright at teaching the humanities and quite bad at teaching foreign languages.
I went to Edinburgh University to study economics. After three years, and the slow realisation that what I was being taught wasn't much more than a pseudo-science, I transferred to philosophy, a subject I had been teaching myself since I was 15 anyway. I also started to teach myself computer programming because I didn't want to be a teacher or academic which are the main careers a degree in philosophy opens up for you. I also got very good at my main occupation at the time, the smoking of the cannabis plant.
I (sort of, not really) graduated with a philosophy degree in 2017, and then failed to find an entry-level job as a software developer for another 6 months in Edinburgh, before moving back to Newcastle where I resigned my commission as smoker-in-chief and founded a software development coop called Code-Operative.
I joined ACORN Newcastle, and after a year, was elected to the board of directors of the national organisation, and took up the role of treasurer of the board. I am not incredibly gifted in that role, but I'm assured that I'm doing fine and probably no one else would have volunteered and done better.
After a successful crowdfunder, we have built an app called Red Alert, that should be helpful in alleviating some of the misery that our society seems to deliberately cultivate.
I'm hoping to start working soon on Wobbly, an app I've had designs for and several false starts at developing for a few years now.
My coop is part of a larger group of technology coops called CoTech.
I'm hoping that in the next decade we can be creative, intelligent and lucky enough to significantly impact the course of the history of this region and country.
Because I am really bored of people's lives being ruined by artificial scarcity.