It’s not really writer’s block, it’s more like the sense of fear you have when your mom asks you a question you were hoping you wouldn’t have to answer. I need to explore a couple things, but I’m not sure I want to be there when I do it. Here we go anyway. Hell, I’m giving myself bravery points for starting typing.

Let’s get the easy stuff first. I’ve been thinking lately about focus. About how we’re born into these tiny rooms of life and we think that the goal is to expand beyond the walls… assuming that familiarity and knowledge of what’s in the room is good enough for it. And I guess people who say “Bloom where you’re planted” have found a ceramics-suitable way of saying what I mean here.

When my father asks me if I’m learning web design, and if I’m learning to do more, I want to explain it like that room. Yeah, I know how to make four walls and furniture, and I could use that kind of knowledge to build a whole house. But when I’m learning, it’s an odd trend to see that things don’t grow outward, they grow inward. I can tell I’m getting better when the size of the room doesn’t change, it just becomes more and more finely detailed; that adds value.

I’m saying that I’ve been thinking about building the value of my life, by creating focus – by making things smaller and more centralized. Instead of useing your knowledge of the basics, to expand the scale of your life indefinitely… maybe use all that skill to make smaller things better… which is also a path that stretches to an indefinite point.

And that warrants a hitting of the publish button.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about something that happened to a friend of mine. She was 15, there were 10 witnesses, and I believe her.

But if I told you it was a robbery, how would you feel about her?

Why? Because you hear about robberies every day? Maybe because she would have no motive to make it up? Because 10 people don’t lie? Because she’s still sticking to her story?

What if I said, she was kidnapped by Bigfoot. Then how would you feel?

Skeptical? Ready to latch on to a detail that helps you rationalize it into the known world?  Tired of crazy people and their theories? Maybe you’d want to know what medications she was on.

And what of me, if I trust her? What if I can’t verify that a robbery ever took place. What if I can’t ever prove that Bigfoot was real, and for that matter, that he was malicious.

And what of you, that you can find a thousand sources of related information but none credible?

What if I said, she saw God.

Now, she’s a religious fanatic? Because of something that was beyond her control, that entered her life – the same as a robbery might – and altered her forever? She’s delusional and stubborn? Because where you perceive walls, she insists that there are none? She’s lying? Because your religion is science, which insists that all experiences be reproduced in order for them to be true?

What’s amazing is that so many people refuse to use all of their eyes. You cannot ignore what you physically see, but you cannot always trust it to be real. Likewise, no one can deny having inner eyes and having witnessed on at least one occasion that which cannot be seen or even measured.

Let me ask you.

Where did you hear that unicorns weren’t real? How do you know that source was trustworthy? How did they know? All opinions of this sort can be traced to science or faith. Either someone has observed that unicorns do not exist in the wild, nor are they practically accounted for throughout recorded history – or someone has met a man he trusts who says they aren’t real. And that’s why we must question both.

Well, that’s why, in a way. But what problem needs to be solved? What end ought to be reached? I say: love.

Rather than talk about myself in this case, I’m going to address mankind, and assume he is a similar animal to me.

It’s impossible not to feel sometimes as though we’re in the dark.

There’s this sense that someone with more knowledge is lording it over us, withholding it for some sinister purpose. Interrupting the process of a no-holds-barred pursuit of what is real, and right, and absolute, and instead using the limits of mankind against him. But it gets worse from there. He then issues propaganda that creates a new, imaginary explanation of things, so that we are sated.

God, when I describe it that way, don’t you just want to fight! Don’t you think you’d take back your life, you’d save us all – with courageous force! And yet.

You are sated.

Why are you sated? You couldn’t possibly know. No one could. Your inner eyes have been blindfolded, and you can feel it, but you have no recourse. You’re a victim. You’re a pawn, and you’re without a hero. You have no eyes left but the physical, which offer you profane amounts of information, but never approach the limit of what can be known.

We’ve been subjected. To what, is irrelevant, isn’t it.

It’s strange that any of us would perceive this glass ceiling along the climb to enlightenment. I’d say it depends on two things. 1, which set of eyes you are predisposed to trust - science, or faith – and 2, how deeply the two are able to intermingle in your life.

If you are able to look up the ladder, and see straight through the glass, you would tell me that the glass isn’t there. That you can continue climbing until you reach nirvana. That science proves to you that since you were able to walk up the last 10 rungs, you consider your odds at 100% for walking successfully up the next 10. You may even become convinced that this formula is infinitely reliable, and assume you had acquired enough information to sustain you from now on.

That is a lie.

You didn’t create the lie. But you’re going to live it.

If you used faith as your sole compass, you wouldn’t be able to count the rungs you’d climbed. You’d know the feeling of the thumping, though, pretty intimately. You wouldn’t know where the ladder ended… so at each new rung, you’d grope into the air, and whatever you felt would dictate your response. If you were able to reach up right over your head, and feel that in 10 more rungs, there was a ceiling – you’d tell me that after that, you couldn’t go anymore. You might also assume you were close to the top, and therefore had sufficient expertise to handle it from here.

That is also a lie.

You didn’t create it. But you’d live it.

Let’s talk about intermingling the two.

Say you were the faith climber. Your outer eyes are blindfolded.

And let’s say you got to the place where you were bumping your hand at the top of your knowledge ladder. But when you felt of the ceiling, your hand detected raised lettering, that, when you traced it, revealed that there was more ladder beyond that point. And that is all it revealed.

The man with the outer eyes would come in handy about now, wouldn’t he. And he’d gladly discuss it all with you, because right about now he can’t figure out why he can see his reflection overhead.

Sadly, the moral of that illustration is not that by working together you can achieve progress. Fact is – you’re stuck. And you can’t convince your friends of what’s happening. You start to wonder if you’re crazy. Poor Inner Eyes, his friends say, a bump is a bump – not knowing that a message had come to him, that usually only appears to men of Outer Eyes.

And Outer Eyes is screaming like a crazy man, having seen something that has thus far been a legend perpitrated by men of Inner Eyes with too much time on their hands. Fate intermingled the two on his behalf.

I say, “on the behalf of each man,” because they not only discovered limits – but they discovered them in freak accidents that do not occur for all people. The man who is predisposed to trust science has been blessed in that faith has inserted itself – very unnaturally – into his field of vision. And his friend, who knows only faith, has been blessed that science has given him something he can perceive as well.

Who only uses science or faith? Who does not intermingle the two? I say: some people. It’s not fair to polarize groups of people  or arguments – however, because of how narrow our ‘vision’ becomes when we ‘look’ toward the end of the ladder, we have essentially polarized ourselves in this respect.

I’m putting you in this next one.

If I told you I saw God, and you believed me, because that made sense to you – we’d be friends. We’d understand something about one another. There would be a spark of kindred feelings… which I consider love.

What if it didn’t make sense to you? Do you think you could love me anyway?

Probably not – not concerning my vision of God, not in that special way. You have been unable to break through the nagging feeling that you are being decieved, so you can only trust what you see, and you are predisposed to trust the eyes of science.

Keep going, you’re in the next one as well.

Let’s say I should you proof that I’ve found and documented a 24th chromosome. The eyes of science compel you to believe me. Now we share something – we earn respect for one another.

But if you have the eyes of faith, there’s little I can do to prove my work. I can’t find any verses in any religious works that say there’s any such thing as chromosomes. I can’t help you experience them. I have to move on.

I know. It’s obvious we need to understand each other – again, that’s not the point.

This is the point.

You cannot convince someone else of their limits. If I tell you that you have limits that you don’t know about… that’s a red flag for you to trust me less, not more.

Mankind must perceive his own limits. Even the ones that he cannot breach. And for that to happen, his limits must speak his language.

All of the facts – all of them – that are widely agreed upon among mankind, started out as wingnut theories and unbelievable proposals. It was only when our language was integrated with the language of the facts. And so you see the climbers’ obstacles as blessings, because that is precisely the experience they were able to pioneer, wasn’t it? They witnessed the work of a catalyst as it was dissolving into a crossover - a meeting of the languages of the known and the unknown. And what’s better, it would have made them closer friends.

These perceptions in us, they layer themselves, very much like an onion - to enforce the sense that there is a container for truth, and that it is bound by the peel, or the bag, or the holder. One of the innermost layers says seeing is believing. The one outside that says believing is creating. The next one further out, tells us that creating is knowing. And the thinnest layer just under the peel has the most of us convinced that knowing, is being.

That, too, is a lie. Even a therapist could tell you that knowing is no relation to being. And you can dwell on any layer you like, but you can’t get rid of the disappointing flavor of truth as a whole. Or truth, as it’s been handed to you, in onion form.

I know I’ve gotten long-winded, and maybe I’m giving up too early on what this essay was intended to give. I just want you to know… and I can’t make you know, can I? That in the whole of humanity, there things that faith and science and knowledge and creation and sensation cannot replicate nor distribute. That not everything beyond the glass ceiling is attainable by all, but that when you hear of a mystery that purports to reach beyond what a reasonable man would attest to, don’t first begin to doubt the man. Doubt the onion! Think outside the peel! And then the bag, and the holder and so on until you confess that you are a stranger to life just as fully as the one for whom fate intervened and began to translate the unknown – no, the unknowable – right before her eyes.

So. I’m thinking of my friend. Just like most of mankind has been subjected to a limited perceived reality, she has no choice but to perceive a vast one… one that exceeds the furthest star in the universe, as far as most are concerned. Can you image how terrified she is? The truth that she witnessed, she cannot impart – she can only paint it with words. And inside the onion, it looks an awful lot like things that others have created and recreated with great consistency, using just a chemical. We hand her that explanation and sincerely expect her to ignore the taste of it, and agree that we’re right. That’s the way we love, isn’t it. We’re going to make her choose between denial, and fear?

What do you think she chose? Well… what’s the added consequence of fear? Loneliness. If she chooses fear, we don’t know how to love her. So we don’t. But what’s the added consequence of denial? The answer is – it doesn’t matter, it’s not going to stop the fear anyway. So the easiest option is to resist admitting the truth.

Just… consider the thought, that wherever there’s a perceived wall, you’re right to suspect it’s made of a lie, and a consider that there is a truth on the other side that you maybe will never reach, and that if you’re lucky, reaches you instead.