Chapter Four We are Not Scientists

"I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn."---Albert Einstein



"We are not scientists!" Einstein announced, as he looked me square in the eye. "Not yet! Not by a long shot. As scientists we should be able to create a new synthesis of consciousness. Piaget stated that an infant, slowly, over a six-month period of time learns to assemble or learns to 'synthesize' a highly unique and significant relationship between its consciousness, its body and the objects of the world. However, what scientists have failed to realize is that every night our conscious minds attempt to create another synthesis but, since our imagination is untrained, we fail miserably in uniting our conscious mind with the dream environment. Not that engineering a concious experience is dreaming not by a long shot. We fail, much more so at creating an intentionally engineered conscious experience." His arm fell to his side, pencil in hand as if defeated. A sparkling glint of sadness enveloped his eyes as threy slowly traced the patterns on the tiled floor.

I was happy that I had exciting news. And I knew I could cheer him up. "I found my hands in my dreams!"
"Ahah!" He turned and looked at me."Tell me more."

I had just returned to see Einstein after a three-week hiatus –Christmas break. Einstein's task had been a lot harder than I expected. I told him that I began repeating the phrase "This is a dream. Look at my hands." as soon as Christmas break started. Einstein wanted to know every detail of my endeavor and I told him that every morning I reviewed my dreams looking for an instance in which I saw my hands. But day after day I failed to even get a glimpse of my hands. By the end of the first week I was tired out and still no success, not even one close call. I had never put forth so much effort to achieve something in my life. I figured that if I quit now I would only try it again in a few weeks so I continued. Half of the next week went by and still nothing.

I decided to take a new approach. I bought a pair of bright yellow rubber gloves and wore one to bed. I figured that having it on my hand while sleeping would trigger me to find my hands. That night I dreamt I was walking through a museum and on my right hand was a bright yellow rubber glove. I felt ashamed for wearing the glove in a public place and hoped no one would see it and make fun of me. When I awoke in the morning and remembered this dream I was pissed! I saw my hand but didn't realize that I was dreaming! I was so close! And without success.

I told Einstein that sometimes hours would go by where I was totally oblivious to my intention. It was not uncommon for me to spend hours at a time thinking about something else before realizing that I wasn't repeating the phrase. I refined the process by noticing when and where my thoughts would stray away from my objective. When these situations arose I took note of what I had so absorbed my attention and taken me away from my task. I braced myself for a possible four weeks of this tiring repetition and devoted every moment of my time to the task. I decided that if the current situation wasn't going to put my life in jeopardy or my health in peril I did without thinking about it and opted to continually repeat the phrase.

I told Einstein that I pressed on and three quarters of the way into the third week, I went to bed, fell asleep and was dreaming a normal dream. I dreamt I was sitting on the tailgate of an old rickety pick up truck that was driving down an old country dirt road. I heard a metal can begin to rattle its way down the bed of the truck. It reached the tailgate and I watched as it fell and bounced pretty high up off the dirt road. It soared into the air and back down again hitting the road but when it bounced back up again I couldn't believe what I saw. The bounce was the exact same as the first one! The can bounced in exactly the same tumbling motion as the first time! What I witnessed was impossible. Suddenly it hit me - This is a dream!

An incredible surge of energy shot up my right arm. And I found myself looking at my hand. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was alive and existing in a place entirely different than anything I had ever known. There was an extraordinary sense of freedom, mystery and specific air of the profound. I couldn't believe that I was alive somewhere else, somewhere where I'd never been. I was standing in the kitchen of my parent's house staring my hand. And my hand had an immense amount of wrinkles on it. It looked like an inflatable pool toy that had been mashed down all winter long and had been entirely forgotten about and unused.

I heard a door open and peered around the kitchen corner and noticed my dad coming out of his bedroom. Suddenly, I became afraid and walked into the living room and sat down. I wondered if he knew that I was dreaming.
Out of nowhere, the dream changed. I was still aware of being entirely alive someplace else but now I was in a dark room or a corridor. A doorway appeared to my left. Inside it was a view of Earth wrapped tightly in chains. A hidden booming voice asked me. "What are you going to do with this?" The chains started to squeeze the planet. I was instantly terrified. My mind raced for some kind of solution.

"Missing link! Missing link!" I cried out pointing at the doorway attempting to beckon my solution to solving Earth's crisis. The chains disappeared and were replaced with a single floating link. The door closed. "How will you control your fears?" The hidden voice asked.

A zombie appeared in front of me. His eyes were glowing, his flesh was in pieces and he was charging at me. I froze to the spot. Before I knew it he was on top of me. He pummeled me with his arms and fists. As soon as I began to defend myself the zombie stopped, turned and walked right through the wall. I heard a woman scream in horror. I scanned the corridor for a door. Then, brazenly, I walked right through the wall following the Zombie.

The strength of the dream suddenly disappeared. I was still aware I was dreaming and had some volition, but it paled in comparison to the previous state. It was nowhere near as real. The captivating force that convinced me that I was doing something completely impossible was replaced with heavy emotions and a kind of drunken lucidity. I knew that I was dreaming but the crystal clear awareness that I was alive was gone.

I found myself standing on a spacious upper level landing in a cafeteria or huge open office/warehouse of sorts. A bunch of men were sitting at a table in front of me. A woman was entertaining them. I was surprised to see it was Lisa, a woman from my college that I had fallen completely in love with. I was standing directly behind her out of her sight. Somehow I knew that this was her work place and that she and I were married. She was talking to the guys about having a lewd sexual encounter with one of more of them. I was shocked. The guys glanced at me nervously.

"Your husband is right behind you." One of them said.

"No he's not," she said turning and looking right through me. She couldn't even see me.

"Oh my gosh!" I thought. "I am invisible!"

Heart broken, appalled and angry, I turned away from the scene and found myself sitting in the back seat of a car. Lisa pulled up in a blazer next to me. I immediately thrust myself awkwardly out of the back seat. She was not happy to see me. We walked to a big, heavy, wooden door set in a massive stone archway. It looked like London in the mid 1800's. I tried to talk to her but she refused to have anything to do with me.

Suddenly, out of nowhere the scenario repeated itself. Somehow, I was again sitting in the back seat of a car as Lisa pulled up. Again I awkwardly struggled to get out. Angrily, I asked myself why I was always in the back seat of this damn car? Again we met at the same immense doorway. This time she took me up into her apartment.

Next thing I knew we were sitting at a small table with our son. Lisa filled my plate with huge portentous amounts of meat from a roast she had cooking all day. She stared at me vehemently with hate and distrust pouring from her eyes. As the dream ended, thoughts of ways to salvage our marriage were running through my head.

Einstein burst out laughing at the recounting of my struggle and became quizzically silent. He stood and slowly paced around the laboratory with his hands behind his back. He stopped in front of a window put his hand on his chin, "You forgot to look at another object and back again at your hand." I was immediately offended. I wanted congratulations and accolades for my achievement. I had worked my butt off to do this and all he could say was that I failed? He read my mood and countermanded with the question, "What was the primary difference between the two different states of awareness that you experienced?"
I pondered for a few moments and said that the first dream was crystal clear and I was completely amazed that I felt like I was alive and living in a body that was as every bit as real as this one. I pondered further and told Einstein that the second half of the dream seemed muddled, heavy and filled with my emotional concerns. I explained to Einstein that I became completely wrapped up in what was taking place and the awe of existing in my body someplace else entirely disappeared.

"Don't get me wrong. What you've done is an achievement but we don't exactly have time to pin a little star on your lapel or name a day after you. It is, however, important to analyze your experience because if there is one thing that is more important than having the experience itself it is what you do with the experience afterwards that counts." He paused looking at me.

"If you could compare the two states of awareness you experienced with other states of awareness from daily life what would be comparable?"

I thought for a moment. “The first half of the experience was amazing, unbelievable and was entirely impossible but happening kinda like riding a roller coaster or being in a life or death situation. The other experience was entirelly about me kind like I was drunken, petty, and filled with concerns about love and being loved."

"And you said you felt like you were someplace else?"

"Oh yeah, I was. I was. . . I don't know how else to say it but I was and still am astonished by how I was alive in every possible way but not here in a place where I am familiar with everything. I was alive but elsewhere." I paused. "Does that make any sense?"

"No matter," he said and waved his hand. "You're not there yet. " He seemed internally frustrated and wanted to say something but refrained at the last moment.

"You see in the everyday world we believe we are surrounded by objects and thus we react to the world as if it were a world of objects. Which, of course the world is. The world is a world of objects. There is no denying that. Our world, which surrounds us, IS an objective world. But as the living creatures that we are, we also have an interior or subjective experience of this very same world. Whether what we are perceiving is internal or external is a debate that has raged on and on in philosophy since the times of Aristotle and perhaps before.

Einstein began to pace the wide empty space between his desk and the door. His eyes seemed to be looking through the walls gazing somewhere far away. "Some certain handful of philosophers believe that when we look at an object the light of that object hits the eye and the image of the object is rendered in the mind. They believe that this image in the mind is what we see and interact with. This assertion leads to the conclusion that what we see and interact with is an illusion, a projection. This particular theory is called the Cartesian Theatre.

“Another very certain set of philosophers, scientists or what have you, believe that we don't see an illusion or a projection. They believe that we see objects of the world directly as they are. Either way it doesn’t really matter because reasonable points and arguments hardly ever change the overall direction and course of our lives. Our ways of thinking and believing things about ourselves and our world seemingly are permanent and unchangeable but what if we could change just a fraction of that!" He winked at me and erupted with a joyful laughter. He began to move and rearrange, I assumed- cleaning up, objects on his laboratory table.

"What’s important is to realize that our world is a world of objects and that our conscious minds have learned to have sensorimotor reactions to a world of objects. Piaget called the process of learning to have the appropriate sensorimotor reaction to the world of objects - assimilation and accommodation. Our minds learn to assimilate and accomdate sensory information to fit into the smaller arrangement of language and even smaller yet, into tiny concepts” He held up a plastic fruit banana. “You see a banana from this viewpoint and it looks tall. You see it from another viewpoint and it is the size of quarter, an oddly bent quarter. Our minds assimilate and accomdate the mulitiude of different views of the objects as the same object! And there behind the language, behind the concepts a plethora of sensory information exists frozen in a kind of state of suspended animation. Too accept the classification of ‘banana’ as a ‘banana’ for the rest of our friggin' lives is a huge waste!
“Why is that? Why do we want to free the sensory information from concepts and language?”
"Because our conscious minds remain trapped there merely responding to the concept and the language enforcing our minds to believe that all there is are sensorimotor reactions to world of objects. Once a banana always a banana. Most artists are not happy with this situation and endeavor to access the raw sensory information encased underneath language and concepts. Artists love to draw the objects, study the shadows, the space, between things, the lights, the varying hues of colorand so on. Most artists desire complete involvement with raw sensory stimulous. They know something of extraordinary value is right there but they are untrained and cannot, as yet, and as in your case, engineer a conscious experience.”
Regular people, I think it was Buddha who said 'There is nothing new under the Sun! We wander the world, through the rest of our lives looking at objects, smelling them, tasting them, handling them but we are still having the same basic sensorimotor reaction to objects. And we think this is an intelligent things to do!" He rolled nearly out of his chair laughing.
“What are we supposed to do?”

"You see we don't have to believe and act as if the world of objects it is a world of objects. The real world is the real world because it is the only thing that offers our senses the conviction that something besides ourselves exists! This is very important to realize. Our senses are convinced that something exists. But as Immanuel Kant realized in what was it 1700's . . . ?" He looked at me eyes pleading for a date. I shrugged my shoulders as I didn't know and didn't care who Immanuel Kant was.
"I will explain Kant's idea more to you at a later date, but for now allow me to assert on Kant's behalf that there is no way for us to know what it is our senses of convinced of. Something is out there riddling our senses tempting our minds to take the challenge and solve its riddle. And this is the heart of the matter; having the guts to believe that the riddle can be solved is everything! Without that we are done. Kaput! Nada! Without something to solve we are nothing. What is amazing about sensing the world is that the sensation of objects is both an internal and external experience. As the taste, touch, smell, sight and sound of objects meets one of our five senses that sensation becomes an internal subjective experience and highly synthesized one at that. We will talk more about that later when things become apparent to you. For now, pay close attention to this dual mode of sensation, existing internally, because you are aware of the object or rather, the sensation in question, and existing externally because the world is a world of definitive objects.

Einstein grabbed a book sitting next to a corner sink. It was aplty titled Consciousness and the World he read aloud from it, "This is an object. But because you can perceive this book, some part of it exists inside your mind, in whatever form that it does, the rest of it as you can see, exists outside your mind in the real world. He flipped it open to a dog-eared page and said, "Philosophers of mind like Brian O'Shaughnessy acknowledge this dual mode of perception and perceiving.”
Of this dual mode Einstien said tilting his glasses down and reading over them, 'It is absolutely unique to the sensation. All other phenomenologies, whether of mental imagery or dream experience or joy or amusement or anxiety or shock, come to consciousness solely as the internal object of the experience: they never come as well as its distinct and perceptible object: they never appear in the mind in this double mode' (534-35).

"You see, when you dreamt yourself alive in this elsewhere place you actually were handling the dual mode of sensation in a very novel way. And you did it with little coaching and very little understanding of what you were doing. For some of us just an idea is enough to give us the impetus to achieve something that is exquisitely impossible. Perhaps it is because you are an artist. But then again in some way we are all artists.

Chapter Three: Abstract and Imaginary Sensory Information

"Learning is experience. Everything else is just information."
– Albert Einstein


"Cement!"

"Hmmm?" Einstein said turning in his chair, his glasses mounting the lower half of his nose.

"Cement!"

He took off his glasses and looked at me puzzlingly.

"I . .. uh . . umm . . well." I didn't want to tell him that I had done the best I could in repeating 'I intend to find my hands in my dreams' for two days and when the third day approached I couldn't stand it any longer and happenstancely, found a handprint in sidewalk and chucked the whole assignment.

"Come, come. Sit, sit."

He urged me to sit on the floor in a corner of his lab and then sat down on my left.

He nodded his head towards the window.

"It kills us so softly."

I looked at him puzzled.

"Look! Look at the light!"

Light streamed in through the window. A slow wind bustled a tree and created a very fluid like shadow that gave the light a kind of life. Dust floated all about and glistened endowing the room with a sense of eternity.

"The universe is so gentle with us. It kills us . . . so softly. " His hand motioned through thin air as if delicately caressing the light. “It takes what 80 - 90 years of looking at light to wear away the ability to see. And what? 60-70 years of hearing to make the ears ineffective. Certainly there are similar limits to touch, taste and smell."

We sat in silence for more than a few moments. I became uncomfortable and increasingly agitated. I began to wonder about what to say, why to say it and whether or not it was my own thoughts or the thoughts my father.

"Shhhh . . . Listen to your senses."

I heard cars driving by, a dull murmur of people talking on the street, birds chirping. I also felt the cold university tile floor and I ran my fingers along the wood grain of a cupboard.

"Your imagination is much more timid than I thought it was."

I was offended. His statement was preposterous and I wanted to tell him so. But somehow I quelled the desire and saw that my entire feelings of offense were stemmed from my father's insistence that I know arguments about knowledge back for forth. If I was truthfull with myself I had to admit that I didn't really know anything about the imagination.

"How did your attempt to find your hands in your dreams go?"

"I . . . uh. . ."

"You found cement."

I again wanted to reiterate my previously felt feelings on how great it was that I found a hand print in cement and how I wanted to tell him that this counted as evidence and that I would rather it not be treated this way. That I had a right to speak up for whatever purpose my imagination had and if taht was finding cement then so it shall be. But I was so flustered and unable to speak that I just sat there.

His took his mouth and did something very strange with it and it made me think that what I had just said was unblievable. I began again to speak aloud and I reiterated that imprinted cement could certainly be found by a future race of beings the very evidence we have of that exists in dinosaour footprints.

He took my mood for granted and talked to it.

"Oh, how interesting, but your mistaken. Perhaps concrete wouldn't exist in their time because the theory of concept compression-over-time says that when things get lost in time they don't appear to their finders as what they originally were. The context is gone. All we have is an artifact. For instance, the Greek Parthenon exists to us as the Greek Parthenon. But for them it whatever it was because there is no way for us to conceive of the entirety of the times they lived in. Concept degradation over time produces the oddest arrangement of artifacts and concepts that can only offer a literal interpretation. Historians can only report things. Archeaologists could only find things that already exist. Spermatologists could only exist as sperm whales.


I looked at him kinda curiosly but peeked like I didn't want him to continue his conjecture.

literally - 'This was literally found right next to the Parthenon. This was found in the Parthenon. The books of the time say this man was the leader of this time. This book says the Parthenon was built by so and so.'



"Now, to evolve this same problem into our present time I could ask permission of your mind to question, 'What if 20th century artifacts were all that were discovered by these future inconceivable peoples. What kind of paintings would they find? Pick three."

"Mark Rothko's 'Untitled, 1958'. Julian Schnabel's, 'Eight Hundred Blows'. And . . uh. . . . some unknown painter."

"Now, lets say that they never find a representation of what they consider art. Art in their times is whatever kind of B.S. art it is they have to deal with. Lets say they find something entirely different."

"Like what?"

"Like random collections of abstract sensory information"

"What is abstract sensory information?"

"It is sensory information that cannot be conceptualized."

"What?"

"Look."






"And Look at this one."






"You see, this Jackson Pollock, offers a sensory conviction to the viewer's senses without delivering a context, nor a means of interpretation, and certainly the painting gives no reference to the external world. On the other hand, Merit Oppenheim's 'Object' delivers a context, offers a very striking interpretation and references near infinite worlds! One is composed entirely of abstract sensory information, which is resistant to conceptualization, and the other offers definite concepts. Watch again."




"You are perceiving without conceptualizing! Your cognitive processes are halted just enough to allow your eyes to see without turning what you see into concepts. This is a highly unique situation! Look around you! Is there anything in this room that you perceive without conceptualizing?" I looked around the room and back again at the painting. He pointed to my feet - "Sneakers, shoelaces, eyelets and um . . . hmmm . . . Well!. What do you call this?" He grabbed the end of my shoelace pointing to its encased plastic tip. Somebody somewhere knows the name for this!" We both busted up laughing.

"You see to conceptualize abstract art work into the overgeneralization 'Art' is a huge downfall and misses the whole point of abstraction in art. What we have in abstract art is of very profound cognitive importance. Abstract art renders one's conceptualizing faculties unable to conceptualize because abstract art conveys sensory conviction without delivering 'understanding.' But we are dummies we don't know what that waht you are getting is the purest substance of abstraction. We are used to conceptualizing sensory information and then turning it into language and therefore were are able to ignore most if not all of the sensory information coming into our bodies by holding time with conceptual stillness a feat not achieved by to many cept humans onthis planet.. A simple glance at an object and we know what it is. The rest of the sensory details of the object are useless to us. We don't 'understand' Pollock's 'Blue Poles' because it is quite simply - abstract sensory information. And abstract sensory information allows one to perceive without 'knowing' what is they are perceiving. The only other time this occurred in our lives is when we were infants.

"Art scholars today and perhaps even some artists have a habit of making a willful linguistic interpretation of abstract art and miss its cognitive importance. Instead of conducting a cognitive examination of art scholars deliver prose like this.” He stood and began to orate - perfectly mimicking an old English accent and conveying a definitive authoritative scholarly tone - "By means of his interlaced trickles and spatters, Pollock created an oscillation between an emphatic surface - further specified by highlights of aluminum paint - and an illusion of indeterminate but somehow definitely shallow depth that reminds me of what Picasso and Braque arrived at thirty-odd years before . . . "

"Mr. Clement Greenberg is certainly responding to the abstract sensory information in a cognitive manner but he fails to realize the overall cognitive impact of abstract art is to render the conceptualizing faculties of mind a moment of pause. The Pollacks painting delivers sensory information in bulk form. He paused in silence for dramatic effect.

"Hence, little bits of abstract sensory information could be found at random by this future civilization and conceptualized and contextualized differently by them to accord to the consensus of the found artifacts. Let's say they find the Greek Parthenon, the Ancient wall of China, and a couple of airplanes and trains. All as intact as could be. But along with it they find random collections abstract sensory information, which is conceptualized by them as a common artifact tying all three places together. But this artifact never existed in our age and time! The abstract sensory information is conceptualized by their minds to accord to their means and methods of investigation. There is no telling what this artifact is from our perspective because the abstract sensory information is conceptualized by their minds! And yet they would prize this artifact as the most definitive representation of our time!" He laughed aloud. Can you imagine what it would be?

He peeked my curiosity and I stood at the edge of my seat.

"But I thought you said that abstract sensory information cannot be conceptualized."

"Yes and no. Abstract sensory information yields to any willful examination. Thus, under art historical scholarship or criticism abstract art yields to description and the powers of language. Any willful examination of abstract sensory information transforms a cognitive examination into imaginary sensory information. Abstract sensory data and imaginary sensory data are the exact same thing and yet the differences between the two are as wide as the Atlantic. The two are as different as night and day. It is only a willful interpretation that separates the two.

He paused for a moment searching my face for clues to rescue me from my confusion.

“You see abstract sensory information overpowers our ability to conceptualize because it delivers sensory information 'en masse' - in large quantities - rendering our ability to understand to a standstill forcing us, by default , to conclude the abstract art is meaningless elitist bullshit - of which it is- if all you understand is simple prosaic descriptions and high auction prices. Thus, it is vital to understand that abstract sensory information imposed upon with one's will transforms it into imaginary sensory information."

"Okay, think I get that. It reminds me of something I wrote down just recently." I dug through my backpack and took out my notebook. "Uh . . . here it is. Sally Everett, an associate professor of art at Metropolitan State College said that, "Art is incomprehensible until understood and understanding occurs as ordinary people fit art into meaningful personal contexts. Without context art is insignificant information" (Everett, 275).

"Aha! Fantastic!” Einstein announced intoning a french accent. “Now please tell me how in the world of all worlds can sensory information be insignificant? In evolutionary terms how can a creature simply designate incoming sensory information as insignificant? Any kind of creature that wants to survive, thrive and live to see another day does so by using all the sensory information presented to its senses. Otherwise its chances of survival are diminished considerably.

"In the 18th century Immanuel Kant said something along these lines - 'Since imagination is the forerunner of reason it contextualizes and conceptualizes or 'synthesizes' abstract sensory information in accord of our ability to reason.' Assuming that these future peoples cognitive processes are similar to ours I can assert that the artifact they find outweighs the importance of any possible existence of a concrete imprinted hand mark for even if they did find the hand mark they have not conceptualized hands. The very idea of hands is as foreign to them as they are to us. The artifact of hand imprint on wet cement would be unable presents itself to them as we see it. Therefore, the very existence of the imprinted hand is side-shuttled for more interesting artifacts that accord to their basic search premises, which according to them is that we are an intelligent species capable of producing technological machinery with our tentacles and under no circumstance do they actually recognize intelligence in anything that looks like an animal paw print!"

My sudden change of expression lit Einstein into fits and rolls of laughter. His eyes sparkled and he grasped his sides in exasperation. I couldn't help but to join him.

After a good fit of laughter I felt the weight of embarrassment lift and I found myself fearlessly expressing some of the ideas I had examined with my imagination.

"Earth and the Sunshine Kids!"

He looked at me quizzically.

I explained that I conceived that the future beings that had no idea what we looked like had evolved to become aware of themselves as planets. Thus, in some far off inconceivable future was a sexless teenager named Earth who was oblivious to our arrangement of a sun centered solar system. And yet, a sun or something similar still existed in the Earth's world and the orbiting planets of our solar system were still there but were conceived of and experienced by the Earth as neighbors, friends, schoolteachers and so on. Mars was the bully at school who picked on Earth. Venus was a warm bodied utterly friendly girl that had all the guys chased after. Jupiter perhaps was a teacher the Earth trusted and consulted in times of need or just out of curiosity and the desire to learn something. The Earth's parents, however, were from some far off solar system. The Earth's mother was a world made entirely of water. And Earth's father was made almost entirely of dirt but had underwater springs that would sometimes break the surface creating momentary oceans or fits of tearful emotion. All of these future beings existed on something they had yet to conceptualize or discover as a planet or whatnot. Maybe they knew they were in a land or perhaps they lived on some huge plain of ground wherein the horizon existed as something akin to the horizon of a black hole.

"What do their bodies look like?"

I admitted that I had a hard time conceiving or imagining a different kind of body for them. I told Einstein that I continued to experiment with the idea in spite of my inability to imagine what they looked like. I admitted that I couldn't conceive of them as having human like bodies but at the same time I couldn't imagine anything else.

"Very interesting. Fanciful and yet wrapped with a touch of sobriety and simplicity. I am dying to ask you what do you think these people believed about our senses?"

"What do you mean?"

"Telling from the objects of our world and how they operate they would conclude that we perceived the world in strict terms of sequence. Perhaps if they were to find a human body and our anthropological means of categorization the would call us Sequentia homosapien!"

"I am not following you."

"According to their view, which is flattered with their assumptions, the settlements they found don't shed any evidence as to what we look like. But they have tons of indirect evidence about how we perceived our world. The question is - What would they conclude about our senses?"

I was baffled that he was going that deep. I didn't make any sense to me.

"Without the evidence of a human body they would picture us with six to seven eyes or 50 ears; beings capable of devouring sequence! If you study the objects of our world and how our objects operate from cars, to VCRs to buses - all of it can be seen to operate by following a strict sequence of events."

"But if they've got a VCR then they have could find out what we looked like just by watching a tape!"

"Whose to say that they could even detect the same visual spectrum that we see? You're talking about living beings with the mass of planets! The evolution of a planet into a living thing fully aware of itself complete with a corresponding life sustaining perceptual environment is phenomenal! A race of such creatures, perhaps, would have synthesized time and space with ultra-slow moving x-rays or gamma rays; not in accordance with the visible spectrum."

"But if they couldn't see our visual spectrum then how did they find the remains of our civilization?"

"Ahah! Yes of course! Who knows?" He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Great question because it show you are headed in the direction of the inconceivable. I think such a question pushes the very limits of the imagination into the unimaginable. And to conceive of the unimaginable takes guts. By exercising the imagination with these thought experiments we are searching for a sense of awe as well as the feeling or the knowing or perhaps even the mood that allows us to acquiese to the idea that it is possible to achieve the impossible."

He looked at me specifically and squinted his eyes as if here were getting ready to tell me a secret. "And further, when things happen in a sequence there are only so many probable versions of events that can occur within a sequence. The plethora of sheer sequence that exists in our times would force them to conclude we were locked in our rationality and thus, artificially intelligent."

"Imagine that," he said and turned to his desk sharpening a pencil.

"But I mean eventually they WOULD find a skeleton of us or a picture or something."

"But what if they didn't? What if this project is shared only among a few high-minded professors who have only recently discovered these curious remnants? And they have only begun to discuss what to do with this discovery."

"Well then what about circumstantial evidence? Doorknobs, handles forks and knives could tell them we had hands."

"That's bullcrap!" He said pounding his desk and standing up. "Tentacles do the same job! Grasping and turning are not new evolutionary inventions! Why I believe that it was 2.3 billion years ago that the first jellyfish roamed the vast and ancient undersea world that the world was at the time.

"Erase sequence from your future Earth's world and what do you have?"I sat there in full concentration attempting to concieve of a conceptual arrangement that was impossible to concieve. "Now your turning to face the silence that comes with facing and pondering the inconceivable!”

"You see the task you've been assigned is more than a bit out of your reach. It will take more than your best to accomplish finding your hands in your dreams. Since you are dumb and your imagination rusty I had to be very patient with you and non-demanding even though you love the challange of meeting demands. Think and ponder of the light, sound, taste, touch and smell and tell me not that as a crow flies that light is your constant reminder!" Einstein announced. "And since you smoke cigarettes and drink beer and have the occasional coffee - taste, touch, smell and sound are also your constant reminders! Every single change in anyone of the five senses shall serve as a constant reminder for you to look at your hands. It is all too often that we ignore the world around us and operate on habit. The objects of the world rule our minds and force us to correspond with reality in artificially intelligent manner. Sounds are always interpreted as cars, buses trucks, trains or whatever may be. Light always lends the conviction of trains, planes or automobiles. Touch is always a desk, a toothbrush, or a carrot. Your task is to be alert to every single change in your perceptual environment and to be keen enough to use those changes to remind you that -this is a dream! And to look at your hands!

He paused for a moment allowing me to gather my things and he added, "You see, to be an imagination engineer, you have to be an inventor. You have to be able to improvise on a moments notice and use everything at your disposal. You have to be willing to entertain ideas beyond your wildest fantasies and then you have to have the audacity to attain those impossibilities. Make the decision to do this. Put your mind to it and you'll achieve something astounding."

Chapter Two: Logical Incongruencies

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity."
– Albert Einstein

I walked in and found Einstein ruminating and slowly walking along the length of his laboratory. “Why doesn’t this moment feel impossible? Given all the random and chance events that went into creating this moment we should be experiencing the impossible!”

He saw me and announced with a finger pointing skyward, “It is only by the slimmest possible chances that life arose on this Earth. Do you know how slim a cord we dangle on? The universe exploded into a flurry of matter and anti-matter. Thus, matter and anti-matter should have canceled each other out leaving nothing. Among scientists it is unanimous; matter and anti-matter were created in equal amounts and should have annihilated each other. By all accounts matter should not exist! But by some inexplicable reason it is believed that an unexplained random chance event occurred allowing enough matter to escape annihilation and create all the matter we see in the universe today.

"But this random chance event - Why did it occur? No one really knows. The latest debates say that an unknown process called baryogenesis created the asymmetry between matter and antimatter.” He looked at me poignantly waiting to see if I knew what asymmetry meant. I nodded and he continued. “By unknown scientists mean hypothetical. Baryogenesis is still a hypothesis and yet somehow somewhere this incongruency is not the be all end all of their conclusions or theories - they still continue to believe a linear sequence of events gave rise to all we see.”

He sat down, weathered but sharply focused. “In spite of this incongruency scientists’ logic prevails and the timeline or sequence of events that led up to the creation of earth are still accepted as truth bearing. He looked at me and blinked repeatedly as if seeing something astounding.

“And yet another logical incongruency exists,” he said springing from his chair and quickly perusing his shelves of books. He found one and plucked it from its encasement. He leafed through and found a page with a turned down corner. Then he read aloud. “If it were not for a slight fluctuation in the density distribution of matter, theorists contend, galaxies would have been unable to form and life would have been unable to evolve (Parker).

“And still another logical incongruency exists! If the Earth were a million miles closer to the sun the Earth would be to hot for
life to evolve. Another million miles away and the Earth would be too cold for life to begin. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. In spite of all these incongruencies in our logic life is here. And still this moment does not feel impossible. How did your logical incongruency go?”

I looked at him surprised by the sudden recognition and a bit shocked because I didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about. Einstein nearly rolled his eyes at me. Instantly I felt insignificant, embarrassed and uncomfortable the same way I did whenever my father rolled his eyes at me. I felt like I let Einstein down and yet at the same time I faintly knew what he wanted of me.

“Let’s go into the future for a moment and examine some logical incongruencies there. Let us imagine that in some far off distant future Earth there is a civilization of intelligent beings that have found scattered, rare remnants of our civilization. They have found our writing but are unable to translate. They have found our manner of living in terms of the layout of our homes, its fixtures and amenities. They have found our planes, trains and automobiles but they have yet to find a skeleton, or any remnant of what we look like neither in books nor pictures.”

“How could they not know how we look Einstein?”

“This is only their first archaeological dig and it is occurring in various parts of their world and their findings are the first acknowledgement of a race of intelligent beings that came before them. And also these beings look entirely different from us. They are so different as to be nearly inconceivable. They are impossible beings whose very nature is similar and yet utterly different from anything we can know or speak of. And for some odd unknown reason they have come to the conclusion that the intelligent beings that existed thousand of millennia before their time had tentacles - not hands. As of yet there is no shred of evidence to refute this conclusion but lots of evidence to support it.

"Now, your task is to stretch your imagination and conceive of the impossible. Next week you must come back with a definitive yet still highly unimaginable idea of what these future beings that are digging up the remains of our civilization looked like. To do this you must go and gather every bit of knowledge you have, then look at the full length of your knowledge and compare and contrast all the weird and crazy ways this future intelligent life form may look like. Then you must go one step further and create the impossible! You must come back with a very definitive yet still highly unimaginable idea of what these future beings look like. Give your imagination all the awe in the world, in the universe and let the imagination dream a current of awe that will pull you into allowing yourself to conceive of and achieve the impossible.”
He looked at me quizzically as if waiting for me to complete the assignment immediately.

“I can’t do this on the spot!”

“Of course you can’t.” He said frowning mischievously. “How was your assignment from last week?”

Finally, a chance at redemption. I was thrilled. I told him that the most absurd conclusion I could come up with was that the perceptual environment was infinite.

“Yes,” he said unimpressed. “Given that we are always moving in space and time, there are always two things that change with specific measurable consistency, an objects location in space and time. Right now, as we sit still, we are moving in six different directions at once. We move at 1038 miles per hour with the rotation of the Earth. The Earth itself moves at 67,00 miles per hour along its orbit around the sun; the solar system in which the Sun and Earth reside in glide along at 135 miles per second; the region of the galaxy that we exist in moves along at 155 miles a second; and the galaxy itself is trucking along at 185 miles per second. Thus, we are moving in six different directions at once. And if we were to locomote ourselves either by walking or driving or taking an elevator we would be moving in seven directions. Therefore, even if there are no detectable perceptual changes in the object, the fact that the objects we are looking at and we ourselves are moving in six different directions should give us the impetus to search for the smallest, slightest perceptual changes because the objects position in space and time has changed.”

He turned and placed a wide eye on me – “Every single debate in academia surrounds or rather covers up or attempts to expound upon logical incongruencies! Logical Incongruencies!” He said pointing his finger skyward. “What we have here is the phenomena of logical incongruencies! These exist everywhere. In all of academia. In every subject, topic and discussion.”

“What are logical incongruencies?”

“Logical incongruencies are gaps in linear way of thinking. It is as if our reasoning goes in a straight line and then suddenly it inexplicably jumps to the left and starts a new line of reasoning. For example, in spite of the fact that the beginning of the universe, this explosion from a singularity of nearly infinite mass, defies everything we know, we still pick up our yardstick of reasoning and continue to measure things as if we actually believe that we have an accurate idea of the world, of the universe, and our humanity.”

“And this sucks because we are wrong we don’t have access to our imagination! Is that what you are saying?”

“No, what started all of physicists and cosmologists know is impossible! Beyond comprehension. Beyond our current understanding of physics. This gives us plenty of room to posit that the universe is the most intelligent thing there is.”

My jaw just about flung open. Here was a research level one university professor actually asserting the existence of God. I was stunned and shocked.

He smiled knowing the effect his words had on me.

“Just for the sake of entertaining your imagination, lets say that the universe could have been intelligent from the very beginning! We can hypothesize that what came out of that initial explosion was a highly intelligent awareness. From there we can posit that perhaps the movement of this intelligence affected the ratio of matter to antimatter in order to ensure its survival and propagation. This huge, vast and inconceivable awareness then trickled down into intelligent galaxies and then was downgraded a bit to form the first generation of Suns that scientists say must have existed out there billions of years ago! And this generation of suns held the universe in its grips for eons! Perhaps these Suns were aware of themselves as some inconceivable aspect of the universe. Then after eons these Suns crumbled and gave birth to yet more intelligent galaxies and within those galaxies another round of Suns.” He smiled and his eyes meandered to the window watching the light stream through for a few moments.

“The supreme awareness of the universe continued to trickle down from Suns to the planets like the Earth. The Earth in turn re-birthed this universal awareness into plankton and such on and so forth. This of course means that the dinosaurs had much more intelligence that we do. We are nothing compared to their intensely searching intelligence.”

“But Einstein, they were huge REPTILES! The lowest form of consciousness we know to exist is driven primarily by the instinct of fear!

“What do you know? You act as if you know everything! Perhaps it is true that our reptilian minds are a mere shadow of the dinosaur fear and anger instinct but what was encased inside their tiny minds?”

“Brain matter!” I said aloud. “Small brains and big bodies produce dumb animals! The ratio of meat to matter, brain matter, has to be like ours. There is a word for it . . . ”

“Otherwise there is no intelligence?!” He said smiling like a Cheshire cat.

“Yes!”

“That is absurd! Who has filled you with so much crap?! How do you account for the coordination of growth, healing, and hormonal secretion within all that mass? And more importantly where is consciousness located in all that dinosaur mass? Let’s throw out the hypothesis that the brain is the center of consciousness. How do you know that the dinosaurs weren’t aware of eternity and thus from their perspective their own perception and conception of time, space and movement seemed to take place on a galactic scale thereby forcing their consciousness to exist during the same era as the first generation of suns?”

Before I got a chance to repel his ridiculous statements he went on. “Further, why does the ‘amount’ of brain matter indicate intelligence? Perhaps WE are intelligent because our anus exists between 3 1/2 feet to 5 1/2 feet above the ground! It is easy to demonstrate that the closer the anus is to the ground the less intelligence an animal demonstrates. And opposingly, it is easy to demonstrate that the higher the anus is from the ground the less intelligence the animal demonstrates. Thus, the median range for producing intelligence is right here!” He sprung out of his chair and nonchalantly presented himself stood as part of the demonstration.

I was incensed. “Yeah right! But brain size correlates with brain matter. Intelligence and brain size may go together or they may not but at least there is brain matter there as a possible source of intelligence. The anus is not a source of intelligence."

“My boy, my boy. Are you saying that the height of the anus has nothing to do with intelligence because the anus is not directly connected to brain matter?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“Bipedalism! Bipedalism rose the animal from the ground and managed to get the anus at the height needed for intellectual banter!”

“But if you are using the height of the anus and comparing that with other species to determine intelligence you need a third thing, a third point.”

“Like?”

“I don’t know . . . like . . . Like some kind of energy line or frequency that governs over the 3/12 to 5/12 feet area."

“Why is that?”

“Because the height of an anus cannot be a measure for intelligence.”

“But the anus is connected to the brain right?”

“Well yeah but . . . “

“ - then perhaps that ultra fine intelligence that burst forth from the universe’s humble beginnings made it so that animals whose anus' can get in that range and have bipedalism would be intelligent!”

“I guess this explains why cats always sit on the backs of couches, huh?”

“Further, lets hypothesize that on a galactic level there is a resonance, much like the gravitational pull of the black hole at the center of the galaxy, between all the plankton in our galaxy. Since their collective mass outweighs any other creature on the planet they are the most intelligent species not only on our planted but throughout the galaxy.”

“There is no given reason on this Earth that you are right because your argument is arranged solely from an idea that has no observable merit!” I felt just like my father. He was always on my ass to be a scientist when I grew up and constantly threw my own ideas back in my face with nearly that exact same line.

Einstein burst into laughter and laughed so hard tears welled up in his eyes. When he finally caught his breath he said, “My little tour of the imagination is merely a demonstration to show you something. Without setting things up in polar opposites you will be trapped in a single view. I am sure you’ve heard the scientific story of the creation of the universe and some people whole-heartedly believe this is the case but that is bad thinking. Who was it that said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function?”

I shrugged my shoulders attempting to hide the fact that I had never heard that such an idea.

“What if this obsession with the linear evolutionary view of the universe is the result of the structure of the left brain? And the right brain, the more imaginative non-linear side is the source of the biblical version. This means the conviction that is held onto so dearly by evolutionists and to an equal measure by creationists could be the sole result of how information is predominately processed by either half of the brain.”

I laughed aloud. “But that would mean that there is rampant dogmatism on both sides. That would mean that countless years could go by without knowing that one’s beliefs were merely the result of the brain structure. It means that years upon years of a peoples lives are spent in meaningless toil debating over the way the brain processes information without ever knowing it!”

“How do we know it is not this way? Born and raised in an environment one would have been taught, versed and coached to embrace being a republican or a democrat – creationist or scientist. The body would grow to uphold these views and tie them to emotions creating a nearly unmovable being. But why do that? Why not see and explore both views without investment by having the audacity to go into the imagination on a journey of awareness.”

“Hmmm?”

"In order to think accurately about anything one has to take what one knows to opposite extremes thereby stretching the imagination and reason in tandem. Reason and imagination do not work in tandem when one side of the brain dominates the other. By stretching the imagination and reason in tandem one slowly becomes capable of achieving and learning extraordinary things. The thought experiment was meant to give you an example of stretching your imagination and reason together thereby touching upon awe and laughter two important ingredients in having no investment in the outcome of the impossible events that surround us. With awe there is clarity of thought and sobriety – no obsession. Without that stretch between imagination and reason we are nothing. I can guarantee you that. But with it we have everything and everthing is within our reach. Everything!" He smiled and turned on the radio dialing it to the classical music station. Vivaldi's Four Seasons played in the laboratory.

"Your time with me will be well spent. You are going to learn an exquisite art form - the art of engineering a conscious experience. So far your imagination is not trained to do this and it is your God given inborn right. Right now you are as rigid as a two-ton barracuda! You're an unmovable being! You’ve never stretched the imagination and felt born on the wings of angels!”

He danced a two-step and snapped his fingers.

"Your imagination is passive to reason when indeed it should triumph. Now you must do everything in your power to find your hands in your dreams. Repeat to yourself, 'I intend to find my hands in my dreams.' Not blindly, as if this were an affirmation of something that already exists, but in tandem with the highly reasonable and demonstrable idea that almost nothing in this world holds the imprint of the human hand. Diligently search for and compare almost all objects you encounter with your hands. Perhaps even write a list of present day objects that may lend a clue to that future civilization that the beings who existed in our times ruled their world with their hands.”

Chapter One: The Imagination

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us . . . Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison. – Albert Einstein

“Your imagination has never been trained.”

“Huh?”

“Your ability to imagine has never been harnessed. At its worst, your imagination is merely a distraction from the monotony of the daily world, and at its best it is an escape hatch into worlds of fantasy.”

I didn’t know what to say. Before I had a chance to formulate a question, Einstein peered at me, “Don’t you think it is odd that we can imagine limitless possibilities and yet we cannot attain them? Wasn’t it Hume that said, “Nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible?”

Einstein grabbed the armrest of his wooden chair and pulled himself out of his seat. “Your imagination is extraordinarily powerfull. And yet every chance you get, you remove yourself from the most incredible present moment in order to imagine sexual encounters, to imagine being famous, or to imagine being rich.”

“Your imagination has incredible power, not because you particularly have anything special about you, but because you as a human being have the power to imagine infinite things! Everyone and anyone can imagine the impossible. The question that remains is how do we attain and experience what we know to be impossible?”

I didn’t have a clue. I shrugged my shoulders and frowned, making exasperated silent gestures to plausible pathways for attaining impossible experiences. This was the third or fourth time we had met. He was a university physics professor and I a painting student. Due to a shortage of painting advisors I had been assigned to Professor Einstein, whose duty it was to teach me painting. So far he had said nothing whatsoever about painting and spoke endlessly about some crazy, but as he repeatedly insisted, 'practical' idea of actually using the imagination to engineer a conscious experince in the realm of the imagintaion.

“Your imagination rules you. It governs everything you do and yet you don’t know how to use it. You wander from the moment into a never-never land where your mind has free reign on the ‘truth’ of what is happening around you.”
I sat there trying to ponder what he was saying to me, but I could only ask the most valid question that came to my mind. “How do you define imagination, Einstein?”

“I define it just like the dictionary does.” He reached to his shelf pulling off a current version of Webster’s. He opened it just about midway and flipped singly through some pages. He ran his finger down a page and when he found the definition he spoke quietly intoning innocence and frugality. “Imagination: the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.”

He peered at me questioningly. “Or perhaps I should say the opposite about you.” He chuckled a bit and said, “I think that your imagination is highly trained. In fact, it is so highly trained that you know everything.” As if on cue and with a dart of his eyes he called my attention to the sound of a car driving by. I heard the muffled sound of what was probably a four-door car. It wasn't a truck or a semi. I knew that for sure.

“When you hear the sound of a car driving by your ability to make common sense conclsions about the world around you automatically interprets the sound to be that of a car. But, your ears have only detected the sound of the‘car.’ From that single sensation of sounds we assume that the sound itself is full and valid proof that a car has just driven by our window.”

“But it has. If I were to hear the sound of a car drive by my window I would most certainly know that it was a car.” He peered at me and then again darted his eyes to the left. The sound of a car began again and slowly went from one side of the room to the other.

“Your finely trained imagination tells you that a car just drove by,” he smiled mischievously.

“Well that’s because it was a car that just drove by. It couldn’t be anything else. All I have to do is jump up and go over to the window the next time a car drives by and I will see that it is a car driving by. It is not going to be some kind of sound effect or trick. It will be a car.”

“But how do you know it’s going to be a car?” He asked like an exasperated grandmother.

“From past experience!” I exclaimed. “I’ve heard that sound thousands of times and of course this time doesn’t mean that it will not be a car. It could be a truck or semi or a bus, or something. A frickin’ moped!”

“So again, let me reiterate that your imagination, which has been finely trained, is telling you that what is going by is a car, a bus or semi-truck.”

“It’s not my imagination. I am not imagining it. The sound is real. It is coming from that direction.” I was my father’s son and he had raised me to embrace the art of argumentation. I could hold my own in an argument in nearly any subject or situation I found myself in.

“But the car is not really or actually present to your senses.”

“The sound of the car is present to my senses, which is why I can detect that it is a car in the first place!”

“Yes, only a sound is present to your senses nothing else is. Even if you were to jump up and run to the window in order to catch a glimpse of the car, you still would not have enough ‘evidence’ to prove that what you saw and heard was actually a car.”

“That’s insane! It’s a car whether I hear it or see it; it is still a car!”

Einstein bowled over laughing. He clutched the sides of his stomach and bellows of laughter erupted into the room. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at me, the situation or what.

When he recovered he said, "You’re not a scientist of perception. If we were to analyze it your common sense conclusions in a correct manner, we’d find that past experience, common sense, and reasoning join together to tell you that that ‘sound’ is a car. When it is not. Is is simply an abstract sensation that you are detecting.” He paused smiling, waving his finger at me. Then he continued, “This University is a research one institute. The means we do hands on scientific, practical research. If you are attending the university you must use all that academia has to offer you. Here, today, you and I, we are cognitive scientists who use empirical reasoning to establish the validity of our observations. You cannot base your conclusion that, ‘a car has just driven by’ on past experience. That is inadmissible at this university and for the purposes of your training - inadmissible to your mind. For instance what would happen if a friend of yours saw a UFO in the same manner you heard the car. He would report to you the details of what he witnessed, the sights, the sounds of a hugely impressive craft, obviously made by an extremely advanced civilization that has traveled either through time or space to reach our magnificent corner of the universe. But who would believe that your friend witnessed this UFO? Only someone standing right next to him! Your friend’s story is a first-hand verbal account of the events he witnessed. These kinds of accounts will always be deemed scientifically improvable because there’s not enough empirical, hands-on, practical evidence to verify his account. If we were scientists of perception the same rule would stand for simple observations arounds us.

I looked at him quizzicly and beckoned him with my eyes to add more meaning to his statements.

“Lets say that someone photographs a Bigfoot or a Sasquatch. That certain someone does not have enough evidence to prove the existence of Sasquatch because we are missing not only the five material sense of the thing in question but also any cultural or artifactual remains. Do these creatures exist in our world in our time? Not according to any means by which we reason and gather evidence from. There is no way to prove beyond the shadow of doubt that these creatures exist. All the senses must be engaged upon an object for it to be real and admissible to our minds.”

With that said his eyes darted to the left. A sound I had never actually heard before zigzagged across the wall and dimly echoed from the corners.

“What did you hear?”

I told him I heard a sound that kind of crisscrossed the walls and seemed to die slowly in the corners of the room.
“What did you imagine?”

I told him that I imagined the sound came from a gizmo of sorts. I suggested to him that the gizmoe was perhaps it was something stashed in his lab that he used for some kind of experiment that he’d forgotten about.

“Some gizmo huh?” He said looking at with me with frowning disappointment and disguised humor.
Einstein moved around the lab as if getting ready to find the gizmo, but instead he asked a simple question, “What did the sound 'sound' like?”

I told him again that the sound was an irritating electronic gizmo kind of sound.

“Gizmo,” he said shaking his head and frowning. He rummaged around and found a round bowl-shaped piece of metal. He rubbed a wooden mallet around the top of it and the bowl emitted an astoundingly beautiful sound.

“What do you hear?”

I told him I heard a most incredible sound.

“What do you imagine?"

I told him that I imagined or rather thought or experienced an impossible sense of resonance. I could hardly believe that the bowl could emit a sound that had such vibrating unity. I began to inquire about the properties of metal from which the bowl was made but he stopped me.

Suddenly a most unfamiliar sound erupted in the room. It sounded like grating sand or gravel being rolled over a hard surface. It nearly scared the crap out of me. In an instant I thought I should run. But somehow my body was gripped by the sound. I listened, acutely aware of every detail and realized the sound was coming in my direction but it was eternally slow. I could hear that something impossibly heavy was moving over tiny granules creating immense pressure and immense cracking and crushing noises. I listened apprehensively as each second the sound kept coming close and closer. Then quite suddenly something in me rearranged the world. The Doppler effect hit me and the sound became the familiar sound of a car driving slowly away.

Einstein watched me with sparkling eyes. “Instead of automatically using the ‘sound’ of the ‘car’ to come to the common sense conclusion that it is a car that lil’ sound chunk of sensory data can be used practically to convince you of anything you can imagine.. If you actually wielded the scientific method your life would take on mythical proportions. Collectively, we agree that the sounds we hear are what common sense tells us it is. And this is a great arrangement that allows us to collectively survive. But individually, and under no circumstance, are you obligatorily held to make the same interpretation with these lil' pieces of abstract sensory data. That can be the job of the imagination.

His mood seemed to change. He put the bowl down and slowly wandered back to his chair. “We make enormous assumptions about ourselves and our world when we rely upon the habitual use of common sense to determine the nature of world around us. These assumptions cause great harm to us as creative beings.

“Remember when you were a child?” He said looking at me with bright inquisitive eyes. “The world of sensory information you interacted with was completely abstract because you didn’t have any words to describe it, and you didn’t have a shred of common sense and not a single habit to guide you. That is why there was such a sense of freedom in childhood. If there were such a thing as “Imagination Engineers,” we could guide ourselves back to that true and very real sense of freedom. This can only be done by willfully choosing to acknowledge that the sensory data we interact with every day is essentially abstract. When you hear the ‘sound’ of a‘car’ driving by our window here, you are actually imagining the whole event because you are using only one sense organ to determine the final nature of the sound into the abstract and then into imaginary.

“Every time we sense the world something of extreme value is occurring. There is purity, a newness as well as an abstractness that comes with sensing the world as the dictionary definition says, ‘never before wholly perceived in reality.’ Unfortunately, as adults our imaginations’ have been trained to be the ‘glue’ that holds the everyday world together. Our imaginations’ don’t have the power to take us to other worlds, to other extraordinary experiences. Instead our imaginations’ have been taught to uphold a world of boredom and constant inequity all coupled with a constant craving for something unknown to us, the feeling of which is easily supplanted with a cup of coffee, a bowl of ice cream, a trip to the movies.” His eyes drifted to the sun-drenched window on the south side of the room.

“Our imaginations’ are languid because of habit, dull because of an unsharpened sense of reasoning and on top of that - past experience, common sense and language hinder the exquisite power of the imagination.”

“Thus,” he said standing up, “much of adult cognition becomes starved for real stimulus. The body and mind want real interaction with real sensory data. But nowadays we purchase the newness of perceptual stimuli with our new cars, new clothes, TV and movie shows. Then within weeks habit takes over, the new car is taken for granted, a scratch is seen as a disappointment instead of new unformed, raw stimuli.”

Einstein’s shoulders slumped as he slowly walked about quietly about the room for a moment. He seemed unabashedly sad and appeared old and fragile. The suddenly he snapped out of it. “But what is all this thought without practicality? A practical method for achieving any idea is of the utmost importance. You yourself are a painter. You are already practically oriented, but you don’t yet know enough about raw stimuli to journey into the realm of the imagination.”
I was aghast and couldn’t quite tell if he was senile or lucid.

“For example,” he said winking at me and simultaneously placing an object in front of me. “Examine this small area of pencil and memorize every detail of it as if your life depended on it.”

He pointed to the area of the pencil next to the eraser and I did as he asked. I imagined that my life depended upon absorbing every detail of the pencil’s surface into memory. I took a minute or two to do this and after I was done I was sure that I had every minute detail of that area of the pencil in my mind.

He then said it was important to fully occupy my mind with something else for a minute or two. He quickly engaged me in a conversation asking me what price I was paying for a dozen eggs at the local supermarkets. We went on for several minutes and just as I realized I was paying too much for my eggs he directed my attention back to the pencil. He said it was important to forget almost entirely about the surface of the pencil.

I looked at the pencil and immediately three new features popped out. There were a plethora of scratches that somehow went unaccounted for and a few seemingly new indentations appeared in the metal that cupped the eraser. And out of nowhere a thin but substantially dark shadow appeared and ran along the underside of the pencil. I couldn’t believe it. How could I be so blind? I was an artist supposedly astute and keen to observing the world around me. Einstein’s entire exercise pointed out glaring oversights on my powers of observation.

“See!”

“See what?” I said.

“The simple and abstract idea of our death is enough to render our system of interpretation silent enough to allow the power of the imagination to create new perceptual details in the pencil.”

I argued that was not the case. I explained that the perceptual details were simply unnoticed the first time I looked at the pencil and were not in anyway created out of my imagination for the simple fact the imagination doesn’t create scratches, dents and unseen shadows in pencils.

“Don’t be so sure of yourself. The imagination has been known for centuries to play tricks on a person.” He stood stiffly with his hands on his right hip and tried to walk off an obvious pain.

“And you said you were sure that every detail was rendered in your mind.” He quickly turned to face me. “How do you account for this change?”

I went on to tell Einstein about the functions of memory and attention and the limits thereof. I told him that one man couldn’t memorize the entire details of a small patch of pencil because there are too many details there for the mind to absorb. I furthered my argument by telling him that all his exercise did was tax my memory to its limits thereby making the new perceptual details in the pencil more a result of a refreshed memory than due to any occurrence in my imagination.

He laughed aloud. “We can certainly encapsulate your explanation for the appearance of the new details within the rubric of your reasoning but what we need to do in order to train your imagination to reach for and attain the impossible is to come up with an impossible explanation for why the details appeared. The more absurd the better.”

I nearly laughed aloud at his recommendation more because I was internally appalled that I hadn’t ever had the chance to say that to my father when he grilled me in the rules and logic of argumentation. I half-laughed and smiled at Einstein, but secretly, I was tickled to death with the idea of coming up with an absurd explanation for the unfounded details in the pencil. I held my delight at bay not wanting Einstein to see that I liked his idea.

“When you hear the sound of a car driving by your ability to make common sense conclusions about the world around you automatically interprets the sound to be that of a car. But, your ears have only detected the sound of the ‘car.’ From that single sensation of sounds we assume that the sound itself is full and valid proof that a car has just driven by our window. "

"The question is rather simple: Is an object and real object when it is perceived with a single sensory organ? General rule of thumb it is not a real object but it still conveys sensations in our ears to occur. This sensation is abstract because it is perceived by one sense organ and one sense organ only! Unfortunately, our minds don't know this and thus we don't know how to utilize it."

I nodded and continued the hypothesis. "Well then it's be safe to assume that perceiving an object with two senses still doesn't make them objects. They would be instead abstract sensations that the mind hasn't yet categorized into an object."

"Indeed! Perhaps an object is only an object if it is perceived directly by three or more senses. And yes, if the mind is still and silent it doesn't categorize the incoming abstract sensations those sensations go right into the imagination, or into emotion, or into the me monster. Abstract sensation is the fodder for dreaming." 

Einstein smiled at me, gave me a big wink and turned back to his desk and busied himself with his equations. I reached for my backpack I went home still trying to gauge if I was offended or not by his remark from a few weeks before that painterly expressions of the self were ridiculously unfounded. That is what painters do right? They express their emotions on the canvas. What could a physics professor have to say about the imagination?

Over the next week and half I puzzled over his concepts and performed his thought experiments with differing rates of success. I didn’t know what to consider a success. A couple of times the details that I had memorized didn’t change in the slightest. This made me wonder if I had failed because I didn’t fully occupy my mind with something else. And what was meant by fully? A few times the details of the small object I had memorized changed so much as to make me think I was a dolt who couldn’t even see nor memorize the most plainly evident features of the world around me.

Einstein’s thought experiment concerning a single sense organ interacting with the perceptual world that surrounds us began to intrigue me to no end. I realized that 80-90% of the interactions I had with the world used only one or two sense organs. My tacit assumptions of the completeness of objects, such as a wall, were thrown into question. When looking at a wall all I see is the wall, and it is only my sense of sight that interacts with it. Yet, how is it real? If I wanted to throw out common sense and my habitual manner of relying on past experience to interpret the world, I realized that the world around me is always made up at any given time of just the five senses and what they detect. About two weeks passed and then I went back to see Einstein and to tell him of my realizations.