thethanimal
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I posted this on the Stereophile site last night, where I first saw the link to the video.
A beautifully moving reminder of the creative adaptability of the crowning achievement of creation — our human bodies. Both viewings (had to watch again with the wife) brought tears, but the second triggered thoughts of material properties of Mylar, hypotheses on optimum relative pressures, the possible merits of alternative balloon gases, and other considerations of physical principles. Perhaps more than any other story, essay, or op-ed, this video elucidates and distills the debate: objective pursuits are laudatory insofar as they remain subservient to the subjective. The physical exists as a platform from which we may commune with the spiritual, so that we may experience “the sound of God talking.” Does God’s voice have second-order harmonics? Or is it clinical, incisive, perfect? Does our hermeneutic allow room for both to be true, perhaps for different people simultaneously, or even for our own experience at different times, according to our emotional needs? It’s this duality — yin and yang, liberal and conservative, man and woman — which builds unity out of tension that makes us whole.
On another note, what does this experience teach us about extrasensory perception? If the auditory cortex can be remapped to our sense of touch, might it be true that our bodies are always synthesizing information from all receptors through all sensory cortexes? If this information is always at a lower signal level we would not be aware of it at all unless it gets hijacked (synesthesia) or hacked (Bob!) — we have not learned to listen, see, feel, or smell deeply enough. If our bodies are processing this information while our consciousness is busy yelling at CNN or Fox News, perhaps our “I just have a feeling” moments are our bodies’ way of trying to break through the ignorance. Maybe we all need to learn to slow down and listen “through the noise floor” to what our world is trying to tell us.
Food for thought, which might be what’s keeping me from the actual food staring at me from the refrigerator as I sit in the night listening to music while the rest of the house sleeps. These COVID-19 lbs aren’t going to just isolate themselves away. I have to work to flatten the curve.
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