– By Patrick Ryan

Since the advent of human cognition, humanity has made its main purpose to focus all of its energy and creative ambition on the postulation of thought into coherent structured forms able to translate an entire universe of meaning. These structures were itself only a reverberation of the so called “objective” reality — a participatory juxtaposition with the end result being a reflection of the very observers themselves. The interwoven riddle in this proposition is that reality itself is inherently mythological, with objectivity being only an automatic and instinctual lift into the light of the imagination. “REALITY IS SLIPPERY!” the Faery folk exclaim! Claiming to know the whole and complete truth of ANYTHING is a recipe for mass cognitive perceptual crash, leaving one potentially bitter and or in utter denial. The unquenchable thirst of postulating the truth of the situation has left us in a dire stupor – often times leaving us unable to decipher between the subjective version of truth from its objective twin.

The longing for a finite, digestible basis for a given hypothesis is a necessary one. We need to come to a basis of understanding — A concrete foundation through which to base all of our other thoughts and ideas from. Science was birthed from this impulse and has served to identify and acknowledge phenomena in our universe that were seemingly invisible prior. As in the case of Descartes, renunciation of everything until reaching a repeatable conclusion was the name of the game. Humanity strives for the laws of nature from which we could be aware of our limitations. But at what cost? We’ve been led astray by our own arrogance of believing we could encapsulate Truth – imposing a schism on an aspect from the whole. Quantifying aspects and shards of this truth? Absolutely, but making the error of confining a given phenomenon to a static and rigid representation is a grave error of human thought.

That’s not to say one shouldn’t indulge in his or her meme-making endeavors. Quite the contrary—bringing ones inner vision to manifest is perhaps the primary purpose and goal of the imaginative intellect. With the fundamental realization that what’s called ‘objective’ is so incredibly vast, complicated,and mysterious that human thought can be seen as a tapestry of inner creative vision that colors the void left by the objective. Despite this, stable patterns emerge, often with its own myriad of complexity and detail. Through these patterns, analysis and observation can chart a relativistic chart of the immediate fractal fluctuations. Modern science has embraced this idea fully and unapologetically, often times without any room for change or alternatives. What today is known statistically as the “bell curve” has dominated our scientific aspirations often undermining the very essence of scientific inquiry itself. With Cartesian thought, the bell curve served the purpose to condense, marginalize, and voraciously neglect the necessity of uniqueness and spontaneity. It served as a way cognitively stifle our innermost impulses and creative longing; a way to make us identify with “everybody else” and where we lay on an imaginal hierarchy. This ideological scalpel deconstructs and dissects everything in its path, often times abandoning direct experience as a type of perceptual fallacy.

Science shall soon come to a time when it is best served in a renegade and radical fashion; one outside the shackles of corporate and governmental interests, and into the domain of exploring our inner collective tapestry into infinite depths. Is it possible to make an art of science? Many say nay, science is our way of DISproving in order to come to a clearer vision and understanding. But I ask, is it possible for science to already be an art? Exploring the implications of the individual observer in experimental design, along with phenomena such as the placebo could serve as doors into the vast relationship between subject and object; the alchemical dance of the Caduceus pursued until realized or otherwise disproven!

Ignoring the shadows in favor for the light is a shortsighted approach to reality. Perhaps the new form of humanity shall transcend its dogmatic reliance on dualistic thinking and instead embrace the intricate and unfathomably complex dynamics of the relationship between light and shadow. Now is the time to explore the possibility that Plato’s realm of Eidos is Nature Herself! Just as the mystics of old have relentlessly reminded us – SAMSARA IS NIRVANA. We’ve been fooled into chasing God the Father only to neglect and rape our Mother. Nature provides the blueprint through which the entire cosmos operates – as a holographic copy through which the universe reveals us to ourselves. It’s time to reconcile the philosophical cold war of Aristotle and Plato; may we unite self and other to unchain the epistemological shackles and gain a new perceptual peak. There’s nothing to run away from nor any safe abode to console us. Let us embrace perceptual finitudes in order to awaken to the infinite. Let us allow ourselves the possibility of ignorance in order to be struck into gnosis.

-Patrick Ryan is a Writer, Poet, Digital artist, and explorer of transcendental realms. He is the co – founder of Free Radical Media and co-host of the Free Radical Media podcast.