Seductively Familiar

We humans have lim­its when it comes to expe­ri­enc­ing novel sit­u­a­tions. When thrown into com­pletely dis­ori­ent­ing states, we tend to project onto what is hap­pen­ing pat­terns we are used to see­ing. Near death expe­ri­ences are in the sym­bolic lan­guage of the indi­vid­ual. Chris­tians some­times see what they think are angels. Hin­dus see what they think are gods or other mythic images. We are not sci­en­tif­i­cally sure of what any of it might actu­ally be. One thing for sure: events impos­si­ble to describe are some­how seen as familiar.

The story is told of a rail­road engi­neer explain­ing how a steam loco­mo­tive works to a group of Native Amer­i­cans. This was in a nine­teenth cen­tury set­ting. After his lec­ture about the boiler, the water, and the pro­pelling cylin­ders, there was a pause. A rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the lis­ten­ers responded with, “Yes, we under­stand all of that, but where are the horses?”

The com­mon Native Amer­i­can term “Iron Horse” tells the whole story. We com­pre­hend the unfa­mil­iar with the famil­iar. This is some­thing we all do. We use metaphors, para­bles, and other fig­ures of speech to describe things we do not (an per­haps can­not) fully com­pre­hend. It is all we know how to do. We are lim­ited by lan­guage. This process is so pow­er­ful that we are not always sure if we are see­ing what we think we are seeing.

Rigid per­son­al­i­ties strug­gle to ham­mer all of real­ity into a few inflex­i­ble cat­e­gories. They are eas­ily threat­ened and often defen­sive. Doing this is exhaust­ing. Stay­ing open to new pos­si­bil­i­ties was even dif­fi­cult for Albert Ein­stein. He actu­ally resisted his own ini­tial find­ings, because they did not fit his famil­iar, and cul­tur­ally inher­ited, frames of ref­er­ence. Real­ity appears to have two sides and two edges, but it really has only one of each. That is so mind bog­gling that we see it in the famil­iar way it is not, rather than the unfa­mil­iar way it actu­ally exists.

Every so often, I won­der if what I am expe­ri­enc­ing is life or what I have been told is life. I won­der how much I am miss­ing by the seduc­tively famil­iar mech­a­nisms of my own habits of per­cep­tion. To a ham­mer, every­thing looks like a nail. Things asso­ci­ated with my past are the first things that my mind picks up on. It is easy for me to spot a trac­tor in a dis­tant field. I grew up doing that.

If an angel walks up to me and engages me in dia­logue, I will prob­a­bly think it is just another con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger. The prospects of that hav­ing hap­pened with­out my aware­ness makes me want to slap myself into wak­ing up to the real mys­ter­ies of life.