1.4. Clarity in free beings: the fruit of desire.

We can't see galaxies with the naked eye, that is what lead some of us into using the telescope. But most of us are not interested in stars, distant planets or galaxies, if all we want is to watch the football game on the telly and discuss the evening news with our friends, then these pupils will seem accurate enough. If I can see the eyes of my girlfriend, the hands and smiles of my friends, the fists and expressions of my foes. I can live my life happily with what I have like billions have lived before me, completely unaware of what came before them or what may come after. I will be very happy in my blindness, as long as I get what I desire. Regarding this object I want to see it clearly, I want to have access to it, but regarding all else, well, who cares? It seems that most living beings are like this: they have an object of desire (rest, food, drink, sex, play, companionship, etc) and, as long as they find no obstacles in their relation with it, they will be happy with it, it can occupy all their life.

In sum whatever it is that we care about, we need transparency to have it, either to have access to it, to assimilate it, or to imprint our mark on it. But we may care about very different things. For instance, if I am in love with a girl I might want to have full connection with her: mobile phones, hands and kisses, all sorts of contacts wont seem enough, marriage will be at hand, as time goes by our presence will become clearer to one another (unless, of course, we start defending from one another!). If, by the contrary, I am in love with the idea of a girl, I will want perfect contact with that idea. I will fumble and mumble on it, and I will allow for no interference, not even by the physical girl who was the original inspiration for that idea, therefore I might even shun from her contact if it interferes negatively with my seeing that picture clearly, this is what sometimes we called Platonic love, but fans and all kind of idolatry is based on the substitution of the originator of the ideal by the ideal. It is not always clear whether we are "in love" with a real something or someone or with the idea we have of it in our minds.

One of the distinctive features of being actually in love with a real something or someone is that we are always ready to change our ideas, we are always listening, trying to get further input, that is also what being in love is all about. By the contrary, when we are in love with ideals we will try to explain away everything that does not fit our preconceived notion. This applies to people, science, religion, art making, etc. It is like if we used a windshield not to look at the outside world, but to draw enticing things on it. They don't work very well if you try to see the outside world, whatever the landscape might be, the windshield will always be reproducing the same arresting image.

"Kim & Kelly" by Scott Wade

"The nag" by Scott Wade

Now, being obsessed by the same old picture might seem a bad thing. It is certainly a terrible thing if we are driving! But it serves a purpose. There is something in there that has caught our attention, we want to understand it. If we were constantly thinking about other topics, flooded with irrelevant (to our purposes) information, we would never be able to focus and understand what we are seeing. The same process that allows to focus on a particular conversation in a noise room or street, is the same ability that makes us so blind to the outside world. The more engaged we are in a conversation the more likely it is to be run over by a car or have an accident. The conscious part of our mind is totally focused on what we want to apprehend, all the rest is on "automatic mode". So, as we see, the ability to "focus", has many advantages and disadvantages, but the main thing is to be sure that when we are too much focused on just one aspect of reality, we still keep in mind that there is more than this, so that we do not make choices or engage in actions that demand a wider view (for instance do not ask a girl to get married just because you are in love with a picture, or an aspect, of her, and don't leave her just because this one aspect has disturbed you).

When we forget that reality is much larger than the small part we see we are bound to be stricken by it. In other words, if I paint my windshield with a beautiful landscape and then I start to drive, reality will strike back at me. It kicks back like saying: "this is now who I am". But some of us are like autistic children, we sometimes suffer from strong obsessions and whatever happens on the outside does not affect us: we are so involved with a particular feeling, memory, idea, game, etc, that nothing else can draw our attention. So, having a dirty windshield is a bit like having a mind clogged by something that arrests our attention in a manner that stops it from looking at the outside, obsessions, lies or dogmas; or a heart oppressed by fear, overreaching passions of sexual desire or hate, etc, seem to be some of the things that obstruct our vision of the outside world. Either by our interest, by our education or by some genetic predisposition, we are so focused on them that we forget everything else. They may maintain our intellect fixed in an old theory (like Einstein and determinism), they stop us from seeing that someone does not love us as it used to be (sometimes the fear of being alone provides such blindness), they narrow a complex situation into a single aspect (like when, in anger, we are only able to see what someone did wrong to us). A dirty windshield does not let many things pass through, it is only good as long as we are learning anything from it, if not, then we are just live continuously the same state of mind, the same ideas, the same fears, we are unable to evolve, to discover new things. We are like prisoners walking over the same ground over and over again.

On the other hand, when you are deeply in love with someone or when we see the beauty of something, you will want to know it to the fullest extent possible. When we're in love, truly in love, we try to clean our windshields, we get ready to be surprised, to be renewed by what we'll learn. It might not be a person, it might be an idea that we made of a person (like when one seems to have found the "perfect" person), or it might be a theory (like the big bang), or a strange fact (like there being black holes or billions of galaxies dancing around), or just a notion (that someone has become infatuated with us, for instance). In all these cases we fall in love and we clear our windshields with respect to the particular with which we are in love. This does not mean we have cleaned all our windshields, because we have lots of them, each for a different direction or kind of thing. For instance, if we love music we'll want to hear it as best as we can. Beethoven for instance become deaf but he could still hear the music "in his head". But either through musical notation or physical sound, we'll want no errors to obscure the perfect view of what we love: clarity is essential if we want to catch what's out there. Without clarity we'll end up listening to our own music. It might be interesting, it is just not communication, it's a soliloquy, a closed landscape.

The opposite image of a dirty windshield is a windshield so clean you just cannot see it, all there is the landscape. But if we get really in love with things outside of us we will want even better than an invisible windshield, and what could be better? Well, in fact there are many things! Things like telescopes, microscopes, spectroscopy, detection of alpha and gamma particles, radio-astronomy, colonoscopy, etc. All these things are the result of a will to see even better in a particular domain. For instance both spectacles and the telescope were made for the same reason: we have cleaned everything between our eyes and what we want to see, our eyes are unobstructed, we are attentively looking, for days without end we gaze at the stars, people's faces or the armies hiding beyond the castle's walls. But even though there is no obstruction we want to see even more, even more. So spectacles are created, and, latter on, telescopes too. They will magnify our ability to watch familiar faces, foreign armies, the moon and distant stars. Today we have created space telescopes able to see in the ultraviolet, x-ray, and infrared specters. We can see billions of distant galaxies organized in filaments that spread all over throughout the visible universe. We have found no end to the physical universe, perhaps Giordano Bruno was right after all and it is infinite. But that will be, according to our current abilities, quite an impossible theory to check out. We still see so little...

Picture of Galileo's telescope (on the right)

Telescopes are ways to increase the clarity of our perceptual view of the world. The heliocentric view was made possible because of this magnification of clarity, and most of our scientific achievements spring from technological clarifications of this kind. From medicine to radioastronomy, in every area of knowledge, great advances were possible each time we could see better, with more detail. We searched for a clearer view and, over many generations, we approached it more and more. Understanding and technology go hand in hand, theory and practice help each other.

Our Western culture was able to grow and dominate the world due to its scientific and technological achievements. But we should not forget that the culture that today gives money to research and development is the same that a few centuries ago condemned Galileo to prison, and although he was saved from burning at the stake, others, like Giordano Bruno, did not have the same luck. Our culture remains closed, dogmatic, religious, and scientists and free thinkers are only able to walk around due to global competition from other countries. Leaders know that they need the technological advances to keep their national power and leadership. Science is something to be tolerated in the name of power. We are far from considering political chores as just an administrative and rather boring task of administering the common good. People who run for positions of power continue to be (like in most of humanity's history) usually quite insane. Craziness is of course, the inability to hear or to understand. So how is it possible that we choose people who are deeply disturbed to positions of power? Well, the fact is, despite our substantial investment (in people, means, time, etc) in science and technology, the western civilization has not really given importance to emotional clarity, sexual clarity, etc. Not only have we not tried to be clear in many aspects of our life, we have even cultivated a certain madness. Consumerism is a way to keep people off balance, you make them feel bad about themselves and then give them some sort of product, completely unrelated to their real problems, and sell it to them so as to make money. Obviously you might not need the money, or you might gain it in some other way. But our culture invite us to join this circus of "who gains more", who has the most beautiful and successful wife/husband, the most achieving offspring, etc. It's amazing how millions of people enter into this scheme, living awful lifes, with no time except to think who thinks what of them, and how to improve their image and standing on the world. This is the world we wave today, this is our civilization. It would be incredible if our leaders were not the most retarded of us. The choices they make, leading constantly to war with other countries, always striving for first place as if we were in a kind of permanent Olympiad, spending all the extra money in weapons, investing in technologies that make us sick (like oil) instead of respecting the environment, investing in publicity stunts instead of science, investing in products instead of education, etc. The world that we have today, with its wars and pollution, prisons full of people who can't find their way in, children whose best friend is a computer, etc. All this is made by sick people in positions of power and sick people putting them there. Our culture, cultivates disequilibrium, it cultivates emotional blindness and confusion. In the following paragraphs I'm going to address several kinds of clarity and not only intellectual clarity, all of them are necessary to have a clear view the world which has many aspects which are simply not sharp. But let's have a look