Blurring My Reality

As most people don't know, because I have never had much of a reason to share, I have a stigmatizm in my left eye. The eye doc told me about it a number of years ago and tried to correct for it in my prescription.

Today, for the first time, I played with my stigmatizm. Correcting for it is futile. The severity of the distortion changes as I flex different muscles around the eye. I was changing the size and location of a coffee shop table by simply squinting. Using the same technique I am currently causing my monitor to expand and contract and pinch at the center. No lens currently available can correct for that degree of variance.

What a fascinating lesson, though! A direct experiment in the mind's ability to shape reality. Not only did the person next to me see a very different table from what I saw, but I could actually CHANGE my experience of the table with little more than a thought. When we see a table, we are experiencing sensory signals that are light reflections off of atomic particles. The sensory signal sent by the eye is assembled and interpreted as a table by our brains. While we cannot actually experience a table, our brains can trick us into thinking that is exactly what is transpiring. A table 'exists' in a very real world. Another table 'exists' as a cerebrally developed entity. Did you think you could fit that actual table in your brain? The table that existed in my head was pulsing, undulating, and moving as a range of probabilities. I touched the table to make certain it was still solid. In actuality nerve endings in my hand sent signals to my brain for it to assemble with my fuzzy visual perception of the table. I'd swear it was a bit spongier than a table should be. One of these days my hand will fall right through all that empty space between the subatomic particles my brain has experienced signals from and assembled the data of as a piece of furniture.

And yes, my brain was under a chemical influence: fair trade organic iced coffee.