What is the purpose?

Imagine the following scenario. You are in a science lab with a complex array of tools for interacting with your subject. Each of these tools allows you a different angle on your subject. Not one of them gives a complete picture but through all of them the view of your subject is vast. Now take one of the tools away, take another away, and another. You slowly begin to lose, not the subject itself, but the depth to which you can see, understand, and know your subject. This is an analogy for our experience of this life, the aesthetic sense being a vital tool for understanding.

This loss of depth is what has happened to our sensory aptitude. As our society moves increasingly indoors, away from nature, and loses the direct, physical experience of the land, we losing the tools and practice in understanding the way our senses influence our experience of the world. I mean this in no way to be an “Amish-istic” call to the old farm days or a nostalgic demolition of the technological passages we have paved. We must reflect as we move forward and incorporate, as fitting, new technologies into what it means to be human, to live as fully as we are capable.

I am not exploring this field from a scientific, quantifiable level. I will not get into neuroscience, physiology, or any other medical field. I also will not touch on the academic realm of psychology, though I do reflect upon the mental and behavioral characteristics of human nature. I am experimenting, acting from a very different and very natural, common angle. I mean to consider, with urgent personal responsibility, the way that we are given to interact with the world.

Think about where you are right now. You are probably sitting at a desk of some kind, possibly lying on a couch or bed. What does the material feel like underneath you? Soft? Hard? Is it cold or hot? Is the air around you still or moving? And the light? Is it natural, fluorescent, or lamp lit? Or is it just the light from the electronics in the room?

These things and more affect the way that we perceive the world. This is a technological age. Technology explores a duo-sensory way of life, weighting our visual and auditory senses beyond any others. We lose the consciousness of each sense absorbing particular circumstances during the day, fragmenting or splintering our existence!

We must learn about our five senses again and those beyond the five. We must graduate from elementary level sensory perception to learn again to read and understand the large part of life that is non-verbal… Like food.

Technology is good, yes, but it isn't everything. It is good to feed your sensory deprived soul a feast of a different sort, one without pixels or keys.