The five-sensed cane of mind
In this case, I shall have to agree to disagree with my fellow contributor.Harry Kemp wrote the following in "The Second Book of Modern Verse" (1922):
Blind
The Spring blew trumpets of color;
Her Green sang in my brain--
I heard a blind man groping
"Tap--tap" with his cane;
I pitied him in his blindness;
But can I boast, "I see"?
Perhaps there walks a spirit
Close by, who pities me,--
A spirit who hears me tapping
The five-sensed cane of mind
Amid such unguessed glories--
That I am worse than blind.
Arthur C. Clarke, recalling the above poem but not the author, misquoted in his book "Profiles of the Future" (dated but still highly readable and entertaining): "... Amid such greater glories, That I am worse than blind."
Truth be told, I rather prefer Clarke's version.
Back to the point I was trying to make--that there are many wonders that lie outside of our senses, but I believe that religious mumbo jumbo is not the way to understand them. This is why we build machines to extend our senses. Sound recorders to downconvert the voices of bats so we can hear them, radio telescopes to probe where our eyes cannot, electron microscopes to explore features we cannot feel.
Mystics would like you to believe that the chaotic (and understandably bewildering) quantum universe is justification for, and here I quote Mr Chopra himself, the possibility for "healing without touch" , "telepathy" and "clarivoyance". If any of these things do happen, it will be through technology, through hardwork and through basic down-to-Earth rationality. Healing without touch? Endoscopy. Telepathy? Some kind of implanted communication device. Clairvoyance? Memory downloads.
Even chaos is nothing of the sort. It is subject to probabilities, to statistical analysis. You might not know for sure what the next coin toss would reveal, but you do know the chances.
Just because our five senses are inadequate does not mean that we should abandon what they tell us, or throw up our hands in despair. We have to proceed on the basic premise that reality has to be consistent. Yes, there are other realities besides what our five senses tell us, but the only way to understand those realities is through the good old five-sensed cane of mind, not, as Mr Chopra would like you to believe, the "sixth sense [of the soul]".
posted by Au Yong, Haw Yee @ 11:16 PM
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