The Veil
We live in the past. It takes eighty milliseconds for our brains to recognize and interpret the information they receive. When they do, removed in time by what to reality is both an eternity and an instant, we can only perceive colors existing within a tiny fragment of the electromagnetic spectrum, emitted by the changing of microscopic states. At a given point, any one person may see a small region of their city or town accurately, which is but a small portion of their country, which is a tiny portion of the world that is a tiny portion of the solar system, and then the galaxy, and then the cluster, supercluster, and ultimately the universe. On the other hand, our eyes also, by definition, cannot themselves glimpse at what is on the microscopic level, and we cannot look alone at a molecule, atom, fermion, or string. We see a miniscule portion of a universe to which we are beautifully irrelevant.
Yet, we have often used nature and bent her to see the unseen, and we often thought we tricked her into telling us her secrets before we learned that she had merely been misunderstood. We have looked to reality, her looking glass, and we have used those photons and our ability to build and create and with them expanded our view. We have looked the universe into its void and observed a universe of fascination, the unknown, and with our simple human brains, we have sought to expand that tiny vision beyond the eyes that we can call our own. We created the sciences and characterized what we saw with our mathematics, gravity, electromagnetism, evolution, neuroscience, astrophysics, relativity, and engrained within all of them, art. That is the incredible element of society that allowed it all. It is the ability to express and represent the information and to think about the world differently, for we are blind men painting the universe.
We have used the boil of chemical and electrical signals traveling through us, being felt by us, to discover something entirely new. We have knocked down the barriers of the universe by just discovering it. If there is any goal held by all humans and all sentient life, then that must be to cast off its veil and to genuinely see it.
