Aug
An Eye for an Eye
Michael R. Dilts
It is a strange thing to wake up and find that one of your eyes is looking at the world you have always known while the other sees something altogether different. From the one eye, you see the green grass and shimmering trees under a delicate blue sky – from the other, a yellow desert plain with barren black skeleton branches rattling their dead white bones in the wind. You have always heard that we humans create reality in our brains where the shower of photons creates a flickering simulation of external experience. Seeing two separate worlds at once, like different movies overlapping on the same screen – well that is something quite disconcerting and unsettling. Which world is true, the one or the other? Or are they both manufactured falsehoods?
How do you test such a thing? What experiments can you perform? You take a walk out on the green lawn/barren terrace. Can you navigate the new reality by closing your eye to the old world? Clouds of glowing strings float past your head, pulse once, twice, and flutter away. They resemble ephemeral 3D modern art sculptures. Are there tiny letters in an unfamiliar alphabet flashing on the border below them? The characters change form with each pulse. As you try to focus your gaze on them, they are gone.
You look down at the space before your feet and see that a deep abyss stretches out under you. You are standing on the edge of a precipice with no safety rail to hold you back. Vertigo seizes your belly and you step back, The abyss follows you. You step back again. There is no solid ground any longer, just the dark space before you. You shift to the other eye, and it tells you everything is as it was before. Lawn. Trees. Sky. For a moment you relax.The old world is still in place,.. isn’t it?
The new eye, the truthful eye tells you that it was never there. There is only the abyss. And you have already fallen, are falling, will fall forever…
Tiffany V
I integrate Transformative Language Arts into any work I do, and I work with people all over the world, but I can't tell you who they are, due to NDAs! I was once told, “you exude art.” So, I decided to spend the rest of my life helping other like-minded individuals get to do the same. Let’s do something magical together!
It is a very apathetic view. But I am glad that someone dares us to look.
Dali melts in one eye and Monet landscape in the other gives “An Eye for an Eye” a psychotic venture of delusions of grandeur playing through the reader’s mind. Worthy of Rod Stiger’s “Night Gallery” presenting a daymare, I was captivated by the art imagery during the first three paragraphs, but by the end of the fourth was praying the swirling mental illness would end.
The Buddhist claim that all is temporal illusion of a thousand births and deaths in every breath. Life is but a delusion we tell ourselves until we believe it or start a new chapter equally as fantasy based. Truth is found in discovering selflessness, oneness and ethical harmony where there is no distinction between inward and outward. Breath in, breath out, watch the drama expose itself as non-existence of object. Beautifully written Michael, but bound to the dharma wheel forever turning into karma sufferings.
Comes down to the red pill or the blue pill. You took both and created quite the conundrum. But then its a perfect explanation of perspective. Impressive Mr. Dilts, impressive.
Dark side wins. It is okay, I am good with that. Love the story.
Judge, jury, and victim all wrapped in a non hero tale (your voice) is plenty for me to follow you anywhere.
Found this to be quite clever; a different look (pun intended) at the world. Love it.
I agree with you: there is always a second way of looking at what we accept as reality. And this was told well.
Impending existential nihilism. How shivery that was:)