The Bubble of Perception Part One

The bubble. I know only my own. It’s a small thing really, following me around wherever I go. Sometimes it's like a cloud of cotton, sometimes it's sticky and clingy in all the wrong places like plastic wrap. It used to be invisible, but now I sense it all the time. Borrowing from my favorite bubble author, I’ll call the sensing of this bubble seeing. Where he just italicized it, I’ll also bold it, just in case.

The bubble works for us best and most efficiently when we’re totally unconscious of it. Unfortunately, it also causes immense problems: narrow mindedness, what I call tunnelvision, perfectionism, dogmatism, and a host of human biases that have been dealt with by others elsewhere.

The problem I have with my bubble lately is that it can’t hide very well anymore. At least not all of it. As a result, I’m constantly playing with the edges of it and they are getting quite worn and frayed. Most of the internet argumentation I see online seems to be argument at the edges of our own bubbles and of those we argue with.

I’m of the older cycle and am seeing the newer cycle in my children’s generation. Unlike some other philosophers, I don’t see my view as necessarily superior. It works for me and worked for my time. It is most of the bubble I still carry around.

Castaneda spoke of tearing out of this bubble, but as I’ve said, mostly I’ve succeeded in fraying its edges. True madness has eluded me, which is what it would look like outside the bubble: incoherent shapes and patterns.

Maybe the easiest way to sense your own bubble is to take a textbook or other book on a technical field you know nothing about and attempt to read it. Or even a book in another language. You’ll immediately see the limitations of your own bubble. A way to play with the edges of it is to look up random articles in an encyclopedia. You’ll soon see how tiny your bubble really is.

Most of us spend our lives meandering around our bubble, keeping it tidy and self consistent. This is called sanity.

My little well of depression space.

Last night someone I love very much ragged on me for awhile because of an incident that I had nothing to do with and suddenly I was in the middle of it, the cause of the incident and a whole lifetime of loneliness and pain.

Love causes you to bear things like this, because sometimes the ones we love just need some moments of release. In this instance, more because of who I am than anything else, the feeling of being beaten up has persisted into the morning.

Might as well jot down the feelings, right? I mean, in a little while, things will brighten up and the person concoction that is here-me-now-inward-depressed-batting-at-moths will be gone for awhile, giving way to another me.

So for now, I’m realizing that every song I wrote about my family members has come true, including my own. And some of those songs weren’t pretty. This god fixation I have is getting worse. It’s not like a particularly powerful thing or overlord type of emotion. More like every offhand thing I do seems to have long reaching consequences that turn out to be my own direct fault or responsibility.

And as a result, I’m quite fearful of even moving. Two cups of coffee would probably dispel these feelings.

But, and this is the thing, I’m right now in this little well of depression space. Later I can go out and interact with my coffee-mind turned on and more or less be human. But part of me knows that I’ll be back in this space again at some point. And all the things done out there, will come back to haunt me in here.

So, if I go out today and have a laugh at the expense of some thing or some one or some event, you can bet that event or one or thing will be here with me at a future time. And they will either be dead, or angry or deflated or otherwise ill-effected, partly or completely but inexplicably related to the laugh I had on them.

It is this connectedness that is eating at me. Certainly the calculating part of my mind can reason that all this connectivity is mental gymnastics, after the fact sleight of hand. I’m reading a book right now that points to the illusion of connectivity through data flooding: somewhere in the endless human data that comes across my mind, there will be connections, parallels, analogies, predictions. All I have to do is watch the river flow by and pick out the parts that I choose.

Even so, this process of assemblage (which is really probably interrelated to the assemblage point idea) is pernicious. It seems my brain works overtime on it, draining me.

PART 2

In emerging from my little well, distractions and the pull of the world will slowly pull my space inside out until I’m standing in the open with the rest of you. We’ll interact and I’ll have a break from self-aggrandizement and solipsism. Relief will give way to assertiveness, moving into annoying humor and what I use as a stand in for my life with others. Given enough time (minutes can be enough if they stretch across the universe) I’ll even forget I was ever here, and about the well entirely.

See you next time.