“In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.”

I think I’ve talked along these lines before, but I can’t find that post (I think this makes post 485 on this blog alone). Still, it seems that the issue is coming up again. I’ve been reading a few blogs lately, namely PAGANARCH and this post over at The Serpent’s Labyrinth .

Now, the two sets might seem a little different. The relevant articles over at PAGANARCH are about Humanist pagans (namely the ones over at Patheos) who are looking down on those who experience the gods as “Discrete Beings” rather than the Jungian Archetypes and seem to be pulling a “What if these Gods/Spirits are just in your mind?” towards their fellow pagans. The Serpent’s Labyrinth article is about “Woo” or the existence of what the Humanist Pagans are looking down on in the practice of Paganism. So they work fairly well together.

“In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.”

I don’t know how old that expression is, but to paraphrase from the 13th warrior: “It was old when my grandmother was a little girl.” So it’s been there around. It used to be a bit of hard wisdom. If you can see something, and everyone around you can’t, you’ve got a leg up. These days though, with the way that pretty much everyone acts though…I’m starting to come to the conclusion that the one eyed man would be judged insane and ignored. If not confined, drugged, or blinded.

I experience the Gods and spirits as Discrete Beings, separate from myself. According to PAGANARCH, this makes me a radical (among other things) as defined by the Humanist Pagans, and I would argue the world at large. To such people, I and those like me are considered insane. Some like to respond about how “high functioning they are” despite seeing these things. Honestly, I’ve had psychological therapy and I never got diagnosed with anything. I literally and a case of text book sanity…and I still see and hear the Gods and spirits.

One things that I’ve often wondered (and has been posited by others) is that those who suffer from certain psychological conditions in fact actually are hearing things or seeing things that are real, but cannot be perceived by others. If I recall correctly, science still cannot explain consciousness, or even thought. We can see the chemical reactions…but it’s all the same chemical reaction. Two different memories have the same chemical pattern, but we experience different memories. Or something like that. But when we get down to it, people can see colors that other people can’t. People can hear things other people can’t. We experience tastes and smells differently.

To stretch it out a little farther, we know that other animals like wolves and bat experience life. But where as Humans are sight oriented, wolves are scent oriented. Imagine if your primary source of information wasn’t your eyes, but your nose? What would it be like to live? Can you wrap your head around such an existence? Going further, Bats are sonic-oriented. They experience their world via sound. What if some humans are more “psychic”-oriented. We experience the world through our minds? There’s already precedent for it. While it may feel that our consciousness exists in our eyes…everything is filtered through our brains. We exist in our brains, our brains filter everything, our brain is a highly developed electro-magnetic generator and sensor. Is it so hard to believe that alterations in brain chemistry might shift the way that electro-magnetic generator functions and what it might pick up in the world around it? If I recall my science classes correctly, the reason matter doesn’t pass through each other is because of the EM fields pressing against each other. Since we know spirits produce EM fields…is it so hard to believe that an EM generator like the brain could function to pick up the EM vibrations of other beings?

But because most brains don’t have that ability…those that do are judged to be insane. Those people that can see are told that they are making it up by those who can. It would be like if all the blind people in the world got together and insisted there were no colors, no light, because they can’t see them. Sounds pretty stupid, everyone knows there’s lights and colors…because they’ve experienced them. But where they will insist to the blind that these things exist, they then turn around to those who see stuff they don’t and insist that they’re making it up or insane.

So tell me…is the one eyed man really king in the land of the blind?