Had a dream about the chickens last night. Somehow they were people, but not like us. I don't remember any more. I've been wondering for some time what the world view of a chicken is like, what it's like to live like that. You really have to bend your brain around just to think about not having hands, having such a flexible neck and moving your head everywhere without being disoriented, having feathers projecting from every inch of your body. I think that would be terribly cumbersome.
And then to think about never being able to say how you feel to someone, never having real contact like a hug, the only comfort you ever get is simply in being part of a group, being near each other and hearing each other when you're scared or feeling sick. What would it be like to not know more, not understand the possibility of these things?
I've been trying to wrap my brain around the concept of 'being' since I was a small child. I was terrified very early that I had bones in me (grew up on a farm), and that the bones weren't *me*. They go everywhere I go, make it possible for me to do and feel things with my other tissues, but they are the sign of death in every culture. I carry the sign of death around inside of me. I think I was dealing with that before I was even 10.
I won't go over everything I've thought since then, I'm sure it would make a book. But I still think about it a lot, about 'being'. About the possibilities we can't imagine, about the limitations we take for granted, about the horrifying thought of seeing ourselves both from the inside and the outside with our perspectives. I think a lot of people can't really do that very well, and I don't know if it's the Asperger's, but I can peel away perspective and put it back together in different shapes and forms, and wonder how in the world can we be stuck in our bodies this way? It seems impossible. Yet here we are, experiencing.
I was always intrigued by the old testament guys who got to 'see God', or at least come close. They always fell to their faces and couldn't move, and had to be stood back up by someone else. The experience of being able to see outside this dimension of thought and mind was enough to disable them, either from terror or being so overwhelmed that they couldn't respond to the new sensations and realizations flooding their minds. Maybe being aspie gives me an edge on thinking about it, because so much has been so overwhelming for me in THIS body in THIS dimension of being. I want very badly to be able to go beyond what we are and see all this for myself. I'm sure someone will have to stand me back up.
Van Halen - Video Hits V1 - Humans Being (1999)