Interpretation

 

 

 

Engineers and scientists tell us that information is a pattern of energy. What we tend to forget is that every individual brings personal myths, histories and experiences to play in interpreting the meaning of the information. 

 

Information doesn’t exist – as Plato told us in his cave – as reality itself; our limited access to information consequently gives us an appropriately limited perspective. Yet we tend to think we see everything there is to see.

 

This is why – whether philosopher, movie writer, scientist, crime witness or mystic – the message keeps coming back that we can’t trust what we think we see as reality, because everyone will have a different interpretation. The signal... the energy... the information pattern... filters through our own consciousness, as if it was a database, to make sense of what the brain thinks is happening.

 

Edgar Mitchell shared the analogy of the siren of a fire truck as it whizzes by a house one night, rousing some of its occupants. The husband, a volunteer firefighter, mentally calculates where the truck is going. The wife is relieved to realize the truck is not coming to her home. The deaf grandmother gets no signal at all. The information signal -- the siren -- is not serving up a fixed message.

 

In other words, it is the consciousness of the observer, using its existing internal database, that creates its own interpretation of a pattern of energy.

 

Why, then, the fuss?

 

Since the brain is thus only an interpretive vehicle, Mitchell wondered, why has it been so hard for so many to believe that there might be energy patterns all around us that we simply haven’t been trained or equipped yet to notice -- things that are not generally in our database for comprehension?

 

Why has it been so difficult to believe that maybe some beings have the skills to focus patterns of energy more expansively than most humans can?

 

Mitchell points out that he believes these skills are all natural – not magical. It was partly the Christian church that taught us that supernatural miracles were a product of God (e.g., impregnating Mary, turning water into wine, healing Lazarus) – and that “normal” humans exhibiting unusual skills could be demonized and burned at the stake. 

 

Whether it is telepathy or precognition – bending spoons or sensing danger – finding home turf in which to spawn or transforming from caterpillar into butterfly – there are unusual talents all around us. Maybe we’re simply not used to observing and interpreting them.