The Valley of the Gods

If I were Derren Brown or James Randi I would now hypnotise you via plain voice, but as it stands, your imagination will have to do. So, picture, if you will, a beautiful valley.

On either side there is a small hill.

In the valley stands a house. One side blue and the other side red.

A group of people appear on the left hill and look at the blue house. They radio another group and tell them they are on a hill overlooking a valley with a blue house. This group now appears on the other hill and radio back that they must be at a different place, as they see a valley, but with a red house in it. After exchanging more facts and data they shift positions and discover that their perception was just a matter of perspective and they were, in fact, looking at the very same thing, a house in a valley. The differentiation factor confusing the issue was just a thin layer of paint.

Problem solved and they are merrily on their way.

But now picture a different, beautiful valley.

A group appears on the left hill and tells the group appearing on the right hill that there is a house in the valley. The group on the right radios back that they don’t see a house. They then receive the additional information that the house is, well, sort of invisible.

They are also told that essentially, it is undetectable and generally kind of unverifiable and only visible to those who have a certain state of mind and don’t see with their eyes and don’t think with their brains but who see and think with their hearts instead. But they are insistent that the house is a house of peace.

The group on the right hill is still trying to find some sort of evidence for the existence of the house and asks the group on the left whether they can see the activity in the valley where animals are changing and new species are appearing all the time, but the group on the left simply says that the invisible house is blocking their view and they are unable to see anything except the house so the other group must be mistaken. Again the group on the right asks how they too can establish the existence of this invisible house and what evidence for the existence exists which is available to the other group? They receive no answer.

The group on the left gets more and more carried away and comes up with more and more details, describing the floors in the kitchen and identifying the shower head as a “jungle rain” model. When the group of people on the right hill cautiously ask how the group on the left is able to identify the model of the shower head when they have not even established the existence of the house, they are accused of ignorance, having closed minds and hard hearts. What they don’t provide is convincing evidence.

The group on the right is now starting to make fun of this situation and when they start drawing pictures of fantasy shower heads the group on the left is so enraged that they start getting aggressive towards the other group and they start killing some of them. They threaten the rest with huge amounts of pain and torture and withdraw to concentrate once again on discussing amongst themselves the architecture and the properties of the invisible house of peace in the middle of the beautiful valley.

But now some of them insist that the front door opens outwards, as do the windows, and other members of the group suddenly get violent because they are adamant that the windows and the doors of their invisible house open to the inside. Yet others chime in and insist that the doors are sliding doors and the windows slide sideways too.

They form different factions and eventually start killing members of the other faction, who don’t believe what they believe and what they are sure is the ultimate truth about their invisible house.

The group on the right is still watching on in horror and amazement, incapable of understanding the scenario, where humans are killing each other over imagined details of an invisible house, completely intolerant of other views or opinions.

People are locked so much into discussing the details that they completely forget that nobody has ever convincingly established the existence of the house itself, which has by now reached bizarre dimensions and individual properties in the minds of the people on the left.

The people on the right are completely amazed and wonder whether the house with all these astonishing properties, which insists on letting people die and have them tortured for ages, could instead simply appear. It does not and happily lets people continue with their egotistical, pernicious oppression, hatred, intolerance and deadly aggression. They give up and start withdrawing from the situation, leaving behind the other group to argue over their invisible house and even kill other humans in its name.

As they move on, they discover that they are leaving the other group behind in a static and framed picture. This frame does not allow a view beyond the frame and beyond the 2 dimensions this group is locked into.

As they zoom out further they discover that there are more frames everywhere, some very similar, some showing very different scenes or different houses or objects, but all have in common their static and framed properties and. As they zoom out even further they discover that they too have limitations.

The planet they live on and the Universe surrounding them.

Those are acceptable conditions and this frame grants sufficient room for inquisitive yet limited brains such as ours.