“Invention”

The goal in life is not happiness, it is consciousness. If you can jibe, you may have felt the ecstasy of mindful presence in a contracted moment or peak experience that wasn’t necessarily gleeful; in fact, it may have been at the toughest summit or the darkest valley, where time slowed down and details magnified. 

Hebrew has a word for this ultimate presence: “Hineni.” It translates to “I am here.” It means, to me, “All of me is here, I am meant to be here, and this moment matters.” And the full immersion gives me elation, even if that doesn’t equal joy. Enthusiastically volunteering for whatever life throws at me, instead of reluctantly attending like I would a mandatory office meeting, makes a difference to my attitude and experience. I feel the largesse of the odds of many timelines converging where I stand; the incomprehensible scale of the universe and the humility of my infinitesimally small portion; the mystique of the hyperspectra of light and sound I can’t detect but that influence me nonetheless… 

I marvel at the tools we’ve invented to be prosthetic sense organs—the microscope, the amplifier, the electrode… 

Despite our limited ability, we intuit that beyond our ability to know it there is an entire field, and we are compelled to build something that will help us see it and explore it. What motivated someone to invent a detector for that which we could not previously detect??? How much more is there yet to discover, only when we construct a capable gadget? 

Maybe our unconscious (or other cells throughout our bodies that we don’t usually credit with sensation) detects waves that our eyes and ears and skin cannot. Maybe we have senses we haven’t yet categorized. The impulse to invent something to detect the undetectable must arise from somewhere. 

“The first detection of light outside the visible spectrum occurred in 1800 when astronomer William Herschel discovered infrared light. By placing a thermometer just beyond the red end of a solar spectrum dispersed by a prism, he found it recorded a higher temperature than visible light, proving the existence of invisible, heat-producing rays.”

“Follow-up: In 1801, Johann Wilhelm Ritter discovered ultraviolet light by observing that rays beyond the violet end of the spectrum were highly effective at darkening silver chloride paper.” 

     -NASA

Knowledge begets knowledge. It stands to reason that if there’s infrared, there might be more; there’s an ultrasonic realm performing a symphony without our audience. 

Writing is the tool we have to plumb what’s below the surface of lived experience. We mine for as-yet-untold stories. We hint at the suppressed feelings while reporting the expressed feelings. (The Emotion Thesaurus is an invaluable writer’s tool; it has whole sections devoted to the ways in which suppressed emotions may manifest in behavior.) The technology we use is exquisite, ancient, and advanced: it’s insight. 

Nathan Oxenfeld writes, “When we close our eyes, we turn off eyesight and turn on insight.” Meditation allows us to tune our instrument so that we might examine the human condition and reveal its full spectrum. 

Writers are scientists and the studio is a laboratory where understanding is cultivated and where culture is actually concocted—because it’s language that shapes our existence (as we can see with clarity now in this era more than ever before). 

This is why we need humans doing the writing and not AI. Human writing produces empathy. AI writing engenders suicidality. We mustn’t let the machines we use to guess deliver results couched as insights. We must remain discerning even while the cloak is thrown over us. We must memorize and record the turns so future generations can locate where we got lost, and course correct, for their own survival. Our present moment is their destiny-in-the-making. It’s a big responsibility. We have the power to create a more peaceful present and a prosperous legacy.