The More You Know (The Longer It Takes to Write a Blog Post)

I read on Cracked.com today (while looking over an article about how self-improvement can make me dumber) that watching 24-hour news television can make me less smart.  Luckily for me (and perhaps for you, as well,) I don't do that.  But as I was going through my usual morning slog of news posts, e-mails, and stories that caught my eye while I was looking through my various social networks, it occurred to me that I spend a lot of time learning new things (ideally so that I can share them with those of you who actually take the time to read this).  And as I was going through all my usual interests, it occurred to me that every time I think I'm done with looking around for interesting things to read or look at, there's always something more that pops up.

For example: this morning I saw a post on MSN about a photograph that @NASA's NuSTAR telescope took.  I checked out the article, and while the details were about as exciting as reading entries in the phone book, I found a neat new word: pareidolia.  (Oddly enough, my spell checker is telling me that the word is misspelled, even though it isn't.)

So that prompted me to check out the link they had in the article about the word--which wasn't nearly as interesting.

What then, you may ask, is pareidolia?

Here's the definition from Wikipedia (Thanks, Wikipedia!).

Pareidolia (/pærɨˈdoʊliə/ parr-i-DOH-lee-ə) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant, a form of apophenia. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse. 

The word comes from the Greek words para (παρά, "beside, alongside, instead") in this context meaning something faulty, wrong, instead of; and the noun eidōlon (εἴδωλον "image, form, shape") the diminutive of eidos. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, seeing patterns in random data.

You can find the full entry here.

And here's the picture prompting all this learning.

So, what began as a harmless bit of curiosity about @NASA and the "Hand of God", actually turned out to be an hour or so of time spent reading and looking up a neat word on the internet.  The point being, of course, that I began to wonder if it were actually possible to know everything--that if I read every article and followed every link, would I somehow be endowed with a greater understanding of all things?  Or would I just be insane and sleep-deprived?

My conclusion is that knowing everything is impossible.

Which led me down my next path.   If knowing everything is impossible, how is it ever possible to know the truth--of anything?

@Sadhguru had something to tell me about truth, though.

Only a fool will talk about what Truth is. One who knows will only talk around it, because you cannot talk about it. You can only define and describe that which has some kind of substance, that which has measurable parameters, or boundaries. If something has no boundaries and no parameters, you cannot talk about it. 

All right.  So it didn't answer my question, but it led me to another interesting place--another way to think about truth, and since I'm all about seeking the truth of things, this, to me, was pretty interesting.

So where did that come from? you ask.

I happened to find it buried in an article, in which @Sadhguru was speaking to someone who had questioned him about thoughts during meditation, or kriya.

Which leads me to my final point: if Truth is boundless, knowledge endless, and my own capacity limited, what's the point of searching for something I will probably never find?

And to that, I can only offer up this: the more we know, the closer we come to Truth.  But it can sometimes take a while to get there.


I want to leave you with a few last little snippets of things that caught my eye today:

A fifteen minute preview of @RonMoore's new show, Helix from @TheMarySue.

A pictures of @JessicaChastain as Merida, again from @TheMarySue.

And finally a post from @GeekTyrant showing several more of the Disney Dream portraits.

Enjoy!