TECHNOLOGY

The world is not as we see it. Our vision, no matter how powerful, creative, and elaborate, will never grasp all the mysteries of the universe. Nor will our technology. Technology is nothing more than an extension of ourselves; it's an enhancement of what our bodies are limited to. Many people had already spoken about atoms, but the concept was considered madness, as we had no way of seeing them. Until someone understood that the eye was just a lens, and all we needed was a better one. That's all. So, lens by lens, eye by eye, humans continually improved our ability to see until we could truly prove, "Look, there they are, the compounds of our matter." Atoms exist, and today we see them thanks to technology. But there's much, much more than them that we don't see. Okay?

I'm trying hard to glimpse, even if just for a few seconds, what it would be like to see EVERYTHING. To have the maximum lens, to defy all limitations. I squint a little... And every time I do, something fantastic happens to me. The other day, I was staring at the community on the other side of the valley where I live.

I imagine the universe as waves of energy passing back and forth, intertwining. I try to see these waves. I'm sure they would have colors, so looking at the community's brick tones blending into the green of the trees makes it easier to imagine those colorful waves I can't see. I squint a little...

In the movie, Constantine looks at the cat and says: Perfect, half in, half out. And he performs a magic trick to see the other world. Do cats have better lenses than ours? Could cats be a technology? Long before that, I remember as a child in Brazil (no one had ever heard of Constantine), and one of the games we played was to collect cat eye gunk and rub it in our eyes so we could see the spirits. Every now and then,  it was the blonde in the bathroom, it was the woman in white, it was the man in the top hat... It's just that in our culture, we interact with the spiritual world daily. If it's not Christians talking about angels and demons, it's Umbanda practitioners talking about entities and the Guarani talking about Nhanderu... One way or another, these beings are part of our lives, our games, our imaginations, and our realities. I squint a little more...

I wish I could study much more than philosophy: religion, biology, chemistry, and physics, to the point of being able to invent a technology capable of showing what I imagine and that deep down I know is real and much more complex than in my imagination. Imagine if we could see everything? Illness, feelings, and even Wi-Fi signals. Imagine if we could see the wind making our thoughts fly? I squint even more...

And right there, as I looked at the hill, I saw a kite fight. The shorter one was already giving up, while the other two still fought for the winner of the skies. One remained serene, trying to find its place within the wind, while the other spiraled, rising and falling as if the wind had to find space within it. That kite defied all the rules.

With which eyes do you see the world? What is your lens? What is it made of? I read somewhere that the best way to see the world is through the eyes of a tourist. Like someone who won the golden ticket to the chocolate factory, or a ticket to the land of dreams. Someone told me that in the world before ours, we had some choice about where we arrived on earth; in other words, we were here passing through, just tourists. We all know we'll arrive and leave; the ticket just doesn't come with a date printed on it, or maybe it does, and we just can't see it...

The same goes for hearing. Until a few years ago, I was bothered by birdsong (I even wrote a column about it). Today, I know that what bothered me was actually the sound of my neighbors' birds and the zoos that kept them in cages. The sound that bothered me was their cries for help, not their singing, you know? I just wasn't listening enough; perhaps time has sharpened my hearing.

I don't know, I only know that there is another world, one that we can't feel, can't see, can't hear, and that perhaps some mediums get close... And cats, too. While I can't create the technology to prove this, I leave here the latest image from the best lens humanity has ever created: an image of the moon, and get this, it's not white, nor gray, it's colored! We just weren't able to see it...

PHOTO credits:

@_ibatullin_ildar_