What the bleep?

[Copied from my first blog, A Nickel for My Thoughts.  I love that this blog and the fertile thoughts thread DO make me feel like I'm contributing]

I just saw the movie "What the $#!% do we know" last night. One of my friends, with whom I had a conversation last week about my place in the world (based on the book 'the Bell Curve' which I'm in the middle of, also very thought provoking) called me up at the last minute to say he was going to see it and did I want to come along. Based on a quick read of the blurb, I thought it sounded interesting, and I've been looking for more spontaneity in my life, so what the heck.

Wow. Absolutely fantastic. The intersection of quantum physics, reality, spirituality... even though I don't necessarily believe everything they showed (i.e. thoughts changing the physical structure of ice crystals? Hard to buy...), it brought up so many major issues, twists on thinking about them and the like. One thing that really struck me was they mentioned that the American indians couldn't 'see' Columbus' ships when they first appeared on the horizon because they had never experienced a ship before, so their brains couldn't interpret what their eyes were seeing, therefore they didn't 'see' them. My initial response was that babies see and experience new things every day, in fact as we grow up we're constantly being exposed to new visual motifs... but then as I thought more about it I realized that while that may be true, we don't grow up in a vacuum - our parents are always there, passing on their own experience of the world, and because we trust them, they guide our interpretation of all these new realities. So not in fact a good test of the idea of us not being able to see things we haven't experienced before. I do wonder, if a baby were to grow up in a vacuum, without any human contact, what they would and would not be able to comprehend.

There was a fantastic quote at the beginning of the film, which totally struck a chord with me and I wanted to put it in here as 'my' quote... of course I can't remember it. Will have to go and see the movie again with pen and paper in hand. I'm jealous of people who seem to be able to remember a dozen quotes from a movie after seeing it once. Definitely not a talent I have. I think it's a boy thing ;-)

So much stuff floating around in my head at the moment. I'm beginning to feel like all this is helping me to come out of the funk I've been in recently where I've felt as if I don't really know why I'm doing what I'm doing. I enjoy it all, of course, but I often feel as if I should be contributing more, rather than spending all my free time on pleasurable yet fleeting pursuits. Hockey, for example - mucho fun, but not much point in the grand scheme of things. Nor is there much point, I suppose, to questioning the point, but I somehow feel more alive, more engaged, as I'm pondering...