Section 2 - Scientists

from:- Yona Levy Grosman

Notes about my work - Exhibition at the Masada National Park 2007

I once again try to understand reality.
This time I turn to the researchers who study the formulation of human understanding. They tell me many things, including:

That at birth we absorb many more stimuli than is known to us in adulthood. They also tell us that the newborn baby sees sounds, hears tastes and smells colors. A symphony of stimuli that shrinks and gets lost with time, while we build defined patterns for understanding the limits of perception. And thus, an entire scope of possibilities shrinks into one specific option. This is similar to the crashing of waves that is spoken about in quantum physics.

For example: You know the drawing of the old hag and young girl. When you see one you cannot, at the same time, see the other. But, the moment we learn to see both of them, our ability to see other options is lost.

From this I learned that the human perception tends to catalogue everything in a two-dimensional manner. On the level of image and background. While the one area is seen as an image, the other, parallel to it, is seen as background.

And indeed, if we accept the fact that our thoughts are linear, we will understand why our perception is built on opposite patterns and why our world is full of contradictions and paradoxes. Black and white, light and dark, good and bad, image and background, time and space, body and mind, is and is not, and more.

I said our human world. But not actual reality. Reality always was and always will remain infinite, independent of our ability to understand.

That is why you see my use of chess board patterns in these works. These patterns are straight and defined by the division between black and white. But, if you pay careful attention you will find that the black is not exactly black, and the white is not exactly white. And all the shades inbetween the black and the white are controlled by chaotic movement of fractal lines characteristic of nature, and which penetrate the straight barriers characteristic of the human rationale.
And thereby teaching us a different reality, much more complex.
And after I learned what my limitations are, which will always cause me to fail to truely understand reality, I went to the physicists.
I tried to understand something about the theory of relativity, quantum theory and the theory of chaos. I found that physicists too, even the most brilliant among them, act within the same human limitation. Which is linear thought in all its aspects.
Those dealing with quantum theory told me that they do not know what is material.
From this I learned that even their world is a world of image and background, based on the understanding of is and is not. And that their thoughts and understanding, just like ours, are filled with inconsistencies. And they, exactly like us, are not able to exhibit more than a tiny limited piece of reality. This is similar to ants standing on an elephant’s back. Each ant reports about the section on which it is standing and claims that it knows precisely what an elephant is.

But the elephant is whole, it is a lot more that the reports of each one of the ants. It is also a lot more than the reports of all the ants together. Even so, the sum of all the reports contains much more information than each one on its own.

However, from this, I learned the significance of all information, of every single detail.
And therefore if that is the situation, if we want to truly understand reality a bit better it is important to learn about more aspects of that reality.

I turned to the physicists who deal with the theory of chaos. They told me about the order and regularity that exists within chaos.
And they especially stressed on the matter of the power of infintismality. Yes, that same something that we think is insignificant and has no impact and therefore is pointless to pay much attention to. And this insignificant thing has even been given a name, “the butterfly effect”.

I did not become a physicist from these sessions, but I did learn a few things: The most important being that: the differences between people is the greatest blessing that a person can have. Because of this difference, each one of us sees reality from a different angle. From this we learn that if we know how to nurture this uniqueness, we will be able to learn about reality from an endless number of points of view.
What happiness we can gain by learning to discover each other’s world.