Reality is a Bowl-Shaped Sky

One of my science teachers said something along the lines of "the sky looks a bit like a flattened bowl, but it's actually a round dome." Yes, he was talking more about mapping the visible sky than the actual nature of space, but you know? I never thought it looked anything like a bowl. It looks like empty space to me, occasionally interrupted by things like clouds and stars and birds.

Our ancestors thought it looked like a bowl, though. An upside-down bowl with holes poked in it so the light outside comes in. Now that we know that the sky is actually empty space, it's more difficult to see the bowl – just as it's more difficult to imagine a flat earth when we know we live on a round planet. I've seen people scoff at the ancients, incredulous that they could be so dense as to believe what we know is false, because it goes against what we can see with our own eyes. But what do we see with our own eyes?

Who here thinks of time as linear? Anyone having a hard time imagining a three dimensional space as being bent, without reverting to a two-dimensional mental image? And can anyone really wrap their mind around the idea of a particle that is also a wave?

Is it so ridiculous that ancient minds could not imagine a round earth, or see a sky that goes on forever?

People often mistake perception with reality. The problem goes deeper than you might assume. I've discussed topics like philosophy and theology with friends who are intelligent, creative, and imaginitive, with an uncommon capacity for thinking outside the box, but even they – and I – have fallen prey to perceptual egocentrism.

I asked a friend about the possibility of God having a self-concept, and her reply was "one would think that, as a being more intelligent and aware than man (who has self
knowledge), God would also have self knowledge." It makes sense, even if the "god" in your mind is purely hypothetical. But why the assumption that a superior being would have self-knowledge just because we have it? I suppose because we are superior to lower beings who have no self-knowledge. But where did this artificial scale of superior and inferior beings come from, and why are things placed the way they are?

Humans think they know what makes a higher being high and a lower being low, and generally their scales put humans pretty close to the top – and everything above us is divine, which is convenient because divine beings are not visible to us and we can't actually ask them whether they would have arranged the scale any differently.

I said to another friend: "we only think of it in terms of 'lower' life forms giving rise to 'higher' forms because we're egotistical enough to think of ourselves as best, and we think of ourselves as the last/latest model of creation simply because the future hasn't happened yet."

My friend replied: "Are you saying maybe we were better before? Or that there is better consciousness somewhere out there?"

And I said: "You misunderstand. The idea that one form is 'better' than another is the illusion." And she agreed.

Where did we come up with the ideas of good and bad, higher and lower, superior and inferior? Is it beginning to look a little like a bowl-shaped sky? That's what it looks like to me.

Figuratively speaking.

Logic. Faith. Reason. Memory. Reality. Instinct. Have you ever really seen infinity? Can you really comprehend matter? Which way is up? The sky is up, but the sky is also down. So how do we figure that we're any better than the dirt under our feet?