Seeing Sounds and Hearing Shapes

As we grow old we learn more about the world around us. Our cultures significantly shape our worldview, the institutions built around our identities (family, religion, or lack thereof, governments, schools, etc.) around us form much of what we later call as our beliefs and convictions, and more importantly we are, to use Althusser's term, interpellated by our social, political and cultural identities. We are who we are because of our culture and we react to our culture forming our belief systems, whether we fully follow what societal conventions express or we choose our own sets of principles based on what is available to us, often creating a mixture of beliefs molded out of our own personal evaluations upon first principles given by our direct contextual references (such as religions, philosophies, political preferences, aesthetic categories for what is good or admirable, and other patterns of thinking brought about by our education or our own chosen ways of acquiring these inner senses of creeds we try to live by).

Because of such concretizing tendencies in our striated "thrownness' into the world, we cannot but form our sense of self and beliefs along these fault lines of thoughts, sensibilities, dispositions, feelings and imaginings. I say they are fault lines, because as we grow older they move along different directions, making us adjust our beliefs to the dominant worldview that rules our thinking, imagining and feeling. They may change and move us forward or perhaps lead us to a step backward.

And because these more or less established Weltenschauung provide a sense of center to our beliefs, a sense of disruption maybe felt by us whenever we feel that this established structural center can make us feel threatened, causing us either some form of stress to our slowly being threatened creeds.

As we grow old some of these beliefs would change while others will stubbornly persist because we are convinced of their truthfulness, lest we have to radically alter our way of viewing the world. To what extent we grow holistically depends on how we adjust to these changes and how we rationalize either our persistence to our beliefs or make needed changes whenever possible.

We have been brought up to think logically and follow what is reasonable as the basis of much of what we believe and flaunt as our creeds. I remember Thomas Aquinas, echoing Aristotle's "What has been in the mind has gone through the sense" or something like that.

Many of what we accept as true have been mediated by our logical abilities and retained and accepted by our "selves" as coherent and rational. Thus we form memories out of thousands of experiences (seeing colors, remembering past experiences, knowing how to ride a bike, recalling country capitals, etc.) and sustain them as part of our mind set's ways of thinking, imagining and feeling.

Even our feelings which are responses to external events to our bodily experiences can be committed to memory (although not in a mechanical way). What I wonder at times is how perhaps along our sensitization to dichotomous logical thinking and the neglect of exercising the imaginative functions of our brains, then it makes me wonder how much we are missing. Naturally our academe-bound thinking has been trained to "think" along rational grounds and reject anything reasonable and consider them unworthy of consideration.

Thus, I think will there be a point in human evolution when we see sounds or hear shapes? Beore you think this is absurd, please take time to consider these weird thought.