Fishhead Blues

A good friend of mine recently wrote about her feelings regarding race. How we got here, where we were, and where we may go. She was very personal about her personal journey through southern bigotry and our journey along the white and black path to equality.
Through this journey, she spoke of her guilt just by being white, and how we all filter the world in our own way that makes reality as we know it. i tried to assure her that that guilt was not hers, but an "oily film we all wear."
But her words made many connections for me, and instigated deep philosophical thoughts (okay, only in comparison to say, Monday Night Football which I also have been thinking about as I get ready to leave work this fine Monday evening) about filters and reality and the mind.
It occurred to me that mostly we feel that what we see is the filter we use on the world, but I think that is wrong, or at least naive and overly simplistic. I think our entire body, and the world all around us—our hands and feet and limbs and hair and eyes and ears and skin and dirt and air and people and everything combine to absorb the entire realm of existence and universe that we are aware of, as if we are an infinitesimally small sponge deep in the middle of an infinite ocean. All that we take is delivered to our personal filter, the mind.
In this mind, the filtering occurs which defines and identifies our world to each of us uniquely. In this way, reality is only the synapses and electrical activity in our mind. Our mind is just the final stage of the filter which creates our reality. So as each galaxy is made up of millions of individual stars and their associated wave structures, energy and gravity, so are the millions of synapses in each brain.
This makes me think that it isn't what is "out" there that is important or real, it is what ONLY happens as a brief chemical and electrical event deep inside us that is real. All else is handed to us by what has come before our newest thoughts.
Now if this seems inconsequential or silly, I submit it is only because your internal reality is not as real as mine, or you are Sarah Palin. but seriously folks... The thought that we are effecting change does not seem as real to me as the thought that we are only "witnessing" what our collective nerve impulses have already absorbed and processed. Our entire existence and the construct we know as the universe could easily be a mass fabrication of minds processing incorrect initil data that us brought us to the wrong current conclusions.
And this is where I found this thought process so interesting. True revelation may only come when the universe we have created actually hands us new data that we have not had, that does not fit theoretically or physically with what we think we know. Walla! We are all really just nodes in an energy field in a storm in the void. Or, we are frog like creatures with magical abilities, pink skin and outrageous musical talent that do nothing but play Beatles music through the millennium.
Needless to say, this is a long walk from the state of race relations in this country. And I promise, I have not been drinking or imbibing anything that set me into an Alice in Wonderland stupor. I'm just saying!
So here's to hoping change can come from within and without, just like Mighty Quinn the Eskimo. Now if you expect me to parse the meaning(s) of an early Bob Dylan song, forget it. These mysteries will remain until the end of days!