We are born, live and die in concrete buildings connected to each other by asphalt streets.
Food comes from the store and water comes from pipes and bottles.
The meat is sold cut and cleaned of blood and the vegetables are trimmed and cleaned of dirt.
At an early age we play in spaces between buildings on surfaces made of metal, concrete and sometimes grass. We enter school and learn about the World. We are taught that society is now modern, developed and advanced and that what was once, hundreds and thousands of years ago, with the exception of some other philosopher or discoverer, is backward, uneducated and with naïve ideas about life and the universe.
We learn about history in order to better understand the present and not repeat mistakes and usually this history covers only the last two or three thousand years. Further back from that things become unclear, fuzzy, distant and somehow inadequate to today’s modern day. For 5-10-20-50-100 thousand years ago there are mostly assumptions and here and there some object found underground but there is nothing to look at because people were quite primitive and this has nothing to do with life today.
There is a subject “Man and Nature”1 at school because man has not been part of nature for a long time. He is superior and she depends on him.
Science is our faithful guide and yardstick. We learn to trust it because it only leads to the truth in a way that the old societies did not have available.
We learn to believe in the concept of progress and that it is guaranteed and constantly happening.
We learn that almost everything is clear. Even if it is not clear to us personally it is on the Internet or at least it is clear to scientists. Which is not yet clear will be clarified soon because the aforementioned progress is moving at an ever higher speed. There are not many secrets left for humanity.
We can safely relax in the predestined rhythm of life and trust it.
Just do what everyone else is doing and don’t ask questions. If you are like them others will recognize you as their own. If you are better at some things you may even be admired which is even better for your position in society.
You study, then work, make a good career, buy everything you need, a house, a car, equipment for hobbies, save, travel on vacation to nice places for a few days. The goal is to be successful which is mostly expressed in your income and material acquisitions and sometimes in fame – measures of others for your worth as a human being which over time imperceptibly become yours too.
Everything outside of these norms and rules – the world beyond the concrete, the electrified and the marked – is a place for a momentary passage, for a short break or entertainment. In the best case it is exotic and in the general case it is uncomfortable, undeveloped, insecure, even life-threatening.
There is nothing special and meaningful in it in terms of content and there is nothing to go there for except for some healthy movement and to take some photos. At most you can get a status of a nature lover or an adventurer. There is no knowledge there nor anything new because knowledge and the new are in books, textbooks and on the Internet. It’s possible you get sick or bitten by some animal. In a nutshell – there is nothing to look for there except to look for trouble.
Your time makes sense when you study and work. You usually work on something that makes the world a better place. Accompanying questions such as ‘Do I know the world?’ are unnecessary. Although you have not experienced the world in person and in depth outside of the news and the Internet, thanks to information technology, you live in the collective assumption that it is well known.
Time outside of work is for rest and vacation, about 20-25 days a year. Having more free time is a waste of time and makes no sense. After all time is money and with money you can buy everything because everything is for sale. Everything except time.
Over the years ideas have crept in to figure out how to make money without working so the time you have left can be free. Then you should live more peacefully and happily at last. It is expected to happen at a later age but it’s not clear exactly when.
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Welcome to the Human Aquarium.
Created by men for men and constantly perfected by ourselves.
It is connected and completely dependent on the external natural, not man-made, world but it pretends not to be so and to be something more than it. To be more perfect, more significant, more secure.
Perhaps our ancestors created it in search of a better life and solutions to the problems of their day.
Nowadays many of us on this planet are born in it, live in it and die in it without ever – not for a single day – getting out of the aquarium and meeting the reality beyond it. To look at its structure and how it is attached to the external real world, the contents of the ‘pipes’ that go in and out of it. We rarely realize we actually live in an aquarium with invisible walls.
Sometimes our bodies come out of it, hermetically sealed in the spacesuits of our beliefs, firmly connected to its reality through the long flexible cables of collective illusions, and we pass momentarily through other spaces which we touch through our senses but without understanding them, without connecting with them, without living and realizing their reality.
We call these outings travels.
Losing connection with the aquarium and going out without a spacesuit is considered madness, suicide, failure.
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For the inhabitants of the aquarium, the seas and oceans do not exist.
- At the time of writing, “Man and Nature” exists as a subject in the official curriculum of primary schools in Bulgaria, my home country. It struck me the very first time I heard it, so I chose it as a concrete illustration. However, many other instances from various countries reveal the deep separation between “humans” and “nature”. ↩︎