The Tao Master raised his cup of green tea to eye level, its handle facing me.
"What do you see?" he asked.
"A tea cup and its handle," I replied.
"You're wrong," he said. "This is a tea cup with no handle."
Everybody Believes That Their Own Point of View is Correct
It's an empirical statement in the least, probably a bit dull and tea cuppy. However, when I run the busy Copacabana beach avenue and see a thousand facets of this human characteristic reflected back to me, I wonder how we ever made it this far.
I run for my sanity. It seems the longer I run, the closer I get to it. Calm and inspired thoughts dive bomb my emptying mind around mile three. Lurking shadows of stress and bad vibes fall behind the dust kicked up by my speedy shoes by mile five. They're an unfit lot, my heavy thoughts, never able to endure the weight of awe they must feel for my shining ass fast fading into the panorama of bikini bodies and shirtless vagabonds.
Running Copacabana beach is interactive. Is it like this in other places? Men shout out to me when I run past, something like: Hey little cat, running on a beautiful day like this is crazy. Come and have a drink. A post-dawn beer at the beach is a common recipe for more than a few people's sanity.
Prior to the invites from Mr. Beer-in-the-hand-is-better-than-two-in-the-bush, I have to navigate across three homeless people who live on a tight corner a block from the beach. The way they grip their 50 cent cachaça bottles tells me how important these fluids are to their sanity on Rio's rough streets. Then, like some perverted 3D Rorschach test, their sad, resigned eyes forever reminds me of my mate in LA, the day he confessed that the impressive mountain of cocaine on his kitchen table was holding his sanity for ransom, indefinitely.
We are all so totally insane on one level. The insanity we see around us is a million people's sanity. I would not argue that I too am insane, with my running and juicing and meditation and yoga and Pollyannaesque views. Can't I see that the world is going to hell? It's the tea cup that is simultaneously with and without a handle.
Science is not exempt from this duality. The moment you read that science has found something to be true, a paper will be published proving the opposite. Bacon shocked the world recently. Outed by science, it had to publicly admit that it was bad for everybody. Apparently no one saw it coming.
The counter punch came only 48 hours later. To paraphrase popular media: If you squint and gloss over research papers, you will find absolute proof that bacon is good for you. The main study referenced in the news involved scientists fertilizing soil with niacin (vitamin B3) and proving that tiny you-can-barely-see-them-with-your-oh-so-naked-eye round worms lived 10 percent longer than their poor brothers and sisters who lived inside an un-fertilized soil control group. Niacin is found in pork as well as many nutritionally and ethically superior sources.
To accept these results ipso facto, you would need to ignore the observation that our human system is likely to function with greater complexity than tiny, tiny round worms. There's another study, by the way, which proves that nicotinamide (the active form of niacin) enhances tumor blood flow and silences the SIRT1 gene - a.k.a. the anti-aging gene - charged with repairing DNA, and preventing diseases such as diabetes and Alzheimers. Many of these SIRT1 studies are carried out on yeast, so take that small test subject!
The Tao Master placed his cup down on to the table.
"Above the cup you can see all points of view," he said.
"Two perspectives are better than one fact."