Fantastic Voyage

Fantastic Voyage

What would it be like to travel inside things?

Imagine having a miniature submarine, like in the movie Fantastic Voyage.

You shrink to microscopic size and enter the interior of things.

You travel inside a tree.

Up through the trunk.

Out into a branch.

Along the stem of a leaf.

Finally arriving inside the leaf itself, looking outward through its thin green surface toward the sky, the earth, and the surrounding forest.

Everything appears different from the inside.

The familiar becomes mysterious.

A tree is no longer a tree.

It is a landscape.

A city.

A living world.

Then imagine traveling inside the human body.

Following blood vessels.

Passing through organs.

Watching signals travel through nerves.

Observing cells communicating with one another.

The body becomes less like an object and more like an ecosystem.

Then another possibility appears.

What would it mean to travel inside an experience?

Suppose you could enter a taste.

A piece of fruit touches the tongue.

Chemical receptors respond.

Signals move along nerves toward the brain.

Patterns of activity appear.

Somehow the mind recognizes all of this as sweetness.

Why sweetness?

Why not a color?

Why not a sound?

At what point does chemistry become experience?

At what point does electrical activity become taste?

The same question can be asked about smell.

Or touch.

Or sight.

Or thought.

If we could follow the journey all the way from physical contact to conscious experience, where exactly would we find the taste?

Where would we find the smell?

Where would we find the color red?

Perhaps the most fascinating voyage is not into the body but into awareness itself.

Not looking at things from the outside.

But entering them from within.

Following them all the way to the place where sensation becomes experience and experience becomes a world.

Every object has an inside.

Every experience has an inside.

And perhaps curiosity is nothing more than the desire to keep exploring.