Lately, more of my attention has gone to current events and the news.
One morning I happened to hear The Moon Represents My Heart. I could not even tell whether it was a caller tune or just someone’s ringtone. What struck me instead was something simpler: I had not really listened to music in quite a while.
In my playlist, three tracks I had saved before happened to sit together: Racial Illusion, Cave Illusion, and Market Illusion. There should really be a fourth one, Theater Illusion, though perhaps the musician has not finished writing it yet. In any case, whoever made them clearly has ideas.
Those four kinds of illusion come from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum. I flipped through it briefly and found it unexpectedly interesting, partly because it echoed thoughts I had already had on my own.
When I was a child, we used to joke about “the eighth day of the week.” Later I found myself wondering: who decided a week had to be seven days? Who says there cannot be an eighth day, or a ninth?
That train of thought led me further. Day and night alternate, and with each turn from dark to light or light to dark, we say a new day has arrived.
A new day?
Not really. That is only a convention, a rule so familiar that it feels natural. On a linear timeline, there is no built-in concept of a “day.” Our lives are only a small stretch upon it—perhaps just a grain of sand in the river of time.
Which means that rules, definitions, and even the way we perceive the world all come from arrangements established by human civilization. The things we think we know have already been guided by systems of naming, dividing, and ordering. They do not necessarily reveal the essence of the world, let alone the universe.
It is a bit like the moment when Copernicus, surrounded by the rigid boundaries imposed by religion, proposed heliocentrism and was met with disbelief. Those religious constraints were visible. The restraints that shape us now are often much harder to see.
That is why education affects how we understand reality.
That is why everyday exchanges with other people also shape our understanding.
Fixed rules, different forms of education, and the endless complexity of communication all keep altering the way we approach what the world really is. And the sad, frightening part is that our thinking may already be confined within these illusions, unable to break through them.
So where does this invisible confinement really come from?