9/12/11: The Blindfold Exercise

It certainly is odd to temporarily abandon your most trusted sense. Walking blindfolded ought to cause one's stomach to drop, one's heart to pound, one's nerves to tingle, but for some reason I felt none of those things today--quite the contrary, in fact. Something about walking slowly, and feeling each step cautiously and methodically was surprisingly meditative. I'm not sure why I find it surprisingly soothing, but I'm even less sure of the answers to the questions that this exercise has raised. I wonder, if a child is born blind, deaf and devoid of any faculty of tactility, olfaction or gustation, is this child conscious? Or alive? If he/she had no sensory input, how could he/she form memories, and from those memories develop complex thoughts? If someone lacks consciousness, are they really alive? Doesn't the concept of "being alive" mean possessing a consciousness? I suppose that the best man to answer these questions would have been Berkeley. If you can't sense the "material world" then how does it exist? Things only exist in our perceptions of them. Take away those perceptions and what is left? However, I also wonder what it is we are sensing, if there is no external reality. If I only see a box lying in front of me, and it exists only in my perception of it, then what is it I was sensing in the first place? Is it all a figment of an imagination? Am I a figment of some consciousness's imagination? Does a universe lie within my own imagination, as real to it's inhabitants as my universe seems to me?
I wish I had the answers to these questions, but sometimes I think that thought and consciousness is just the inability to know things, and that a lack of knowledge galvanizes the existence of consciousness. In that respect, I would like to assert (on a somewhat off-topic note) that humans are the least wise formations of organic matter on this earth. Our consciousness, our lack of knowledge, is so powerful that we are capable of thought and language at a level far beyond anything else on this planet. So, in our ignorance we gabber on and on filling the air with our pointless noise, not understanding that we don't understand. All the while the trees stand quietly alongside the mountains, fully aware and accepting of their inability to know, in pure enlightenment.