The notion that seeing things anew was always more of a metaphor than a fact of life, or so I thought; but being hopelessly myopic had been at best a restriction that, over time, was something I had become accustomed to. Little did I know how much it had effected my perceptions about so many things.

The first thing I would reach for in the morning were my glasses, usually very expensive and so thick that I could never hope to get frames that were fashionable. Everything was so out of focus that when my vision worsened I had no clue what was happening until I started noticing a perfectly formed halo with rainbow colors around lights, especially at night.

Perhaps this was a vision from above sent to me as an indication I was evolving spiritually, I initially thought, until crossing the street at night became dangerous because I could not judge the speed of oncoming traffic.

It was not until I consulted my opthamologist did it occur to me that I had posterior cataracts and they were progressively getting worse to the point that I began tripping over wires I could not see. It was then I decided to have surgery although my judgement was clouded for years by fear of all things medically invasive. But the decision was made and I intentionally avoided googling the procedure, so that I would not back out at the last minute.

Having experienced bypass surgery, popliteal aneurysms, rotator cuff surgery, I had become accustomed to viewing my scars as a metaphor for Frankenstein’s monster, squeamish of all things related to hospitals regardless of how simple the procedure seemed. After all, I thought, bleeding and infection can change the simplest procedure into a nightmare.

One eye was done first. This is common to ensure that if something does go wrong, the other eye is not effected. When the bandage came off I was amazed that not only had my vision been restored to 20/20, but light and color was so intensified and clear,  I had never realized that I had been seeing all things through rose colored glasses. In my case it was brown. I though white was a shade of sepia . I had missed all the vividness and subtleties of shades and the blueness of light. With the right eye for comparison,  I learned a lot from roaming the  streets of Manhattan covering one eye with one hand, then switching, noticing different images as the left eye, once the weaker, was now   dominant, and everything right of the mid line became a total blur . Although this effected depth perception, I could compare  the differences in light between the two. The right side was like wearing brownish tinted sunglasses. All colors I thought were red, I saw differently. The right eye was corrected one month later, and now I can see without glasses.

Perhaps that old saying that seeing things through rose colored glasses is more than just a cliche. All I can say for certain is that it motivated me to look again at many things that I took for granted as true because I could not see what other people saw,  and drew different conclusions based on my limitations. Maybe this has psychological and philosophical implications that go beyond just sight, and involves the basis of many foundations I built upon as my journey of discovery continues with new insight.

In the film, BUtterfield 8 (1960), there is a tense moment when Elizabeth Taylor who portrays Gloria Wandrous shouts in a confrontational outburst with her mother. “Mama, face it, I’m the slut of all time.” A moment of clarity from a woman who was judged “loose,” or perhaps it reflected one persons attempt to live a passionate life without the constraints of guilt.

Many scientists question whether the guarantee of confidentiality and anonymity are enough to get people to answer inquiries about sex, honestly. Usually, the most  unconventional of fantasies, the thoughts that flirt with danger and border on the taboo, urges played out in mental privacy, are the ones that are most exhilarating although not for public scrutiny, let alone personal acknowledgement.

Looking at sexual behavior candidly becomes difficult when one is caught in the theologically defined battleground of good and evil, provoking a tendency to view oneself with the noblest of motives and thus compromising objectivity especially when compartmentalizing sexual events becomes a basis for privacy..

Scientific surveys may not be reliable measure of the way fantasies translate from scenario into behavior because they are frequently influenced not only by how moral boundaries are defined and socially appraised but also applied differently for each sex.

Men and women are not treated equally when it comes to morality, and exploring these differences has been the subject of great literature, cinema and controversy. Women who express their sexuality openly are viewed as sluts while men under the same circumstances are portrayed as sowing their oats, unless they are gay. Imagine how Elizabeth Taylor as Gloria Wandrous would have been treated if she were a man.

When the late grandma Seydee Sedit-Best was eulogized at the Boyardee funeral home, there were many who shed tears for this pioneer. She was a philologist and Biochemist educated at Oxford who was well known for translating many cookbooks into French. A life well lived, her crowning achievement was her recipe for mystic chicken soup.  She had been struggled for years, using precise and painstaking research, documenting her groundbreaking discovery in her first book, A Lil’ Bit Of This And A Lil’ Bit Of That, on the new york best seller list for three consecutive years.

She was born on December 31, 1899 and died January 22, 2001, living in three centuries and two millenniums and she never let anyone forget it, for she was like one of her soup ingredients, an old hen, as close to death as they come before being cut down and plucked after  a century.  She had built a reputation for being a healer,  as her false teeth glared, immersed in a glass of brown water on top of the coffin covered with the flag of France.

As I glanced at the teeth, recollections, long submerged, rose to the surface. My first memories of Sedyee now held the answer to a family mystery. I was distantly related to her and now sat in the second row to the left of the hand crafted box carved from a tree that grows only in the forest just north of Dijon, France.

Seydee was still alive and perky when I grew up. I remember her in the living room, declaring that the mystic receipe had transcendental properties. From my part, whether this was true, not or just a crock was always a point of contention. I never believed her because she never came off as the scientific type, but rather with the essence of a peasant immigrant who migrated from an obscure village of France and always seemed a bit odd resembling more a character in a Parisian fairy tale, so I never took very her seriously. Little did I know about who she really was until her papers were found buried in the backyard, dug up by our beloved family dog, Mustard, a canine that was bred in the famous Dog farms of Dijon and whose descendants were sent to the royal houses of Europe as companions first to Queen Victoria then her many children, married to most of the major houses of European royalty .

Then there were her medals we found in an old shoe box in her closet next to the numerous girdles she washed by hand and kept hidden behind the wood paneled door next to the portrait of  Empress Josephine. France had bestowed her the grand legion of honor with the grade of chevalier in 1956. Two years later Italy awarded her the Knight Grand Cross of the order of merit.  Also found was an ornate scroll written in calligraphy of her nomination for the Nobel prize in Biochemistry. The day her shoe box was discovered my family and I  sat on the table and looked at each other and said, “Who new.”

Grandma Seydee had always said that the event making it possible to find the answer to her recipe came from an ancient Tibetan text she discovered quite accidentally in the old Strands Book Store on Broadway and twelfth street just south of New York’s Union Square while doing her doctoral dissertation on Medicinal Elements Of Mushrooms And Herbs. Her theory was simple: there was a direct correlation between the mode of delivery of herbs and their potency in the body.

Her scientific approach was highly controversial, and she was dismissed by her contemporaries “as a tribal medicine woman who plucked mushrooms in to basket, one marked poisonous and the other,  edible but hallucinogenic.” Her theories however were never disproved, and by using Vitamin B-12 as a baseline comparison, she speculated about how her chicken soup would bring someone back from the brink of death. From her experimental techniques she came to several clues about various components of long life in her first major paper, Vitamin B-12 Levels , Sleep Deprivation and Dreams. In the paper she claimed  Its well known that taking vitamin B-12 was poorly absorbed in the gut to be of any value. Injecting it directly into the blood stream yielded much better results. Perhaps. her hypothesis followed,  smoking herbs or using them as ingredients in soup were far more effective. Unfortunately, she experimented on herself, which resulted in some mental confusion that raised many questions about her methods and effected her reputation within the scientific community. Some of her peers claimed she was too addicted to her own methods to be truly objective about her research or the conclusions she drew from the results.

During the early part of her life Grandma Seydee traveled across Asia, India and the Near East. Her father had been a traveling Buddhist monk who by happenstance met her mother one day at an outdoor Paris Flea Market where they eventually married. In an unpublished book, he said, “When I saw the way she carried the chickens by their neck, I instantly fell in love,”  and Seydee was born seven months later. Perhaps this was the first indication that chicken was her destiny and in her blood.

Her father was simply called He as his full name was unpronounceable in French  He was well known in many ancient monasteries across China, and He left her the only copy of his unpublished autobiography, Mystic Curiosities And Inventions with several clues underlined using invisible ink. One was a hand drawn map of the upper Siang valley in Tibet.

As a child, He took little Seydee to The Bronx Botanical Gardens, and among the numerous rose bushes that bloomed in early May, while teaching her to meditate, he first told her the story of his ancestor Miri, shaman of the Adi people. The medicine woman was long lived, but myth and legend still resonates within hundreds of tribes that exist to this day. Her name was also found etched on walls of many underground caves discovered in the Gobi desert of Mongolia that were long rumored to house the remnants of scrolls rescued by monks from the Alexandrian Library before it was burned.

When she was in Egypt studying meditation in one of the secret chambers of the great pyramids   she met Akmid Sedit who became her professor in the mystic arts and her first husband. Together, as man and wife they studied many degrees of Freemasonry and had a shared interest in Herbology experimenting with many mushrooms from a variety of cultures until his untimely death. After the mourning period, Seydee was determined to follow in Akmid’s footsteps which led her to the first two major ingredient of chicken soup: water and chicken; although she reasoned that water was in everything and therefore  a medium for soup rather than a true ingredient. However,  chicken was more specific and when she used different kinds cooking chickens, she realized in order to cure sick people, an old hen had to be used, “as close to death as they come.” This became her mantra that set her on the path of  her most important discovery: Grandma Seydee’s Mystic Chicken Soup.

Its clear there was more to grandma Seydee then the appearance an old bent woman who wore black orthopedic shoes and had purple tinted hair, always in the kitchen struggling with an old hen mumbling to herself incoherently.

Redemption has always been the subject of great controversy. In Theology, it refers to the ability to recognize and overcome one’s weaknesses by finding a resolution using religious doctrine when faced with a moral dilemma created by personal choice.

Different religions associate a variety of meanings defining the path needed to achieve it. Catholicism for example entails receiving absolution from sin from an ordained hierarchy that maintains a philosophy equating redemption with eternal life, bestowed as a reward often involving personal sacrifice as a component.

In Buddhism, redemption is about surrendering attachments to desires in a larger sense, and in so doing rising above any temptation. Specifics are individual, and relates to the conditions of one’s evolution, and a reflection of the faith one has in the process. Relying on the guidance of those who have traveled a similar path, and who have faced the same struggles best affirms their course by example, having attained a degree of enlightenment. These are the teachers, and their help in the search is invaluable. However learning something from anyone qualifies them as your teacher, even if the lesson was unintentionally observed.  When this is realized, compassion for everyone develops because all have the capacity to teach, according to their experiences.

For redemption to have any meaning, compassion must saturate  awareness, allowing emotional turmoil to be  transformed  into solemnity as thoughts change from anger and retribution to understanding and forgiveness, otherwise anger will overwhelm and influence  any higher goals .

Forgiveness isn’t about letting someone elude judgement for their acts, but a recognition that cosmic justice will play its role in balancing the scales, as much as magnetic energy attracts or repels elements from each other. This is why so many people are against the death penalty.

One does not need to be present to see justice play out, as trust in the higher forces instills the knowledge of its inevitability allowing resentment towards someone for their actions to be released. It is also a lesson for everyone to realize that the same laws apply to all.

Redemption begins by accepting responsibility for thoughts and actions and acknowledging that the process begins by learning to forgive ourselves, then surrendering to redemption becomes part of the course of evolution and the awakening enlightenment of the soul.

What we hear when we are conscious effects what we recall hearing when we are asleep. Scientists, philosophers, artists and poets have speculated about what transpires within the subconscious mind. Once there, thoughts coagulate, many are permeated with sounds that are rarely in the same sequence then when they were heard in a conscious state; some are fragments connected with visual images, scents, smells or touch, perhaps with colors woven into a dream that follows its own logic that seems quite reasonable when there, but makes little sense when awake.

This happens once extraneous thoughts are let go while drifting along the edge of day’s journey and the horizon is reached, falling into the embrace of sleep as attachments are shed for an instant, passing through the doorway into the library of infinite scenarios.

Everything experienced during this state is prioritized in a vast storage facility, a repository of all the impressions that we collectively consider the unconscious, an environment with endless tiers extending across various level of awareness not previously realized that resonate when something is remembered.

It is here, where dreams become the seamless bridge between what is real and what things seem to be; evoking the visceral sensation that remains as the inner nature of who we are begins to reveal itself to our waking consciousness, hopefully long enough to retain the memory and discover its meaning.

According to Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, teleportation was used as means of quickening up the pace of the storyline by getting the actors from one place to another and conserving resources (money). He left the task of explaining its basis in science to the writers,  although academics have already identified the challenges.

Scientists use the hydrogen atom as the simplest model. At its center, is the proton with one circulating electron. In two dimensions, the electron’s path is described as a circle with a central point. In three dimensions the path is far more irregular. Plotting its course from where it had traveled at any given measured instant reveals the form of an asymmetrical cloud. Perhaps the force of magnetism exerted on the electron’s path isn’t equal at all time or maybe there are smaller, much tinier elements that also effects the electron’s course.

In order to teleport a person from one place to another, the location of every electron of every atom and all the other unseen particles would have to be charted, then rematerialized without interrupting their velocity, to another place.

If this could be done, it would reaffirm one of the fundamental laws of science: matter can neither be created nor destroyed; whatever exists now is what existed millions of years ago, just in different form. This balance would have to be maintained. So, in order to teleport someone, they would have to be dematerialized (killed) and the atoms rematerialized in another place and hopefully the person would be brought back to life. But how would all this relate to the soul? where would it go when the body is between the state of dis-assembly and reconstruction?

When surrounded by haze and fog the future can seem bleak. How to proceed to get beyond being overwhelmed is not an uncommon experience. Even in the midst of emotional turmoil so many things lead to misunderstanding one’s environment; Vision is at best clouded, often by the fear of not knowing how to handle what needs to be changed. Many of them are obvious but approach so fast at the same time that they become blind spots that gets larger as paralysis develops, diverting our attention from its course.

Specific details are unimportant. All that is certain is that it starts with a loss of self confidence that leads to inhibitions, maladaptive behavior and the tendency to form co-dependent relationships. But being overextended by everything that needs change is just a distraction from realizing The First Step: Find your way in your own life to rediscover the self-confidence that has been lost; examine your boundaries as an individual and develop the time you need for yourself to feel fulfilled. These are all related, and being focused on them will help reveal where adjustments are critical. Once the power of The First Step has begun, current perspective will no longer be the same and what was feared will be less threatening and embraced more as challenges. When this has been accomplished behavior will adapt, then the second step will appear as a reflection of how thought has been transformed.

Perhaps this has been oversimplified, so obvious that it seems contrived, but it’s easy to forget something so basic and fundamental that its hard not wonder how so many people have neglected it, and lost their way.

Finding the place where confidence resides may need the assistance of someone who has the ability to be objective and say what needs to be said at the right moment and has enough trust to be credible. Timing is crucial, as anyone who has struggled with being in this position can identify. Giving good advice has to be based on the right motive recognizing that withholding it can also be appropriate when unhealthy dependency develops. This assumes that help has been asked for however it has been communicated.

The First Step is not as easy as it sounds. It requires the ability to learn how to be assertive about one’s boundaries and firmly convey limits with conviction. The quest is to reclaim the power of self confidence because somehow it has been lost and anxiety in the presence of uncertainty increases. This is especially true in co-dependent relationships and the most difficult thing to see when involved in one.

Trying to deal with everything at the same time, perhaps hoping that time itself will somehow show the solution is not as reliable as recognizing that rediscovering lost self confidence needs to be aggressively sought and affirmed, defining an essential ingredient of empowerment, a worthy first step without wasting time worrying about things so far ahead that they are impossible to anticipate from current perspective.

As part of a sequence each step is an outgrowth of the one’s before, and mastering them as they present is a reasonable way to make everything more manageable, and perhaps inspiring the outcome by eliminating irrational fear. Each step will transform the self by validating the time spent searching for what has been lost, fundamental self confidence.

When thinking about The Singularity, the image of Astronomy, Astrophysics, Black Holes and Einstein comes to mind, yet another notion defines it as a point on the path of technological acceleration, where convergence of everything is at its fastest, and creating an emergent technology with its own version of sentience to challenge our own appears credible.

Perhaps in a parallel universe synthetic life will be created by humans to serve us as workers or soldiers, an effort supported by the business sector looking to reduce labor costs and maximize profits, or governments with designed warriors at their disposal; empowered with the ability to expand its capabilities by surpassing the intelligence of its creators.

It could also be argued that this has already happened in another reality where imagining this is  leant credence by physics, defining the Cosmos as multi-universes separated only by unique  signatures in the form of vibrations, allowing for all possibilities that can happen do happen in an alternate quantum reality and where an infinite number of potential outcomes are determined not only by our actions, but our thoughts as well.

Science Fiction has been a perfect medium for presenting scientific theories with contemporary social overtones in a format that is more acceptable by society; culturally relevant and easily digestable and yet distant enough to be non-threatening. A form of literature frequently misunderstood, Science Fiction has often had as its basis a future where advancements often begin with developments in medical technology that expand the boundaries of life in unpredictable ways.

Battlestar Gallactia was about the creation of artificial life, a milestone that has already begun in our reality. But, in theirs, the Cylons choose to exterminate their creators and almost succeeds. In yet another popular series, Star Trek – The Next Generation, a seventh season episode Parallels explores the theory of traveling from one reality to another. The events begin when  Lt. Worf, in a shuttle craft, inadvertently causes a spacial rift between quantum alternate universes, tearing the fabric of space, shifting from one reality to the next, experiencing some of the infinite outcomes that were determined by his choices.

The acclaimed series took a metaphysical approach when it explored the legal status of artificial life and the criteria for self awareness in the thought provoking trial of Data in Measure Of A Man, a second season episode that points out that although self awareness has been demonstrated, no one has been able to find a way measure consciousness, let alone judge it.

It has always been easy to dismiss Science Fiction as a fantasy, but it has been hard to ignore the numerous inventions that were first thought by writers that have now become science fact and changed our culture. Who would have thought that in this alternate reality, a computer named Watson would compete and win on Jeopardy as a contestant against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two human challengers and all time champions of the show.

Perhaps this is our first step towards realizing The Singularity – a future time when the confluence of  scientific, societal and economic conditions move so fast making it impossible to reflect or even predict what will happen from our current perspective, leaving all possibilities open until someone perceives them from whatever place the source of all possibilities exists and puts them within grasp.