801.10 Sense Coordination of the Infant

801.11 One of the most surprising things about a newborn child is that it is already tactilely coordinated. Even in the first day, the baby is so well coordinated tactilely that if you put your finger against its palm, the baby will close its hand firmly and deftly around your finger, although it is not using its ears or eyes at all. If you will now exert a tiny bit of tension effort to remove your finger, the child will respond at once by opening its hand. The infant will repeat the closing and opening response to your initiatives as many times as you may wish to initiate. This should not surprise us if we realize that the baby has been in tactile communication with its mother for months before evacuating her womb, within which, however, its visual, olfactory, and aural faculties were muted and inoperative. Not much time after birth the child employs for the first time its olfactory glands and starts searching the mother’s breast and the source of milk. Quite a few days later it begins to hear; and very much later, it sees. The sequence in which the child’s faculties become employed corresponds to the order of increased range of its respective faculties of information apprehending.

801.12 Thus we find the child successively coordinating the first three faculties: the tactile, the olfactory, and the aural. He begins to learn how they work together and quite rapidly gets to be very skillful in coordinating and handling the information coming to him through these senses. It is only days later that he begins to use his sight. He tries tactilely, olfactorily, and aurally to confirm what he sees to be reality. He cannot do so over any great distance because neither his arms and hands nor his tasting mouth will reach very far. Months later, the child crawls to check tactilely, olfactorily, and aurally on phenomena still further away; and thereby to coordinatingly sort out his information inputs; and thereby develop a scheme ofand a total sense of reality and repetitive event expectancy. He crawls over to the chair to find that his eyes have reported to him correctly that the chair is indeed there. He begins to check up and coordinate on more distant objects, and he finds his visual ability to be reliable. The child seeing the Fourth of July fireworks for the first time sees a flash and then hears a boom. Maybe that doesn’t mean so much to him, because boom (aural) and flash (optical) may be different phenomena; but when he sees a man hammering a fence post, he has by this time been hammering a whole lot and he knows the sound that makes. He may not be very sure of the fireworks in the sky, the flash and the boom, but he is really very confident about the sound of the hammering of the fence post. When he sees the man hammer and then hears the sound a fraction later, he begins to realize that there is some lag in the rates in which he gets information from different faculties. His eye gets it faster than his ear.

801.13 The three postnatal senses the child coordinates are secondary. The first prenatal one, the tactile, is primary. The real emphasis of the judgment of life is on the tactile, the primary, the thing you can touch[^27]. The ranges of the first three senses are so close together, and sight is so different, that we may best rank them as #1, touch, being a primary set; with both #2, olfactoral coupled with #3, aural, as a secondary set; and #4 sight, as a tertiary set: wherefore in effect, touch is the yesterday set; while the olfactoral and aural (what you are smelling, eating, saying, and hearing) are the now set; while sight (what only may be next) is the future set. (We can seem to see, but we have not yet come to it.) Whereas reality is eternally now, human apprehending demonstrates a large assortment of lags in rates of cognitions whose myriadly multivaried frequencies of myriadly multivaried, positivenegative, omnidirectional aberrations, in multivaried degrees, produce such elusively off-center effects as possibly to result in an illusionary awareness of an approximately unlimited number of individually different awareness patterns, all of whose relative imperfections induce the illusion of a reality in which “life” is terminal, because physically imperfect; as contrasted to mind’s discovery of an omni-interaccommodative complex of a variety of different a priori, cosmic, and eternal principles, which can only be intellectually discovered, have no weight, and apparently manifest a perfect, abstract, eternal design, the metaphysical utterly transcendent of the physical.

801.14 The 186,000-miles-per-second speed of light is so fast that it was only just recently measured, and it doesn’t really have much meaning to us. You don’t have a sense of 700 million miles per hour. If you did get to “see” that way, you would be spontaneously conscious of seeing the Sun eight minutes after the horizon had obscured it; ergo, consciously seeing an arc around the Earth’s curvature. We are not seeing that way as yet. To explain our sight, we call it “instantaneous.” We say we can see instantaneously. This fact has misled us very greatly. You insist that you are seeing the blackand-white page of this book, do you not? You’re not. You have a brain-centered television set, and the light is bouncing off the page. The resultant comes back through your optical system and is scanned and actually goes back into the brain, and you are seeing the page in your brain. You are not seeing the page out in front of you. We have gotten used to the idea that we see outside of ourselves, but we just don’t do so. It only takes about a billionth of a second for the light to bounce off the page and get in the brain to be scanned, so the child is fooled into thinking that he is seeing outside of himself. And we are misinforming ourselves in discounting the lag and assuming that we see it “over there.” No one has ever seen outside themselves.