news from a fish bowl

 Throughout the day today, I was reflecting on the metaphor of a fish bowl to describe how people often see reality. Part of it might have been the fact that I was at an exotic pet store yesterday, and found many animals peering back at me. I wondered, how do they see me? Does the way I see them match with their own perspective? There can never be a way of knowing the definitive of such questions Similarly, everything we think is always being shaped by impressions that are conditioned. There is never any "bottom" to these endless ways of framing experience, and one does not ever reach the end conclusion.
   The search for a definitive answer is like trying to find the "real" reflection in a fish bowl. All the light is continually being curved and refracted in different directions, and one can never fully know what is the "final" way of seeing. Such a perspective does not necessarily mean that one "gives up" establishing an understanding (since such understandings are what connect people), but there comes a humility that is aware the one's impressions are bound to be conditioned and impermanent.
   The opposite to this "humility" might be something akin to paranoia. "Paranoia" also accepts that things are not always what they seem, but it adds to this the idea that illusions are the product of "deliberate" plans or aims, usually in the attempt to belittle or step someone down to a lower stature or position. The paranoid perspective accepts the illusory nature of appearances, but adds the additional suspicion that something beneath those appearances is deliberately "throwing up" illusions to fool or to perhaps mislead a person. That might be very much like a fish trying to find the underlying "clear" view outside the fishbowl, thinking that it can still penetrate past the reflections to see the "real" outside world. Is there a real "outside" world after all, and could this paranoia be a projection of one's own desire to control appearances? I see paranoia as something halfway between seeing illusory appearances and clinging to a permanent purpose underneath. It becomes a burdensome quest for an underlying "truth" that perhaps is not "out there" and does not have an independent existence or self-evidence.