Matter of perspective

"Harbinger of Millers' Prosperity, like this nickname?" smiling Nadine came alongside Miranda to make fun of Luca at lunch, his class distributing the ping-pong ball sized kernels of wheat they stuffed pockets and schoolbags with around the tables, the boy also nibbled on them as his magic turned the grain even in a raw state absolutely delicious and tender.

"Pretty accurate. Tomorrow we can taste buns made of it, looking forward to breakfast." Bryce revealed the Herbology teacher's excited announcement as she went to have the staff there carefully pick up every bit of harvest, before Luca had time to swallow.

"Not bad, but I still prefer meat and dairy products. Maybe if used on making a pizza…" Luca took the sack containing locked boxes of dishes he received from Vilemyr Inn off the delivery eagle's leg, a big bottle of his favourite fairy nectar opened first to wash down the dry balls.

"Give me a sip too." Miranda readied her palm up to take the bottle, Nadine pushed a golden ball into her mouth from behind and locked her lips with both hands, earning a roll of the girl's eyes as she tried to chew it.

"Employment secured for life, I'm sure if you want, getting hired to grow stuff would be easy." Nadine released Miranda and sat on her left, leaning forward to look at Luca unpacking the boxes and putting them back in the sack.

"To be honest, I almost trapped us all." the boy recalled fighting his way through the thick and rigid stalks looking at position of the sun to determine consistent direction.

"Yeah, only ten seconds later and we would have to transfigure hatchets and work hard to get out." Bryce confirmed the difficulty they faced to leave the affected area, the eagle beating its wings in front of the group to gain altitude after Luca tied the bag back to its leg.

"Amusing... Girls pestered us to ask about Sundays' self-study sessions, are we continuing?" Nadine poured herself a cup of coconut milk, or tried, as Miranda preempted her reaching hand and pushed all the jugs containing liquid away in an act of vengeance.

"I don't mind." Luca consented without thinking, the girls shoving and holding each other for a while, happy to reunite after summer, the four chatted about the never-ending stream of new spells to practice until the ice-cream jingle called for the next lesson - in the boys' case, Philosophy.

In the classroom, young, spirited and animated man talked while waving his hands and walking around in circles around the sitting students, his slightly receding brown hair unkempt, the kids picked up from their double desks a book each titled: 'The Problems of Philosophy', by Bertrand Russell.

"Last year the course was hastily assembled, I simply took the ethics and tried to impart them on all of Ilvermorny, was told to try make graduates think about becoming a better person, but the subject of philosophy isn't centered around morality. The real meaning and origin of it can be traced and summed up with a single sequence of letters in the english language: contemplation. If you want to add, rational and evidence-based." he stopped briefly under the blackboard and wrote the word in big, capitalized letters before resuming the powerwalk.

"Last year, hopefully, we all contemplated on how to live the best in reality of our circumstances, this first half of the school year, I want you to figure out how to think the best, which the book touches upon from an angle of introducing multiple other theories on, ultimately constructing a model of particulars, material forms, and universals, truths believed in mind. To hold faith in what your senses tell you yet examine each piece of knowledge you hold closely to avoid a preconceived notion preventing an acknowledgment of its form in the entirety of it. I don't want to talk strictly about it before you read the first chapter, have time for that until our next lesson in a week, but would rather today tell you how to digest any book I gave and will give you over the next six years and a succinct review of the one you just acquired." lap later, he wrote 'reading' on the blackboard.

"In summary, 'Problems' advocate employing an analytical, scientific method of ascertaining reality centered on preknowledge that what follows from a true premise is true, making a priority of data obtained from what we can see, smell, touch, and so on, but allowing beliefs to be created by individuals constantly - distinguishing between universals and particulars, just as Plato distinguishes between ideas and forms. I don't know how much of the book you will understand in the first reading, and it isn't what I want to focus on today, so let's pick a word to sum up part of it: reality." after a lap he wrote the word 'reality' below.

"In Russell's opinion that I agree with, every single philosophy book is merely an outlet from which questions should be formulated by the reader. It isn't supposed to provide any answers, or rather answers and whether to follow them is entirely up to the individual. Reality isn't meant to be established by accepting other's points of view, we only broaden our perception and hopefully come to realize a core value of philosophy - lucid confirmation of your being and experience. That brings me to what I want to present before you today: perspective, which I had thoughts about while reading his book." another word added, the man didn't pay attention to the class and went his way.

"I wish of you to imagine a premise: if we as humans were innately of higher state of understanding or a lower state of understanding, those discussions would lose any meaning. Thoughts of others, their perspective, couldn't be conveyed, were prevented from being expressed, or were meaningless for our advancement in understanding. Such deliberations were made possible only five to six thousand years ago by existence of widespread spoken language and writing, before that, who actually could spare time for something besides day to day survival against the elements, hostile tribes, animals, and lack of food? 'Learning', if we can call it that, was limited to passing on the knowledge of hunting and gathering by example, not a single murmuring and gesticulating individual could form a theory outside his immediate perception, what Russell calls Knowledge by Acquaintance, differentiated from Knowledge by Description. We simply didn't have a possibility to obtain extensive knowledge of items or phenomena outside the immediate physical surrounding. Those were the times of lower state of understanding." he wrote 'lower'.

"Our current state is made possible because of the power of language, I make a string of sounds from my mouth, and you imagine in your head a pretty similar to my meaning object or scene. Descriptional language makes possible extensive conscious contemplation, I modulate my throat to emit a noise or write abstract shapes on a blackboard, without knowledge instilled since birth completely unintelligible, yet your and mine mind can immediately come up with comparable images that correspond to their meaning. The greatest evolution, unheard of leap forward, why we ultimately wrestled the world from under the magical creature's rule and came to the present equipped with tools to discuss anything, but in my judgment, those thoughts and passage of precise knowledge are only valid for human experience in this point of evolution. In a supposed hundred thousand years or another five thousand years, when genetics and science improve, to enable a stable, common consensus the future humans take as obvious from their early upbringing or lack of interest in deliberations on reality as their minds 'figure it all out', a completely different form of human species will emerge when occurrence of what we do here, now, contemplation, need to ask questions, ceases to exist." 'present' appeared on the blackboard.

"Higher states I can immediately conceptualize are two possibilities of extreme unity and extreme separation: first, where language would be superfluous, and we all communicate through precise data derived from our extraordinary and consistent with each other deep perception of the world. We, wizards, can actually achieve such union of sensory data through legilimency, reading each other's minds, and we can perceive in incredible detail if enough charms and potions work to power up our bodies. Now, follow that to a net encompassing all of our species where consensus would be mandatory and singular on all issues, at all times, capable of precisely mapping the entire Earth. Babies would be born with the same amount of knowledge as adults, working happily to advance society in the material world they are masters of and have a micro-understanding about. Second way, totally split individuals into their mental dimensions, as we are kind of now - do those with more powerful magic exist in different realm than those with less? Intelligent and slow, we live in different realities, men and women, poor and rich, empaths and psychopaths, strong and weak. To clarify, at this moment, there might as well be six billion different dimensions or worlds contained and colliding with each other on Earth each time they attempt to exchange ideas. This can be taken to another level, with no need to communicate between us to achieve a complete and fulfilling life, or at least an illusion of it." the man stopped and gazed over the class of twelve-year-olds squinting at him collectively, Luca came out of a trance he spent gazing blankly forward, looked around and saw his colleagues' vacant eyes, the class looked at the man with complete incomprehension.

"Tom Grimsditch, the owner of Vilemyr Inn, heir to one of Twelve Aurors, invented Fantasy Tobacco. It works by making fantasy immersive as if a second layer of existence, augmented daydreaming indistinguishable from reality, enables an imitation of life in unprecedented clarity but utterly fictional. In state induced by it and drugs or stimulants like it, contemplation loses any meaning, because you know, are able to instinctually perceive your place in the universe, and come to terms with it, there is no disconnect between what you know and don't know, it doesn't seem to register in your mind. Such state of illusory certainty, a proper created dimension in a brain, if lasting permanently with no regard to physical body, could be achieved even today, requiring Mr. Grimsditch to make the person inhale his Tobacco constantly, never experiencing doubt, their innate imagination capable of bringing a world of sensation. Or maybe not capable, I don't know. But such a being's state in my opinion could be called 'higher' than current human's." teacher wrote the word 'higher' on the blackboard, making it from top to bottom read: contemplation, reality, reading, perspective, lower, present, higher.

"Higher state equals unity in truth, abandonment of differing individual perspective, where everyone sees the world only in universals, through the lens of their minds, not sensory data, as smell, touch, and so on. Of course, the opposite might be true - complete abandonment of universals and collective fixation on only the particulars, consciously forgetting unimportant, what cannot be measured empirically, deam the universe obsolete to individual's existence. This is at least as I imagine we can, in indefinite passage of time, evolve on a wager that our species improves. Philosophy is what allows me to speculate like that, free flow of thought built upon the foundation of knowledge whose aim is to exercise intellect more than any unique gain." the man went on to admit his speech was rather pointless.

"What I want to say is that only in this particular moment of humanity's development we can engage in such contemplations, that in both lower and higher types of being, philosophy doesn't exist." he put an X aside the words of lower and higher. "Because reality is already explored and utilized by everybody all the time to the limit, or species would be too ignorant to even begin thinking of anything but subjective gratifications. We are in a phase of exploration that is invaluable, you could be the next person adding a block of understanding of the Truth that I am certain future humans will enjoy, given time." Luca closed his eyes and focused on the message the man tried to convey, somehow getting it, probably, plausibly. Many other marks drawn beside the core seven words on a blackboard made the boy and the rest of his class completely dizzy, only the teacher himself didn't seem to mind their reactions and kept adding two-way arrows between the words as he stood with his back to them, end of the lesson going unnoticed if not for the man's reminder with a shout and clap of the hands that made the sluggish students mechanically get up and get out.

"You got anything of what that guy said?" Bryce went in a stooped posture down the stairs in direction of basement.

"Sort of, yes?" Luca uncertainly tried to convince himself, Bryce with a sudden crazed look in his eyes, shook Luca's robe.

"Tell me, tell me!" he yelled making a scene, not caring about the weird eyes of onlookers.

"I kind of feel, but I don't really know…" Luca didn't mind the slight swaying and continued to ponder in confusion until Bryce let him go. Boy's entire class for the rest of the day walked bent forward, rubbing their juvenile smooth chins a lot, with their sight on the floor, still trying to figure what were they supposed to carry out of that classroom.

In the lesson of Offense, they learned a more advanced dueling spell, Expelliarmus, and were told to prepare for duels with teachers after the weekend, so they could briefly guide everyone personally and notice shortcomings before safely letting the kids face each other according to skill level. During the evening, Luca couldn't wait to take out the book and read it overnight again, sitting with both his legs and arms crossed in front of himself, back to the bed's hard-wood headrest, his ruby eyes gleaming under the faint moonlight provided by his window.

"I shouldn't only perceive as I…" Luca wondered what is reality for no-maj as he won't have a chance to rejoin that side of the world, how are things looking from the perspective of dark creatures and those rebels up north, did he have a shortcoming common to people who can't imagine or visit 'worlds of others' as the teacher said it.

"Thats a lot of superfluous words to say reality is real…" muttered Luca reading the middle chapters intently.

"My memory from the perspective of other people in the same spaces as me… I can get acquainted with the mind of those around me easily, I gotta ask Mr. Grimsditch to learn reading thoughts…" the boy talked to himself long into the night, planning what to do to expand his horizons.