People only know how to see with their eyes, not with their minds. But almost nothing has obvious boundaries. What about all the stuff you can't see with your eyes? Are you just going to ignore that?
- The Arkon
What you look at is far more complicated than what you end up seeing.
- The Arkon
Once during an Indian fruit harvest, a farmer took a break from work and slumped down in the shade of a tree to enjoy a coconut. Upon splitting it open, he saw inside a message from his Hindu god, Vishnu. The Brahmic writing was clear for anyone to see, plainly spelt out in the two halves of white meat. But the implications of this experience can only be one of the following: either the Supreme Being has no qualms about revealing his
Divine Will in the contents of mere palm fruit, or the farmer's senses produced an inaccurate image of what he saw in the coconut. It's anyone's guess as to which it really was, but the moral of the story remains that whilst miracles are known to happen, it can also be said that people regularly see things which aren't there.
Most people mistake their perception of the world for reality itself, and push forward in life with an incomplete understanding of things. Such errors could be mild, like purchasing a rotten apple because you didn't inspect its underside, or they could be detrimental, like presuming a desert oasis to be real when it's only a hallucination.
In both cases, what people claim to "know" is in fact only known conditionally, partly thanks to their limited senses. It's rare to find people whose conception of reality isn't exclusively dependent on their senses, who understand that there are several doorways separating knowledge from ignorance, of which one is labeled "Perception", and it must be entered with prudence.
Humans beings are attached to nothing so much as their perception of the world.
This perception is the passageway through which the mind connects with the external world, functioning as a private thoroughfare between our senses and our thoughts. Because of this, reality will always look distinct to each person, with a composition that's biased towards their values and prejudices. In the same garden, the farmer may notice the vegetable patch, the botanist the flowers, the painter the coloring of the plants, and the entomologist the insects crawling in the grass.
All people are enclosed within their consciousness, and can't step outside it any more than they can escape their own skin. Hence, what we call “reality” is something generated from standing within a framed perspective. Outside of this frame of perception exists what could be termed an "absolute" - a vast aggregate that eludes human apprehension, much like events in outer space that are invisible to the naked eye. To ponder the idea of the absolute is a first step towards conceptualizing the infinite number of things that exist outside your awareness. It then follows that what we call "reality" is simply the interaction between something limited, like our perceptions, and the absolute that stands outside it. Without that frame, all of life would be the same experience to all living things. The direct experience of a human being would be the same as that of a cat. Yet a man and a cat live in completely different worlds, even when sharing the same physical space.
We look at the world through a narrowing lens, seeing only slices of it at any one time, and even then we have to narrow our lens further to focus on the things relevant to us.
As a result, many aspects of human experience are not direct, but a kind of virtual reality created by our senses and given substance by our past impressions. The way a person is steered by these influences is what ultimately governs his critical faculties and perceptions.
It's a common presumption that people see the world primarily with their eyes,
but this is only true when they look at objects they recognize; things they've seen before and already have categorized. When looking at something foreign, the imagination takes over the function of the eyes and becomes the main tool of orientation. Whilst our physical senses reveal to us the physical world, it's our imagination that allows us to project ourselves beyond time and space into the realm of possibilities, abstracts and narratives. Here, however, is where many people suffer for their lack of imagination.
A particular kind of perspective about what's "normal" has been put into the minds of the masses, causing their imaginations to become ill-equipped to grapple with problems whose answers are unconventional. After all, the human mind processes new information largely based on its previous intake of facts and images. So if this previous intake is insufficient, then the imagination, working through guesswork or opinion, will demand answers in spite of its inability to conceive of them, much like groping in the dark for something that may not be there.
Conventional wisdom tells us that the world is made up of objects. Having seen these objects - buildings, vehicles, people - we reflect on how to interact with them, and then take action. As self-evident as this appears, it warrants further reflection. Let's imagine a scenario where you're sitting in a cafe and glimpse an attractive individual at a nearby table. On one level, you perceive them as an object of interest - an intriguing material thing to be observed. Captivated by their appearance, you start to draft assumptions about what kind of person they are and how you might approach them.
But in your enamored state, you failed to consider the invisible levels of this person's existence. In terms of the biological, that person exists as billions of cells that perform numerous functions uninterruptedly. The cells go on to form tissues, which collectively form organs and so on until we finally arrive at what the person looks like in front of you. If it turns out that the person is a cancer patient battling a tumor, then the importance of their unseen cellular reality becomes quite relevant. And there are other levels of analysis: this person will have inextricable social ties that define them, such as friends and family who come from different backgrounds. Even those groups are connected to yet other groupings, until who the person is can be expanded to encompass virtually anything. But when you blissfully observe them as an object from your nearby table, you don't see any of that. You can only see them at a certain level of resolution, yet all the other details that escape your attention are equally relevant for defining who they are.
The idea of the world being more than just a collection of objects can be seen not only in social relationships, but also with inanimate devices. When you use a computer, you're not really interacting with the computer itself, which is essentially a motherboard and other internal components. A keyboard, mouse and a GUI have been provided for you to use, and they interact with the computer for you. But if the computer were to unexpectedly crash, then you'd be forced to interact with the machine itself, which most people find frustrating since they know very little about how computers actually work. Similarly, when you interact with the world, your desire is mainly to produce a favorable result for yourself, for which a technical understanding of things is often unnecessary.
It's why everything from vehicles to consumer technology is masked by a simple user interface that hides the complex inner workings. So as it turns out, the world is not primarily made up of the objects - it's made up of information.
More practically speaking, it's made up of tools and obstacles; things you can use for your purposes and things that get in your way. It's only because of limited perception that people think the world is only full of objects, having failed to see that an object always transcends the manner in which they frame it.
Despite living in a society of millions, there's a sense in which each man is an island.
We stand alone at the center of our own experiences, and no-one else has access to the world we carry around within ourselves. We might communicate our feelings and insights, or even create shared moments around the same activity, but each person's experience remains unique to their own consciousness. So it follows that the most essential thing for any individual, far more than one's circumstances, is the constitution of this consciousness. The ability to not only observe the world as a collection of information, but to view oneself as an object to be parsed is what makes for a sophisticated
self-concept. By extending your awareness and contemplation to include yourself, you develop a mindset that prevents you from being tossed about by every unexpected development or whim, as it equips you with a better understanding of yourself and your place in the world.
We all tell ourselves stories about who we are, where we'd like to be, and how we're going to get there. These stories determine the significance of the things we encounter, and that which furthers our progress in these stories is considered positive, whilst the things that impede our progress are viewed as negative. But with the current spread of stories about what it means to be human and what we ought to value most, courtesy of the mass media and Hollywood, the ultimate goal placed into the hearts of many is the pursuit of happiness; a happiness that consists merely in the frequent repetition of pleasure and aversion from pain, using oneself as the primary measure of everything. The reason why the current state of widespread censorship and ignorance can be so effective is because people's awareness of the world have become inextricably tied to their personal preferences, such that any whiff of displeasure or dissonance is off-putting.
People's sensibilities have become so geared towards a narrowly-defined self-interest that their perception remains reliably limited - sufficiently so to allow for their control through marketing and propaganda. The resulting dilemma is that not only are people blind to the obvious, they are also blind to their blindness. Despite their fate being inseparably tied to the quality of their choices, people seem content to make rather poor decisions, as if life were a video game offering multiple lives and different options to choose from if you get stuck. They don't contemplate their moves as if they were the only moves they could ever make, which is what life actually is. With their perceptual systems downgraded to such a poor resolution, a game-like virtual reality is perhaps the best representation such people have to work with. They gaze at the world through a pixelated lens, even as it grows increasingly dull in their eyes, unaware or uninterested in the things which transcend their perceptions. Simply put, they're happy when people and events conform to those perceptions and are unhappy when they don't, thus demonstrating that what you see and hear depends not only on where you're standing or what you know; it also depends on what sort of person you are and what you value.
greekspeek for thought
There are 3 perceptions to be mindful of: the way you see yourself, the way you think others see you, and the way they really see you.
Perception creates an environment within an environment. After all, how can one guy be happy with his messy house and another guy needs his to be spotless?
It's understandable that people want more details about particular subjects, but the truth is that the details are already in front of them, just not in the way that they're used to seeing them, which is why they gloss over things.
The things people say are problematic are actually not. It's the things they don't even know exist that are the real problems; the things they can't or won't acknowledge.
Can you blame people for following their perception?
There's going to be certain critical points where your perception and reality cross, and you have be cognizant enough to grab a hold of those points and use them as your reference. But how can you do that if your sense of perception is so far gone?
Are you wondering why can't you find the information that's relevant to what you're pursuing? Well, your eyes and ears register new information based on previous intake, so if you haven't taken in anything of importance previously, how do you expect to see more of it now? It's kind of like an anti-conditioning that makes you ignore the obvious. I say "anti-conditioning" because "conditioning" implies that there's a tailored impulse to something prevalent in your mind. This is the opposite, where your mind is lacking the relevant impulse to begin with, and so no progress can be made.
Can you be like Sherlock Holmes about the truth by looking at all the obvious details? You could have 100 investigators look at a crime scene, yet come up with nothing, but when Sherlock Holmes steps in, he sees what everyone's missing, and not by using a microscope or computer, but just with his eyes. So why isn't anyone paying attention to what's right in front of them? At best they acknowledge it only after you bring it up, but even then they can't expand on it.
