The Prison of Perception: Open Your Eyes.
{Wings of Perception / Unknown}
“You have escaped the cage. Your wings are stretched out. Now fly.” ~ Rumi
Perception is the foundation of all our behavior. All reactions — emotional, physical, biochemical, mental — are based upon our perceptions.
Our perceptions, however, are not pure input. They come bundled with accessories that we may want to take a look at.
There is the recording faculty, whether it be sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, or intuition, named manas in Sanskrit. There is also the discriminative faculty, which classifies these impressions and reacts to them. This faculty is called buddhi. The third faculty bundled in perception is called ahamkar — the ego sense that claims this perception for its own and then stores it up as individual knowledge.
As an illustration of the three aspects of perception, this following example is given in Patanjaili‘s yoga aphorisms:
Manas reports “A large, animate object is quickly approaching.”
Buddhi decides “That’s a bull. It is angry. It wants to attack someone.”
Ahamkar screams “It wants to attack me, Pantanjali! It is I who see this bull. It is I who am frightened. It is I who am about to run away.”
Later on from the branches of a nearby tree, Ahamkar may add, “Now I know that this bull (which is not I) is dangerous. There are others who do not know this; it is my personal knowledge which will cause me to avoid this bull in the future!”
So we have three faculties, all working together. The first one — the recording faculty, manas, is pure, in that it is only limited only by the sensitivity or capacity of the individual.
The second faculty, buddhi, is where things start to get dodgy. We classify a perception — let’s say, the sonic boom after the passing of military jet — based on a judgement: is it dangerous or advantageous? And doesn’t that just depend on a lot of things? How many things can you think of that determine whether something you perceive is dangerous or advantageous to your survival? And your reaction — what is that based on?
By the time we get to the third component, ahamkar — the bondage is complete. The perceptions have meaning — specific meaning for you personally. Is your country at war? Will your stocks rise or plummet? Are you in a country where you or someone you love is getting killed?
Or maybe it’s just two gay guys kissing in front of you, and that really triggers you.
Why is this upsetting for you? What dangerous, potentially shadow information is lying down there? Is it possible that you might look and find that it’s not scary at all? Or, do you suspect that it’s the beginning of a can of ugly worms? And if it is a can of worms, what is it doing to you inside, and wouldn’t it be healthy to extract? It might be a good question to get to the bottom of. This is how we are kept trapped — fear and advantage.
Thus the baggage in our perceptions includes interpretations of what we have perceived.
But wait, there’s more! What the ancient ones observed but did not articulate (for they created rituals for the healthy expression and dissolution or resolution of this aspect) was that our perceptions are also skewed by our personal shadows, and our projections — things we can’t bear to see or experience within ourselves.
We continue to hide these distasteful aspects of ourselves from ourselves, by attaching them to incoming sensual information, projecting them onto ‘other’, and further distorting the messaged contained in our perception of any phenomenon.
And there’s more! Our perceptions are also caged-in by conditioning. When we realize that we really don’t need most of what’s being advertised and sold out there, why can’t we just quit our soul-killing corporate jobs and go paint or fish or play guitar or become a wino or write poetry or teach middle-school girls in the middle east? Except for the last option, we probably wouldn’t exactly die, so wouldn’t it be better?
But without jobs, we’d have no means. We’d have no status. No ability to acquire the basics of food, clothing, shelter, sex, a sense of belonging. So we have to live fake, confused, messed-up lives that feel wrong, just to get by as a mere acceptably-conditioned sliver of our awesome, radiant, authentic selves.
However, this is a catch-22 situation, because the Earth has everything on it that should allow us to have all our fundamental needs met, freeing us up to bond socially with those who share our values and interests.
Money doesn’t grow on trees, but food, clothing and shelter do.
So what the hell happened? How did the means replace the end and skew the game?
Think about it. Really think about it. Why are things the way they are? And, understanding that, do they have to be that way? Are we perhaps the ones responsible for things getting worse instead of better, because of all the built in assumptions contained in our perceptual baggage?
It’s worth a try to sort it all out. Perhaps if we free our minds, purify our perceptions, and understand our emotions and reactions, we will find ourselves freer than we ever dreamed possible.
*****
Read more on the subject:
How to Know God, The Yoga Aphorisms of Pantanjali
Owning Your Own Shadow, Understanding the Dark Side of the Human Psyche by Robert A. Johnson
Mondo Zen www.mondozen.org
{Free your mind.}
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