Perception

Perception

Recently, I heard a scientist say, that as far as our experience and knowledge of the world of objects around us goes, we don’t actually know what is out there. Science has reduced these objects to fields of energy vibrating at various frequencies, but has not yet discovered the secrets behind them. Mentalism states that, not only are these things forms of Consciousness, but so also is the body. It is as mental as a thought. It can come as quite a shock to realize that flesh, blood and bone are not material things, but ideas formed by the mind in the same way as all the other things as ideas are formed.

Let us consider the act of perceiving. To give an exact explanation of the actual process would be highly presumptuous, because I do not possess experiential knowledge of it and I have never met anyone who has. As discussed later, we cannot “get in” to this series of events that produces the percept, because it happens at an incredible speed, too fast for the conscious mind to grasp.

If you glance from this page to the clock on the wall, you will instantly become aware of it: you simply switched your gaze and bingo that’s that! But there is much more to it. At one moment you were looking at the page and a fraction of a second later, you were looking at the clock. You were, however, totally unaware of the process of becoming aware of it. Why? The answer is that the subconscious mind that executed the series of events leading to the awareness of the clock, functions at a speed too fast for the conscious mind to catch the experience. Look around from one object to another and they appear as if by magic, as if you are simply exploring the world around you. But the tick of time between giving attention to an object and becoming aware of it contains an act by the mind of truly wondrous creativity.

Attention is the first function of the human mind. Here is this sentient, vibrant being, having created all its faculties out of the need to function in the world, sending out mental waves through the medium of the senses and in this way giving attention to and interacting with the world. When the mind, via one of its senses – in this case, sight – sends its attention to something “out” there, namely the clock, it has to take information about the clock, that is, its shape, color, movement of the second hand, etc., and work it up into a perception, a mental creation. The whole process does not start at the clock and proceed via the light-rays to the eye and then the optic nerve to the brain, from which a perception miraculously and inexplicably springs. It is not a reflex physiological process starting with the clock and somehow ending with mental awareness of it at the brain. It is a creative mental process that occurs because of the mind’s fundamental ability to give attention and then manufacture its own percepts. The whole series of events that produces the event begins with the mind and ends with the mind.

Our final awareness of the clock, our perception of it, is the result of this amazing creative process that goes on beneath the threshold of the conscious mind. The individual, however, is not the only mind at work here. It is only able to form perceptions of “things” from the master image provided by the Cosmic or World-Mind, which is the creator of all “things”. Staying with the individual mind, the thought of the “thing” comes after we have given attention to it. This whole process of arriving at the awareness of the clock happens so fast that we no longer have any experiential knowledge of it. We have forgotten how we painstakingly went through it, time after time after time, in a series of repetitions that resulted in the incredible speed at which we can now perform it. We cannot get in as we say, to this amazing series of events. But just because you cannot witness the speed at which you – as mind – can function, does not mean you are not thinking.

What about the ticking of the clock? If you can hear it then the mind went through a similar process to that by which it became aware of the clock’s shape and color. If you also touch, smell and taste it (it’s a gingerbread clock), a similar process applies.

When the mind uses all six senses at once in becoming aware of something, then a percept is formed through a process of instant fusion of information from sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell and kinesthesia. This instant fusion produces the perception, the idea, the mental creation. In this case we created a perception of the clock. From the standpoint of the individual the perception of the clock is the clock.

It is worth noting that in studying the mind, it is possible only for the purpose of theoretical analysis to separate one of the senses out. Separation of them is not possible in actual experience.

In studying the above, it is necessary to adopt the double standpoint, the first being the philosophic, the second the practical. The former seeks to get at the essential nature of objects around us, while the latter deals with them as the solid things that the senses present to us. The Appearance is also the Real. For the practical purpose of interacting with things in our everyday lives, it is essential to treat such an object as a chair as a solid wooden piece of furniture and proceed to sit on it, for it is no less solid for being mental. We, as individual minds, have created a so-called body that possesses acute sensitivity. Our senses inform us very accurately of the world around us. If they did not, then we would walk into walls and not through door-openings, miss the toilet seat and stick our forks up our noses!

This article was first published in Going Mental by Daniel McGowan. You can download the PDF of this book for free here:  FREE DOWNLOAD