Perceiving reality
Chade wrote:
I have no way of knowing what’s happening right now. My senses can only pass a limited representation of what has just happened onto mybrain. That’s what I mean by not being fully aligned.
The best I can do is try and interpret it while, to borrow Erwin’s phrase, ignoring the crap spinning round in my head.
Alright, let’s look at that, since you bring it up.
You certainly do have a way of knowing what’s happening right now – you can simply pay attention to it. Now, you’re probably thinking along the lines of “how do I know my senses aren’t playing tricks on me?” or “that table seems solid, but I think I know it isn’t,” or “how do I know aliens aren’t planting these thoughts into my brain?” Those sorts of questions don’t address “reality” if we use that term in any meaningful sense. They are addressing a spin on reality, or what Tom would describe as “narration.”
Put your hand on a table. In attempting to know reality, you’re thinking along the lines of “am I really touching this table?” “Is this table really there?” “Is my hand really there?” “Am I really here?” None of these things have anything to do with reality. What reality is, from your point of view, is that there is a sensation of a hand being on a table, and a perception of that sensation. That’s real. There’s your reality. It simply does not matter what the physical actuality behind that sensation or that perception is; both the sensation and the perception are real.
It when you start – to use Tom’s phrase again – narrating things that you move away from reality. When you start thinking, “Aha! This table feels solid, but I know it isn’t!” you’re moving away from reality and paying attention to voices in your head. You might think you are seeing through an illusion of reality, but the opposite is occurring. The reality, in this case, is that there is a thought that although a table feels solid, it isn’t, and there is a perception of that thought.
The fact that your “senses can only pass a limited representation of what has just happened” is completely irrelevant to the question of perceiving reality. Nobody said that you have to perceive the totality of reality at any given moment. The fact that you are perceiving a limited representation of what has happened does not mean that you are not perceiving reality any more than the fact that you aren’t perceiving what’s happening on the other side of the galaxy does. Even though you may have an incomplete philosophical understanding of the nature of existence, that in no way disbars you from perceiving reality.
The best way to think of this is that you are perceiving reality when you are not perceiving what is imaginary. Reality is not some abstract physical concept, here; it is everything that is not imagined.
The biggest difficulty most people have with actually doing this is that their ability to distinguish what is imagined from what is real is horribly underdeveloped; they think all kinds of nonsense spinning round their heads is “real.” They think, for instance, that “there is suffering in the world,” and they think that is real. What actually is real is that there is a thought that there is suffering in the world, and there is a perception of that thought. A large part of “spiritual progress” is nothing other than learning to bring to light the unreality of more and more things that you had previously considered to be real.
This is really important to understand. If you persist in clinging to this philosophical conception of “reality,” which is itself an imaginary thing, then you’re never going to realise what you’re looking for. If you really go off on a tangent then you’re going to conclude that you can join the “make your own personal reality” crowd and go 180 degrees in the wrong direction.
My talk of “perceiving reality” is not gibberish; you actually can do it. What stops you from doing it is paying attention to imaginary things, and this idea that you “have no way of knowing what’s happening right now” is one of them. The thought itself is real, so you can demonstrate your ability to perceive reality very easily to yourself right there. It is believing what that thought represents that you need to be careful of. I’ve frequently said that beliefs – all beliefs – should be eschewed, and this is why. If you stop thinking, if you stop believing, and if you stop “narrating,” then what you’re going to be perceiving is reality. Once you get a grip of this, then you can start perceiving the reality of your thoughts, and then you won’t have to sit in quiet meditation in order to do it any more.
I’ve often said that none of this stuff is particularly difficult; it’s figuring out precisely what it is that you’re supposed to be doing that’s the tricky part. That’s why – to reference another recent conversation in this thread – it’s so insanely ridiculous to think you’re going to have much of a shot of doing this by focusing purely on physical practice. You’ll miss the boat entirely, that way, because even if your practice is “successful” you’ll have no idea what that success actually means, and it’ll be wasted on you. Some other guy on this thread was talking about a particular type of experience that he’s had sporadically, but cannot generate at will; this is because he doesn’t understand the conditions for it, or anything of its nature. This isn’t a negative reflection on him; hardly anybody has a good understanding of this stuff, so they resort to saying things like “just do the practice, and it’ll happen.” It might do, but if it does, it’ll be essentially accidental. As I’ve said, you always have a theory of what’s what whether you like it or not, so if you deliberately deny the necessity of that theory, you have nobody else to blame when things don’t work out very well for you.
2 Comments on “Perceiving reality”
What is the difference between “sensations”, “perceptions” and “perceptions of sensations”? Do you use some philosophical or religious authority such as Hume or Buddhism when defining these words?
What is the difference between “sensations”, “perceptions” and “perceptions of sensations”?
The definitions are relatively flexible here, but the distinction arises from the fact that you do perceive sensations (e.g. you perceive a sensation of coldness, or of warmth, or of a particular taste, or a particular smell, etc.) For there to be a perception there must be at least a perceiver, a thing being perceived, and an instance of perception, so based on this observation we conclude that there is at least:
1. A sensation which is being perceived;
2. A perception of that sensation; and
3. A self which is doing the perceiving.
and that all of these three things are real. This remains true even – for instance – if the universe has no actual physical substance, since we are specifically not commenting on what the nature of that reality might be, only the fact that it exists.
In this context there’s no difference between “perceptions” and “perceptions of sensations.”
Do you use some philosophical or religious authority such as Hume or Buddhism when defining these words?
No, my own authority is sufficient here.
The actual nature of the reality of any of these things is not particularly important to this post, as I just described, so questions of definition are relatively academic here. What it important is that they are there and that they are real, regardless of what their actual nature is, and that they are distinct from any narration that the conscious mind decides to overlay upon them. You could use different speculative definitions if you so chose, the essential point of this post would remain unaltered.
The argument really counters the commonly held position that it is impossible to perceive reality because, for instance, there is no way of knowing whether or not the universe exists; I am saying that this position is false because we can determine at least three things that are real, even if we have absolutely no idea what the nature of that reality is. The “external” universe may only be reflected to us via the senses, but we can determine that – for instance – that sensory representation is itself real, whether physical or not. It’s specifically a question of perception rather than understanding. “Perceiving reality” and “understanding the nature of reality” are two completely different things; the former is easy, the latter may ultimately be impossible.