Relativity* of Perception*
*Pranam*
1 Perception is not what each view is; that is the vision made of an
individual seeking what one wishes to see. Perception is that of the mind,
an abstract. Even the mind has regulation and has an impact on other
factors. Perception is what one does not see anything, as only as that
thing, which cannot be seen. One cannot perceive one. Till such a thing
happens, nature treats the living beings as children, who play with the
toys, and scatters them all as they wished, and go to sleep; mother nature
can regulate to refurbish the next day, for the children to play. We try to
breathe, but breath is a borrowed one. Unaware we forget to repay the
borrowed one. We think the elephant and the wood are different; love and
sivam are different; and all these do happen, till we wake up to find that,
both are one only, perception varies through the vision of the mind. (KR).
2 We noticed that our essential Self is the highest reality. Even doubt
and denial of it really affirm it. In our ordinary external life we are
prone to believe that our eyes are the seers of objects. This is the
uncritical opinion of the common man. But it is not difficult to perceive
that the eyes by themselves have not the power to know things independently.
The matter comes into high relief in the states of dream and deep sleep,
when, even if the eyes are kept open, nothing external can be seen or
observed. No sense-organ seems to function in these states. The ears, even
if they are kept open, cannot hear sounds. If we place a few particles of
sugar on the tongue of a sleeping man, he will produce no reaction and have
no taste of it. The very existence of a body is then, for all practical
purposes, negative. The reason, as you will immediately understand it, is
that the mind in these two states is withdrawn from the body and maintains
no contact with the senses of knowledge. When the mind pervades and
activates the senses, they seem to work as intelligent agents of knowledge.
But then they are deprived of relation with the mind, they lose all their
value. The mind is the real perceiver, and to it even the sense organs,
such as the eyes, stand in the position of objects.
3 But deeper analysis has shown us that even the mind has an objective
character, inasmuch as it is seen to be deprived of all life in the states
of swoon and deep sleep. It is intelligent when it is awake but
non-intelligent when it is made to wind up and adjourn its activities. A
consciousness higher than the mind enlivens it and gives it meaning. The
mind is a psychological organ, not a metaphysical principle. It is on
account of the relative activities of the mind that we have a diversity of
experience in the world. It is the mind that creates a gulf between the
objects and our reactions to them, between existence and value. This
distinction is made not only in respect of the things of the outside world
but also the different aspects of our own personality, viz., the physical
body made up of the five gross elements—earth, water, fire, air and ether-;
the vital body consisting of the vital forces and the organs of motor
activity; the mental body consisting of the faculties of understanding,
feeling, willing, memory and the like, together with the five senses of
perception; and a primal causal element which is experienced by us in the
state of deep sleep. For purpose of simplicity we may use the term mind to
designate all the psychological functions together. The manner in which the
external world is felt by the mind is very much dependent on the latter's
constitution and inherent shortcomings
4 A knowledge of the functions of the mind is essential to understand
life in its fullness. In the observation of the mind we can have no
instrument, such as the ones we use in observing, measuring, examining or
cleaning outward things. The mind is the student as well as the object of
study, when life as a whole is the theme that we wish to investigate and
comprehend. In a famous image given in the Kathopanishad, the inner self of
man is compared to a lord seated in a chariot, the body to the chariot, the
intellect to the charioteer, the mind to the reins, the senses to the
horses pulling the chariot, and the objects of the senses to the roads
along which the chariot is driven. The Upanishad gives a caution that the
supreme state can be reached only by him who has as his charioteer a
powerfully discriminative intellect which directs the restive horses of the
senses with the aid of the reins of the mind, and not by any one else who
may have a bad charioteer. The meaning of this analogy is that the human
individuality and personality are outer forms and instruments to be
properly used by the inner directive intelligence towards the great
destination of life, and not be taken as ends in themselves or mistaken for
reality as such.
5 These deep-rooted urges are an immediate consequence of the self's
restriction to a dualistic perception of the world and an arrogation of
ultimate selfhood to itself, while the truth is otherwise. The individual
has a morbid habit of unconsciously asserting itself as the centre of
experience and considering the other contents of the universe as adjectives
or subsidiary elements meant to bring satisfaction to it in some way or the
other. In this respect, we should say that all forms of human knowledge are
different types of activity to achieve certain ends other than themselves.
Man never is, he is always to be. This predicament is, as it would be
clear, a corollary of the feeling that we are localised entities forming a
mechanical whole, which we call the universe, of which it seems that we can
never have simultaneous knowledge. Our perceptions are always in a series,
we know things one after another, and not at one stroke. We never see one
and the same picture at two given moments in a cinematographic projection,
but yet we seem to see a continuity of the existence of forms on account of
a very quick succession and motion of the pictures. Strictly speaking, we
never see one and the same thing in a particular act of perception, but the
rapidity of the psychoses is so tremendous that there is an illusion of the
perception of a static existence. And above all, there is that absolute
Self behind all mental functions, from which these draw sustenance, and
borrow existence as well, as light.
6 There is an unceasing attempt on its part to break boundaries, to
overcome all limitations and to transcend itself at every step. The
environment called life in which it finds itself is only an opportunity
provided to it to seek and find what it wishes to have in order to exceed
itself in experience in the different stages of evolution. The universe is
a vast field of psychological experience of multitudinous centres of
individuality for working out their desserts by way of objective experience.
The universe is another name for experience by a cosmic mind, of which the
relative minds are refractive aspects and parts. The desirable and the
undesirable in life are nothing but certain consequences which logically
follow the whimsical and unmethodical desires of the ignorant individuals
who know not their own ultimate destination. What is desirable today need
not be so tomorrow, and today's painful experience may be a blessing for
the future. It does not mean that all that we want is always the good. We
often grope in darkness and find a cup of poison which we avidly drink,
while we are really in search of some soothing food to appease our hunger.
There is no error in the world or the objects; it is in the painful fact
that we have no knowledge of what is really good for us. It is not enough
if a physician knows merely that a particular drug has the power to
suppress a particular ailment, he has also to know what other reactions the
drug will produce in the living organism. In our life, the mind has to act
as its own physician, and in this work it has to exercise great vigilance
born of right perception. No thought, feeling or willing can be said to be
healthy when it is not in consonance with the health and peace of the
universe as a whole. That we are members of a single undivided family
demands that we have to be mutually co-operative, and think and act in
terms of mutual welfare, which, in the end, is the welfare of the whole.
When this knowledge is not given to the mind, it acts blindly and errs with
the idea that what appears to bring a temporary sensation of pleasure to it
is the true and the good*. When it does not learn the lesson of life by
enlightened reason, it has to learn it by pain.*
7 Absolute Consciousness and anything that may seem to be opposed to it
can only be a phase of itself. The fivefold base of objective perception,
viz., sound, touch, form, taste and smell, is found to be inseparable from
and reciprocally related to the senses of knowledge working under the
direction of the mind. The theory of the Vedanta is that the mind,
constituting mainly the functions of understanding, thinking, feeling,
remembering and willing, is the resultant of the collective totality of the
purified forms of the essences of the five substrata of sensations
enumerated above. The sympathy that is observed between sensations and
their objects is thus explained by the fact that the cause of the
appearances of the two are essentially the same. Not only this. There is
the presupposition of the greater truth that at the background of the mind,
the senses and their objects, there is the Absolute itself as their very
reality.
8 Material welfare, the enjoyment of desires and relations to
society are given due consideration and are equally regulated by Dharma
which, at the same time, works with Moksha or the ultimate realisation of
the infinite as its aim. Dharma is the ethical value, Artha the material
and the economic value, Kama the vital value and Moksha the infinite value
of life. As the infinite included all the finites, the aspiration for
Moksha naturally implies the fulfilment of the ends of the other desires
and the execution of all other duties in life. This sublime aspiration
arises in the mind when it has an inherent feeling of 'enough' with the
things of the world. This is the 'divine discontent' which acts as a
forerunner of the struggle of the spirit to grasp and know itself in the
Absolute. It is here that true knowledge dawns.
9 The individual expands to the family, the family to the
community, the community to a wider society or the nation, the nation to
the whole world, and the world to the cosmos, wherein the process of
expansion finds its limit and begins to turn inward into the centre of
experience which, in the end, is recognised to be identical with the
Supreme Being. Bearing this in mind, the sage of the Upanishad warns us
with the great rule of life that everything shall desert us if we consider
it to be different from our own essential self. As we have already noticed,
nothing in this world can be considered to be merely a means to the
satisfaction of another, for in this mutually-determined whole there are
only ends, not means. The Bhagavad-Gita states that all pleasures that are
born of the contact of the mind and the senses with the external are wombs
of pain, for outward contact is not the way of contacting reality. The
dissatisfying consequence of sense-gratifications, the fear that usually
attends upon them, the chances of getting addicted to the habits and
impressions produced by such pleasures, and the inevitability of the rise
of further desires and greater distractions, in addition to the wearing out
of the senses, should rouse in the man of discrimination a consciousness of
the higher life.
10 When every type of action is visualised as a process of the
universal activity of God, or the Absolute, individual and personal agency
drops out from the scene altogether. Behold the soul-stirring dictum of the
Bhagavad-Gita, that the wise one should always maintain the feeling that
the agent, the process and the result of action are only modes in the
universal design. Here becomes explicit the truth of the saying that we are
to regard ourselves as only instruments and not the real doers of any
action. This is Karma-Yoga, that master technique of converting every work
into duty and a veritable self-sacrifice, self-dedication and
self-consecration in the beatitude of God. And Karma-Yoga is said to be
based on Buddhi-Yoga or the art of right understanding, the understanding
that man is ever in a state of attunement with God. Even the springs of
instinctive action are found ultimately to be rooted in a distortion of the
desire for self-possession in the completeness of the Divine. Only,
instinctive action suffers and labours under the ignorance that the body
and the mind have an existence isolated from other bodies and minds. This
misery is Samsara, the aberration of the soul from itself, and the
searching for itself in the not-self, the phantom and the imagination.
11 Every thought is a tiny ripple, a wave in the sea of
existence, and has a claim to exist and be evaluated as any other thing
existent or conceivable. Everyone of us, therefore, has at his background
infinite support, infinite help, infinite sympathy, if only we would be
careful enough to evoke it, by being aware of it. The unity of religions,
the concord of philosophical thought, the meaning of universal brotherhood
and the necessity for universal love in life is here explained, and we are
now able to recognise it not as a fancy, a dogma, a creed or a tenet, but
as the one law of life, the rule of individual and social survival, the
principle and significance of our very existence.
12 Every bit of thing in the world, from the lowest to the highest,
every little thought, feeling and action has to be viewed, judged and
evaluated in the light of the unitary law that we have thus discovered as
relentlessly operating within us and also outside us. True morality is the
determination of the lower by the higher, the envisaging of every step that
we take as a necessary precondition of the next step. Life in the world is
a means which, when it evolves itself completely, takes the shape of the
end, and the end is already present at every stage of the developing
process of the means. The world is thus teleological and not mechanical.
We, individuals inhabiting this universe, are held together not as pebbles
or stones forming a heap but as organic parts which are inseparably related
to a living whole that cannot be cut or divided without being mutilated and
destroyed. Our social relations, which have a deeper meaning than is seen
on the surface, should apprise us of the existence of a universal Self, and
of our duty to it in all the strata of life. In our perceptions we perceive
it, in our feelings we feel it, and in our actions we stumble upon it every
moment, though we, at the present state of ours, are not endowed with an
adequate knowledge of it. Human psychology is a study of the mental
behaviour of the human individuality, and this individuality is, as we have
observed above, a conglomeration of certain involuntary urges that seek
satisfaction in things they know not. The only saving factor is the higher
reason which sometimes points to a higher life above them.
13 Reason should also be able to know its limitations, and also the
reason why it should be so limited. Our present-day psychological analyses
cannot be the last word in the field of inner research, for we have other
means of knowledge than mere sensation. The mind, when it is disturbed by
the revolting noise of the senses, cannot properly reflect in itself the
true state of affairs. When the five senses of knowledge stand fixed
together with the understanding and the faculty of thinking, and the
intellect does not oscillate, that, they say, is the supreme state,
declares the Kathopanishad. That, again, is called the condition of Yoga
wherein the consciousness does not get objectified through the avenues of
the senses, and the mind rests in itself. Yoga is at-one-ment with the
Infinite. No science of the mind or study of the inner behaviour of the
human being can be exact and meaningful when this mighty truth is lost
sight of, and the endeavours at right knowledge are confined to the belief
that what we see with our eyes is all. Far from this is the goal we are
seeking, and we require an altogether different education to be able to
appreciate this point of view. {Sivananda gurukulam}. KR IRS 21222
On Mon, 21 Feb 2022 at 07:27, Markendeya Yeddanapudi <
[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> --
> *Mar**The Grand Perception*
>
>
>
> Perception means, the process of association of a new experience or new
> phenomenon, to the existing paradigmatic concepts. Perception adds to the
> foundation-the understanding. The understanding embeds into one’s hormonal
> communications, enabling every cell join the cellular symbiosis of living.
>
> Every organism has its own perception process and coordination process
> with the universe?All of them in the Biosphere, have a common perception
> process based on breathing, smelling and sensing, with the exception of the
> human organism, which has surrendered its perception to machines? For every
> organism with the exception of the human, perceiving is feeling.
>
> For the human, perceiving means going to the library to know and note,
> live in map knowledge, and the cells dictated by the mind only, which sees
> by using the visual cortex to build the 3D shapes, shapes that become the
> main reality, while the invisible spectrum and the resulting abstract
> sensations get shelfed. We live by postponing real understanding and
> perception. Because the very faculty of perception and understanding and
> participating in nature are lost by us as we have surrendered to machines,
> and no longer breathe to smell sense and learn.
>
> Quantum Physics has put conscious notice at the center of the subject
> making it the ultimate core. But how do we become conscious today? It is no
> longer by breathing, smelling and sensing, all symbiotically by
> participating in nature as nature. Our eyes have to see, machines must
> confirm, and we give smell an insignificant subordinate role.
>
> Imagine the grand perception of nature or the Universe, traversing the
> whole galaxies, and your partnering with all of them, by means of the
> quantum entanglement at the cosmic level and breathing, smelling and
> sensing at the level of the earth, in which you participate continuously.
> Your perception has cosmic effects.
>
> But thanks to science and technology we repudiate this very existence of
> the grand symbiotic perception of the universe and demand that the
> perception must be proved mechanically. But Quantum Physics clearly asserts
> that it is only participation in the emotional plus cosmic process of the
> Universe as a whole, that gives understanding as feeling. The gigantic
> subject matter-the Macrocosm and the Microcosm, partners with you in your
> learning.
>
> After destroying nature, no, while continuously destroying nature, if you
> take to machine learning and artificial intelligence as education and
> economic development, you slide down into the abyss.
>
> There is God or the grand Universe or Mega-verse, simply nature. Your
> Technology and the destruction of nature is clearly poisoning.
>
> We need Sages who partner with nature.
>
> YM
>
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