Really? - Quareness Series 71st "Lecture".
Have you noticed how we regularly tend to make assumptions and faulty leaps of logic, harbouring bias in our "knowing" that we are right and those others wrong, and often fearing the worst. In striving for unattainable perfection, we seem constantly to be telling ourselves what we can and cannot do. As an antidote to this dis..ease maybe we should try living more with our eyes wide open?
Normally for us seeing feels like it's immediate and kinda passive...we open our eyes and the world is instantly just there...seeing is believing and what we see appears to be the truth. However, such is hardly the case for a blind man who's more likely acutely aware of the illusions involved in "seeing" (e.g. having to rely on a friend to describe say a photograph before he can "see" the image depicted) where objects may appear, morph and disappear in his reality. His is more an experience of fragmented and transitory "images" born of conscious analysis of clues and searching for some logic. And this places him in a great position to know that what we see with our eyes or otherwise is neither universal truth nor objective reality. Rather what we all perceive is unique and personal...a virtual reality constucted by our individual brains.
We are told that the visual cortex makes up around 30% of the brain (as against about 8% for touch and 2-3% for hearing) and that every second our eyes can send that visual cortex up to two billion pieces of information while the rest of the body can send only an additional billion. It's hardly any surprise then that the "illusion of sight" is such a compelling one.
To create the experience of sight, our brains reference our conceptual understanding of the world and other knowledge, as well as our memories, opinions, emotions and mental attention. All of these things and far more are linked in the brain to our sight, and these linkages work both ways (usually occurring subconsciously) e.g. what we see impacts how we feel, and the way we feel can literally change what we see. For the sighted majority of humanity what we see is a complex mental construction of our own making, but we experience it passively as a direct representation of the world around us. You could say that we create our own reality and we tend to believe it.
Of course sight is just one of many ways by which we may shape this "reality" of ours. This is readily apparent when we consider how say our fears can distort our perception. Under the warped logic of fear, almost anything can seem better than uncertainty. Fear may fill the void at all costs bypassing what we dread for what we know and favouring the worst in place of the ambiguous...in effect substituting assumption for reason. And fear is a self-realising thing when it replaces the unknown with the awful...on those occasions when we have the greatest need to look outside ourselves and think critically, fear tends to retreat deep inside our minds, shrinking and distorting our view and drowning our capacity for critical thought with a flood of disruptive emotions.
To live life with eyes wide open we'd need to hold ourselves accountable for every moment/thought/detail, seeing beyond our fears, recognising our assumptions, harnessing our internal powers, silencing our internal critics, correcting our misconceptions about luck and success, accepting our strengths and weaknesses and understanding the difference. We might reasonably ask ourselves...what do we fear?...what lies do we tell ourselves?...how do we embellish our truth and write our own fictions?...what reality are we creating for ourselves? Not doing so seems likely to exact quite a toll in missed opportunities and unrealised potential, engendering insecurity and distrust instead of fulfillment and connection.
Our fears, critics, heroes and villains are most likely just excuses, rationalisations, shortcuts and justifications...fictions we perceive as reality...but we can choose to see through them and let them go. Each of us may be the powerful creator of our own reality and with that empowerment comes complete responsibility (response..ability).
It has been suggested that our thoughts are really preconceived notions we have about the world, based upon our past experiences and beliefs. Deciding something negative about someone or something tends to find its way back to us, continually showing up. On the other hand our deciding something positive about them will tend toward the world demonstrating this to be true. In this way we can get to shaping "our version" of another's reality...what we say or think bounces off them, resulting in a filtered reaction towards us and biases our experience based around any beliefs we have about them or ourselves at the time.
What we 'think' appears to have to project itself upon our reality. Every second our subconscious minds are rapidly sifting through information to fit our beliefs, construct the world around us, and give us a frame of reference to consciously process it. Every time we think, we are actually selecting different fragments of data that is way too big to process, and we are shifting what we see, feel and experience. By focusing then on what we want or don't want, we bias what we see and experience, thereby changing how we live. Within this construct we seem to have the ability to shape someone's personality through love or lack thereof. However, who anyone really is will not change. Perhaps the best we can do is to bring out the soul inside others, allowing them to flourish, be loved and be loving. And the worst we can do may be to facilitate hiding the soul away through constantly criticizing and punishing those others for being themselves.
In the final analysis it's a matter of our choosing to embrace who we really are, with curiosity and gratitude as we learn to appreciate all the experiences and lessons in our lives.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
October, 2016.