Quotes about Perception

Any perception can connect us to reality, properly and fully.
What we see doesn't have to be pretty, particulary; we can appreciate anything that exists.
There is some prinicple of magic in everything, some living quality.
Something living, something real, is taking place in everything,

We need a much deeper understanding of exactly what it is our industrial society, in its present creation, is jeopardizing. We need a more profound perception of what is at stake.

What happens depends on our way of observing it or on the fact that we observe it

"What a shift!  In a radically different interpretation of our relationship to the world we live in, Wheeler states that it's impossible for us to simply watch the universe happen around us.  Experiments in quantum physics, in fact, do show that simply looking at something as tiny as an electron--just focusing our awareness upon what it's doing for even an instant of time--changes its properties while we're watching it.  The experiments suggest that the very observation is an act of creation, and that consciousness is doing the creating.  These findings seem to support Wheeler's propostion that we can no longer consider ourselves merely onlookers who have no effect on the world that we're observing.

To think of ourselves as participating in creation rather than simply passing through the universe during a brief period of a lifetime requires a new perception of what the cosmos is and how it works.  The groundwork for such a radical worldview was the basis for a series of books and papers by another Princeton physicist and colleague of Einstein, David Bohm.  Before his death in 1992, Bohm left us two pioneering theories that offer a very different--and in some ways, a nearly holistic--view of the universe and our role in it.

The first was an interpretation of quantum physics that set the stage for Bohm's meeting and subsequent friendship with Einstein.  It was this theory that opened the door to what Bohm called the "creative operation of underlying ... levels of reality."  In other words, he beileved that there are deeper or higher planes of creation that hold the template for what happens in our world.  It's from these subtler levels of reality that our physical world originates."

The mind is the seat of perception of the things we see, hear, and feel.  It is through the mind that we see the beauties of the earth and sky, or music, of art, in fact, of everything.  That silent shuttle of thought working in and out through cell and nerve weaves into one harmonious whole the myriad moods of mind, and we call it life.

As a scientist, objectivity is one of my most deeply held values. If we could just try harder, I once thought, surely we could each see the world as others see it and learn to respect one another's views more readily. But I learned from the Pirahas, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross-culturally.

And this do I call immaculate perception of all things: to want nothing else from them, but to be allowed to lie before them as a mirror with a hundred facets.

The senses are complementary powers evolved in complex interdependence with one another. Each sense is a unique modality of this body’s existence, yet in the activity of perception these divergent modalities necessarily intercommunicate and overlap. It is thus that a raven soaring in the distance is not, for me, a mere visual image; as I follow it with my eyes, I inevitably feel the stretch and flex of its wings with my own muscles, and its sudden swoop toward the nearby trees is a visceral as well as a visual experience for me. The raven’s loud, guttural cry, as it swerves overhead, is not circumscribed within a strictly audible field – it echoes through the visible, immediately animating the visible landscape with the reckless style or mood proper to that jet black shape. My various senses, diverging as they do from a single, coherent body, coherently converge, as well, in the perceived thing, just as the separate perspectives of my two eyes converge upon the raven and convene there into a single focus. My senses connect up with each other in the things I perceive, or rather each perceived thing gathers my senses together in a coherent manner and it is this that enables me to experience the thing itself as a center of forces, as another nexus of experience, as an Other.

Humanity is looking for a new story. The one it has embraced since the Renaissance is no longer viable. Despite all of its positive contributions to modern life, three hundred years of scientific-technological development has left our civilization in an untenable position--at odds with its natural environment and ultimately its own deeper, collective, soul. Only a global shift in fundamental perceptions, values, and corresponding actions will allow human-kind to resume an evolutionary pat in alignment with nature and the larger cosmos.

Reality can be perceived when emotion is set aside.

We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.

The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story.

A black Hole in your dimensional space is another reality system whose co-ordiantes interface with those of the Earth. It is a locus of being for a collective identity, just as Earth is a locus of being for a collective Human identity. The collective or star referred to as Black Hole is neither dead nor gone. Its focus of consciousness is just temporarily redirected into other dimensional co-ordinates that preclude its appearance in your space/time continuum. The field your scientists interpret to be unoccupiable and inescapable is actually holding the star's place in space, the way you might put a "Reserved" sign on your airplane seat if you wanted to get off for a walk between legs of a flight. Because the collective identity of the star has taken a walk somewhere your consciousness cannot currently reach, instead of percieving its manifestation, you percieve it as a gap in your space/time continuum. Your scientists think of it as being sealed off behind its own event horizon. In fact it is Human perception that is sealed off behind their current consciousness horizon.

Those who do the impossible are often unaware that what they did was impossible.

Beware of anger.  It is the most difficult to remove of all the
hindrances.  But it is the alcohol of the body, you know, and the
devil of it is that it deadens the perceptions.

There are two types of dimensions. Those we perceive and those we do not. Those we do not include the spiritual dimension.

I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow.  Like the bare peak of the koan, this one is not different from myself.  I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this moment, as its grass tops stray against the snows.  If the snow leopard should leap from the rock above and manifest itself before me - S-A-A-O! - then in that moment of pure fright, out of my wits, I might truly perceive it, and be free.

The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness.  Wonderful is its power to charm and to command.  It is a mountain air.  It is the embalmer of the world.  It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary.  It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it.  By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power.  Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy.

Your perception determines your reality.

Weird, strange, different and unique are all different shades of the same word. How you perceive an experience or individual will determine which shade of this word you use. Another's perception may be entirely different.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.

The Lord doesn't make mistakes. The mistake is in the perception which is often based on limited information.

When we are no longer able to change a situation - just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer - we are challenged to change ourselves

If I was to survive, I must literally believe myself into being. This, of course, was essentially no different from what I'd always done. I'd simply believed in myself until, in fact, I existed.

Although there is a universal reality and a universal truth, individual reality and individual truth are merely manipulations you create for yourself out of the data that you choose. True, the data that flows towards any individual is incomplete and each individual builds their reality and truth frameworks from that incomplete data.

Intuition (is) perception via the unconcious.

"Each person perceives, experiences, and interprets the world and its events in accord withg their own prdominant level of consciousness. this is further reinforced by the mind's proclivity to explanation via mentalization and rationalized interpretation of perceived data"...."Because the mind, by virtue of its innate structure, is unable to differentiate perception from essence or res cogitans (interna) from res externa (extensa), as noted by René Descartes, it makes the naïve assumption that it experiences and thereby 'knows reality' and that other viewpoints therefore must be 'wrong'.........". David R. Hawkins, "The Reality, Spirituality, and Modern Man", 2008, p. 59-60

It is the function of art to renew our perception.  What we are familiar with we cease to see.  The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.