Quotes about Perception

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.

The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.  Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of "physical reality" indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means.  It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final.  We must always be ready to change these notions - that is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics - in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way logically.

-THE GENERAL PUBLIC'S APATHY REGARDING VIRTUALLY ANYTHING SUBSTANTIVE IS PARTLY DUE TO SENSORY OVERLOAD.  WHAT HAS OCCURED IS A CULTURAL AND NEUROCHEMICAL SHELL SHOCKING INTO COGNITIVE DISSONANCE AND CHRONIC SOMATOPSYCHOSIS. -.-

In our lifetimes, humanity will begin a shift in thinking, especially in their perception of The Lord. This will begin as a small, possibly insignificant trickle, but over time shall build into a wave on consciousness that sweeps over all of humanity.

"The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways, but without material from the external world it is powerless, and unlike the sausage machine it must seize its material for itself, since events only become experiences through the interest we take in them; if they do not interest us, we are making nothing of them. The man, therefore, whose attention is turned within finds nothing worthy of his notice, whereas the man whose attention is turned outward can find within, in those rare moments when he examines his soul, the most varied and interesting assortment of ingredients being dissected and recombined into beautiful and instructive patterns."

The nature of the Absolute is neither perceptible nor imperceptible; and with phenomena it is just the same.  But to one who has discovered his real nature, how can there be anywhere or anything separate from it?...

...Therefore it is said:  'The perception of a phenomenon IS the perception of the Universal Nature, since phenomena and Mind are one and the same.'

A perception  (experience), sudden as blinking, that subject and object are one, will lead to a deeply mysterious wordless understanding; and by this understanding will you awake to the truth of Zen.

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

Life gives more to those people who see most clearly the beauty and value of what they have.

The Lord is beyond the perception of most but not all of us.

I felt exceedingly small, but also exceedingly large, and the things that had once seemed so important now appeared trifling. Actually, those things had never even existed. I’d imagined every last one of them. Nothing ever really existed. Somehow, just then, navigating that cosmic ocean of sky, this was everything I needed to know.

all perception
is projection
- a nlp-ism

"Our lives are unique. Our voices are enduring. Our bodies are antiques. Our perception of life is complicated. That makes us a work of art."

"Imagine a vertical pole, the vertical pole representing God, or reality. This symbolizes a unified whole. We split this pole lengthwise, thus we have two poles. We take the one we have split off away and lay it across the vertical pole to create a horizontal or lateral pole. Now we have the picture of a cross. By splitting the vertical pole and laying one pole across we have laid one half of the unified whole in exact opposition to the vertical or God pole. All the lateral pole contains must now, of necessity, as well be opposed to God, or the vertical pole. This lateral pole depicts our world, our view of reality. A reality which is no more real, for it is not more whole. It depicts our separation from Oneness. What is not real must be unreal, as a dream is unreal form the vista of one in the waking state. So this world we know, in which we breathe and live; a world split from is whole. It is this lateral pole we misinterpret. If we did not see it falsely, then the lateral pole would upright itself in our perception, would realign itself with the vertical pole and become One with it again. But being as it is, our perception of reality is at cross purposes with reality, so we see it as separate from it can across. So the lateral pole becomes the world of illusion or altered state of mind--the altered Ego. This point needs to be clearly understood: The lateral axis itself is not the illusion, only its lateral position is; that is, our perception of it as being separate from the vertical pole. We have thus formed a cross to which we nailed ourselves. We crucified ourselves. Nobody else did this to us."

The third point of reference is freedom of perception; it is intent; it is spirit; the somersault of thought into the miraculous; the act of reaching beyond our boundaries and touching the inconceivable.

We cannot discover the best inside ourselves while we are dwelling on the the worst in anyone else.

            “Beliefs can easily cause us to become blind to the obvious.  Recent research on ‘inattentional blindness’ has shown that even minor tweaks to one’s expectations can cause a form of blindness.  A simple experiment developed by University of Illinois psychologist Daniel Simons provided a dramatic demonstration of this effect.  …

            Simon’s experiment consists of a twenty-five second video clip of six people playing a basketball game.  Three are dressed in white T-shirts and three in black T-shirts.  The white team is passing a basketball amongst themselves, and the black team is doing likewise.  During the game, a person dressed in a black gorilla suit calmly walks into the middle of the game, beats its chest, and then walks off.  The gorilla is not understated or camouflaged – it’s blatantly obvious.  And yet the majority of people viewing the clip do not see the gorilla provided they’re given a very simple instruction:  count the number of basketballs tossed between the members wearing white T-shirts.  This minor deflection of attention is enough to cause complete blindness to something as obvious as a gorilla.  The power of deflecting attention is well known to stage magicians, who specialize in creating such illusions.”

Your detailed plan of action means very little - it will change over time.  Yet, writing out your detailed plan of action means everything - especially if it seems impossible. 

When perception is stronger than mindfulness, we recognize various appearances and create concepts such as “body,” “cat”, “house,” or “person”… On some clear night, go outside, look up at the sky, and see if you can find the Big Dipper. For most people that is a familiar constellation, easy to pick out from all the other stars. But is there really a Big Dipper up there in the sky? There is no Big Dipper up there. “Big Dipper” is a concept. Humans looked, saw a certain pattern, and then created a concept in our collective mind to describe it. That concept is useful because it helps us recognize the constellation. But it also has another, less useful effect. By creating the concept “Big Dipper” we separate out those stars from all the rest, and then, if we become attached to the idea of that separation, we lose the sense of the night sky's wholeness, its oneness. Does the separation actually exist in the sky? No. We created it through the use of a concept. Does anything change in the sky when we understand that there is no Big Dipper? No.

Sometimes, I look for something that is particularly ugly, and I make an effort to see something beautiful in it.  I have found, over the years, that everything I once took for granted - every sun rise, every autumn tree, every intricate shadow - is now stunningly beautiful, and makes my life that much more enjoyable

Q: But what about the classical spiritual teaching of "the space between two thoughts"?

A: It is a misunderstanding for there is no detectable space 'between' two thoughts through which one can glimpse the Infinite.  The supposed 'space' is not between the thoughts but prior to the thoughts.

Perception moves at the same rate as does mentalization; therefore, to expect that perception will discern a space between two thoughts is impossible because perception would have to then move faster than 1/10,000th of a second, that is, the perceptive faculty of the mind moves at the same rate as the content of the mind.  Thus, to try to witness the space between two thoughts is like a dog's trying to chase its own tail.  This is why many serious and committed meditators do not reach Enlightenment, even after many years of devoted meditation.  They are simply looking in the wrong place (calibrates as true).

So it's worth pondering that this whole system, which we are calling 'thought', works as a system of reflexes.  The question is: can you become aware of the reflex character of thought--that it is a reflex, that it is a whole system of reflexes which is constantly capable of being modified, added to, changed?  And we could say that as long as the reflexes are free to change then there must be some kind of intelligence or perception, something a bit beyond the reflex, which would be able to see whether it's coherent or not.  But when it gets conditioned too strongly it may resist that perception; it may not allow it.

To find refuge in our capacity for unwavering, impartial love is to find a stable refuge for all persons, to bless them as sacred beings worthy of love. It is to extend refuge to the many — to encircle all in a zone of healing and protection. We can sense this emerging within the meditation and we can learn to carry its protective power into every part of our world.

We are learning to take off the Coke bottle-like glasses that have hidden the sacred truth that each person is seen accurately only through eyes of wisdom and love, the eyes of the Buddha in us, the eyes of God. Such pure vision is not some ideal from on high. It is our own inmost vision.

Pain and Pleasure are merely defined by Perception

It isn't the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it's what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up...

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Language is virtually always pathological; hence the solution is to move as fast and far as possible from language to experience, from linguistic to experimental or psychological philosophy. In order to know that we are not in the linguistic maze, we need to determine, according to Berkeley, whether the things we are talking about exist; hence we need to look for the relevant perceptions. For him, this usually means retiring into himself and trying to imagine whether x exists, having formed the best definition possible of x.

Suppose one who had always continued blind be told by his guide that after he has advanced so many steps he shall come to the brink of a precipice, or be stopped by a wall; must not this to him seem very admirable and surprising? He cannot conceive how it is possible for mortals to frame such predictions as these, which to him would seem as strange and unaccountable as prophesy doth to others. Even they who are blessed with the visive faculty may (though familiarity make it less observed) find therein sufficient cause of admiration.