Perceptions

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception.

David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, wrote those thoughts in his 1741 work Treatise of Human Nature. Hume is explaining an acute action of the mind when he talks about perceptions. Perceptions can be truths as well as untruths, but we accept them all as facts. They become a piece of our knowing. We use perceptions to dissect our experiences. In that regard, they become influences that direct our emotional and physical behavior. Perceptions rule our actions, and we wait for confirmation from others to continue those actions.

Actions are our direct response to perceptions. Action is energy, so our perceptions are filled with the power of energy. We can build, destroy and complicate situations using a single perception. That perception will linger in our brains until another one enhances it or replaces it. Changing perceptions is not easy. We guard our knowledge even if it has been tainted by faulty associations and influences. We have been taught to be right, and think right, so we rely on our perceptions to confirm our conformity. We even mold our perceptions, so they conform to the perception of others. Their vision of right influences our vision, even when their vision is colored with emotions and fear.

We don’t travel inside of our perceptions and see the infinite field of choices within the mind. We usually pick one or two choices and live them. But this infinite field inside the mind is where realities are molded. It is where the self projects the self into every physical scenario. When we begin to observe the self within our perceptions, the perceptions change. We sense more of who we are. Our cognate sense begins the action that guides our perceptions and the choices within them.

Imagined Dreams

The path of experience is nowhere settled. There is no one road that does not have avenues to another. There are deep veins of probable actions ever available to you at any given time. Your imagination can be of great value, allowing you to open yourself to such courses; you can then use it to help you bring these into being.

In your mind see those probable abilities or events taking place. As you do, the intensity of your desire brings them into your experience. There are no boundaries set about the self.

Jane Roberts wrote those thoughts in her book, The Unknown Reality. Imagination is a powerful tool. In our imagined dreams, the world and the elements within it are moving toward a preconceived goal. We imagine life as it can be, not what it is. We sense our power-based laws falling into a pit of contempt, and the lawmakers that enforce them are dripping with the sap of self-incriminating Botox. The boundaries of the mindless power merchants are shrinking in fact-less fiction. And as they do, the individuals within us become responsible for these self-created dreams.

In these imagined dreams, we are responsible for creation. The laws within these dreams conform to several roads that drift in and out of probable actions. We accept each road and follow every course until a beacon shines in the inner sanctuary of peaceful realism. In that sacred place, we live to imagine more, and we dream endlessly to become what we are.

What we are in these dreams is just a spark in the fire of time-motivated, truthful proficiencies. These innocuous truths signal nothing, but another stop in the endless journey to feel the moral and immoral actions of our soul.

Sneerful Insanity

Life is a series of punctuated conscious moments. Much like the frames of a motion picture on a reel passing through a projector create an image and then vanish, our awareness of life also passes from instant to instant.

Every action we take involves this kind of on-off movement. Each time we raise an eyebrow in incredulity, or flare our nostrils in a sneer, a large number of mental events occur. As we listen to an untrustworthy politician's speech, not all of our neurons, muscle fibers, skin patched, and nerve endings want to go along to produce our incredulous sneer.

In a society of sneerers, your sneer is expected. You have learned well how to sneer. You have watched your peers sneer. You have learned just how to hold your head, to flare your nostrils, and to condescend. The society of sneerers could conceivably encompass a whole country! In such a country perhaps sneering becomes an accepted, expected norm, and if we lived in that country perhaps our normal expression would be sneerful. Thus our faces become the face of a nation. Not only that, but our way of speaking may be shaped by our faces, our expressions literally shaping the very way we utter a word.

What would have to occur to create a shift from a sneer to a grin? Simply awareness and intent would do it.

Fred Alan Wolf Ph.D. wrote those thoughts. We live in a world of duplicity. A world where associations like right and wrong, good and bad influence our beliefs in one way or another. We want to be on the side of right and good, but as we work toward those goals, we find those associations have elements of bad and wrong interlaced in them.

There is a sneer in our laughter and pride in our prejudice. We travel the road to justice on a broken wagon filled with past expectations. Our sense of comradery is infused with morsels of doubt, and our vindictiveness is salted with a beaker of remorse.

We forget that this world is a fraction of our life and snippet of our purpose. We treat our emotional wounds with the ointment of redundancy and heal in the arms of our sneerful democracy. We do all of this to feel our sneers, our laughter and our beliefs. We are purpose- filled warriors. We fight to do what we do never knowing what we are doing. And in the final act of surrender, we sneer at love and then fall in love with the sneerful insanity of it all.

Enlightenment

Enlightenment we can thus see is an absolute state of mind in which no ‘discrimination’ takes place and it requires a great mental effort to realize this state of viewing all things ‘in one thought.’

In fact, our logical as well as practical consciousness is too given up to analysis and ideation; that is to say, we cut up given realties into elements in order to understand them; but when they are put together to make the original whole, its elements stand out too conspicuously defined, and we do not view the whole ‘in one thought.’

And as it is only when ‘one thought’ is reached that we have enlightenment, an effort is to be made to go beyond our relative empirical consciousness, which attaches itself to the multitudinosity and not to the unity of things.

D.T. Suzuki, the 20th century’s most well-known authority on Zen, wrote those thoughts in his essay Enlightenment and Ignorance. Our practical consciousness takes us on a journey that has many stops. These stops are filled with thoughts. We don’t always know what we think since there is a confused state of awareness between the stops.

We call these stops experiences in our reality, and we use them to touch the enlightenment within them. Enlightenment is the vacillating, indescribable fence that contains all the stops and experiences within the action of consciousness. Enlightenment is not a thing or a place. Enlightenment can’t be taught or lost. It can’t be bartered or sold. But it can be the action we sense as our practical consciousness adjusts to the speed of no-thought.

How we reach and sense, this action of consciousness is our choice. We don’t need to meditate or run off to a monastery and fast for life. But what we must do is accept our self as a whole part of the whole of consciousness where enlightenment freely roams.