Look and Look Again...

“But now’s the time to look and look again at what you see, is that the way it ought to stay?” A fantastic lyric from a phenomenal song from the greatest band ever assembled. I have the answer to the greatest band question, but I’ll get to that question later. Instead, it’s the words worth looking into. With the reflections from the most recent posts beginning to permeate the mind that brought them up, I realize just how few of my perceptions align any longer with the life that I’ve created. That’s not to say I was completely off base, and many of the wonderful situations I am in now are completely thanks to a little fate, dumb luck and a few opportunities I was smart enough not to pass up. That said, it becomes more apparent each day that if things are to change, for some “truth” in my perception is to emerge, a reassessment of everything is in order. Not simply a look in, but a look in that comes with pliers and wrenches. It seems almost obvious that if we aren’t where want to be we have to change what we’re doing, and it all begins with our minds: our perceptions, ideas and beliefs and the way they fit together to form our continuous reality.

And where does this whole business of our personal experience begin? It all starts with our perceptions, and to change what we are receiving we must change the what and how of all that we take in. It is from the stuff of our perceptions that we assemble moments which provide the fodder for the actions about which we judge, opine upon, love, hate etc. Without this experience, we couldn’t have the “stuff” necessary to form thoughts at all. Hard to have an opinion about something you cannot have a concept of (Philosophers and psychologists posit that there is knowledge hard wired into us, knowledge of certain mathematical concepts, the capacity for language along with a couple of other items. I don’t disagree, but to be able to think about something, math, language, whatever you need to also have some referent to apply those capacities to.)

So to change our perceptions is to change the foundation on which our experience rests. I’ve argued in a previous post that we often justify our thoughts with other thoughts, but at some point if we want to make a decision about a real world action, be it judging another for enjoying the Arizona Immigration Bill, having issue with our coworker or determining which food is the most delectable at some point we have to point “out there” to something that will provide enough proof for our mental process to be “right”. Note I have no desire here to talk about what right is, instead simply about the constituent parts of our reality.

Those constituent parts are tricky things to nail down. Is it in the moments, the events, the overarching themes, at what point do we make our perceptions that allow us to form beliefs? Funny, it seems to be all of the above, and we can easily see this reflected in the number of perspectives and types of people out there. Those who focus on the moment to moment typically do not get to see from the perspective of events – it is in the minutiae that they will find the meaning. Those who perceive in events will not notice the minute to minute, it is the sum result of the moments that make up the relevant time span, and only that total matters concerning judgments. The ones who view their experiences for the themes will gloss over both the moments and the actions, the importance rests in what she/he can take away from multiple events, the actions out there are just inspiration for the thoughts inside.

I’ve been known to say that simply minds talk about people, average minds talk about events and great minds talk about ideas, but I won’t extend that claim as far as our perceptions. It isn’t fair when talking about how you see, because it is what you do with those perceptions, what beliefs you form them into, that is most important. Besides, each of the types of perceivers has their own issues that fundamentally block their perception of “true” things.

Those who find the meaning in the moments will find themselves forever questioning the moments that have come before. Since each moment is a new moment, the information in it must be taken as paramount; it is what’s new, what’s now. The past has already occurred and the future has not yet, so the primacy of the moment is maintained. Unfortunately, no thing is perfect forever and thus the Momenter is always in danger of being shaken up about their core beliefs. Fortunately, since each moment is a new space to find meaning, the potential for “truth” is much higher.

Those who take in their meaning in events have their own unique set of potential and problems. By perceiving your truth in events, you can gloss over the moment-to-moment trauma, in effect your playing either a true/false, yes/no or bad/good game. You begin with your preconceived notions and let the action determine how you feel when it’s all said and done. The benefit of allowing more moments is a double edged sword – for depending upon the situation you can both fall more deeply into error or allow yourself to “normalize” over the sum of the experience hopefully leading to a more “truthful” view.

It’s tempting to think, from the issues with the previous two, is that event perception on the level of idea would be the most fruitful way to experience. Conflicting moments or even conflicting events that do not mesh with what you believe are no longer an issue, the vital truth is revealed in comparison with what you can see as tying the events together, the moral of the story.
Tempting but misguided for the theme perceiver has the problem of being changeless, our perceptions need not enter into our beliefs and ideals. This way of thought has all sorts of problems, the main issue being that what we believe need not have anything to do with life-as-it-is-now. Life-as-it-is-now here is just another way to admit that the world can and does change, that ideas that may have formerly been used to represent “truth” probably no longer apply.

Take the Second Amendment for instance – the right to bear arms was granted to those who mostly likely had to both hunt for a decent share of their victuals and had the added bonus to perhaps keeping some British from invading your domicile. I’m pretty sure the founding fathers did not have fully automatic custom modified assault rifles with hollow point magazines in every home. The point is that times change, ideas change. The sun used to revolve around the earth after all, that was a truth that many bright minds were killed for daring to challenge.

Admittedly most people use some combination of all three modes and often more then one in forming a given belief. It’s enough to understand that however we try to see things rightly, we’re balancing dangerously close to the edge of operating on what we pretend things to be, as opposed to what they are. And when you consider that all other minds are operating on some combination of the above, trying to discern where truth may hide seems to be getting farther away. Even if we take in the details that we believe we need, where can we turn to make sure we’re on the right track?

In the absence of something out there for us to point to, we really only have other minds as a check to our truth. And if we have other people running on other premises, all thinking that they would have the right way, where can we even begin? I wouldn’t want to say that it’s the sum total of all the minds, for the consequences of that notion have too many examples in history to list. And we can’t turn to individual people, because even the best of us have doubtful resumes - in the same way that you should kill the Buddha you see in the road, you should further distrust the merits of anyone proclaiming to have “it”. It does once again seem like we’re getting farther away from our confidence in being able to decide the right way.

And what about this nagging item lingering in the background? You know, the one that keeps asking where we get off in the first place. The one issue that all three of these ideas still rests on is the idea of being able to see what is right in the first place. If we are held by our prejudices, our past beliefs, our prior experiences then we are parsing down the infinity in all things and all moments into a form that is manageable enough for us to think about all. I don’t remember the exact figures, but from the excellent film what the bleep (don’t mind the movie, watch for the interviews) we perceive information orders of magnitude above what we can actually consciously process. Something crazy, something like 2,000 bytes is perceived when 200,000 are taken in each moment. I’m not sure where the computer-processing analog comes in, but when I research further I will absolutely share the word. At least let it be enough to raise up the notion that perhaps we should change the 2,000 we consciously work with. That’s where the truth is, somewhere in those bytes. I’ll also entertain notions that the “truth” is all 200,000, what we must discover a way to simply take in and rightly process more – I’ll also believe that the truth is in none of it, that there isn’t any to be found and we should all just keep our heads down and keep plodding like we are because anything different would be worse. Maybe there is one right way, and we should just be more concerned about who’s already got it?

I’ll entertain those, but I believe those lines would be absurd to really take seriously - my view falls somewhere in the middle. Truth, and right perception (view, experience, whatever) are terms that may be totally knowable or completely out of our reach, but it seems as though we can pass on with a relative view of truth and being right. I’m sorry that I’ve talked a lot about it without really talking towards what I think that it is, but that’s simply because the jury is ultimately still out. I’m not willing to make any claims yet, because I’m still working towards articulating the idea that truth and the right way is; perhaps it is that which gets us where we want to go, do what we want to do and be what we want to be.

And sometimes it’s best to expect progress, not perfection. Even if we ultimately come to find that we cannot hope to have a perfectly truthful mind, we can at least bring to the front just how we wrong we can expect things to be, and to further understand the effect that our perceptions ideas and ideas and beliefs have on others. So what can we say? I would say that should we be wholly fulfilled and sound in what we are and what we are doing and the change that it effects in the world, then we have found the truth. There may be an objective truth out there, and if I can find a way to see it I will most certainly tell you, but for now suffice that it’s different for everyone and most closely linked to a life in which your biggest question is how to best help others get to where you are. In the meanwhile, it’s worth a thought as to just what your beliefs just might be doing - what effect are you having here, and would you consider it to come from the (your) truth?