Imagine your body has become coated in a semi-transparent film. It coats your skin and covers your eyes and ears. It has a very subtle opaque, smoky quality, and it distorts, fuzzes, the perception of anything beyond it. You can make out the objects around you – there’s your cell phone, your water bottle, your shoes, your lamp – and you feel yourself to be seeing them all quite clearly. You can pick them up, examine them, touch them, taste them, analyze and describe them. You have learned to entirely ignore the opaqueness.
In fact, you don’t even need to ignore it. You’ve learned to adjust your eyes to simply focus on the film itself instead, rather than attempting to perceive the objects beyond. So while you may feel yourself to be looking directly at an object, you are actually looking directly at the object’s reflection in the opaque film and confusing that for the direct object itself. As a result, you spend your time dwelling in a reflection of reality rather than in direct contact with it. You are like the prisoner in Plato’s Allegory, watching only shadows on the wall, thinking them to be objects in-and-of themselves.
What is the film made of? How did it get there? Can it be removed?
The film is not a physical object. It is a mode of consciousness. To remove it, you must adopt an alternative mode of consciousness. Modes of consciousness are notoriously difficult to explain with words. Like the finger pointing to the Moon, thinking, pondering, and conceptualizing within one mode of consciousness is rarely a productive means of exiting that mode of consciousness and entering another. This would be like explaining the color blue to someone using only words and shades of red.
Let’s try anyway.
First, understand that the mode of consciousness you are attempting to adopt is no different from “being here and now” or “attaining mindfulness” or “waking up”. It is also no different from “opening the third eye”, which in an apt metaphor, focuses the mind directly on the experiences rather than allowing it to be lost in the duality and illusion of the everyday mode of consciousness. The trick is not actually achieving this state – it is recognizing the state we are currently in. Attaining the meditative and enlightened mode of consciousness happens quite intuitively and naturally and does not need to be forced. Being able to see the everyday mode of consciousness, and not simply ‘tuning into’ it and thereby confusing it with the direct perception of reality, is far trickier and quite necessary.
So, naturally, the next thing you must do is accept, acknowledge, feel, and digest the fact that all of your perceptions are indirect, fuzzy, opaque, distorted, illusory. Conceptualize your perceptual field – especially your field of vision and your field of thoughts – with that opaque film. Come to persuade your intuition – which may resist quite strongly – that though you always think of your current mode of consciousness as a direct channel to reality, it is not. Allow your eyes to unfocus, and consciously conceptualize the world around you as a 2D surface, as lacking substance or depth, as being a mere reflection. Dwell in this state for some time. It is not our instinct to see the illusion for what it is and it takes time and reflection and contemplation for our minds to adjust on a deep and visceral level.
Then, re-focus your eyes and proceed to stare directly and intensely on a single point or object while focusing sharply and pointedly on your own breathing, re-focusing every moment. Each instant, replicate your action of the previous second: focus on where you feel the breath in your body right in that instant, and focus on looking straight at the point or object. Don’t allow instinct to take over. Don’t allow yourself to go on auto-pilot. Keep re-upping your attention. If distinct thoughts arise in your mind, if self-reflection begins, if you start to conceptualize your breathing or the point, your perception has tuned itself to the film again. You can repeat the practice and try again. The practice is successful when the point or object is seen directly – when all perceptions become direct perceptions (when the distance between self and object vanishes), and when thoughts, internal dialogue, and self-reflection fade away.
Hallmarks of this direct perceiving, tuning ‘past’ the illusion, include: a sense of awe or wonder at the 3D-ness and vividness of the perception, a sense of playfulness or spontaneity, a sense of being aware and attentive to all thoughts or perceptions, of clarity, a sense that perceptions are malleable, flexible, impermanent, or intangible, and the sense that one is having a dream or dream-like experience. Perhaps the strongest test of one’s own mode of consciousness is the perception of other beings. If other people are felt to be purely external, made of something other than what you are made of, originating from a different source than you originate from, or if solipsism feels potentially valid, you are not perceiving directly. If others feel internal, or if the internal-external dichotomy feels invalid, or if others are felt as originating from a similar source to yourself, or of ‘self’ is a concept which doesn’t apply to any particular human point-of-view, including your own, you may be seeing directly, perceiving attentively, awake to your direct experiences.
No magic, no alteration of reality, no occult practices, are feasible without first attaining this mode of consciousness. From the everyday mode of consciousness, such acts are performed on the wall of the Cave – they miss their targets entirely and the performers will not understand why, or become convinced that magic is impossible.
This is a basic teaching. It is a beginner’s teaching. If you can’t master this, don’t bother going anywhere else. You can read about the truth and speak about the truth and contemplate the truth, but none of these indicate your own perception of it, your own attentiveness to it, your own awareness of it. And the talk and reading will all be vanity without that direct perception.
Sure. I don’t think there’s any need to fear permanent illusion. I don’t think mind is the kind of thing which can even imaginably be captured.
Well, no. This is an exercise. There’s a certain degree of metaphor inherent in it. It’s a practice for getting at the nature of reality, it’s not an attempt to describe reality literally. I start off with, “Imagine that your body has become coated in a semi-transparent film.” I’m not saying that your body is literally coated in anything. I’m talking about adopting a certain imagining. Visualizing something and watching the repercussions of this visualization. Seeing how the mind reacts to imagining certain things.
I agree. Subjectivity is the closest thing to objectivity that there is. ;)
I also agree. I often visualize mind as a kind of 4-dimensional sphere. Mind is the whole sphere, a solid object, and every surface and side of it, undifferentiated in that quality. And the whole sphere is bubbling and contorting and vibrating and changing in color, in texture, in smell, in intensity, in density, and in every conceivable way. And perception rests at the very center of the sphere. The entire experience is self-created, self-experienced, self-contained. Everything, from fundamental concepts to fluttery worldly aesthetics, are aspects of mind, temporary manifestations.
I agree again. There is no use differentiating between the ‘real’ external world or the ‘unreal’ external world, because the concept of an external world isn’t a valid one. None of it is ‘how it really is’.
But to make that realization, to understand that in a visceral way, the first thing you’ll need to do if you’re just some random Mr. Joe Internet trying to learn how to break out of convention is to start looking at, relating to, and experiencing your observations in a different way.
Most people walk around very lost in their perceptions. Unalert, unawake, in a quite fuzzy state. They aren’t even self-aware of their own actions, their own volition. They’re not mindful of what’s happening in any given moment. Their attention is dispersed across this wide range of very high-end, frilly, worldly stuff. It’s the difference between people who, while confused, are at least very alert to their surroundings, sharp of mind, a clever witness to their own senses and someone who is having an argument on the phone while eating a sandwich. That’s the ‘film’. That’s the opaqueness. It’s standing in between where they feel themselves to be and where they feel the real world to be. It’s in between them and the perceptions that they understand as happening ‘around’ them. So I say, “Imagine you’re covered head-to-toe in opaque film,” because starting from a very conventional mindset, that visualization is a good jumping-off point for seeing how dispersed consciousness is, for becoming aware of the sluggish and inattentive habits that don’t even allow them to be truly conscious of their own experiences.
Yes, but that doesn’t make them all equally useful for being a jumping-off point for, say, meditating or doing intense contemplation. I’m sure you’re familiar with the very significant practical differences between the states or qualities of mind you’ve had in very mundane or superficial moments as opposed to the state of mind you might have after writing a long post on subjective idealism. In one of these states, you’re much more attentive to the experiences you’ve having. Neither is more objective or true or nonvolitional or anything than the other, that’s true, but they’re not equally useful for spiritual practice.
I think you’ve probably raised a valid point that I shouldn’t have used the terms ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ here. They could definitely be misleading, but I find them useful personally perhaps because I’m aware of the specific ways in which I’m using the terms here. I’m not referring to direct, objective reality or indirect, subjective illusion. I’m referring to attention and clear focus on one’s subjective thoughts and experiences as opposed to not being aware of these things, becoming lost in convention, in unproductive modes of consciousness.
I hope that clarifies things. As always, I appreciate your words, which come from a place of wisdom, though I think (as has happened more than once before), your perceived disagreement with me here stems from a different interpretation of the language I used than I had intended.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2016-08-20 07:30:00 (d6ole49)
I agree, but in this case I would talk about a difference between skillful and clumsy mental modalities as opposed to direct vs indirect perceptions. As I said, I feel like telling people that their present perceptions are indirect but if they try hard and cleverly enough finally they’ll get a direct perception is taking people further and further away from the notion of skillfulness. Because skillfulness explicitly disavows binary conclusions. Direct/indirect seems binary. Whereas we naturally conceive of skill as a continuum.
So someone can achieve better perceptions, more enchanted ones, more peaceful, more creative, what have you. But none of those will be a product of “direct” access (to something, usually some factual domain). Skillfulness becomes an option once you give up the idea of direct/indirect perception, which seems directly related to the correspondence theory of truth. In this way of thinking direct perception would bridge the gap between perception and fact and somehow let you in on the raw facts of the world. Someone who believes that will think of the notion of skillful perceptions as entirely frivolous or even deluded.
Exactly. I think it’s fine for you to think like you do because I believe the way you understand what you’re saying is basically “skillful.” So you will not cut your mind on the rough binary edge between direct and indirect, cause you know better. However, if you talk like this to others in a society that’s soaked with notions of objectivity, you gotta be careful in how you express yourself.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2016-08-23 15:31:31 (d6swgj6)
Wise council as always. You often find the parts of the language I use that, while intuitive for me, might mislead others, and I appreciate that.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2016-08-23 16:17:21 (d6sxi89)