A digest for conscious living
This morning’s practice was more focused than the past couple of days, and although today was virtually a mirror image of yesterday’s demanding schedule, I felt relatively immune to the stress. Meditation creates an interesting paradox for me- it provides me with a perspective on my life that might be described as pleasantly detached, but somehow, this distance allows me to appreciate things much more deeply than when I did not practice. It might be similar to the sense one gets after living in the same place for one’s entire life and then going away on a journey. Almost immediately, one’s sense of appreciation and love for everything that one once took for granted comes into focus and one becomes acutely aware of one’s connection to home, family, friends, and even places. Meditation does the same thing on an even more fundamental level. It takes one out of one’s self, and in so doing highlights the significance that even the most banal or routine experiences have for us. It cultivates gratitude for simply having the privilege to be…
I was thinking today how odd it is that everything that we experience, is experienced in our brain. All our sense perceptions and reflections on these take place in the brain. Take the sense of Vision for example; when one sees something, the eyes are being stimulated by photons being reflected off an object outside the body. The eyes however are not “seeing” anything, they are simply mechanism which translate this electromagnetic radiation into information which is then passed through the optic nerve to the brain where the information is processed and “reconstructed” into a perceived image of the object being viewed. Therefore, the “seeing” takes place deep inside one’s skull, in absolute darkness.
To me, the fact that we have no way to actually interact with anything directly, that any sense perception we have (even the tactile sense) functions in the same way as our sense of vision is almost eerie. In a very real sense, our entire existence is being experienced as a digital recreation of reality. In addition, the brain has the power to introduce psychological distortions and filters to the information which is being sensed to make it appear extremely different from what it is in reality. A poignant example might be a bulimic person who is dangerously thin, but when asked to draw an outline of their perceived body shape consistently draws the outline of an obese person.
In fact we all have these filters firmly in place in our psyche. One need only think so far as any fear or insecurity that one has, and one can be certain that one’s perception is not true to reality. So the question begs to be asked: How accurate is one’s perception of one’s own life, or the world in which one lives?
There are several ways to remove the psychological filters which warp one’s perception of their world. Psychedelic compounds have long been used by human beings to achieve this aim. Unfortunately, these drugs have dangerous side effects, and create their own distortions of reality. Not to mention that long term use of such substances is untenable and undesirable for most people, but there is another way… Meditation. I will write more about this topic tomorrow- I desperately need to sleep now.
Goodnight.
Love,
Kikta