Noticing/Receiving
Perception is generally understood today as the process by which the brain organizes and interprets sensory information (*1). When driving a car, I can notice many small details: The sound of the door closing, the softness or hardness of the seats, the roundness of the steering wheel, the gauges on the dashboard, the acceleration of the car or the sound of the engine as I drive off.
In addition to the perception of the outside world, there is also self-perception. This includes thoughts and inner states of experience such as joy, sadness, pleasure, boredom, anger, relaxation.
Human perception is almost always connected with interaction – for example, the interaction between inside and outside with the help of sensory impressions. This interaction has at least two sides – a sender and a receiver. There is not only noticing, but also transferring.
In this sense, transferring and noticing are an exchange – a give and take. The boundaries on the material level dissolve in the perceptive consciousness. To sense the silence means: to become silence, to let the silence into oneself. To perceive the universe leads to experiencing the vastness and aliveness in the cosmos.
Inseparable from perception are the objects of perception: hands, laptop, car, steering wheel. They are linguistic names for perceptual phenomena. Language serves as a second layer, superimposed on sensory perception – a kind of beta matrix next to the alpha matrix. For the ancient Greeks, language was a God-given ability – also an aspect of receiving.
Many of our patterns of perception, feeling and thinking are learned throughout life. We “download” these patterns as “software” from the collective, morphogenetic fields. We practice and try them out until they become natural to us.
For the researcher Rupert Sheldrake, the conscious self is directly connected to the external environment and the states of the body via these fields – both in perceptual processes and in consciously controlled activity.(* 2) Whenever we use these structures, we revive them. We can move relatively freely in the large perceptual space and always download the latest software, whereby the rules of the game, i.e. the operating system level, are predetermined for us. We cannot change the basic structures of the matrix. Here, too, the transferring plays an important role.
From Noticing/Receiving to Transferring
Comparable to children playing in the sandbox and creating certain figures, we individually and collectively create new forms in the perceptual space of the world. The laws of nature and the sand correspond to the operating system (and the hardware). The forms disappear again after some time, the sand remains.
We need the form in order to have experiences and to be able to effect something. The world of forms is the level of expression of the soul – a kind of playground to be able to experience and create perceptions of the most diverse kind.
Our perception is like an instrument of interpretation for a complex, multi-dimensional universe. The energy projects itself into our individual spatio-temporal perceptual construct.
Without a certain intensity of this projection, we cannot perceive it as material reality. We construct our reality by filtering out of the energy spectrum the parts that correspond to us, and we replace missing parts to create a coherent picture. We filter out the parts that are significant to us, while we simply ignore what is insignificant to us.
When two people see a movie in the cinema, the sensory impressions are in principle very similar. However, the perception of the motion picture can be completely different. The events in the movie serve as a projection screen for the wishes, fears and longings of the viewer. The projection makes the partly unconscious, nebulous inner world tangible. By empathising with the protagonists, the illusion on the screen becomes “real” – a kind of feedback as confirmation.
From noticing/receiving to creating (projective creation)
Two researchers who have worked intensively on the subject of perception are Karl Pribram and David Bohm. Karl Pribram says, that our perception of the outside world is a kind of holographic image created by the brain. What happens outside of us is comparable to the radio waves that supply the television with an image. What we think is reality is the image of the external reality in our head. In his book The form within my point of view, Pribram concludes: “It is our interpretation of observations that transforms a perceptual occurrence into a form compatible with the world we navigate. This interpretation is dependent on our human ability afforded by our brain processes.” (*3)
A compelling experiment was done in Israel by Shlomo Breznitz (*4): Groups of soldiers were asked to walk a distance of 25 miles in the desert, and they were not told the correct length, but given a lower or higher figure. In the subsequent medical examination, the physiological stress in the body corresponded to the information given and not to the real stress of the distance. This means that we react more to the model in our head than to reality itself. This can be seen as a kind of projective creation. We give external things a certain reality depending on our consciousness. This would also explain the placebo effect.
The quantum physicist David Bohm goes one step further. He sees indirect evidence for the existence of a reality beyond our 3D reality: the quantum energy field or quantum potential. In his book Wholeness and Implicate Order, Bohm says: ” We have seen that in the ‘quantum’ context, the order in every immediately perceptible aspect of the world is to be regarded as coming out of a more comprehensive implicate order, in which all aspects ultimately merge in the undefinable and immeasurable holomovement.”(*5).
Michael Talbot writes about this in the book The Holographic Universe (*6): “Considered together, Bohm and Pribram’s theories provide a profound new way of looking at the world: Our brains mathematically construct objective reality by interpreting frequencies that are ultimately projections from another dimension, a deeper order of existence that is beyond both space and time: The brain is a hologram enfolded in a holographic universe.”
And furthermore Talbot says: “What is ‘out there’ is a vast ocean of waves and frequencies, and reality looks concrete to us only because our brains are able to take this holographic blur and convert it into the sticks and stones and other familiar objects that make up our world.” (*6)
Pure Noticing/Receiving – Pure Transferring
The holographic, constructivist view suggests how relative and how limited one’s natural perception is. This inevitably leads to the question: If there is something universal, timeless and spaceless behind the world of appearances – how can I experience some of it directly?
In her book The Voice of the Silence, H. P. Blavatsky speaks of overcoming the sensory construction of perception (*7): “When to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams; when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE the inner sound which kills the outer. Then only, not till then, shall he forsake the region of Asat, the false, to come unto the realm of Sat, the true. Before the soul can see, the Harmony within must be attained, and fleshly eyes be rendered blind to all illusion.”
And furthermore H. P. Blavatsky says: “Merge into one sense thy senses.”
These words can be understood as indications that it is possible to return to a kind of original perception which is at the same time noticing/receiving and transferring. Then there is no longer any separation. The perceiver and the object of perception merge into one. The world of becoming is left behind and perception opens up to Being.
Being reveals itself as undivided consciousness in the present moment – in the NOW and in the open space – in the HERE.
Sources:
1 Online Lexikon für Psychologie und Pädagogik (Online encyclopaedia for psychology and education), https://lexikon.stangl.eu/4674/wahrnehmung
2 Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance, p. 196
3 Karl H. Pribram, The form within my point of view, p. 127
4 Shlomo Breznitz & Collins Hemingway, Maximum Brainpower, p. 165
5 David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, p. 197
6 Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, p. 54
7 Helena Petrovna Blavatsy, The Voice of the Silence, p. 6
