Building a Lens of Freedom

To begin, let us consider how one comes to hold a worldview? How does a baby come out of the womb without any ideas of itself or the world, without any prejudices or biases, without any opinions or beliefs, and one day come to hold a complex model of themselves, the world around them, and their relations and preferences to it? How do we come to know and relate to the world of things?

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When I was a kid, I used to lay on the bed with my siblings and look up at the plaster patterns on the ceiling. We would see all kinds of shapes in the patterns — animals, faces, landscapes, objects, monsters, and all kinds of things. I’m sure you’ve done something like this, like laying on the grass and looking up at the clouds or stars, which told you endless stories.

This is our perception at work. The faculty of perception takes sensory data — in this case, light waves that have bounced off the clouds and ended up in our eyes — and then constructs them into a distinct concept, organizing the data into like-patterns, creating a useful model or experience we can make sense of.

Without perception, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish the world of things. Our experience would be a seamless, ever-changing mess of noise — lights, shadows, colors, smells, sounds, etc., with no way to distinguish anything from anything else.

In our example, then, instead of just seeing a seamless and ever-changing soup of light waves — colors, shadows, and light — the faculty of perception allows us to perceive white clouds as distinct and separate from the blue sky, both of which are in relation not only to each other but also to our self, an additional concept.

The neurologist and physician Oliver Sacks tells a story of a patient whose vision he was able to restore, which really captures the point I’m trying to make here. After the procedure whereby Dr. Sacks restored the patient’s vision, Sacks asked the patient, “Well…what do you see?” The patient paused. It turns out that the patient’s visual field was restored but all he could see was a chaotic mess of moving lights, colors, and shadows. And it wasn’t until the patient could tie the movement of Sack’s lips to the patient’s perception of Sack’s voice that the picture started coming into view.

Now, what’s interesting to take away from this story is that we most often take our perception of the world for granted. We think this is the way the world is — exactly how we experience it. Rather than seeing all this data as continuous waves of light, sound, etc., we experience a world of things. We see cars, homes, people, plants, clouds, and more.

And this isn’t only true for what we see. It’s also true for all our sensory experiences. We hear phones ring, for example. We hear people speak and dogs bark. We feel our hands rest against our legs. But without our perception, each of these ‘things’ would melt into a chaotic, ever-changing wave of noise, inseparable from one another and inseparable from the rest of experience.

To be clear, I’m not talking about thoughts here. When we gaze out into a room, for example, we are not having thoughts about each thing in the room. But our perception is still unconsciously registering everything. We don’t panic because our entire visual field is organized nicely, even though we aren’t having active thoughts about each thing in our field of vision. Thoughts, of course, are important in constructing a worldview, but we’ll get to thoughts another time. Today, I just want to focus on perception.

So, just to recap, the faculty of perception collects sensory data, organizes it into a useful category or concept, which it then stores in memory to pull from later, when it detects like-patterns. In other words, perception creates our moment-to-moment world of appearances. It takes a chaotic world of ever-changing sensory data and molds it into a coherent and stable model of the world, or experience. It even molds the perception of a continuous and stable experience of ‘self’.

Now, an important question to ask for those of us practicing the Dharma, is whether our perception is aligned with reality? Can we reliably say that our perception is providing us an accurate view of the world and of ourselves?

My partner has an excellent story to highlight my point here. When she and her ex-husband were on their honeymoon in Europe, they stayed in a hotel that smelled terribly rotten. It bothered both of them immensely. After a couple days, though, when they were walking near their hotel, they saw a fromagerie, or cheese factory, connected to their hotel. From this point on, the smell no longer bothered them but in fact delighted them.

Another thing to consider here is the perception of other animals. Snakes, for example, experience the world of vision in infrared. Bats experience a visual representation of the world through sound waves, and dogs see with their olfactory system. Do we have the correct view of the world, or do one of these other animals have the correct view?

And wait…are there actual stable, clearly defined things in reality?

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Let’s get back to our newborn baby. Just consider that this baby comes into the world and has no ideas about anything. It doesn’t have a concept of self or other. It doesn’t have a concept of life or death, of up or down, left or right, good or bad. It must build its perception of each of these in time (time being another concept it must build). Until then, it’s like Dr. Sack’s patient — there exists only an undifferentiated field of ever-changing waves.

So, how do we accomplish this incredible feat of building a perception? Well, we don’t do it at all. I didn’t build my perception, nor did you. Our perception of the world arises through numerous causes and conditions — the families, environments, and communities we’re born into; the language, traditions, institutions, norms, and belief systems of our respective cultures; the trends, styles, and preferences of our generation; the books we read and movies we watch; the friend groups we hang out with; our prior experiences; our interests and impulses; our genetic makeup (snake vs human, and even genetic differences among humans, like those who experience sensory disorders); and on and on.

What makes perception so complex is that we don’t all perceive things the same way. In fact, none of us perceive anything the same way. We each build our own model. And none of us, not even twins, have the exact same circumstances and experiences. Our unique conditions cause us to perceive the exact same thing (person or situation) differently. One person, for example, may perceive a dog jumping on them as a threat, while another person may perceive an excited and loving dog happy to see them.

Perception, then, is a conjectural and creative process. More accurately, it’s both a conjectural and a critical process, a continuous feedback loop of trial and the elimination of error, just like the scientific method, natural selection, and every other knowledge creating process.

Just as in science, where we put forward a hypothesis and then rigorously test and adjust this hypothesis against observation, experimentation, and critical reasoning, our faculty of perception creates a collection of useful concepts, which it continuously refines and adjusts as it gets feedback through additional sensory data. But, we can never say, with science or perception, that we’ve come to the Final True perception or theory of anything.

“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” — Oscar Wilde

[If you’re interested in deepening your understanding of this process, check out this article. It will speak a bit about how our innate impulses, like hunger, present problems when they are confronted by obstacles in our environment, which require us to create concepts (ideas) to overcome the obstacles.]