Ancient Redwood hugged personally by the author when our worlds coalesced, from the ground, up.
Dire Straits’ “Brothers In Arms” song lyric; written by Mark Knopfler
Synchronicity struck again so I’m leaning into it.
I’ve been thinking about perception, lately. And the nature of reality. Actually, I’ve been thinking about the nature of reality for quite a long time so I guess I’ve also been thinking about perception a lot longer than just “lately” too.
When you’re a teacher or principal, you get on the job training, everyday, in the nature of reality. Kids will constantly teach you that reality is a tenuous state of affairs. For example:
If you aren’t present to actually witness some kind of conflict between children, you’re at a severe disadvantage if you think your goal is trying to come to some kind of truth on the matter (silly you!). I quickly learned that when I tried to mediate a conflict, my main goal should never be to discern what actually happened. Because…when applied to conflict between kids, say, off of the playground from recess, those two different children will perceive the situation differently; and for each, THAT will be their reality despite all effort to convince them otherwise. If the teacher believes successful conflict resolution mandates an agreement on reality and truth, (reality and truth being not always mutually inclusive!), they’ll find themselves rapidly down a rabbit hole of frustration with nary a resolution in sight. Trust me on this: it would take you less than 47 seconds sitting in front of two kindergarteners who are passionately arguing with each other about what actually happened on the dino slide for you to no longer care what actually happened on the dino slide!
But here’s the thing—the exact same thing can be said everywhere else, about everyone else, throughout all time and space. Dino slides notwithstanding. This is NOT just a schoolyard phenomenon. THIS is the nature of reality for us all.
You cannot argue well against perception. Which means one has to understand the nature of perception in order to have even a minimal chance of comprehending the incomprehensible nature of reality.
I don’t want to stay focused on conflict resolution right now, despite how utterly fascinating that subject is, especially when kindergarteners are involved. I still believe, despite being semi-retired from the profession for going on my third year now, that if anyone wanted an effective conflict mediator to resolve conflict (like say, in Gaza or the Ukraine—and I don’t say this lightly), they might want to start by employing either a kindergarten teacher or an elementary school principal. Honestly. I’ve got some fun stories I could share from that world.
We live in different ones, we really do!
Proof:
Famous examples of the different worlds we perceive with our own eyes—you tell me the world you see in each sketch, and I can guarantee I perceive a much different world. If you need to ask, ask in a comment or DM to me!
Okay, further proof by way of explanation:
I was brought to this synchronistic place by three recent and very different experiences. One being a passage from a book; one being a TEDTalk from a Korean Zen monk; and the third from a lecture by a renowned microbiologist/geneticist.
Briefly and in reverse order:
Thirdly:
Dr. Bruce Lipton is a pioneer in a field that more and more scientists are discovering is a unified field of previously-thought disparate realms: cellular biology, genetics, psychology, neurology, and spirituality. Dr. Lipton is one of the champions of epigenetics—the study of how mind influences genetic potential and behavior (as opposed to the opposite pathway) which has huge implications in the worlds of medicine, pharmacology, psychology, and spirituality (to say nothing of economics and the conglomeration of the multibillion dollar ad campaigns of drug companies that holds hostage every component of the health care system—including your doctor’s behavior when they are sitting in front of you in their attempt to “ease your suffering.” And don’t get me started on health insurance capitalism!).
In a lecture I attended in late July, Dr. Lipton reminded me yet again of some of the essential Laws of Physics that serve as the foundation of our current scientific understanding of the physical world. Things like: everything is made of atoms; atoms are purely energy and because of that Law, form truly is emptiness (you’ll see a connection soon here**); the vast majority of space in the Universe is empty space, ourselves included; and that the mere observation of a thing fundamentally changes that thing—even at a distance (search out the paradox of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment—fascinating!). Hold on to this last thought.
And he reminded the audience that we don’t see anything as it is. What happens in reality is that photons of light emanating from some source, like the sun, bounces off an object in all directions some of which enter a little tiny hole in your eyeball that then get focused to the back of that eyeball that then gets turned into a different electrical pulse that travels up the optic nerve and into the occipital lobe near the back of the brain so that the brain can create a story, an image, of the object. We “see” rebounded packets of light energy (photons) upon which the brain then places meaning. Disrupt any of that pathway, and the object no longer gets seen. Turn off the light, step into complete darkness, and nothing can be seen even if it were right in front of your now useless eyeballs. Those things, for all intents and purposes, might as well not even exist in the first place. They no longer are a part of our perceived reality.
Secondly:
In his TEDTalk, titled “The Zen of Perception: Mastering Suffering and Pain,” Hyon Gak Sunim talks about Olivia Farnsworth, a UK teenager (born in 2009) who, because of an extremely rare condition on one little portion of one of her chromosomes (a condition called Chromosome 6 Deletion), she cannot feel pain. One would think this to be a good thing until you consider things more deeply—until you consider the ramifications involving severe injury, infection, and sepsis. Sunim also shared a personal story of a severe injury he received to his shoulder and how he came to understand the nature of pain, suffering, and the power of the mind to reframe pain in a totally different and impersonal way.
Both of these stories are about perception. Both of these stories exemplify perception is more than just “how I see things.” It’s so much more complex than that (with even a biological component, as young Olivia would remind us). And yet, when boiled down to fundamentals, perception is among the simplest things to grasp. Afterall, we each are constantly perceiving everything. We just forget. And, if we ever knew in the first place, we forget how this simple fact could surface compassion for every other living being.
Because you can never know what is happening inside any other living being. They are living in their own world. And it’s a world we cannot visit—but we could always stand to understand a little more of those other worlds, should we just remember what the great Mark Knopfler sings to us: “We live in different ones.”
And finally firstly (though as I think on it more, the synchronistic examples are virtually numberless):
I offer this passage from a book I’m now well into, and loving:
Please don’t read too quickly past this passage. It’s quite profound. If you stayed with it a little more, you might come to an understanding of awe—you might come to a realization of how insignificant we wee humans actually are in the grand scheme of the entire Universe. And you might come to an appreciation of how miraculous, and utterly incomprehensible, our existence actually is.
This passage is solely about the nature of perception. And it is key to understanding how we inhabit our own unique world separate from, yet adjacent and intimately connected to, the worlds of everyone else. It’s also the key to compassion.
By the way, the name of the book is ** “The Book of Form and Emptiness1,” a work of “fiction” by Ruth Ozeki. The passage is on page 51. The entire book is about perception. (I put quotation marks around “fiction” here because this really isn’t a work of fiction. The BEST literary fiction always is a perception of reality.)
But falling trees Kert?
A while back in these posts on the Alchemy of our Lives, we pondered together the age-old conundrum: “Do falling trees make a sound in a forest if no one is around to hear them?”
You may answer this now for yourself. I’ll wait a few moments…
🕛
🕒
🕕
🕘
Times up.
Let’s rephrase more accurately: Do falling trees make a sound in a forest if no one, no thing, is around to perceive it?”
One has to think deeply about the nature of perception, reality, sound, and even existence. Because, the answer…
…is no.
In order for a sound to even be sound, it requires a receiver. Sound is just energy; sound has no form, it is only vibration caused by the movement of something in a medium, and transmitted through or across that medium to a receiver.
Source → Movement → Medium → Vibration → Transmittance → Receiver = Sound. Subtract anything in this pathway on the left side of the equation, and there can be no sound.
It is that vibrational energy that, in the presence of an ear, excites a few very small bones that sends their own electrical, formless impulses to the brain of that perceiver, that then gets registered as sound. But “reality” gets stranger than that. Because when our brains register a sound, it’s not the sound of the thing that sent it, it’s the sound our brains created out of the formless and empty signals it perceived. We created the sound inside of us! Unless, that is, something in those bones or along those synapses doesn’t function well. Then we are deaf to the sound. It’s as if the sound didn’t even exist, because for a person who is deaf, who perceives things differently, it doesn’t. They live in a different world—their own world of their own creation. Not really different from us.
There are literally thousands and thousands of radiowave signals being transmitted in our atmosphere all the time. Not a single one of them exists for us unless we use a special thing called a “radio” and tune it so it resonates with a very tiny segment of a radio wave, either its amplitude or its frequency, so that we can hear the latest Taylor Swift megahit. We are deaf to all the rest—and we are deaf to it all without the receiver.
But here’s the craziest thing: we also created the tree, and the forest via similar pathways. It’s not just ears and sounds we’re talking about. It’s eyes and sight; skin and touch; tongues and taste; noses and smell; nerve endings and pain; and perceptions and worlds. Quantum physics is crazily uncovering the craziness of the reality of Form vs. Emptiness.
We can only, ONLY perceive that whose energy vibrations, which are empty and formless, enter through one of our sense organs. And from those organs, get converted into further, different, energy impulses that lead to the brain where the brain creates a story of what is being perceived—whether that story be “candy bar,” or “baking bread,” or “Sultans of Swing,” or “tree”—or that tree falling in a forest. We receive our own unique vibrations because no one inhabits the same space as us, at the same time, with the same sense organs, and certainly not with the same brain whose function is to interpret the vibrational energy into the stories we tell ourselves about the world in which we live. We are unique, by definition. And therefore the world we inhabit is unique to us as well.
No one can say that the tree I see is the same tree you see. Or the sound of a plane flying overhead is the same sound you hear. Or that the color red is the same color red for any other person but me.
Similarly, I have my own rainbow, my own colors pink and blue, and my own taste and smell of freshly baked sourdough bread. In essence, and without exaggeration or hubris, I inhabit my own world—a population of one. The passage from Ozeki’s book intriguingly asks: what happens to sensations when they become you? What happens to that chicken or broccoli, that tree falling sound, or the words your reading on the screen right now when they enter you?
Answer: they become you. Those objects never really existed as we think they did—they only exist because we created their meaning, by making them a part of us. They had to enter us, in some way, to become real to us. Outside of our perception, nothing really exists.
Think about the things we don’t even know exist yet because we can’t perceive them. Think of all the things we know exist now but didn’t know years, decades, or a millennia ago, because we couldn’t perceive them. To those humans, those things didn’t exist—they weren’t in the world’s they were inhabiting.
And here we wee humans think we know so much.
Why care?
In a word: Compassion.
All this, with proper skill and understanding, becomes seeds to our compassion. No one knows the world another inhabits—if we knew the full story of another, if we could inhabit but for a few moments their world, we’d be too busy bowing down to them in honor of the dignity of their experience to even begin to think about hating them, or hurting them, or dissing them…or creating war with them. Instead, oh the horror(!), there might be only love and understanding.
(Were that only the case!)
As I finish this up, I’m leaving on the table something even more fascinating to think on—the nature of story and how we use story, in interpreting our world, to create what we think is real, ie form, because it is a part of our Alchemy. Maybe that’s further down the road some—maybe next week, maybe not. I don’t yet know the world I’ll be in then. So, we’ll see.
Until then, give me the grace of your understanding, and allow me to live in my own world with dignity and peace. But please, don’t take your own world too far away—we can still see each other, we can still hug each other, and we can still believe in love together.
Yeah, pretty good worlds to live in, those. May we live in them fully.
But, as always, this is all just my perception of things. Of course, you’ll perceive things differently. Just as you should. Regardless, you will anyway. You don’t live in my world.
THAT is the nature of things. You should tell me about your world sometime—so I can make it my own.
PS: to close a loop, also via Hyon Gak Sunim, from his teacher Dae Soen Sa Nim:
Then listen closely. They’ll answer, but you gotta be there ready to hear with opened ears, but more importantly, an opened heart. Their worlds were here way before ours, so their wisdom is eternal.
Interesting Kert. Me likey. When I read this kind of thing I’m always a little afraid that if I embrace the notion that “nothing exists” I’ll be left hopeless. I want the world to exist. Other trees, plants and the mycelium experience the vibrations of the falling tree, in their way of hearing.
Maybe there’s a difference between realms at the atomic level and our level. Maybe a rock is a hard rock at our level even though it’s a bunch of energy at the atomic level?
Einstein says energy and mass are the same and somehow the speed of light squared is involved.
Or maybe it’s all just energy but that is sensed and registered by consciousness. And maybe consciousness is the one real thing?
Detweiler’s comment says that’s the Buddhist idea.
I like to add I think consciousnesses in relationship with each other seems to be a core somehow too…so not just consciousness but relational networks of consciousness.
Hi Kert, I accept everything you wrote and the mysterious truth of it. Your rendering of it and how you got there is beautiful and unique. I enjoy your noting of quantum physics contribution to the truths you have described. As I read Substack I feel a number of sensitive and thoughtful writers making their own discoveries in this area. Everyone on their unique path. This thinking has been a preoccupation of mine as well. It changes everything which frightens many people. I find Buddhism and the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta helpful with their thousands of years experience with this awareness. Advaita Vedanta says there is only consciousness and we join all others in the primary function: witnessing it all.. Becoming aware of there being only consciousness can lead to our true understanding of Existence, Consciousness
And the Bliss it is. Namaste, with a deep bow to your beautifully described awareness. Daniel
Interesting Kert. Me likey. When I read this kind of thing I’m always a little afraid that if I embrace the notion that “nothing exists” I’ll be left hopeless. I want the world to exist. Other trees, plants and the mycelium experience the vibrations of the falling tree, in their way of hearing.
Maybe there’s a difference between realms at the atomic level and our level. Maybe a rock is a hard rock at our level even though it’s a bunch of energy at the atomic level?
Einstein says energy and mass are the same and somehow the speed of light squared is involved.
Or maybe it’s all just energy but that is sensed and registered by consciousness. And maybe consciousness is the one real thing?
Detweiler’s comment says that’s the Buddhist idea.
I like to add I think consciousnesses in relationship with each other seems to be a core somehow too…so not just consciousness but relational networks of consciousness.
Nice tree.
Hi Kert, I accept everything you wrote and the mysterious truth of it. Your rendering of it and how you got there is beautiful and unique. I enjoy your noting of quantum physics contribution to the truths you have described. As I read Substack I feel a number of sensitive and thoughtful writers making their own discoveries in this area. Everyone on their unique path. This thinking has been a preoccupation of mine as well. It changes everything which frightens many people. I find Buddhism and the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta helpful with their thousands of years experience with this awareness. Advaita Vedanta says there is only consciousness and we join all others in the primary function: witnessing it all.. Becoming aware of there being only consciousness can lead to our true understanding of Existence, Consciousness
And the Bliss it is. Namaste, with a deep bow to your beautifully described awareness. Daniel