What is correct perception? Correct means that which is done without error. To perceive is to cognize and have something become known through internal sense apparatus. Correct perception, then, is correct knowing accomplished through accurately using the internal senses.
Human beings have another sense apparatus: the mind. It is the mind that actually is the mechanism of correct or incorrect cognition. The mind gives a sense or meaning to that which the organs of perception have actually sensed. For example, the taste buds taste strawberry. To the taste buds, strawberry is a mixture of sweet and sour. Our tongue and mouth feel the texture of strawberry. The texture of strawberry is soft but firm and juicy. But it is the mind that gives these senses a meaning and a preference.
Here lies the rub or the liberation and the wrong or correct understanding of a perception. Cognition – to know because we have experienced something – is born from the mind. Cognition is what the mind does with the data perceptions offered by eye, ear, nose, tongue, or organ of touch. Data perceptions includes what we read in books, hear from others, or receive from any source.
Cognition is the result of the mind’s function which is to label and ascribe meaning or purpose to something. Perception is the result of the five sense apparatus that make things known. Perceiving takes in data and synthesizes it. Then cognition is engaged to give meaning to the collection of perceptions.
A conversation that I had recently with someone provides an example of perceived data or information and the human cognitive process and what it does with information. The information was Walmart selling an increasing variety of organic foods. We each had thoughts about the positive and negative of that based on a view of interdependence and yet came to different conclusions. Each of us had a story in our mind about Walmart selling more organic foods which included both beneficial and detrimental projections.
Wrong perceptions are predicated upon wrong, limited and limiting views, often ones that include personalization. This happens on small private scale such as the snake-rope example as well as on a large scale like the conqueror telling the history or stories spun to engage a war.
Cognitions (the known that becomes the story) with selfishness as their base will always be wrong, limited, and limiting and will use perceptions as validation for the selfish view. Intransigence about global climate change is an good example of this.
Correct perception, then, boils down to two essential understandings: a) interconnectedness-interdependence which is the antidote to selfishness and b) emptiness-infinite potential which adjusts or empties the story. All existence is completely and infallibly interconnected. That interconnectedness is predicated upon complete interdependence. Examples to illustrate this could be chosen from Nature, from your day, from the meal you last ate, or the electricity running the mechanism you are reading this post on. Choose one and consider the fullness of interdependence that is in that one example, knowing that there are factors of interconnectedness that you don’t currently know. Correct perception relies upon a two-fold process: scope back and have a wide consideration and realize that the single self (me on any scale) is focused on the single which is, by nature, wrong perception.
The second essential understanding is emptiness-infinite potential. The strawberry is not what we like or dislike about it. Nor is it what an ant, bird, farmer, or drop of rain might “say” about it either. And, of course, you are not what you say about yourself and I am not what I say about myself. We know that is so because what we say changes through the day. “I am late.” “I am hungry.” “I am tired.” “I am Donna.” “I am a woman.” The fact that these I am statements change makes clear that the person is not what the person says about him or herself. As I come to understand that I am not these I am stories and statements more of the infinite potential that I am is possible. Freeing myself of my stories, I actually am more free. Emptying my ideas of myself from my ideas of myself, I can begin to discover who and what is this self. Who and what is Donna?
Now organs of perception, unfiltered and unaltered by the mind (of me), provide a new adventure – the adventure of correct perception. It turns out that we are deleting or marginalizing whole types of perception because of the stories in our mind. This is why orrect perception is a whole new view of reality, of what already is.
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Hi Donna,
Yet again I am grateful for your ability to clarify something I think I already know but am very vague about knowing, saying, understanding it concisely. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Much love,
Anne
Most welcome. Being human is just this: increasing clarity so that abundant compassion can BE. much love, d