MIND SET
SEEING ISN’T BELIEVING
Reality may be very different from what we see. To find the true meaning of things, we should search within, says Rajiv Vij
One fish said to the other:“Do you believe in this ocean that they talk about?”
This ancient Chinese saying well illustrates how narrow our vision of the world and theuniverse can be. We see the world from our limited perceptual framework. Despite evolution of our race, an average human mind is severely restricted by what it can perceive through thesenses. What we hear is limited by the frequency our ears can process; dogs can hear manyhigher frequencies and hence, have a very different perception of the sounds out there. Our sightis limited by the light frequencies our eyes can relate to; since pit vipers can sense heat frominfrared rays (like night vision goggles), they must view the same world very differently. If wehad a different mechanism, we would be seeing things differently. From our knowledge of science, we know so many things are just not what they appear — earth is not flat, the ground below us is not stationery and the sun doesn’t rise in the east.The fact is that we see and hear what we can and not what the reality is. The world out there isan unprocessed and formless data, waiting to be interpreted by us. The human nervous systemtakes in only the minutest proportion of the total energy vibrating in the environment. Researchshows that each conscious moment is actually comprised of many much smaller and unconscious“mini” moments, each appearing and disappearing rapidly. According to Buddhist texts, it takes17 mind-moments for a cognitive experience to register. As Marshall Glickman describes in his book ‘Beyond the Breath’: “This happens so quickly that we experience a steady state of consciousness, just as a movie appears seamless even though it’s made of many quickly flashedstill photos.” We are so engrossed in this fascinating movie that we are unable to step aside todistinguish between the movie and the reality.Besides the limitation in our ability to pick up the absolute truth in the first place, our perceptions are further clouded by our own thoughts and emotions. It is believed that 20% of what we see is objective data and the rest is a projection, biased by our thoughts and emotions. Neuroscientists highlight that the electrical impulses that reach our retina must also interact withthe thinking and the emotional parts of the brain. Thus, we don’t see a mosaic of blue, white andcolorless space, but sky and clouds. As French author Anais Nin said, “We do not see things asthey are. We see them as we are” — our thoughts and emotions project their own hues andcolours to whatever we observe. We are also quick to dole out intrinsic qualities to things and people, thinking “this is beautiful, that is ugly,” without being cognizant of the fact that theseattributes are assigned by our mind. As a Buddhist verse says: “Is anything on earth universallyand unanimously recognized as beautiful? For a lover, a beautiful woman is an object of desire;for the hermit, a distraction; for the wolf, a good meal.”
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