A Powerful Story

 A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen.  The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.

All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken.  He scratched the earth for worms and insects.  He clucked and cackled.  And he would trash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old.  One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky.  It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The old eagle looked up in awe.  "Who is that?" he asked.

"That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor.  "He belongs to the sky.  We belong to the earth--we're chickens."  So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was.

A Few Thoughts: How Concepts Dominate Our PerceptionsPure perce...

A Few Thoughts:  How Concepts Dominate Our Perceptions

Pure perce...:  How Concepts Dominate Our Perceptions Pure perception is incomprehensible to us.  What we commonly call perception is really the inte...

 How Concepts Dominate Our Perceptions

Pure perception is incomprehensible to us.  What we commonly call perception is really the interpretaton of a meningless phenomenon into a specific and use "cognition."  Fundamentally, a perception is simply a sensory encounter with some object or occurrence, and is without association or emotional charge.

Two major conceptual contributors that dominate all of our experience: "interpretaton" and "meaning."  Since perception as itself is meaningless, what we perceive is useless without interpretation.  The mere fact of seeing an object, hearing a sound, or feeling a sensation means nothing unless we know what is is and how it relates to us.   To make sense of what we perceive, we automatically associate, classify, and interpret the meaningless data that is available.   First everything perceived  is quickly interpreted so as to determine what it is- a flower, a dog, a chair, soft, fast, a person.  Having conceptually identified what something is, we then immediately relate it to ourselves.

No matter what we perceived, once we interpreted it in some basic way, we will go on to assess its value or threat to us by associating it with an array of past experiences and beliefs, and so supply it with meaning.  This meaning renders the thing ugly, expensive, mine, hers, sacred, too big, useful, friendly, hostile, dangerous etc etc.  Once meaning is attached, our minds will immediately infuse the thing with some "emotional" charge, subtle or gross, to indicate in a feeling-sense how we should relate to it.  This charge is based on the value or threat that a thing or notion has relative to us, and so this feeling-reaction contains information suggesting particular hahavior-should we run away or feed it a biscuit ?  Such feeling-charge manifests as attraction, fear, disinterest, annoyance, desire, boredom, importance, repulsion, and so on, as well as many such feelings far too subtle to warrant a name.  This application of interpretation,  meaning, and emotional-charge occurs so fast and automatically that we do not distinguish any of these as separate activities within our whole experience.

This mechanism is a remarkable feature of the human  mind-a rapid means of converting all perceptions into a self-relating form which  enables us to take the necessary actions to insure our safety and survival.  It's wise to remember, however, that everything we think we "know" is an interpretation.  Every bit of information we take in is influenced and altered by our particular set of beliefs, assumptions, and associations.  These alterations are conceptual "add-ons" that strongly influence our experience of whatever is perceived.  What we reat to is not the object itself but rather the interpretation and meaning that we ourselves appy to the object.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.    - William Shakespeare

The same process that we apply to objects of perception also works the same way on our own thoguths, emotions, and sensations.   Our ideas and beliefs and, in a way, our entire history are applied to everything that comes into our awareness-whether it's people and objects, or our own thoughts and feelings.

What we know as reality is influenced by the concepts with which we interpret it.  From "tree" to "hot" to "disgusting,"  what something means to us predetermines how we will perceive it.  Yet this relationship between concept and reality is so seamless it is undertectable.

Unless we make the distinction between our additions and what is there, we can't become conscious of what's actually there.  Our whole experience of self and life is conceptually dominated.  This means that we are not simply experiencing life and who we are; we are also constantly "imagining" life and who we are.  Since it does not seem like it's our imagination we're perceiving, we don't know the difference between what we are adding and what is there.

Simply put:  any perception we have is only understood through concept.  This is a very dominant aspect of experience.  Seeing an object doesn't give us much until we recognize it as a chair that we can sit on, or a dog that might bite our leg, or a rotten apple that is best thrown away.  Along with every perception is an automatic mental association with many concepts.

A Few Thoughts: My First Blog

A Few Thoughts: My First Blog: Today I have decided to really start writing something.  Just want to put my thoughts down as much as anything else.  I am not bothered if a...

A Few Thoughts: Power lies in Making distinctions. Freedom lies ...

A Few Thoughts: Power lies in Making distinctions.   Freedom lies ...: Power lies in Making distinctions.   Freedom lies in destroying them. So what is "Distinction" ? Our experience of ab...

Power lies in Making distinctions.   Freedom lies in destroying them.

So what is "Distinction" ?

Our experience of absolutely everything, and in every way, is a matter of distinction.  Making a distinction in our experience means we can now isolate and know something in our field of awareness.  A distinction can be anything, any thought, feeling, object, class, category, level, measure etc. If it is distinct from what it is not, it is a distinction.

Distinction is everything.  It makes up our entire world and everything in it.

For example, a car is a distinction- it is not a bus or any other form of transport.    

A rock is a distinction.  What distinction is it ? It is the distinction "rock", it is the distinction of that particular rock.  We may also make a distinction regarding the color of the rock, the weight of the rock, the size and shape of the rock, the substance of the rock, the temperature of the rock, and any other "piece" of information or perception about the rock.  Anything else we are aware of in relation to the rock is another distinction.  All together, these are what constitute our awareness of the rock.

Fear - fear is a distinction within the domain of emotions.  We know the difference between fear and anger, joy and any other emotion - these are all "distinctions" in emotions.

How do you "make" a distinction ?  If you are aware of something in any way, if you can think about it, perceive it, imagine it, or know it in any way, you have "made" the distinction.  If not, then you cannot think about it, perceive it, imagine it, or know it in any way.  It does not exist at all in your experience.   It is not possible to understand anything that you do not create for yourself, and much of it must be created.  Making a distinction is simply creating in your consciousness a particular awareness or experience - this is then that distinction. 

We make distinctions all the time.  They are what constitute our reality, our experiences, our perceptions.

When we learn something, we make new distinctions. We perceive something we hadn't perceived before. When you learn how to make a pie, you make distinctions of the different ingredients, their characteristics, the proportion to use, the temperature to bake it etc.

Whenever we make new distinctions, we have new experiences and new perceptions.  And since our interactions are determined by what we experience, we can also create new abilities.  Every ability to interact effectively with the world around us, or within us - is determined by the distinctions we make.  This would be seen as what we know and how we know it.

How we perceive events, what we perceive in the event, and how clearly we perceive it are all functions of the distinctions we make. If we make fine distinctions in balance, for example, we are able to balance our bodies much better than if we made gross distinctions in balance.  It is the same with space, distance, movements, forces, thinking, feeling, communication, and so on.  Most people think there is only one type of snow (specially those who lived in the tropic). But Eskimos can distinguises tens of varieties of snows. That is why they are much more capable of interacting with their freezing environment than the rest of us.  Distinction is the prime ingredient of all perception, and therefore of all interaction, and so determines the interaction.  This determination governs what can and what will occur in the interaction, and so determines the level of ability anyone will have within an interaction.

When we realize the prime place distinctions play in our lives, we realize that nothing can occur or proceed without them - they constitute our entire experience and every element of it.  And although all power and ability arise from the distinctions we make, we should not ignore the fact that real personal freedom can only be had through eliminating distinctions.

So there you go.  We now should understand why "Power"  lies in ability to make distinctions.  I will expand on why "freedom" lies in destroying them in the next blog.

My First Blog

Today I have decided to really start writing something.  Just want to put my thoughts down as much as anything else.  I am not bothered if anyone cares to read it.  But if you do, you might find something really interesting, or useful or both, unless of course it is not (at least to you ).

So what am I going to write about ? Anything that comes to mind, but most likely something that interest me.  Usually that means meditation, personal development, The Buddha Dhamma, spirituality, NLP, hypnosis, the unconscious mind, and other metaphysical stuffs.

As it is 12:42AM now, it is gone past my usual bedtime.  So I am going to pause here for now, and will continue tomorrow ( I promise ).


7th June 2014.  12:43AM