Seeing What is There.

Wall of a derelict house. In the Maniototo, near En Hakkore retreat centre.

I have a new monitor: 27" of clear sharp colour, take a bow Mr. Dell. Today, after a week or two of looking at the thing, I noticed that it has an adjustable base, so I tilted it upwards a little. And an odd thing happened. The oblong screen became a parallelogram, wider at the bottom than at the top. It didn't really of course, it's just that in the time I had been viewing it the screen had been perpendicular, and at an angle to my line of vision and my brain had got used to it the way it was, and had, without consulting me, been performing the nifty little trick of making a perceptual adjustments so that it looked rectangular. And now I went and changed the angles and my brain reinterpreted the shape using the old maths. I knew it was rectangular but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't see it that way. The illusion was so persuasive I even got a set square and made sure it was safe to disbelieve my own eyes.

All day and every day our perceptual apparatus performs similar swindles, so that we constantly see and hear and taste and feel and smell the world not as the world is but as our brain thinks it should be. Our perceptual system is a wonderful avenue into the universe of which we are a part, but it is also a filter, screening and interpreting the universe on our behalf. We see the world not as the world is, but as we are.

The spiritual life is about perceiving the world. All spiritual practices aim in one way or another to introduce us to what is really there. To do this, all spiritual practices must take a first, preliminary step, of introducing us to ourselves. It's only when we know how we habitually distort the world around us that we are able to get beyond ourselves and move closer to what is there. I suppose a spiritual practitioner is in some ways like an artist, whose first task is perception. Without perception even the most skilled painter or sculptor or film maker or dancer or photographer or composer is merely a decorator.

Jesus said " For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth." To follow Jesus does not mean staunchly defending our culturally and biologically given perceptions. It means pretty much the opposite. It means forsaking all that seems obvious to me, even those things as blatantly and unarguably obvious as the great parallelogram of glass two feet in front of my nose. It's only when I give up my perceptions that I have any hope of perceiving.

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