Thursday, October 04, 2007
Working with the mind's eye
The nature of consciousness is projective, that is, we see outside of ourselves something that we have inside ourselves. We project images of self-interactions, we put on others our own internal dialogues. The more a person is wedded to the idea that only solid outside things are real, the more they will ironically have no contact with anything solid or outside of themselves. The same is true for people who are blind to an aspect of self that is getting in their way – they will have enormous reactions to anyone who resembles that mood, because they are desperate to wrestle with it externally, even to the point of misinterpreting other people’s actions just to draw them into a roleplay doomed to never really satisfy or conclude. You see this in people who obsess on finding an enemy to conquer and kill, thereby hoping to exterminate a troublesome side of their own personalities which they refuse to command. They will demonize others just to stage the battle that they hope to fight and win inside, to the point of offending and threatening and making external enemies where there could have been friends. Even the most civilized evangelicals of all stripes are by definition people who believe that you want and need to believe what they believe, which is a volatile and stressful limitation not conducive to getting to know other people.
In truth there do exist external others who wait to be discerned behind the layered masks of projective reality, just as each of us might wish to someday be really seen and understood by colleagues who only know and treat us superficially. But people who only react to their own projections will never encounter anyone beyond themselves, because they are stuck on recreating the same remembered and anticipated scenes over and over. Consciousness is both the problem and the solution; only by becoming aware of our projections, and listening and looking for where external reality departs from internal expectations, can we develop a sense for another mind that is thinking apart from our own. We must allow for surprises both in ourselves and others, little evidences for how much more free than past formulas both we and another truly are. Thus we give the gift of allowing people to become real, by allowing realness to show itself. The gift is fortunately symmetric and bilateral, that is, even if the other person declines our offer to be more authentic, we can still take our own opportunity to grow by observing all that happens with compassion (we sink back into our projections whenever we get angry and blame the other person for being the limitation). The path to emerging the True Other is marked with great empathy, patience, humility, and love; thus it is guaranteed to be a spiritual experience in which the divine potential becomes perceived as actually blossoming and beckoning within ourselves as well as, hopefully, a new and deeper friend.
That the nature of consciousness is projective is seen in the phenomenon of portraits and dolls and robots, and all the anthropomorphizing these entail. People cannot help but offer immediate emotional sympathies to a lifeless block of material if it is just granted a face, even more so if it can walk, talk, and exhibit programmed human-like activities. The thing is not thus alive and never will be on this basis - it is the person’s mind which is investing outwardly the inner relationships, and the individual’s reactions will only reveal much about the person, nothing about the object. Such is the basis of disdain for superstition and religion in the rationalist, who holds a truth but also fails to consider how much they project and disown their own frustrated desires to find real companions behind the workings of a universe.
Small adjustments to a robot’s appearance can push a person into different reactive scenarios that remain nonetheless unilateral to the viewer’s mind, such as a doll that moves from evoking affection to provoking fear with a sharpened eyebrow, a downturned mouth, or worse, something implying disease such as a missing eye. There is in modern animation the phenomenon known as the Uncanny Valley in which a synthetic character is sympathetic only up to a certain point of realness, then it becomes horrifying for being photo-realistic but disturbingly inhuman, such as in zombie-like deadness of expression or gait. All such doll phenomena must be seen as manifestations of viewer consciousness with no external validity. Even if we believe in animism, that all objects carry life force, we must concede that the consciousness of a non-human object would be likely very different from our own, having nothing to do with the immediate humanizing judgments that we project onto dolls and robots. A person who is not skilled in allowing other people to bubble up their real intentions would have even less capacity to discern the nature of animistic spirits, fairies, and the like, rumors of whose existence are so prevalent throughout history that we cannot discard the possibility of meeting them one day, but only after we master the tricks and traps of our own projective minds as bred for human company.
Curiously, the doll phenomenon does not seem to work in reverse. That is to say, if someone conceives a doll-like image on a purported real being, this doesn't imply the being is mere fabrication. The emotional response in a human receiver of the doll appearance may be itself the valid communication of a mind that is less depictable. In my own mystical experience, I have come to appreciate that the reality of forms is always subjective, and more valid are the configurations of form which are consistently and informatively symbolic in a context. Symbolism is in fact more, not less, real than reality itself, which leads to the notions of archetype, cosmic man, sacred geometry, etc.
My personal bias has been to conclude that people who speak of meeting fairies that are little winged angels dressed in cute tiny outfits with sparkling wands and other commonly held accessories are strictly projecting. What creature truly from another dimension would have evolved to resemble a human child’s toy? Likewise, those who speak of being abducted by the standard aliens as seen in movies and fiction from the 20th century – big dark almond eyes, hairless spindly bodies, large skulls presumably evolved to hold those brains so much bigger than our own – are surely in denial of their internal issues and proclivities for trance hallucination.
But when I proceed to hunt only for the weirdest of life-forms in my edge perceptions - things barely conceivable or recognizable, and hopefully not too terrifyingly alien for my poor human-ensconced mind to consider - I’m disappointed to not find any such realistic things, not even in my dreams. Worse for my ego, some of the conversations those other people report with their cookie-cutter fairies and aliens are on occasion impressively enlightened and enlightening, quite indicative of a real contact experience. So I have to conclude that in this matter (pun intended), it is I the over-educated one who is suffering from the projective nature of consciousness. Perhaps extra-dimensional beings are almost necessarily perceived with the parts available to our human condition, and the more familiar and non-threatening may be the better. God may really be look like Santa Claus, and vice versa, for example.
So I now consider giving up on discovering weird forms altogether (although if I do meet one then I will be ready), and just brace myself for the New Agey ball of light that visits with telepathic wisdom as illustrated by scenes from my own life and culture. That way I’ll probably end up sounding only slightly less kooky and indefensible as those mythically minded folks I previously ridiculed, but at least I will have gotten past my own ego and into the next level beckoning, where liberated minds have consequential conversations.
In truth there do exist external others who wait to be discerned behind the layered masks of projective reality, just as each of us might wish to someday be really seen and understood by colleagues who only know and treat us superficially. But people who only react to their own projections will never encounter anyone beyond themselves, because they are stuck on recreating the same remembered and anticipated scenes over and over. Consciousness is both the problem and the solution; only by becoming aware of our projections, and listening and looking for where external reality departs from internal expectations, can we develop a sense for another mind that is thinking apart from our own. We must allow for surprises both in ourselves and others, little evidences for how much more free than past formulas both we and another truly are. Thus we give the gift of allowing people to become real, by allowing realness to show itself. The gift is fortunately symmetric and bilateral, that is, even if the other person declines our offer to be more authentic, we can still take our own opportunity to grow by observing all that happens with compassion (we sink back into our projections whenever we get angry and blame the other person for being the limitation). The path to emerging the True Other is marked with great empathy, patience, humility, and love; thus it is guaranteed to be a spiritual experience in which the divine potential becomes perceived as actually blossoming and beckoning within ourselves as well as, hopefully, a new and deeper friend.
That the nature of consciousness is projective is seen in the phenomenon of portraits and dolls and robots, and all the anthropomorphizing these entail. People cannot help but offer immediate emotional sympathies to a lifeless block of material if it is just granted a face, even more so if it can walk, talk, and exhibit programmed human-like activities. The thing is not thus alive and never will be on this basis - it is the person’s mind which is investing outwardly the inner relationships, and the individual’s reactions will only reveal much about the person, nothing about the object. Such is the basis of disdain for superstition and religion in the rationalist, who holds a truth but also fails to consider how much they project and disown their own frustrated desires to find real companions behind the workings of a universe.
Small adjustments to a robot’s appearance can push a person into different reactive scenarios that remain nonetheless unilateral to the viewer’s mind, such as a doll that moves from evoking affection to provoking fear with a sharpened eyebrow, a downturned mouth, or worse, something implying disease such as a missing eye. There is in modern animation the phenomenon known as the Uncanny Valley in which a synthetic character is sympathetic only up to a certain point of realness, then it becomes horrifying for being photo-realistic but disturbingly inhuman, such as in zombie-like deadness of expression or gait. All such doll phenomena must be seen as manifestations of viewer consciousness with no external validity. Even if we believe in animism, that all objects carry life force, we must concede that the consciousness of a non-human object would be likely very different from our own, having nothing to do with the immediate humanizing judgments that we project onto dolls and robots. A person who is not skilled in allowing other people to bubble up their real intentions would have even less capacity to discern the nature of animistic spirits, fairies, and the like, rumors of whose existence are so prevalent throughout history that we cannot discard the possibility of meeting them one day, but only after we master the tricks and traps of our own projective minds as bred for human company.
Curiously, the doll phenomenon does not seem to work in reverse. That is to say, if someone conceives a doll-like image on a purported real being, this doesn't imply the being is mere fabrication. The emotional response in a human receiver of the doll appearance may be itself the valid communication of a mind that is less depictable. In my own mystical experience, I have come to appreciate that the reality of forms is always subjective, and more valid are the configurations of form which are consistently and informatively symbolic in a context. Symbolism is in fact more, not less, real than reality itself, which leads to the notions of archetype, cosmic man, sacred geometry, etc.
My personal bias has been to conclude that people who speak of meeting fairies that are little winged angels dressed in cute tiny outfits with sparkling wands and other commonly held accessories are strictly projecting. What creature truly from another dimension would have evolved to resemble a human child’s toy? Likewise, those who speak of being abducted by the standard aliens as seen in movies and fiction from the 20th century – big dark almond eyes, hairless spindly bodies, large skulls presumably evolved to hold those brains so much bigger than our own – are surely in denial of their internal issues and proclivities for trance hallucination.
But when I proceed to hunt only for the weirdest of life-forms in my edge perceptions - things barely conceivable or recognizable, and hopefully not too terrifyingly alien for my poor human-ensconced mind to consider - I’m disappointed to not find any such realistic things, not even in my dreams. Worse for my ego, some of the conversations those other people report with their cookie-cutter fairies and aliens are on occasion impressively enlightened and enlightening, quite indicative of a real contact experience. So I have to conclude that in this matter (pun intended), it is I the over-educated one who is suffering from the projective nature of consciousness. Perhaps extra-dimensional beings are almost necessarily perceived with the parts available to our human condition, and the more familiar and non-threatening may be the better. God may really be look like Santa Claus, and vice versa, for example.
So I now consider giving up on discovering weird forms altogether (although if I do meet one then I will be ready), and just brace myself for the New Agey ball of light that visits with telepathic wisdom as illustrated by scenes from my own life and culture. That way I’ll probably end up sounding only slightly less kooky and indefensible as those mythically minded folks I previously ridiculed, but at least I will have gotten past my own ego and into the next level beckoning, where liberated minds have consequential conversations.
