Session 777

Nature of Perception, Session 777

Initially, however, before the birth of images and words – as you understand them – the world existed in different terms from those you know now.  Images as you consider them had not taken the form that you recognize.  It seems to you that visually, for example, the natural world must be put together or perceived in a certain fashion.

Whatever your language, you perceive trees, mountains, people, oceans.  You never see a man merge with a tree, for example.  This would be considered an hallucinatory image.  Your visual data are learned and interpreted so that they appear as the only possible results of those data.  Inner vision can confound you, because in your mind you often see images quite clearly that you would dismiss if your eyes were open.  In the term of which we are speaking, however, the young species utilized what I have called the “inner senses” to a far greater degree than you do.  Visually, early man did not perceive the physical world in the way that seems natural to you.

When a man’s consciousness, for example, blended with that of a tree, those data became “visual” for others to perceive.  When a man’s consciousness merged with an animal’s, that blending became visual data also.

In a manner of speaking, the brain put visual information together so that the visual contents of the world were not as stationary as they are now.  You have learned to be highly specific in your physical sight and interpretations.  Your mental vision holds hints as to data that could be, but are not visually, physically perceived.  You have trained yourselves to react to certain visual cues which trigger your mental interpretations, and to ignore other variations.

These latter can be described as too subtle.  Yet actually they are no more subtle than those cues you acknowledge.

Data, you say, are stored in the chromosomes, strung together in a certain fashion.  Now biologically that is direct cognition.  The inner senses perceive directly in the same fashion.  To you, language means words.  Words are always symbols for emotions or feelings, intents or desires.  Direct cognition did not need the symbols.  The first language, the initial language, did not involve images or words, but dealt with a free flow of directly cognitive material.

A man, wondering what a tree was like, became one, and let his own consciousness flow into the tree.  Man’s consciousness mixed and merged with other kinds of consciousness with the great curiosity of love.  A child did not simply look at an animal, but let its consciousness merge with the animal’s, and so to some extent the animal looked out through the child’s eyes.

In ways most difficult to explain, man “absorbed” an animal’s spirit before he killed it, so that the spirit of the animal merged with his own.  In using the animal’s flesh, then, the hunter believed that he was giving the animal a new focus of existence.  He could draw on the animal’s strength, and the animal could join in human consciousness.  Nature and spirit therefore were one.

Your own kind of focus emerged from such a background, so that within yourselves you contain myriad consciousnesses of which you are unaware.  Through your own particular focus, the consciousness of the natural world merged to form a synthesis in which, for example, symphonies can emerge.  You act not only for yourselves, but also for other kinds of consciousness that you have purposefully forgotten.  In following your own purposes, which are yours, you also serve the purposes of others you have forgotten.

In thinking your own private thoughts, you also add to a larger psychic and mental reality of which you are part.  Your languages program your perceptions, and limit your communications in certain terms as much as they facilitate it.

A musician writing a symphony, however, does not use all of the notes that are available to him.  He chooses and discriminates.  His discrimination is based upon his knowledge of the information available, however.  In the same way, your languages are based upon an inner knowledge of larger available communications.  The “secrets” of languages are not to be found, then, in the available sounds, accents, root words or syllables, but in the rhythms between the words; the pauses and hesitations; the flow with which the words are put together, and the unsaid inferences that connect verbal and visual data.

As a species “you” sought certain kinds of experience.  Individually, and as tribes or nations, you follow certain “progressions” – and yet in so doing you act also on the part of the whole of nature.  You take into your bodies in transmuted form the consciousness of all the things you consume.

Those consciousnesses then merge to perceive the world in a fashion you call your own.  Through your eyes the beasts, vegetables, birds, and dust perceive the dawn and sunlight as you do – as you, and yet on the other hand your experience is your own.

To some extent it is true to say that languages emerged as you began to lose direct communications with your own experience, and with that of others.  Language is therefore a substitute for direct communication.  The symbols of the words stand for your own or someone else’s experience, while protecting you or them from it at the same time.

Visual data as you perceive them amount to visual language; the images perceived are like visual words.  An object is presented to your visual perception so that you can safely perceive it from the outside.  Objects as you see them are also symbols.