Did You See That?

Another nice quote from some of my notes on Nisargadatta Maharaj:

"Learn to look without imagination, to listen without distortion: that is all. Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realize that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelled, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear."

Nisargadatta Maharaj

This doesn't mean that nothing really exists "out there," and that everything is a mental construct. No. What it does mean is that as we receive perceptions of that external reality through our six senses — eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin contact, and thoughts in the mind — our brain then MODIFIES EACH AND EVERY ONE of those perceptions.

At the first level, it may be a physical modification. Do your eyes see the same color i see? On the extreme end, some people are color blind. Do your ears hear the same sounds as i do? People have different hearing abilities, some more acute than others. Do you smell reality the same way i do or are you more or less sensitive to odors that others? And the same for all six senses.

After that first gate, then every perception is run through out mind, where the raw input is modified based on our beliefs, desires, current state of mind, ideology, religious beliefs, political leanings, memories of past events, expectations of what we thought we will perceive, and on, and on.

And this doesn't even bring up the Buddhist beliefs of karma, and all the seeds of past events, thoughts, actions, stored in our alayavijnana, our store consciousness.

As teachers everywhere tell us, what we say we perceive, in almost every case, is not "reality as it is," but reality as we want to perceive it, as we have been taught to perceive it, as our history has led us to expect to perceive it. But is is not the Truth.

Teachers are constantly telling us to stop this habit — because that is all it is, a habit. Teachers tell us to simply notice that this is what we are doing and to work to undo the habit. This is learned on your meditation cushion.