This is such a fundamental one, should/could be read or listen to before the "Spiritual Enlightenment, the most shocking truth you'll ever hear"
Thank you so much Leo!
What is perception?
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is infinite” William Blake
What is perception and what is the relationship between perception, the mind, the brain, consciousness and reality? How it is that perception can happen at all?
After a 14 days meditation retreat, Leo discovered that perception is an illusion, perception does not exist.
Perception is not a biological or neurological process, it doesn’t occur, the raw data of perception is undeniable, you hear sounds and see colors. The visual and auditory field, the sensory bubble that you are in, including perception or experience, is like a snow globe painted from the inside. Perception carry in hidden metaphysics as it implies a subject and an object. By definition, perception and experience requires a subject, someone who is having an experience.
So what does an experience look like when we remove the owner of the experience. Is the color red literally floating in the vacuum of empty space without you to experience it? When we take away the subject and we make the subject and the object collapse together, can we still call that an experience? On one hand we can say that the color red is still an experience that is not occurring to anybody. The raw data would still stay the same and it is no longer yours, it is not happening to you, that is a radical recontextualization, it’s not happening to your brain and your mind and not even a part of your life anymore, but the universe is experiencing it.
Imaging an object that exists all by itself in an empty universe and no-one perceiving it. How does the universe register that this object is there?
Your current conception of what reality is that
1)There is an external objective material world, that this world exist independently of you.
2)They are two kinds of objects like rocks, cars, building and planets and then there are sentient creatures like humans and animals.
3)These sentient creatures perceive the external world.
4)Every creature has its perceptual field or bubble.
5)You are one of these sentient creatures
6)Perceptions occur inside the brain or are produced by the brain which is itself a dumb object like a rock. We don’t know how the the brain can produce this perceptual bubble field, but nevertheless it does because here it is.
But
1)There is no objective external material world, the only one thing that exists, is this one universal field of consciousness.
2)You did not come into existence as an object, nor as a sentient creature but you were born as an idea. You are the idea that you are a physical object.
3)This idea of “You”, when it came to existence, took ownership of this field of consciousness and misinterpreted it as its own perceptions.
But there is no such thing as perception. You believe that this bubble is yours, or you, comprising your life. You imagine that birth is a bubble of perception coming in to existence and that death is the extinction of this bubble. The ego constructed out of this field, carved out of an infinite block of stone, a personal story, the sense of “me” like a child receiving a toy believing that it is his toy. Nothing about the toy changes when you call it “my toy” or “it’s mine”. You are creating the idea that “it’s mine”. So here you can see that it’s not a simple word game, that ownership is some sort objective property of the universe rather than a projection of your own mind. The belief you have about the ownership of the bubble of perception, is like that child. You bought into the idea that you are biological sentient creature. Education reinforced that idea. But what you are is more like a negative sculpture, a hole that was carved out from that universal field of consciousness. You believe death is the disillusion of this structure which will break appart a negative space. If we remove the “you” out of the bubble of perception, the raw data won’t change. Still, if we remove the “you”, the picture changes significantly. We might say that perceptions are just floating out in the vacuum of empty space… It seems strange and radical and it is a radical recontextualisation. There never was such a biological creature organism, that was an illusion, that was a negative space.
The objective material external world out there causing your perceptions never existed. Appearance is reality, there is nothing to reality than appearance. But also the internal world is not real and never existed, you have mistaken the external world for the internal world. What you thought was the internal world, colors, sensations, our subjectivity, our individual bubble is actually the external world. Those two interpretations of reality are not opposite, they are actually identical. Notice that the raw data stay the same, the colors, the feelings, the shapes stay the same, the only thing that changes is the interpretation of your experience to the point where you cease to exist by removing the subject. When you reinterpret yourself out of existence, what you see is the substrat that was carving out the negative space, perceptions become being.
Experience = Perceptions vs Being.
Being is Perception minus the Ego, or Experience minus Ego is Being. Perception is Being plus Ego.
Perceptions and experience are technically speaking a misinterpretation of being as the ego take ownership over this being.
A good but limited analogy is when you take a sponge, they are bubbles of empty space. you are one these bubble.
There is no subject, there is only the bubble. Who is perceiving this sponge? That is the mind fuck, no one is, the sponge just is, without anybody looking at it. It doesn’t change what it looks like but it changes what you look it to be, it takes you out of the equation and depersonalize everything. The sponge contains time and space and is infinite, it contains infinite amount of dimensions, and you are just one of these bubbles, the negative space. But physically, you are the whole sponge, we are all one. To realize that you need to stop identifying with one of this bubbles. This is what enlightenment is. The collapsing of all categories and distinctions, like subject and object, inner and outer, internal and external, mind and body, going from the mind/body dualism of Descartes unifying all into one field of consciousness.
Do the following exercice:
Ground yourself in actuality by looking at your hand, put your awareness on the visual field and realize that you are not a biological creature, this field is not some part of a biological creature coming from some brain, this visual field is not yours, it feels as though this field is your life, try to see your hand as an object floating in the vacuum of empty space, try to see that there is no you looking at the hand, the hand just is, try to depersonalize the experience of the you, your emotions, your sensations, this is the external world, the raw fabric of the universe, it’s just existing. Your thoughts and perceptions about the external world, sounds, colors, shapes, smells, emotions, feeling, ideas, understanding, that is not biology, that is the raw physical universe.
How is possible though that it has all those subjective qualities? It’s possible because here it is! What you thought until now was just a groundless assumption. The universe is this. It’s not happening to you, it’s happening to itself, it’s always happening without a you. The only time when you think something is happening to you is when you think it’s happening to you. When you are not thinking about it, it’s not happening to you, it’s just there for itself.
You strip the you or the ego away from this experience, this change the experience to be not an experience anymore but to be absolute being or Truth, the Truth is “this” without the you. Don’t expect the sound or sight to change when realizing it, don’t expect angels or anything else, you will realize that there never was a you here, and that the Truth is pure Being. The difficulty in this exercise is not by seeing something different but the reinterpretation or recontextualization of what you’ve always been experiencing, breaking out of the illusion. This is why they say enlightenment is already here or that you’ve always been enlightened.
This is what waking up is. You misinterpreted it because of your drive to survive and your fear of death, because you want you to survive. Your number one priority in life is to be you, the reason why enlightenment is so rare is because you don’t want to surrender the you. The process to surrender might trigger a lot of egoic reactions, because your mind wants you to survive. Survival is not about fairness, not about truth, it’s about lies and deceptions. Your mind will work overtime to maintain the deception that you have been under your entire life because your entire life hingers upon it. When you realize this, that will be the end of you, you will die. But death is not what you think it means. Death is not the cessation of perceptions, colors etc, it means the elimination of the idea of you, just an idea. There will never be a physical death of you because that would mean that you were a physical object, that was a false assumption.
What you think of physical death is actually conceptual death, (the sense that you are one of the bubble of the sponge).
If you say: “ this is not possible, there is physical death ” … what is that but just another concept. The mind traps itself with concepts, mistaking concepts for physical reality.
This is why people are so touchy when we question there metaphysical, scientific or religious beliefs. If we question it too much it starts to pull apart there entire reality. They don’t fear that their reality will fall apart, although some might experience the fear of insanity. When your reality falls apart you might experience that you going insane. But before you get to that fear, you experience a more primal fear, the fear of death.
As soon as you get anywhere close to realize you are not one of these bubbles of the sponge, your ego goes crazy, hyper reactive and emotional in order to distract you away from the truth and to drive you deeper into falsehood, deeper into the illusion with negative emotions. This is the explanation of the entire game of life. Spoiler alert ;-) When you understand this at the cellular level, your life will never be the same again, it transforms your entire relationship to life, human beings, living and non living things and creatures.
-Is the universe self-aware? If there is nobody to perceive the sponge, how is it possible that it’s being perceived?
You assumed that awareness is something living creatures do when in fact there is no such thing as a living creature, your mistake was to come up with this idea of sentient living creatures, there are no such things and you are no such thing.
-How can there be an awareness without a living creature?
Well,…, how can there be an awareness with living creatures? No matter how you try to explain it, awareness is a very weird thing, that is exactly what science can’t explain. Awareness is not a thing, it can’t be explained, it’s irreducibly mystical and mysterious, because it’s the most fundamental thing there is, you can’t get more fundamental than awareness, it is not property of biological creatures. It’s not that rocks are not aware but one day when matter evolves to microbes and bacterias, fish become mammals and so on, finally the lizard becomes aware. Awareness is not a thing. Technically speaking awareness doesn’t even exist. Awareness is pure nothingness, a pure void or vacuum, that in which the sponge is suspended, nobody has or produces awareness. To think that there is awareness is already a mistake, because we think of it as a weird field, but it’s just nothing.
Imagine there is a alternate universe in which awareness doesn’t exist, no sentient creatures, no internal worlds, no perceptions, only facts, nobody to perceive what is happening. The collection of what is happening, all the facts of that universe is the Truth, it’s just Being. You might think it’s boring, there is no love, no knowledge, living creatures a dead universe. Well this universe is our present universe, this is what is happening right now. Our entire universe consists of only one thing, the raw truth, the raw facts. All this colors and shapes, sounds and smells it just pure raw data happening to absolutely nobody and perceived by nobody with no awareness, that is Truth with a capital “T”.
-But how come I Am perceiving it? How can the truth just be? How can it look as if it’s been “awared”?
Truth just is. It’s just “isness” There is nowhere else to go, it’s the only thing that there is. It is self-apparent, or self-aware. But this is the limit of communication right here. Non-duality cannot be put into words concepts or analogies. You need to go beyond all that. Not with beliefs, ideas, philosophy or concepts. Look at actuality, what is happening around you ,the pure truth.
-How do you explain that the brain affects perceptions? If my brain is damaged, how come for example my sight could be altered?
The brain is itself a perception. That is important to understand. All scientists believe that the brain is something more fundamental than a perception, prior to perceptions. That is not the case, we bring the brain at the same level as all the perceptions that we attribute to the brain such that the brain itself is also one of the perceptions. When you do that, the brain ceases to have that same kind of explanatory causal power that it uses to have. You can no longer use the concept of a brain to metaphysically ground the rest of reality and perception.
The brain is a special perception. It’s a perception that tends to have a global effect on all other perceptions, like when you take a drug or a pill. The pill is just another perception.
So we take a pill, a perception, we put in our mouth, a perception, going through the blood, a perception, chemicals get into our brain, chemicals are perceptions too. This is how the universe works. A field of perceptions interacting with themselves in various ways, sometimes with local effects, sometimes with global effects which is what happens when your brain got damaged. We are using the world perceptions, but what we really are talking about is Being. We have being interacting with being. This one unified field of consciousness is self-interacting, it’s not static, it’s constantly morphing and changing. The bubbles are always popping in and out of existence, that’s what you would think to be your physical birth and death but it contains absolutely everything.
In conclusion, perceptions is being or absolute truth when properly interpreted, but most people on earth misinterpreted this because of the sense of self. They mistaken perception for the self, “my perceptions”, they mistake the self for being a sentient creature, but they are all illusions, like negative scultures in this one unified field.
How is possible to know any of this?
It’s possible for anybody to realize it by shutting down the mind, becoming very focussed on the present moment and doing it every day, hour after hour for months and years until it clicks. You can’t make it click, it will click on its own, but you can do serious technics that lead towards the clicking, like meditation, contemplating, psychedelics. You can listen to this episode prior doing psychedelics and you will see it. Here is the many thousand years old mind/body problem resolved.
If you go through this whole process, it will transform your entire life, the doors of your perceptions will be cleansed and what you will be left with as William Blake said, you will realized that you are the infinite, the entire universe, not a little object in the universe. To get there you must go through all of your fears and neurosis, surrender your arrogance, your judgments, all the demonizations of others, to be radically open minded to break through. The end result is the most amazing joy but the process of cleansing the doors of your perception is some of the greatest hell and struggle that you can possibly imaging. You will never know what you miss unless you do it. What you’ll miss is so great that it is impossible to put into words.
