I have inside of my mind, many idea’s and thoughts and images
and I am trying to make sense of all of it… trying to put together
the puzzle as it were… without any sense of what the overall image
should look like or what it might look like…….
I was born into the world… just as you were………
we are born naked and dependent…
the “world” that is made up of family, friends, media,
church, state… the “world” spends the next 20 years indoctrinating us with
the myths, biases, prejudices, habits, ism’s, superstitions of that “world”…
But what exactly are those indoctrinations? one way to think of those
indoctrinations is that they are the prism, the values through which we view
the “world”… In other words, the indoctrinations are the perceptions through
which we view the “world”. We are taught, indoctrinated with the viewpoint
that all men are evil, conservative viewpoint, and then we perceive the world
through that lens of all men are evil. The indoctrinations are a method of
perceiving, seeing, the world……. we use those indoctrinations as a means
of seeing… the Greeks viewed wisdom as a means of seeing… wisdom was
connected with sight, the act of seeing……. so we can think about
those indoctrinations as a means of how we see the “world”.
When we begin the process of knowing thyself, it comes about because
we begin to see ourselves differently then we earlier saw ourselves…
in other words, the image we have of ourselves that is dominated by
the indoctrinations of our childhood, change because of life’s experiences…
as we grow older and “wiser” we see ourselves in different terms then
the indoctrinations of our childhood…
again focus on this act of sight, seeing, vision, perception……
we experience… and in that experience we see things differently…
for example, the first time we fall in love… that experience
changes how we see the word love… for we have heard of love all our lives
but once we fall in love, we see what love really is and that changes
our perception of the world…this new found understanding comes from
a new perception of “reality”, a new vision of experiences, we experience
love for the first time and it changes us, for many of us, it radically changes us…
and that change is the act of changing perceptions…
so it is important to think about change as changing perceptions,
we view things differently and in that difference we become something
else………
In high school or shortly thereafter, I tried reading “Zen and the art of
motorcycle maintenance” The book had just been published and I was
curious… I didn’t get through the book because my perceptions wasn’t
ready, I wasn’t ready to read the book… it was gobblygook for me…
at some point in the 1980’s, I tried again, I got through it this time
and it seem to me to be profound and deep and I didn’t understand
its greatness…my perception had change about the book,
the book itself hadn’t change, I had change since the last time
I read it…
at some point in the 1990’s, I read it again…and I was disappointed
because it seem shallow and incomplete, unnecessary……
the book still hadn’t change, but I had dramatically changed
with each passing decade… by the 90’s, I had read a lot
of philosophy and I have had a lot of life experiences…
the book hadn’t change but I had change…
now if I were to read it again, my understanding
of the book would once again be dramatically different.
my perception, my seeing the book would be very different.
In the 40 years since I have first read the book, I have become, I am
a completely different person…… I am now old… where I am
in my place in life changes how I read and/or understand idea’s,
books, movies, people……. I see things differently because I
am different…….
it all becomes a question of our perception of events, experiences,
people……… it actually has nothing to do with the actual event,
experience or the person in question, it has everything to do with
how we see, how we perceive these things……
I see IQ45 as a village idiot and another person might see Jesus
walking on water and we might see the exact same event or
experience… and yet we perceive events and experiences far
differently…
the question of life is not in the event or experiences we have
but in how we see them or how we perceive them…
it is in our perceptions of things that matter, not in the things
themselves.
In this regard, Kant was right… it is in our perceptions that
make all the difference in the world, not in the experiences
themselves………
So how do you perceive the world?
and that answers everything about who you are and
what it means to be human to you………
Kropotkin