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This nOde last updated September 19th, 2004 and is permanently morphing...
(5 Chicchan (Serpent) / 8 Ch'en (Black) - 5/260 - 12.19.11.11.5)
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reality" 
- sample from 604
track _Perception Of Reality_ MP3
by Psy
chaos
perception
perception (per-sèp´shen)
noun
1.The process,
act, or faculty of perceiving.
2.The effect or product
of perceiving.
3.Psychology. a. Recognition
and interpretation of sensory stimuli based chiefly on memory.
b. The neurological processes by which such recognition and interpretation
are effected.
4.a. Insight, intuition,
or knowledge gained by perceiving. b. The capacity for such insight.
[Middle English percepcioun,
from Old French percepcion, from Latin perceptio, perception-, from perceptus,
past participle of percipere, to perceive. See perceive.]
- percep´tional adjective
Perception (psychology)
Perception (psychology), process by which sensory stimulation is organized into usable experience. Despite the fundamental role that perception plays in the lives of human beings and all but the simplest animals, its processes remain largely obscure, for two main reasons: researchers have had only limited success in breaking down perception into analyzable units; and scientifically verifiable findings are difficult to obtain or repeat, since the study of perception depends mostly on subjective and introspective reports.
Percepts
Perceptual psychologists
recognize that most raw, unorganized sensory stimuli are almost instantaneously
and subconsciously "corrected" into percepts, or usable experience. Perception
is not a simple matter of organizing direct sensory stimuli into percepts,
however. Percepts themselves, gained from past experience, also become
organized, greatly advancing the accuracy and speed of a person's perception.
The study and theory of percepts reach beyond academic psychology to possible
practical applications in learning, education, and clinical psychology.
Classical Theory
According to classical perception
theory, most percepts result from a person's ability to synthesize past
experience and current sensory cues. As a newborn explores its world, it
soon learns to organize what it sees into a three-dimensional
pattern. Using visual, tactile, and auditory cues, the infant quickly learns
a host of specific associations that correspond to the properties of objects
in the physical world. Proponents of the classical theory of perception
believed that most percepts are derived by what they called "unconscious
inference from nonnoticed sensations."
Gestalt Theory
According to Gestalt Psychology,
perception is to be understood by taking into account total configurations
of mental processes. Experiments by proponents of the Gestalt theory showed
that perception of form- a mental structure that takes its attributes from
a corresponding structure of brain processes- does not depend on perception
of individual elements making up the form. Thus, "squareness" can be perceived
in a figure made up of four red lines as well as in one of four black dots.
More recently, researchers have found that specific retinal and nerve cells
of amphibians and mammals respond to particular configurations, to particular
movements, and to simultaneous stimulation of similarly located cells in
the retinas of both eyes.
perception (noun)
vision: perception, recognition
intellect: cognition, perception,
apperception, percipience, insight
idea: conception, perception,
apprehension, intellect
discrimination: insight,
perception, acumen, flair, intelligence
knowledge: intellection,
apprehension, comprehension, perception, understanding, grasp, mastery,
intellect
sagacity: perception, perspicacity,
clear thought, clear thinking, clear-headedness
Spirit
Spirit borrows from matter
the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form
of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.
Henri Bergson (1859-1941),
French philosopher. Last sentence in Matter and Memory, "Summary and Conclusion,"
sct. 9 (1896; tr. 1988).
Society
We can imagine
a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does
not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social
needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties,
leading to various forms of pathology.
Noam Chomsky (b. 1928),
U.S. linguist, political analyst. Language
and Responsibility, "A Philosophy of Language" (1979).
Language: English
The problems of society will
also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is
the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through
it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then
must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.
Njabulo Ndebele (b. 1948),
Lesotho educator, writer. "The English Language and Social Change," keynote
paper, 1986, delivered to the Jubilee Conference of the English Academy
of Southern Africa, Johannesburg. Quoted in: Richard W. Bailey, "English
at its Twilight," in The State of the Language (ed. by Christopher Ricks
and Leonard Michaels, 1990).
One of the reasons for the
failure of feminism to dislodge deeply held perceptions of male and female
behaviour was its insistence that women were victims, and men powerful
patriarchs, which made a travesty of ordinary people's experience of the
mutual interdependence of men and women.
Rosalind Coward (b. 1953),
British author. Our Treacherous Hearts, ch. 9 (1992).
Perception
To perceive means to immobilize
. . . we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception
itself.
Henri Bergson (1859-1941),
French philosopher. Matter and Memory,
ch. 4, sct. 4 (1896; tr. 1911).
Knowledge
Can the knowledge deriving
from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?
No doubt the number of people crass enough to reply exclusively on the
former and scorn the latter are sufficient in themselves to explain the
disfavor into which everything deriving from the senses has gradually fallen.
But when the most scholarly of men have taught me that light
is a vibration, or offered me any other fruits of their labors of reasoning,
they will not have rendered me an account of what is important to me about
light, of what my eyes have begun to teach me about it, of what makes me
different from a blind man- things which are the stuff of miracles, not
subject matter for reasoning.
Louis Aragon (1897-1982),
French poet. Paris Peasant, "Preface to a Modern Mythology" (first published
1926; repr. 1971).
U.S. Republican Party
No one has ever seen a Republican
mass meeting that was devoid of the perception of the ludicrous.
Mark Twain (1835-1910),
U.S. author. Closing words of "Turncoats," speech, 1884 (published in Mark
Twain's Speeches, ed. by Albert Bigelow Paine, 1923).
Science
True science investigates
and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people
of a given time
and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the
region of perception to the region of emotion.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910),
Russian novelist, philosopher. What Is Art? ch. 10 (1898; repr. in Tolstoy
on Art, ed. by Aylmer Maude, 1924).
Humor
The comic is the perception
of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
Umberto Eco (b. 1932), Italian
semiologist, novelist. "De consolatione Philosophiae" (1980; repr. in _Travels
in Hyperreality_,
tr. by William Weaver, 1986).
Criticism and the Arts
Good critical writing is
measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical
writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the
critic.
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959),
U.S. author. Letter, 7 May 1948, to Harper's Magazine editor Frederick
Lewis Allen (published in Raymond Chandler Speaking, 1962).
Alcohol: Drunkenness
For art to exist, for any
sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological
precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher. Twilight of the Idols, "Expeditions
of an Untimely Man," aph. 8 (1889).
 |
The Masses
The adjustment of reality
to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope,
as much for thinking as for perception.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940),
German critic, philosopher. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
sct. 3 (1936; repr. in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, 1968).
Disasters
The popularity of disaster
movies . . . expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by
irresistible and unforeseen forces
which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled
symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing.
We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus,
innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance
will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.
David Mamet (b. 1947), U.S.
playwright. Writing in Restaurants, "Decadence" (1986).
Aesthetics
'Tis the perception of the
beautiful,
A fine extension of the
faculties,
Platonic, universal, wonderful,
Drawn from the stars, and filtered
through the skies,
Without which life would
be extremely dull.
Lord Byron (1788-1824),
English poet. Don Juan, cto. 2, st. 212.
Fiction
If I were a writer, how I
would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the
margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.
Lovely.
Don DeLillo (b. 1926), U.S.
author. Owen Brademas, in The Names, ch. 4 (1982).
Perception
However, no two people see
the external world in exactly the same way. To every separate person a
thing is what he thinks it is- in other words, not a thing, but a think.
Penelope Fitzgerald (b.
1916), British author. Shippey, in The Gate of Angels, ch. 6 (1990).
Religion
I cannot see how a man of
any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious- except he
purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.
Mark Twain (1835-1910),
U.S. author. Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, vol. 3, (ed. by Frederick
Anderson, 1979), Notebook 27 (Aug. 1887-July 1888).
Art
A primary function of art
and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture
in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy
of perception and judgment.
Lionel Trilling (1905-75),
U.S. critic. Beyond Culture, Preface (1965).
Investment
Money itself isn't lost or
made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another. This painting
here. I bought it 10 years ago for 60 thousand dollars. I could sell it
today for 600. The illusion has become real
and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it.
Oliver Stone (b. 1946),
U.S. filmmaker. Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas), in the film _Wall
Street_ (written by Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser, directed by Stone,
1987). The character of Gekko was loosely based on financier Ivan Boesky.
Reform
In England we have come to
rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening
between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt
to do it.
H.
G. Wells (1866-1946), British author. The Work, Wealth and Happiness
of Mankind, ch. 2 (1931).
Comedy and Comedians
The perception of the comic
is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection
from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects
sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible.
If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82),
U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. Letters and Social Aims, "The Comic"
(1876).
Perception
Nothing exists until or unless
it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And
his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing
it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.
William
Burroughs (b. 1914), U.S. author. Painting and Guns, "The Creative Observer"
(1992).
As Alfred
Korzybski and de Bono (among others) have demonstrated, Opinions result
from perceptions, and perceptions reinforce Opinions, which then further control
perceptions, in a repeating loop
that logic can never penetrate. (Only a shocking new perception, too strong
to get edited out by Opinion, can break this self-hypnotic loop.)
- Robert
Anton Wilson - "Flying Saucers, Phony Photos and Fuzzy
Logic" in _Cosmic
Trigger III_
 |
reality then becomes a "shared hallucination", meaning
that there is a cemented, agreed upon perception of something. if there
was a race of people living on an island who thought that the color green
was actually the color pink, are they wrong? to the majority of the
people on this planet, maybe, but to them the notion of "being wrong" about
something like that is absurd.
they are simply not sharing in the agreed upon perception, or hallucination.
wars are fought over this kind of difference. in order for us to stop
fighting, and even arguing (a waste of valuable time),
we must simply accept that "green" is "pink" to some people. english
prime. - @Om* 2/3/2000
hardcore
track _Life In Pink_ MP3 (160k)
by Girls Against Boys off of _House Of GVSB_ on Touch & Go
(1996)to extend upon this concept, there is a fear that "anything goes", and for those currently in power, they have the right to perpetuate the status quo and current hierarchy. far from it. once you establish that there is no objective "truth", then we begin to make progress. if everyone accepts the notion that everyone is sharing a particular and very specific hallucination ("history", "science", "facts", etc.), then there is no need to argue over what is "truth". this doesn't mean that ethics are thrown out the window. we all know how much crap we learned in history class. how Columbus was such a great guy. how until very recently in the last couple of decades, racism was a very acceptable mass hallucination. when we pledge allegiance to the flag, and are punished in school when we refuse, it is no different than when certain children living elsewhere are taught that america is the great satan. it is all shared perception and hallucinations, and memetic warfare. the prize is your mind. are we going to accept the forced hallucinations and a specific version of history, when we all know that different power structures teach different versions? the source of the pipeline comes from things you take for granted: television, institutionalized learning, science, churches, etc. look at your source. is this the template you want to use? this idea crystallized in my mind when i was actually involved in a scene that was reported on the local news. how wrong the reporters and media "get" a certain situation. they got it so wrong, that it MUST be like that with EVERY story. and this is the molding process of "truth" and the "news". think about how they all get it wrong. assume the same is being done for everything else, and you will see that there is no objective truth. how do we then deal with this? we don't. we let them have it. those that choose the medium are enslaved to it. be confident and know that even as a minority, your version of perceiving the world is just as valid as anyone else's. don't let the lowest common denominator peer pressure you into a version of the truth. it's difficult to do, especially because we are social beings, but it begins with confidence. not arrogance, but confidence, in knowing that your version is right - no more or no less - than anyone else's. when people perceive your confidence, then it affects change. you begin to influence. not top down influence using mass media (push technology), but peer-to-peer pull technologies - your friends, the people you work and play with. it reverberates through confidence. i think it is time to focus in on what we are going to be confident about - how about peace, for starters? - @Om* 7/22/02
When we recognize something, we
energize the portions of our luminous sphere which match the incoming energy
meeting our assemblage point. We resurrect memories
as isomorphisms
to incoming energy, and we call that perception. Our perception assembles clusters
of isomorphisms, which are then clustered together into larger isomorphisms,
which we call situations. Situations are then clustered into reality.
Vortices in our energy constantly check to make sure these isomorphisms match.
When they do, we feel our perceptions to be true. When they don't match, a wavering,
vacillating uncertainty
enters these vortices, identifying a better match, or in cases of denial, a
tightening of the badly matching vortex.
- _Mappinig Awareness_ by
Lawrence Au
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"The gospel of classical physics
was the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics - according to which the universe
is running down like a clock because all its energy is being steadily dissipated
into the random motion of molecules in a gas - so that the end would be as the
beginning was according to 'Genesis': "without form and void". Only in recent
years did biologists realize that this applies only in the theoretical case
of a "closed system", completely isolated from its environment; whereas all
living organisms are "open systems" which feed on energies and materials found
in their environment. Instead of 'running down' like a clockwork which dissipates
energy through friction, a living organism is all the time 'building up' more
complex chemicals from chemicals it feeds on, more complex forms of energy from
the energy it absorbs, and more complex patterns of "information"
- perceptions, memories,
ideas - from the input of its receptors. It is active instead of being just
reactive; it adapts the environment to its needs, instead of passiviely adapting
to it; it learns from experience and constructs systems
of knowledge out of chaos
of sensations impinging on it; it sucks information from the environment as
it feeds on its substance and synthesises its energies."
-Arthur
Koestler, _The Roots of Coincidence_
If we accept that a successful piece
of art can support various levels of intellectual investment from the viewer,
a given piece will not have a single unchangeable "meaning" for that individual.
Rather, the meaning for that person will be made up of a network
of shifting interactions between many perceptions of the work. It is interesting
to think about the mental space that these interactions and perceptions take
place in.
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"In our ordinary perceptions we
view space as an amorphous entity which is related to us in units of measurement.
For us space is essentially quantitative; we understand it in terms of dimension,
volume and distance. For the adept who uses yantras
in yogic meditation, on the other hand, space enclosed within the bounded figure
is purely qualitative; space is absolute void and unity is a 'sacrament' by
means of which he communicates with a force
that stands for life itself.
 |
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If you read _Giordano Bruno and
the Hermetic
Tradition_ you know that Bruno
was burned at the stake and the reason that he was burned at the stake is because
he looked up at the sky and did not see the stellar shells and the angelic hierarchies.
Bruno had a mystical experience and when it was over he said, "the universe
is infinite.
The stars go on forever." That single statement was the intellectual dynamite
that destroyed the whole Medieval, Hellenistic, the entire previous cosmological
vision was left behind with that single statement. It was such a powerful statement
that he had to go to the stake for that. And we have never recovered from that
perception. It was a fundamental perception and it occurred because he looked
without preconception into the night sky and did not see wheels and demons and
angels and shells of cosmic fate and necessity and he just said, that's bullshit,
what is there is infinite space, infinite time,
the stars are hung like lamps onto the utmost regions of infinity. This, then,
inaugurates the beginning of modernity and it's a perception that arose on the foundation
of all this earlier thinking.
 |
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- Terence
McKenna lecture on Alchemy
 |
This is a process
of education. What the psychedelic experience is it's the process
of education so compressed that it has become a cascade of actual visual
images which, rather than a kind of slow unfoldment of linked perception,
but really, attention
to attention and appreciation of the immediate.
- Terence McKenna - _Nature Is The
Center Of The Mandala
Part 2_ MP3(32k)(44:12)
Operationally what these psychedelics
do is they dissolve
cultural conditioning. Cultural conditioning is like software, but
beneath the software is the hardware of brain and organism and by dissolving
the cultural conditioning to speak English, German, Swahili or whatever,
then one returns to this ur-sprach, this primal language
of the animal body and can explore the real dimension
of feeling that culture has a tendency to cut us off from. Culture
replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine
an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room
comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light
of many colors, movement, sound, a tranformative hierophany of integrated
perception and the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the
room and she says to the child, 'that's a bird, baby, that's a bird,' instantly
the complex wave
of the angel peacock irridescent transformative mystery is collapsed, into
the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is
a bird, and by the time we're five or six years old all the mystery of
reality has been carefully tiled over with words. This is a bird, this
is a house, this is the sky, and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic
shell of disempowered perception, and what the psychedelics do is they
burst apart this cultural envelope of confinement and return us really
to the legacy and birthright of the organism.
_Ordinary Language, Visible Language
and Virtual
Reality_ by Terence McKenna
Perhaps some mystics have achieved
higher levels of consciousness than Beethoven
(perhaps!), but if so, we cannot know of it. Aleister
Crowley once astonished me by writing that the artist is greater than the
mystic, an odd remark from a man who was only a mediocre artist himself (althought
a great mystic.) Listening to Ludwig, I have come to understand what Crowley
meant. The mystic, unless he or she is also an artist, cannot communicate
the higher states of awareness achieved by the fully turned-on brain; but the
great artist can. Listening to Beethoven, one shares, somewhat, in his
expanded perceptions;
and the more one listens, the more one shares.
- Justin Case - _Beethoven As Information_
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The term "synchronicity"
is otherwise viewed as the term "coincidence" by those who do not find
themselves perceptually within its flow.
With the basic frequency
of the environment of the universe increasing, the concept of synchronicity
is very important, because the ongoing perception of it is a "marker" of
the relationship between your consciousness and the subjective reality
you perceive. As most of you have no doubt noticed, the rate and perception
of synchronicity is increasing, as is the perception that the linear time
flow is speeding up. Perhaps the best overall composite commentary on synchronicity
that we have so-far seen is as follows:
Synchronicity is the conscious perception
in a physiological time track of the simultaneous manifestation of the multi-dimensional
universe. It is the conscious recognition that all events, objects, relationships,
points of view, perceptions and interactions are ONE thing viewed from different
perspectives. As the basic resonant
vibration of the system increases, synchronicity becomes more easily perceptible
within experiential reality. Synchronicity is also a reflection of what you
believe you reality to be. Synchronicity, relative to reality, IS what reality
IS, and it is the WAY it is. Now, many people have discussed the subject of
synchronicity, all the way from Carl
Jung to Bashar. However, it is from Bashar, representing the Essassani,
that we get further clarification: " Recognize that you are all functioning
completely within synchronicity, but many of you choose to function within negative
synchronicity, choosing a perception of a negative reality,
rather than positive synchronicity and a positive perception of reality. Should
you choose a negative reality, than those situtations will be negative reflections.
Clearly, variations in temporal perception are a factor separating one individual consciousness from another within a species and, to an even greater degree, separating the conscious awareness of different species. It may be said, indeed, that each distinct variation in the pattern of temporal recognition constitutes an entirely different universe of perception. For example, birds have a capacity for temporal recognition eight to ten times more rapid than we do. For them, pictures flashing at twenty-four frames per second, which appear to us as a continuous, moving picture, remain still photos until the velocity of 240 frames per second is reached. Likewise, sounds which are to us a continuous whistle are to birds separate and distinct peeps. In other words, birds are able to record ten times as many granulated perceptions as we can in any given temporal interval, which accounts for the acute rapidity of their reflex responses. It is even possible to say this perceptual rapidity was not developed in birds to enhance flight ability, but rather that birds fly only because it is a movement which suitably embodies and expresses the perceptual rapidity.
The sense of time, then, is related to the rate of change in phenomenal experience."
- Robert Lawler - _Ancient Temple Architecture_ pp. 74, 75
“We will, in this coming century,
go to Mars and explore other parts of our solar system,” Edgar
Mitchell said. “But it’s rather crude to be standing on Mars, looking back
at Earth and saying, ‘I come from the United States.’ That tiny little point
of light
out there is Earth, and we come from Earth. “We don’t have that mentality yet.
When we’re ready to have that mentality as a people, then it’s probably an adequate time
to start exploring deeper into our universe and start to colonize, which we
will if we survive that long.” According to Mitchell, in order to survive that
long, individuals must choose to engage in activities that are mutually enhancing.
We must find our worth within the greater whole rather than repressing others
for one’s own sake. “We have to ask, 'How many VCRs and boxes of new, improved
detergent do we need in a year or in a lifetime?' This is where value systems
and perception of our place in the universe comes in. “The best any of us can
do is say, ‘This is what I have discovered.’ Live it; practice it every day.
If it’s successful, it will spread, and that seems to be what is happening.
Whether it will happen fast enough, who knows? We’ll find out when we get there.”
Clearly, the act of apprehending relevance or irrelevance cannot be reduced to a technique or a method, determined by some set of rules. Rather, this is an 'art', both in the sense of requiring creative perception and in the sense that this perception has to develop further in a kind of skill (as in the work of the artisan).
In 1619, Johannes
Kepler (1571-1630) wrote _Harmonice Mundi_, using just intonation and the
consonant harmonic
intervals (1:2, 2:3, 3:4, 4:5, 5:6, 3:5, 5:8) supporting polyphonic music. Kepler
realized that his rough models of 3-dimensional
regular polytopes did not accurately describe his astronomical laws of planetary
motion (based on analysis of data of Tycho
Brahe) so he used harmonic musical relationships to refine the polytope models.
To Kepler, the polyphonic harmonic relationships had a purpose: to form a common
basis for the perception of the universe by all life, including life beyond
the earth.
The animating purpose of Dada
and Surrealism
was to smash all accepted values and expectations; to jolt
perception awake from robotic sleep and into seeing the world in a new, fresh
way that is nonlinear and multidimensional.
Picasso's _Man with a Violin_ depicts an ordinary scene, but from all sides
and angles at once. In Marcel
Duchamp's _Nude Descending A Staircase, No.2_, we see what the title descibes,
but from a perspective of nonlinear time.
The Surrealists investigated dreams
and the unconscious, automatic art and writing, the art of "primitive" peoples
and the art of children and schizophrenics.
They were on a quest for magickal
perception, a shaman's
view of the world.
 |
We've learned to distrust the verb
TO BE, the world is - let's say rather: note the striking resemblance between
the concept satori
and the concept REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE - in both cases: a perception of
the "ordinary" with extraordinary consequences for consciousness & action.
We can't use the phrase "is like" because both concepts (like all cross concepts,
all words for that matter) come crusted with accretions - each burdened with
all its psycho-cultural baggage, like guess who arrive suspiciously overly well-supplied
for the weekend.
[...]
The sorcerer is a Simple
Realist: the world is real--
but then so must consciousness be real since its effects are so tangible.
The dullard finds even wine tasteless but the sorcerer can be intoxicated
by the mere sight of water.
Quality of perception
defines the world of intoxication -- but to sustain it & expand it
to include others demands activity of another kind -- sorcery.
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"The second
attention is the power of life," he declared. "It exists within every atom
of the universe; it is the power behind perception and all things which you
perceive."..."There are many unseen miracles in life. The very existence of
the universe is a miracle. The fact that we live and are aware is a miracle.
The fact that we die and are reborn is a miracle."
- from _Surfing the Himalayas_ by Frederick Lenz
"Moreover, with his love for the
gadget as a collection of wheels that rotate and make noise, he has emphasized
the extended physical transportation of man, rather than the transportation
of language
and ideas. He does not seem to realize that where man's word goes, and where
his power of perception goes, to that point his control and in a sense his physical
existence is extended. To see and give commands to the whole world is almost
the same as being everywhere."
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In the book _Stockhausen: towards
A Cosmic Music_, the German avant-garde composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen describes the human body as an indredibly complicated vibrating
instrument of perception. The composer, who travels the vast spaceways
that link electronic music and mysticism, argues that the "esoteric" is simply
that which cannot yet be explained by science.
- Erik Davis - _Techgnosis:
Myth, Magic
& Mysticism In The Age Of Information_
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We have to understand. Whitehead
said, "Understanding is the apperception of pattern as such;" to fear death
is to misunderstand life. Cognitive activity is the defining act of humanness. Language,
thought, analysis, art, dance,
poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm
of the eschaton.
We humans may be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. The imagination
is everything. This was Blake's
perception. This is where we came from. This is where we are going. And it is
only to be approached through cognitive activity.
- Terence McKenna - _New Maps Of Hyperspace_
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The Neurophone
is an electronic telepathy machine. Several tests prove that it bypasses the eighth
cranial nerve, the hearing nerve, and transmits sound directly to the brain.
This means that the Neurophone stimulates perception through a seventh or alternative
sense.
The skin is our largest and most
complex organ. In addition to being the first line of defense
against infection, the skin is a gigantic liquid crystal brain. The skin is
piezo-electric. When it is vibrated or rubbed, it generates electric
signals and scalar waves.
Every organ of perceptionevolved
from the skin. When we are embryos, our sensory organs evolved from the folds
in the skin. Many primitive organisms and animals can see and hear with their
skin. We now know that the skin transmits ultrasonic impulses to an organ in
the inner ear known as the Saccule. The skin vibrates in resonance
with the ultrasonic ( 40 KHz) Neurophone modulated carrier wave and transmits
the sound from the carrier through multiple channels into the brain. When the
Neurophone was originally developed, neurophysiologists considered that the
brain was hard-wired
and that the various cranial nerves were hard-wired to every sensory system.
The eighth
cranial nerve is the nerve bundle that runs from the inner ear to the brain.
Theoretically, we should only be able to hear with our ears if our sensor organs
are hardwired.
When Data Became Dada
If information
was no longer the known statistics of dead data but fresh experience --
spontaneous, unknown and alive -- then twentieth century culture began
with its creative assimilation. What the scientist finds out through thinking,
the artist discovers through new ways of perceiving, hearing and feeling.
While Einstein
made scientific history with his theory of relativity and Heisenberg with
his uncertainty
principle, the Surrealist
"dada" revolution (Dali, Cocteau, Satie, etc.), James
Joyce's omnicultural _Finnegans Wake_, and the music of Jazz brought
the living experience to the people. Both scientists and artists recognized
this dynamic shift from a "reality"
that was once "predictable, solid and set" to one that seemed wilder, more
plural, malleable and unfathomable. To those minds awakening from the slumber
of nineteenth century "certainty" trance,
our so-called "reality" entered the realm of immeasurable possibilities
with countless interpretations. Any culture failing to assimilate this
transformation in perception,
never enters the twentieth century let alone, the twenty-first.
- Antero Alli - _Occulture:
The Secret Marriage of Art and Magick_
 |
 |
 |
The poet, the artist, the sleuth
- whoever sharpens our perception tends to be anti social; rarely "well-adjusted,"
he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often
exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really
are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain anti-social
power, is manifest in the famous story, "The Emperor's New Clothes"
"Well adjusted" courtiers, having vested interests, saw the Emperor as beautifully
appointed. The anti-social brat, unaccustomed to the old environment,
clearly saw that the emperor "ain't got nothin' on."
- Marshall
McLuhan - _The Medium Is The Massage_
 |
"It occurred to me by intuition,
and music was the driving force
behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception."
- Albert Einstein on his theory of relativity
|
It seems likely that persons trained in E-Prime
will grow more cautious about their perceptions and not "rush
to judgement" in the manner of most of us throughout history. - Robert
Anton Wilson
|
A few of the words from this century
have had a particularly magical
effect, words like "Noosphere"
and "Gaia"
and "Global Village" in actuality announced and pronounced something into being.
Each may have existed before these words had been articulated, but none could
be seen, even though they might be completely self-evident. Language
shapes perception completely.
- Mark
Pesce Visiting Professor of Interactive Media School of Cinema-Television
University of Southern California
 |
The war
on drugs is not a war on substances; it's a war on states of mind. Entheogens
are not illegal because a loving government is concerned that you're going to
hurt yourself by smoking pot or tripping in your bedroom. Entheogens are illegal
because they make you question authority. They break down socially constructed
fables and cleanse the doors of perception. They make you question the wrongs
of society in a fundamental way, making you dangerous. You're like Neo in _The
Matrix_ (vhs/ntsc)
(1999) when all of the illusions of reality
have been irrevocably stripped away.
- Josh Wickerham
 |
track _Alternation, Perception & Resistance - A Comprehension
Exercise_ MP3
by The Hafler Trio off of 12" on L.A.Y.L.A.H. #013 (1985)
It would seem that still after all these years perception
is essentially thought to be a passive process.
This view supports the notion that the redifinition of these terms is long overdue.
This can only be accomplished if we take the leap into integrating all the aspects
of our interaction and utilisation of the world and all that it contains. This
method, which provides the only true
form of communication, involves the crystallisation of information
through all the sensory channels. Viewed from only one angle, or separating
one element from another, we are left with only flat,
two-dimensional ideas. This addition of one more element is an improvement,
but the structure is still outside us. We must move, alarming though this may
be to some, to the realm of conscious form, to the allegory and to the element
of participation in information. We may no longer dissect our world in secluded
laboratories, thinking we have found in a test-tube the laws by which
the world turns. What then must be done to bring this state of affairs into
being? Firstly we must break down and dig up the roots of the misconceptions
already in place.
It may seem that this is happening already but all this
is no more than a stream of happy accidents with no aim, no connection. We must
then dredge what remains of the material to be used in this vision of communication
on higher levels and re-present it to ourselves so that we may realise just
how important our task is.
We must then open up the channels. but all at once: there
must be no weeds to choke our carefully nursed crops, and, we must wait
for the harvest. Let us begin this process immediately
with a demonstration of what effects can be created with the simple use
of electrical
angle realisation. It must be stressed that the more conscious effort the viewer
puts into the exercise, the deeper will be the understanding of the material
employed. Perhaps by now you are already thinking that you are beginning to
speak this language
of direct perception. But perhaps you are not... Imagine
a light pulse,
sent out from a source in the direction of the motion of the source.
If you can transfer the result of thus in your mind to other forms of
information... The senses which make us up are like machines in
a factory. They are quite capable of working in the dark, but work
much better when candles are lit in the room in which they are installed.
But when electric lighting is installed, their efficiency improves further,
and when the shutters of the factory windows are flung open, and daylight
is allowed to enter, the machines work at maximum efficiency. But the
fact remains that only the manager of the factory can pull the switches.
The Hafler Trio
composers
ANDREW McKENZIE
CHRISTOPHER R.WATSON
Dr.EDWARD MOOLENBEEK
Speech by PETER BANDER
It goes like this. We know that
an atom is more than 99% empty space and less than 1% actual matter. (These
numbers are oversimplified, albeit greatly, for the sake of an easier read.)
The atom looks solid to us because we are larger and perceive at a rate so slow
that the atom appears to spin
astronomically fast. It is not just the spin which makes the atom take on the
properties of a solid block of matter. It is more than that. It is our perception
of that spin which makes it seem like matter. Our rate of perception is slower:
the spin of the atom is faster. It is this vast difference in the two relative
scales of time
that enables a mostly empty structure to appear solid to the observer.
If we were able to shrink ourselves and accelerate our speed of perception, the electrons of that atom would appear to slow in their orbits. Eventually, the atom would become more apparent for its empty space than for its solidness. It would thus transform from solidness to emptiness. Accelerate our speed of perception fast enough, and we would find ourselves looking at the components of an atom standing still amid a sea of other atomic components standing still. More than 99% of the matter in the universe, as we formerly knew it, would have disappeared and we would be looking at the less than 1% of matter that remains.
What has just happened is that we eliminated matter when we accelerated the scale of time. We started by measuring the amount of matter in the known universe as it exists within the time scale of, say, a human second. By altering our observation to span the time of merely an astronomical fraction of a second, we find matter has disappeared. This is because matter is a function of time. It takes a certain measurement of time for the components of the atom to complete the amount of orbits necessary to guard their circumference and turn empty space into an impenetrable unit. Accordingly, whether this is solid or empty depends entirely on the amount of time being measured.
A supposition by Tom Burns Bacon October 1999
[...]
Our experience tells us that
the Earth is flat. Science tells us that it is (roughly) spherical. Relying
on our senses, we believe that the Earth does not move. Relying on science,
we know that it rotates on its axis and revolves around the Sun.
Astronomy shows that our everyday perceptions are in some respects mistaken.
It might be objected that these are examples of simple perceptual illusion:
they do not show that our basic beliefs are at fault.
The trouble with this response
is that it fails to grasp just how radically science challenges the common-sense
view of things. The passage of time,
for example, is an integral part of our everyday experience, but some physicists
believe time may not be part of the scheme of things. It is common sense
to believe that we cannot change the world just by observing it. Yet, according
to some interpretations of quantum
mechanics, that is precisely what happens. Whereas science expands
our horizons beyond
the confines of our ordinary understanding, philosophy ends by shutting
us inside it. As someone working in ethical and political philosophy, I
have been particularly struck by the way many philosophers uncritically
accept ordinary ways of thinking about humans.
[...]
The picture of the human animal that is emerging from science will unsettle people who hold to traditional ideas about consciousness, personal autonomy and the like. The idea that the ordinary sensation of selfhood is an error we cannot shake off suggests that some of the most valuable and distinctively human aspects of our lives may rest on illusions. Along with most philosophers, many scientists have subscribed to an ideal in which we can ultimately come to live without illusions. Ironically, scientific research demonstrates that these illusions are essential features of our normal functioning.
- John Gray - New Scientist vol 175 issue 2360 - 14 September 2002, page 46
 |
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PerceptronE-Primeattentionfocussixth
sense - A power of perception seemingly independent of the five senses;
keen intuition.psychedelics
- distoring perception, dissolving
boundariesQuarks_
by Stephen M. PhillipsESPER
- Extra Sensory Perception And Excitation ResearchAldous
HuxleyTAZ:
Jul 29, 00 ; _The Doors of Perception_ (open air); GermanyAnomalog:
_Mantra
(Doors Of Perception Mix)_ MP3
by Material off of _Mantra_ CDs on Axiom #001 (1993)ambient
track _Perception_ MP3 (192k)
by Sketch off of _Reasons To Sway_ CD on Apollo (1995)
by Jedi
Mind Tricks off of _The Psycho-Social, Chemical, Biological, and Electro-Magnetic
Manipulation of Human Consciousness_ |
 |
Perception
Mix)_ by The
Infinity Project off of _Deck Wizards:
Goa Gil - Kosmokrator_
on Psychic Deli (1996)_Out
Of Control_ by Kevin
Kelly |
R.D.
LaingReality_
MP3
by Psy chaos
by Space off of _Quantum
ep_ 12" on Metamorphic
by Headroom off of _Shades Of Shape_ 12"x2 on Planet Rhythm #006 ambient
track _Synergistic
Perceptions_ MP3
by Robert Rich & Brian Lustmord off of _Stalker_ CD on Phantom
by The Fucking Champs off of _V_ on Drag City (2002)
by Mathlete off of _Telstar Parthenon_ on Plastique (2000)_Variations
In Consciousness Part 1_ 12" by Retroflex on Soma
Recordings Limited
by Engine Down off of _To Bury Within The Sound_ on Lovitt
by Kumba Mela Experiment off of _Talisman_ compilation CD on Interchill (2003)
trance
track _Perception_ MP3
by Cass & Slide
by Perceptions off of _Interstellar Fugitives_ compilation 12"x3 on Underground
Resistance #045 (1998)Edge_
MP3 (320k)
by Vidna Obmana & Serge Devadder off of _The Shape Of Solitude_ on Multimood
(1999)Gamelan
3)_ MP3_Shamanistic
Return_
by Shpongle
off of _Tales Of The Inexpressable_ CD on Twisted
(2001)
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