Saturday, September 19, 2009

Is it possible our eyes deceive us?

Both philosophically & spiritually, is it possible our eyes deceive us?

Deception happens from the mind not the eyes. Like another said: the eyes are neutral, providing data. What happens is people think they are seeing, but what they are actually doing is engaging in a kind of internal dialog with the raw data they have received through their senses. It's a lot like the dreaming which happens in the night. We engage in thinking and generate feelings according to that from the images, and weave a story around all that we view in the recorded images. We have great capability to recall recorded images from our extensive memory banks, and what we do that deceives us is interact with these memories, like it's real time, but in fact, all is just memory and all is in the past.

This activity of being engaged processing the raw data, and coming to conclusions about it via our cognitive processes, is also what makes us blind to what is going on right now. This is because our attention is withdrawn from the outside world and turned inside, to process all that data in this way. The deception happens here, in weaving the story and making our conclusions, judgments, etc., which we do with our thinking. The more we believe what we think is true and that our conclusions are truth, the more we are deceived. The more emotion we can generate with the undertone of our thoughts the more it feels 'real', thus we fool ourselves that how we see it (the interpreted viewpoint) is in fact reality, when in reality it's only a figment of our imagination.

I wrote a poem which says the same in fewer words: Lost in Inside World

Betsy