Perspective Can Shift Thinking - A Second Look

 Maybe these Google guys new what they were doing after all when
they decided to pay over a billion dollars to ride the 21st century Gutenberg.

Yet it is with our  words that we describe and communicate through symbols the ideas and thoughts that run through our mind. For the settled mind, or one who is in a Theta or Delta wave stage of consciousness, words through metaphors describe revelations, visions and epiphanies of the mundane or the sublime. This codification as Maslow puts it, can easily get lost in translation. As the perception of the symbols is filtered and distorted though the perspective of our colored glasses of experience. We have our own psychic filter which reduces our ability to see truth by creating an atmospheric fog of concepts and constructs altering our perception of the very words and symbols used to help us see what is invisible.
 

“The very beginning, the intrinsic core, the universal nucleus
of every high religion…has been the private, lonely, personal
illumination, revelation, or ecstasy of some acutely sensitive
prophet or seer. The high religions call themselves revealed
religions and each of them tends to rest its validity, its function
and its right to exist on the codification and the communication
of this original mystic experience or revelation from the lonely
prophet to the masses of human beings in general.

 Abraham H. Maslow
Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences,
Penguin Books, New Yourk, 1964, p. 19

  Many men in history have dealt with this problem of language, describing the unseen. I personally like the following excerpt from H.G. Wells in his book, “An Open Conspiracy”, a member of the Fabian society he writes,

Human thought is still very much confused by the imperfection of the words and other symbols it employs and the consequences of this confused thinking are much more serious and extensive than is commonly realized. We still see the world through a mist of words; it is only the things immediately about us that are plain fact. Through symbols, and especially through words, man has raised himself above the level of the ape and come to a considerable mastery over his universe. But every step in his mental ascent has involved entanglement with these symbols and words he was using; they were at once helpful and very dangerous and misleading. A great part of our affairs, social, political, intellectual, is in a perplexing and dangerous state today because of our loose, uncritical, slovenly use of words.
 
All through the later Middle Ages there were great disputes among the schoolmen about the use of words and symbols. There is a queer disposition in the human mind to think that symbols and words and logical deductions are truer than actual experiences, and these great controversies were due to the struggle of the human intelligence against that disposition. On the one side were the Realists, who were so called because they believed, in effect, that names were more real than facts, and on the other side were the Nominalists, who from the first were pervaded by a suspicion about names and words generally; who thought there might be some sort of catch in verbal processes, and who gradually worked their way towards verification by experiment which is the fundamental thing about experimental science - experimental science which has given our human world all these immense powers and possibilities that tempt and threaten it today. These controversies of the schoolmen were of the utmost importance to mankind. The modern world could not begin to come into existence until the human mind had broken away from the narrow-minded verbalist way of thinking which the Realists followed.

The Open Conspiracy  HG Wells

 
Words then can be seen as the interface between the spirit of man which animates the mind or the observer of the real and the mind of man which is seen as the process of that observation. An observation of that which is observed in the manifest world, or through the senses of the body.

This follows the universal law of “As above so below”. Just as we have three realms of the Terrestrial, Celestial, and what we can call the unmanifested or transcendent, there are three realms ‘Within” us.  These three realms can be talked of in many different terms.

•    Body, Mind and Spirit.

•    The gross (flesh) , the Subtle (mental) and the Causal (transcendent)

•    Subconscious, Self-conscious and Super conscious

•    The Prepersonal, Personal and Transpersonal

•    The Self (Unconscious), the Ego and the Self (Conscious)

There are many more but these will suffice to say that within us all as the great Christian mystic St. Bonaventure has said, there are three ways of attaining knowledge which he calls the three eyes. There is the eye of the flesh which observes the manifested world of matter in the realm of time and space. The eye of reason, whereby we know of  mind, logic and philosophy. And finally the eye of contemplation whereby we attain unto the knowledge of the transcendent and unmanifested reality of the Divine.

 This knowledge St. Bonaventure said was a further process of illumination of the exterior, Lumen exterius which is the light of the eyes in the sensory realm of space and time. The Lumen interius which gives rise to the knowledge of philosophy and reason and finally the Lumen superius which speaks of the illumination of the realm of the transcendent in the spirit of man through contemplation. The realm beyond space and time (body) or reason and logic (mind), but of the divine unmanifested (spirit) realm of pure potentiality.

 
It is with these eyes that we peer into those things which we now see darkly and hope to shed light on. To awake to the realization that by looking inside one-self we acknowledge that life is not a destination but a journey of significance that must be traveled by the inward man. The question is, how far down the rabbit whole are you willing to go? Could the reality we now experience be just a thin veil of a dream, an illusion that must be cast off and looked at from a new perspective?  Have we really contemplated the allegory of the cave? I leave you with these quotes that I hope will stir your interest to keep you reading and searching for the truth of the three realms.
 

“Of these and other things of the same kind, relating to
the true and waking reality of nature, we have only this, and
we are unable to cast off sleep and determine the truth about them."

 
"The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.

Therefore, the sage is guided by what he feels
and not by what he sees.
He lets go of that and chooses this."

   Tao Te Ching,  Lao Tsu.

 
”“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one."

Albert Einstein

Morpheus:

What is real? How do you define real?

If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then
'real'is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

     You've been living in a dreamworld, Neo.
     It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.