The Threads of the Ego Experience Pulled Free

"Due to its nature as a construction, rather than as a metaphysical entity, the sense of being an ego can be radically deconstructed. Accomplishing this deconstruction requires noticing and tracking the sensory phenomena that together make up the construction of the self, and then patiently untangling them from the whole. One by one, as the threads of the ego experience are pulled free, perception shifts to encompass all of creation."

~ Michael Taft, highlighting key themes from his talk "Deconstructing The Perception Of The Ego/self" at the Science and Nonduality Conference, October 26, 2013

See also: The Atomic Components of Narrative Elements

A Moment of Direct Perception

Excerpt from "Holding Life Consciously," a conversation with Arthur Zajonc, On Being, June 24, 2010: 

Prof. Zajonc: People have a wrong kind of idea of how discoveries happen in science. They think you kind of calculate your way towards the discovery. It never works that way. You may embed yourself in the math. You may study it thoroughly or you may work within the lab context and have data sets that you're pouring over, but the insight comes in a flash. It's walking across a bridge in Dublin and inscribing the formula for the quaternions, how they're going to work, in pure mathematics. Or it's Newton seeing an apple fall. And when he sees the apple fall, he says, "Well, that's exactly the same as the moon overhead." They look totally different, but he sees them as congruent with one another.

Then you get busy with the math and you say could that be? You get busy with the experiment that's going to confirm or disconfirm what it is you've just seen, but you've seen it intuitively. You've seen it as what Goethe calls an aperçu, a moment of perception, direct perception. And for Goethe, that moment of discovery was the key. Everything else that follows on is of less interest to him. His interests are less with the technical sides of science than with its application to human life, to the arts of course -- painting among other arts. And so he's interested in what he calls the sensory-moral, or sinnlich-sittliche, sensory-moral aspects of color.

Ms. Tippett: Right. Right. I mean, here's a sentence that you wrote: "Goethe forcefully holds our attention to the epiphanous moments in science, the poetry that is the heart of science." Explain that to me, "the poetry that is the heart of science."

Prof. Zajonc: Knowledge is not an object that you acquire. It's not a mechanism that somehow you provide to the human mind. It's actually an epiphanal moment. And I think this is true of the arts, poetry, painting, music, and I would say also to spiritual understanding.

Perception is Relative

The Difference Between Wisdom and Understanding

Excerpt from The Forms of Things Unknown: An Essay on the Impact of the Technological Revolution on the Creative Arts by Herbert Read:

Le Penseur (The Thinker), Auguste RodinA distinction which runs through the whole development of human thought has become blurred during the past two hundred years. Implicit in all ancient philosophy, acknowledged by medieval scholastics and the natural philosophers of the Renaissance, and even by Locke and Newton, is a difference of kind, if not of value, between wisdom and understanding.

By wisdom was meant an intuitive apprehension of truth, and the attitude involved was receptive or contemplative. Intellectus was the name given to this faculty in the Middle Ages.

Understanding, on the other hand, was always a practical or constructive activity, and ratio was its name — the power by means of which we perceive, know, remember and judge sensible phenomena. Philosophy was conceived as an endeavour to perfect this constructive power of the mind as an aid to wisdom.

To clarify perception, excluding all distortions due to emotion and prejudice; to analyse statements so that our knowledge is consistent; to establish facts, so that our memory is consolidated; to bring the inquiring will into harmony with the intuitive intellect, so that our judgment is true and constant — such have been the aims of all who called themselves philosophers.

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See also: "The Forms of Things Unknown: A 1963 Essay on the Role of the Creative Arts in Society," Brain Pickings, August 29, 2012

Explore, Fixate, Repeat, All Day, Every Day

Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1503-05) La Gioconda (Detail) Oil on poplar wood. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Excerpt from "Vision Is All About Change," by Susana Martinez-Conde, The New York Times: Gray Matter, May 17, 2013:

Every known visual system depends on movement: we see things either because they move or because our eyes do.

Some of the earliest clues to this came more than two centuries ago. Erasmus Darwin, a grandfather of Charles Darwin, observed in 1794 that staring at a small piece of scarlet silk on white paper for a long time — thereby minimizing (though not stopping) his eye movements — made it grow fainter in color, until it seemed to vanish...

What may be most surprising is that large eye motions and miniature eye jolts help us see the world in similar ways — largely at the same time.

Scientists had long believed that we used two types of oculomotor behavior to sample the visual world, alternating between big saccades to scan our surroundings and tiny ones to fix our gaze on a location of interest. Explore, fixate, repeat, all day, every day.

It seemed to make intuitive sense that we would have one brain system for exploring the environment and another for focusing on specific objects. But it turns out that exploration and gaze-fixation are not all that different processes in the brain.

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See also: Choosing What We Perceive