The World is as You See It

Photo-Ahmed Yaaniu

How we perceive the world we live in determines our experience of reality. Our experience could be one of harmony or dissonance or a combination of both. And, If we would like to change the way we perceive the world, how do we go about this?

  As I was contemplating this statement about perception, an image of our planet Earth came up. The planet we live on has a multitude of islands. In fact, when I googled how many islands there are in the world, the number 670,000 came up. Why are there this many individual islands? Because they are separated from each other and thereby defined, by a body of water. Now if we take the water away, what we find is all those “separate” islands aren’t separate anymore! It is just one unbroken landmass. In fact, they were never really separate in the first place—the separation is an illusion—it’s only a perception that is based on a condition. That condition is the existence of the oceans.

So this kind of misperception represented in the above is mirrored in the way nearly all of us experience our reality. That is, we perceive differences and separation between ourselves and other people, as well as differences between our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and sense perceptions; when essentially, at our core, there is only one consciousness that unites us all. But more on this later.

Some of the influences that are responsible for this misperception, just to name a few, are our gender, race, age, and our conditioning; and especially, the way we identify ourselves with all of the above. But let’s look at a more fundamental element that causes us to experience this sense of separation, and that is speech.  Just like the oceans that delude us into believing that the islands are separate from one another, similarly, through the medium of speech, we articulate and define, and interpret what we experience, and then convince ourselves that in reality, we are completely separate and different from one another. This perception of difference inevitably results in us riding the rollercoaster of the never-ending ups and downs of life, because we associate with whatever is happening to us, as us.

I think we are all pretty much aware of how powerful speech is. We can feel insulted, humiliated, embarrassed, judged, elevated, inspired, etc, etc, (this list is endless) by words, both internally as thought and externally as speech.

Fundamentally, words are the medium that we use to create our perception, and ultimately, our experience of reality. This conception reminds me of a very powerful statement in the Vedantic text, The Yoga Vashishtha, which states, in Sanskrit: Yatha Drishti Tatha Srishti. Translated as, “The world is as you see it.“ [1] Or, you could say, “as you perceive the world, so you experience it.”

How do we perceive the world? We could say that we perceive the world through our senses—sight-smell-touch-taste-hearing—but is this true? The senses send signals to our brain, our brain processes these signals and then translates them into perceptions. Our perceptions are essentially dependent on the way we interpret them, and our interpretations are heavily influenced by our history and conditioning, and then the medium we use to understand and translate these interpretations, are words, or speech.

So speech is an extremely powerful medium. Again, we define ourselves and experience our world through the power of speech.  

I remember a story about the power of speech that one of my teachers was very fond of telling. It was about a married couple where the husband was Russian and the wife was French, and they only spoke their respective languages. Even though they couldn’t understand each other’s language, they were very happy, and, very much in love. Then one day a mutual friend came to visit them for an extended period. He was a professor of languages and spoke both Russian and French fluently.

So he offered to teach them each other’s language so that they could communicate with each other. And of course, they happily agreed, and after some time, low and behold they could speak and understand what each other was saying.  

The professor eventually left their house with a feeling of great satisfaction and accomplishment. However a couple of years later, he visited them again, but when he arrived at their house he found that they had divorced, and after further inquiry, he found out that once they were able to communicate with each other, they began to argue, criticize, judge and blame each other and ultimately this led to their separation.  

Knowing how powerful words can be, we have to be very careful in the way we use them; and that’s as much with thoughts (our internal dialogue) as well as the words we speak to each other. We can hurt, abuse, and delude ourselves and others through speech. And paradoxically, we can uplift and inspire ourselves and others, through speech.  

I love these words from Thich Nhat Hanh—Walking Meditation: He says, “Your mind is like a piece of land planted with many different kinds of seeds: seeds of joy, peace, mindfulness, understanding, and love; seeds of craving, anger, fear, hate, and forgetfulness. The quality of your life depends on the seeds you water. When the seeds of happiness in you are watered, you will become happy. When the seeds of anger in you are watered, you will become angry. The seeds that are watered frequently are those that will grow strong.” [2]  

We water the seeds that Thich Nhat Hanh is talking about with our desires and our aversions which are expressed, often unconsciously I might add, through the words we use.  

Nelson Mandela encapsulates this concept when he said in his book, Long Walk to Freedom: “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”[3]  

Such powerful words. Again—“As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”

So, what do we do? How do we ensure that we don’t get entrapped by the power of speech?  

One approach, (and of course, there are many,) is to examine the very origin of speech to help us, discover, how we can free ourselves from the limitations speech imposes on us.  

From the philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism there is a sutra in the Shiva Sutras that states: In Sanskrit—

Jñānādhiṣṭhānaṁ mātṛkā||1/4||

Translated as: “The un-understood mother of sound inherent in the alphabet, is the basis of limited knowledge.” [4]

For me, this is a very powerful and a very beautiful sutra that’s full of the most profound understanding. I’ll go through the translation of the sutra word by word.

First, I’ll read it once more, the translation; “The un-understood mother of sound inherent in the alphabet is the basis of limited knowledge.”  “Limited knowledge” it’s the result of believing in the perceptions we have or believing in the narratives we tell ourselves—That is, we believe that we are nothing more than the forms we identify ourselves with. Such as our body, our thoughts, and emotions, our race and gender, our socio-economic class, our jobs and skills, our possessions, our life issues, etc, etc.

This “limited knowledge” is manifested by us through using the “sounds inherent in the alphabet,” that is, words or speech. And the reason we do this, again and again, ad nauseam, is because we “un-understand the mother of sound.” Or put another way, we are unaware of the primary source of sound that is essentially the creative power of not only words and speech, but really, everything! And yes, that includes us!

So, what the above sutra is telling us, is, that once we recognize and understand “the mother of sound” as our essential nature, we will no longer be bound by any form of limitation, especially those limited forms we impose on ourselves through words or speech.

Now this terminology, “the mother of sound,” it may be unfamiliar to you. More familiar terms for our essential nature, that is the “mother of sound” are: Aatman, or Self—Awareness—Chidaananda, or pure consciousness—Sachitaananda, or existence, consciousness, and bliss absolute—Om, or the primordial resonance or primordial sound vibration, beingness, presence, the list goes on.                           

As you may well know, there is a multiplicity of ways and means for us to immerse ourselves in our essential nature. And one of the great ironies about the philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism is that it often proposes that we use what got us into that state of limitation in the first place, to also get us out of that state, into a state of freedom.

So embracing this approach, right now let’s do an exercise where we use the subtle form of sound vibration, that exists in the form of our thoughts, to do just this.

Take a comfortable posture.

Close your eyes and for a few moments; become aware of your breath.

Breathing in, breathing out. Breathing in, breathing out.

Allow the breath to breathe easefully, in its natural rhythm.

Let the breath breathe the way it wants to breathe.

Now become aware of any thoughts you may have. Observe how they come into your awareness, stay for a period of time and then dissipate.

Thoughts come into our awareness, they’re there for some time, and then they fade away, and they dissolve.

And as these thoughts come and go, gently let go of holding on to the content of your thoughts;  that is, just gently let go of your identification with them—They are simply just groups of words that are like clouds in the sky, waves on the ocean, and by simply observing, see if you can notice where your thoughts arise from and where they fall back into and dissolve.

Just watch where your thoughts arise from, and where they fall back into and dissolve.

Observe how your thoughts continuously arise from your consciousness or awareness and dissolve back into your awareness.  Arising from and subsiding back into your awareness.

Now we’re using our thoughts as a means of connecting to our awareness, by engaging in the practice of simply observing how our thoughts arise from and subside back into our awareness—“the mother of sound.”

That’s what awareness is, the mother of sound, because she gives birth to these forms of words that become our thoughts and that become our speech.

There’s a beautiful passage from the Shaivite text the Vijnana Bhairava which goes: “Just as waves arise from water, flames from fire, rays from the sun, even so, the various aspects of the universe have arisen in differentiated forms from me,  from my own consciousness.” [5]

Your thoughts are just waves of consciousness arising from and dissolving back into the primordial resonance of your awareness. This awareness is the essential nature of all beings.

Rest, in this beautiful ocean of your awareness.

The world is as you see it.  

__________________________________________________________________________

1] Venkateshananda Swami (1993) Vasistha’s Yoga, ‎ SUNY Press, New York.

2] Hanh, Thich Nhat,  Anh-Huong & Hanh, (2006) Walking Meditation, Sounds True, Inc

3] Mandela, Nelson (1995) Long Walk to Freedom, Little, Brown & Company

4] Singh, Jaideva (1979) Siva Sutras, Motilal Banarsidass, India

5] Singh, Jaideva (1991) Vijnana-bhairava, SUNY Press, New York