Quotes About Perception

We confuse being some thing with Being.

Only when we realize that beliefs are not the truth will the door of possibility open so that we can experience what "is" true.

Once a conceptual identity occupies the place of "self," this is what we think we are "being.

We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish. —John Culkin

We delude ourselves that we want to implant honesty in our children: what we really want is to imbue them with our particular kind of dishonesty, with our culture's dishonesty. —Sidney Harris

Our core beliefs simply appear to us as reality.

So when searching for the "absolute existence," we need to acknowledge that our relationship to "reality" is to consider our perception of physical conditions as objective and real, and our perception of the mind's activities as subjective and just made up.

An inner dialogue runs pretty much unceasingly though our minds. Sometimes we listen; sometimes we barely notice. The commands and assessments of this story line are there all the same, even if the depth of their influence goes unnoticed. But the most dangerous fictions aren't those we recognize as stories. Of more concern to us here are the ones we assume to be real.

it seems that the conceptual activity that is created to serve the self has become the self.

I'm inviting you to realize that we're not talking about changing from an apple to an orange, which is too easy and still in the domain of familiar things, as is simply imagining a "better self". The demand here is more like transforming from being an apple to being the color blue, or infinite space.

Again, I invite you to consider that if you can identify with character traits, qualities, thinking, or experiences other than what you identify with now, then you must not actually be any of these elements. If this is so, who are you? What are you? If you try to pin down who you really are, you will search your mind and attempt to grab onto an idea, or feeling, or sense. Yet that very idea, feeling, or sense itself can be let go, and so it can't be you either. See how this works?

And, if the "programming" (our beliefs) is flawed or the data is incorrect, then false conclusions will show up in place of what's true. Perceptions will be biased, but will appear to simply reflect reality.

separating the truth from what's believed. This action allows you to let go of your own knowledge and open up to freshly experience this moment without presumption.

We become attached to our beliefs, to our roles and traits, and also to the strategies needed for maintaining all this. We rarely acknowledge that all our mental, emotional, and perceptual activities are processes, and that they're there to serve a specific purpose. We're so busy identifying with mind's conceptual mechanisms that we lose touch with what's real. It is not hard to see, then, how self becomes confused with the mind.

when the mind serves "the self" it is actually serving something of its own making—a conceptual self.

When self becomes confused with mind, and mind becomes seen as the self, the mind's self-serving activities end up creating an experience of reality that is entirely self-referential.

Remember, mind has no interest in what's true—its job is to keep you alive while maintaining an identifiable sense of self. To do this, it not only creates and identifies with physical and mental-emotional activities, it also builds on past experience and any previously established conceptual identity. You're still alive and you're still you, so mind will naturally protect and promote all the beliefs behind the activities that keep you that way.

Freud was a genius; geniuses are bright but not necessarily right. What they do do, right or wrong, is to provide images that guide, or compel, the lives of the rest of us. If we are not careful we may accept the inevitability of these images. It seems that great men offer us a portion of reality and, because of their greatness, we take it for the whole.

His (Samuel Coleridge) dark senses were constantly in play, the frustration of them bringing illness. Weather and organic nature combined in a synaesthetic multi-media event, and this was the ground of all perception before it was divded up in daily living: the Primary Imagination giving way to the Secondary. Poetry was forever seeking a conscious return to this state, which existed all the time, whether he knew it or not.

I loved my dreams more than reality.

M got into difficulties. Somebody – and since the client was dead it wasn't clear who – didn't like his two paintings.

Paranoia is a form of awareness.

Every problem I have comes from believing something to be true that is not true.

Appearances count," Father says. "When they see us riding our bikes to church, when they hear us sing and we dress up on Sunday that makes them believe certain things about us." "Like what?" I say. "That we're like them," he says. "That we believe the same things. That makes them happy, to see us doing what they're doing." The