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Would you want to play around with a technology like that? Wouldn't you want to buy one? It would be way better than an iPod.

Sounds like science-fiction, right? It sounds like some kind of virtual reality or holodeck-type thing? Well it's not. It is the natural way which you are supposed to be operating as a being. It is the reason we have physical bodies: because they are that sci-fi technology which allow us to experience any state at will.

Sense & Beauty

In order to make the best possible use of the technology of your body though, and how it hooks into your emotional and mental states, you need to first understand how perception works. Our bodies are perceptual instruments. Their purpose is to perceive. You can tell because of all the perceptual instruments attached to it: eyes, ears, skin, tongues, noses, etc. Each of these are considered (nowadays) as "senses" and they are usually thought of as being attached to specialized sensory organs. Each type of sensory organ is uniquely designed to enhance the experience a certain type of stimulus. Eyes are "better" at sensing light than your tongue is. [A simple exercise: Try closing your eyes and using your tongue to tell whether it is dark in the room in which you are located.] Ears are better at dealing with sound waves.

You could also think of it as each sense organ having a preference for a certain type of stimulus: your ears are built the way they are because your ears find sound to be beautiful, and your eyes find light to beautiful and infinitely intriguing. They seek it. They need it. Their purpose is to collect it. This collection process of sense organs seeking out certain types of beauty is what we call sensation. Pure sensation has no value judgement. Your ears do not decide whether or not a certain sound is beautiful. They just resonate in sympathetic vibration with the stimulus, almost having a call and response relationship with stimulus. The stimulus calls out, the sense organ responds by vibrating in a similar pattern: it is trying to recreate it.

If A Tree Falls…

The sympathetic recreated vibration of the stimulus is sent to the proprioceptive system. The way I am coming to understand proprioception is simply as: awareness of sensation. You know that Zen koan, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? This is what that koan is getting at. It is asking the question: if you have a pain in your leg, but you are not aware that you have that pain, are you really even having that pain? What if you go to pick a steaming pot up off the stove without a potholder? If you are not aware that it is hot when you touch it, are you going to experience it as hot? This is an altogether different question from: will a steaming pot burn your hand? Although practices such as walking across hot coals, etc perhaps point to these two questions sharing a closer link than most of us probably are willing to admit into our view of reality.

Fire Is Hot!

So proprioception is the awareness that you are having a sensation. Sensation is (roughly) the sympathetic vibration of specialized organs within the body to stimuli.

Perception, then, is sort of a layer of abstraction working on top of that. As you become proprioceptively aware that you are having a sensation, perception's job is to take a snapshot of everything that is happening in that moment and then make cause-effect relationship assumptions about the source of a sensation. In other words, it links together a sensation with what it assumes to be the stimulus which was responsible for the sensation arising.

This translates into linguistic conclusions such as "Fire is hot" or "A knife is sharp."

Translated through our current concept system, "Fire is hot" becomes more accurately stated as:

"'Fire' is perceived as having a causal link to the proprioceptive awareness of the sensation of 'heat'."

It is easier just to say, "Fire is hot." It saves us time and, in this case at least, it tends to be an equally accurate. Your brain thrives on simplifying things: boiling them down to the lowest common denominator. It saves computational energy. This is what your perceptual field is for. Your perceptual field could be defined as the "stage" in which sensations (and proprioceptive awareness of those sensations) can occur. More simply put (for our purposes right now), your perceptual field is loosely defined as, or at least anchored in, the physical body. Your body is where you experience sensations, yes? I am not yet talking about your reaction to those sensations - we'll come back to that shortly.

Associations & Assumptions

Perception could simply be thought of as the processes of association which occur within your perceptual field, and which make correlative assumptions about cause and effect relationships between sensations and stimuli. Perception simply takes a snap shot of all these different factors: (1) stimuli, (2) sensation, (3) awareness of sensation. It looks at which stimuli is associated with which sensation and what the awareness of that sensation itself feels like. It looks at how these things cluster together spatial and temporal proximity (what is in the same place at the same time).

Perception still does not make value-judgements on these things. It just takes notes on how these things are clustered together, what is linked to what. And then it makes assumptions that if these things are clustered together once, then they will be clustered like that again. The more times, then, you repeat those unique clusters of the three elements (stimuli, sensation, & awareness), the more your perception is going to become habituated. Habituation partly comes from "proof". These things actually did and do occur this way on a regular basis. Therefore, it becomes a logical consequence to predict that this cluster will in the future create the same (or similar) perceptual field state. And it is not wrong in making these associations and assumptions. Accuracy in pattern-recognition is perhaps the most vital skill in survival: the primary purpose of the biological organism.

In the most general sense, this is the logical chain which perception operates according to: "I am aware of a sensation occurring, which means that sensation must be occurring (or else I would not be aware of it), which means that a stimulus must be causing that sensation to occur." It then takes a snapshot of all stimuli and assigns it to that predictive category to help steer future behavior: "Fire is hot."

Repeat Or Retreat?

The steering of future behavior is where the next element of the human experience arises: emotion. Emotion is simply the assignment of value to a perceptual field state. The two possible values are: (1) repeat and (2) retreat. Perception notes all components of a perceptual field state and makes assumptions based upon those associations. Emotion answers the question: "Shall we continue this perceptual field state or terminate it?" Is it pleasant or unpleasant?

Due to certain biological parameters, we have certain sensations which we select for and against. "Fire is hot" is a perceptual assumption which is useful because it helps us prevent damage from occurring to our perceptual instruments: our sense organs and bodies in general. "Fire is hot" is immediately assigned the "retreat" emotional value. This value is instantly fed back into the perceptual system, which makes sure to cluster it together with associated stimuli, sensation and awareness. Emotion, in a sense, colors proprioceptive awareness. It trains the perceptual instruments (sense organs) to seek out perceptual field states which it would like to repeat and retreat from those which it would not.

Ordering of Perceptual Elements

I may be missing a few intermediary steps here, but I am attempting to describe an extremely stripped down way of looking at how your body, mind, perceptions and emotions work. So forgive me as I continually refine and improve upon what has been said. In any event, it is only after emotional value-assignment (repeat or retreat) where what I would consider "conscious thought" comes into play. So if we label these steps in order:

1. Stimulus
2. Sensation
3. Awareness
4. Perception (association & assumption)
5. Emotion
6. Thought (Cognition)

Understand that these processes all happen instantaneously though, as the perceptual field state is *always* changing. It, like T. Rex in Jurassic Park, is completely focused on change, on motion. T. Rex, supposedly, could not see its victims unless they were moving. Not sure how accurate this "movie science" is, but it is a useful metaphor for our purposes here. An other way to think about it is that your perceptual field only knows itself by cycling through different states. That is, in fact, its entire purpose. The perceptual field acts as a stage for actors (stimuli) to perform on (sensation, etc). You could think of emotion and thought then as kind of like the audience, who decides whether they like the performance and whether it relates to their life. Perception acts more like a director: you never see the director, but it is the choices of the director which determine what is happening on stage.

So-Called "Conscious" Thought

If emotion's function is indeed to assign a repeat/retreat value to a perceptual field state, then cognition arises as a logical consequence of that. If you want to end a state, you need to figure out what caused it and eliminate that stimulus. You need to move your hand out of the fire in order for it to stop being hot. Then you need to know that dousing it with cool water will balance out the perceptual state back to normal. In areas directly related to survival of the biological organism, these choices are completely automatic. These behavioral choices are happening below the level of conscious awareness. And this is where just about all thoughts seem to have their roots (I know this is a broad statement - it is meant to be provocative).

Thoughts arise almost mechanically out of emotional value assignments to perceptual field states. This is why thoughts can tend to have such an obsessive or addictive quality to them: because they are the tip of an iceberg which begins much father down. The purpose of thoughts is to act as a problem-solving tool to investigate, predict and manipulate cause-effect chains (assumptions made on the level of perception, typically way below the level of conscious cognition) resulting in perceptual field states. It steers your behavior towards pleasurable field states and away from painful ones. And it tells itself that this is for your own good (ie, that it is "necessary" and "true"), because this tendency is directly rooted in rules required for the biological survival of the organism. But by the time you have gotten to cognition, the sixth level of awareness in our descriptive system, many associations, assumptions and value judgements have already been passed. For the most part, these things remain below the level of conscious thought. And our thoughts flow along as a logical consequence of these underlying associations, assumptions, and value judgements. This explains the feeling (the perceptual field state) of "not knowing why you did something" or acting in such a way that you get caught in behavioral patterns you cannot consciously comprehend.

FIRE OUCH!

The reason for this is simple: it is easier and faster computationally to say "fire ouch!" than to be much more precise:

"'Fire' is perceived as having a causal link to the proprioceptive awareness of the sensation of 'heat'. Heat should be avoided because it damages the ability to perceive field states and therefore threatens the survival of the biological organism."

NO FIRE OUCH! That is what you teach a very young child about to reach for the handle of a steaming pot on the stove. It is also more or less how you train dogs:

Your dog barks. You do not want it to bark (it is an unpleasant field state for you). So you yell, "NO BARK!" to the dog. But if you wait until later when the dog is no longer barking, it is going to have no idea what you are scolding it for. But it is smart enough to recognize unpleasant field states, so it will cower and slink away (retreat). In order to more effectively train a dog (or a small child, for that matter), you need to be sure that your corrective feedback is immediately associated with the stimulus which caused it. You need to create the shortcut in the dog's perceptual system: BARK = REPRIMAND (negative state) = RETREAT. In other words, "NO BARK!" You link this behavioral filter into the dog's perceptual system through consistent application of a repetitive stimulus:

NO BARK! NO BARK! NO BARK!

Except you do not yell it three times. You just yell it when the dog barks. You basically have to train the dog to replace its biological functional perceptual program with yours. Dogs are naturally built to do this as pack animals: they see you as the alpha (or they should, anyway), the master, and they pattern behavior after the stimulus feedback you flow back into their perceptual field. Remember what we said about the ear vibrating in resonance or in sympathy with stimulus?

Great Apes

Humans learn much the same way: we are "apes." We mimic. We copy. We are pack animals who learn behavioral strategies to promote our survival from one another. We look for leaders, masters, models from whom to copy successful survival strategies. That is what you are doing with me by reading this (especially reading down this far). You perceive me as having a successful behavioral strategy which improves my perceptual field states and increases my chances for survival and reproduction. Or you don't, I'm just saying is all…

The point is simply that your perceptions are much complex than most people are probably realizing. As a result of this, most people are acting largely unconsciously to rules set up automatically by associations, assumptions and value judgements of which they are not even aware. Worse than that, the people who *are* aware of these things can literally see it by your behavior when you are not aware of this stuff. And they can then lead you, like stage magicians practicing sleight of hand and larger scale illusions: they act as directors of your perception.

A Matter of National Security

Your "thoughts" are most likely of no help to you in learning any of this on your own because they are not getting to the roots of these deep-seated patterns. You have to understand that what you consider right now to be your "mind" is nothing more than a perceptual instrument in itself. It is, in a sense, no different from an eye or an ear. It is ONLY a sense organ designed to seek out a certain type of stimulus which it finds "beautiful" and which it then resonates with sympathetically. Your mind, for the most part, is governed by your perceptual system, and it is just going ahead and linking together your thought states to your emotional states, to your awareness of sensations and to stimuli. Perception and cognition seem to almost function as parallel processors, filtering the same data sets in completely different ways.

And unfortunately, perception classifies all the really important stuff you need to know consciously as a matter of "national security". That is, the roots of how these things work are necessarily tied up in the literal survival of the biological organism. The processes and information at work are shared with (sent up to the level of) conscious thought ONLY on a "need to know" basis. If you don't have the security clearance, you will not be let into the meeting. So what you have to do, essentially, is become a spy in this system.

Awakening the Man Inside

Luckily, you already have a "man on the inside" working for you. This deep-cover agent is actually the proprioceptive system itself. It is awareness of sensation. And it occurs at a level functionally before and below the level of associations, assumptions, value judgements and predictive steering of behavior. The way you get back in touch with you proprioceptive system is by simply becoming aware of sensations, and completely stripping them out of the context of all the things you associate with them, or which are clustered together with them by the perceptual system. What does it *really* feel like inside your hand, or when your heart beats rapidly? Just focus strictly on that, with no interpretation.

Practice this for a while and then we'll talk more about how to dial in specific perceptual field states in your own personal sci-fi holodeck technology. Actually, we've been talking about that all along, but we have to go about it the long way because our understanding of our own perceptual processes is completely whacked. Hopefully though, we are moving forward, bit by bit. Please let me know your results!

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