Greetings!

If you have been following me and are familiar with my website, you know the quality of my thinking and writing. And now, I would like to do more.  I would especially like to reach out to younger generations… but with a combination of humor and sanity.

I want to put together a team.  I am looking for like-minded people to take my projects to the next step.  If you’re a big picture thinker with a sense of humor and a sense of fun – looking for ways to make a difference in this crazy world; if you have any skills in editing, website development, Internet marketing, research, etc.; or even if you just have time to spare and would like to volunteer – let me hear from you.

You can email me at – drjeisen@gmail.com

My current website is – www.drjeffeisen.com

My new website is – www.in-sane.net (in development; 1^st page only is relevant)

Dr. Jeff

(P.S. If you volunteer, you’ll get free training in PsychoNoetics…)

Now back to the search for what is real…
This is the fourth essay in a 5-essay series on the perceptual illusion.
It presents the 6-8th ways that our understanding of reality is limited and made false by the ways we perceive ourselves and the world around us. It moves toward the awareness that
WHOLE-SYSTEM CHANGE IS REAL… AND IMPERCEPTIBLE

The  sixth way perception creates an illusion is by creating the illusion of being an individual.  Of course, it is related to both the illusions of separation, and the separation of self and other. However, it is such a central illusion that it bears pointing out.

The illusion of being an individual is also the sixth evolutionary benefit, for without it the whole house of cards, the entirety of the perceptual illusion, both the drawbacks and the benefits – would collapse.

The seventh way perception creates an illusion is by relationship. The perceiving organism implicitly relates and compares everything to its Self, or, by extension, a projection of its Self – on every level of complexity and every dimension of beingness.  Thus, things can be classified as better or worse, nearer or further, more or less.

However, the seventh evolutionary benefit is also the illusion of relationship. The organism in question uses these relationships to make sense of the world.  Without relationships, both explicit and implicit, without better and worse, nearer and further, hotter and colder, one can‘t have descriptions, qualities or values: like temperature, location, weight, size, etc. Without comparisons, without things, one is just left with the ‘isness’ of aperceptual reality.

Another, little seen aspect of the perceptual illusion of relationship or comparison is ‘scale.’ The universe is vast, comprising things too small to see with the naked eye, and too large to see in their entirety without standing back – way back. This holds true whether the distance one stands back is measured in microns, meters, or light-years. And, of course, the same principle extends (variably) to all dimensions: weight, distance, force or strength, etc. But if we were to change size radically, to go to a completely different scale (on the powers of 10), or if we were a lot smaller or bigger, the scale by which we perceived would also change.

Humans perceive on the human scale, cells perceive on the cellular scale. The size of the perceiving organism in question determines the scale of perception, and the sensory organs are calibrated to that scale.

The eighth way perception creates an illusion is the appearance of constancy.  However, since the lack of constancy is disorientating – to say the least, the appearance of constancy is also the eighth benefit.

Imagine the universe as a balloon. As it expands the ‘apparent’ distances between heavenly bodies, even the internal distances within atoms and molecules, ‘seem to’ increase, while all other dimensions increase or contract simultaneously.  However, without a point of reference as a comparison, it is impossible to perceive these changes. Determination, location or measurement requires one or more fixed coordinates to use as a constant.  There are no still coordinates or absolute constants in the universe, only relative ones. Since fixed constants don’t exist, nothing can be determined or measured absolutely.  So even though all dimensions change, in the absence of fixed coordinates, the changes cannot be determined, documented or measured.  In fact, they are unnoticeable.

Whole system change is imperceptible.