Someone recently asked me to explain what I meant by a lens in my writing. He must have looked briefly at my work. While I think I have explained what I mean by this metaphor fairly well in my works, I don’t mind explaining it one more time.
Lenses are pieces of ground glass that affect how things appear when we look through them. They color or reshape in some way the image we see. A lens can distort what we see, but in photography they are more often used to improve the image. For instance a polarized lens can remove haze by filtering out horizontal light waves, resulting in improved clarity and contrast. Sometimes a person’s skin can be made to appear smoother by adding a diffusion filter to a lens. I used to be a camera assistant. My job included changing lenses and filters on cameras.
We have an expression in the English language when speaking of how we understand a subject. We speak of the lens a person is looking at the subject through. The lens we speak of is a metaphor for how we are conceptually framing a particular subject. This is very related to how I use the metaphor in the evolution of perception.
I should add a tidbit that might be a little interesting. The 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza was a lens grinder by profession. He died of a pulmonary ailment, thought to be either tuberculosis or silicosis, brought on by inhaling glass dust while working. Anyway, because of this lenses have often been associated with philosophy.
In my philosophy I develop a concept I call the perceptual schema. I liken perceptual schemas to lenses we see through. It is literally a way of perceiving. The word “schema” means a way of organizing something. Hence a perceptual schema is a way of organizing what we perceive. When I use the word “perceive” I am using the word in its original broad sense. Thus, whether talking about considering an idea in our thoughts or having a dream or literally perceiving a physical object with our bodily senses, the word perception in this oldest and broadest sense applies equally.
I believe that perception evolved and the world we see, smell, and taste is the result. But when this evolution began we had not yet appeared. So this perception when it began to evolve was still unified. It was in this earliest period that the laws of nature evolved as perceptual schemas, ways of perceiving. You can think of these as algorithms. Our bodies evolved out of these mathematical laws. They supervened upon those mathematical natural laws which preceded them. Hence, while we now find ourselves apparently as separate individuals, the seeing that we enjoy is really one. In other words, while it appears otherwise, the witness of all we see, hear, think, smell, taste, and imagine is really one. We are all one. And that one can be called God.
This idea obviously takes a lot more explaining, and requires addressing all the various objections and concerns that arise. But that is what my three books are for.
This idea would never have occurred to me had I not been exposed to the concepts of the Eastern teacher Meher Baba from a young age. I have often mentioned my father explaining Baba’s cosmology to me for the first time when I was five years old. Hence it is really no wonder that this idea occurred to me when I encountered the problems of philosophy in middle age.
I liken the perceptual schema in my system to the sanskara in Meher Baba’s.
The very foundation of all my explanations is sanskaras, which no religion has explained. (Meher Baba, LM 835)
Baba himself used this analogy of lenses as well as other analogies from cinema and photography in his book Intelligence Notebooks. You can download a copy of that book freely on my website. See especially PDF pages 192, 219 and 220.
I have long felt confident that this idea will be of interest to philosophers some day. Right now I get it why no one is interested. I should write a paper about why that is at the moment and why that is liable to change in the future. But for now I have explained once more my concept of lenses.
No comments:
Post a Comment