I’m a philosopher and this website is where I store all my files I wish to last into the future. About 25 years ago I developed a theory of how the phenomenal world formed and what it consists of called the evolution of perception. This is the story of how that idea materialized and its implications.
While I think I have had the idea of an evolution of perception vaguely in my mind all my life, I only began writing it in 2001. My first attempt was written at the request of my thesis advisor when I was in graduate school studying philosophy. I wrote a ten page paper on it, gave it to him to read, and he later replied that he had never heard of such an idea and that I ought to develop it. I told him I had in mind to write a book about it, and I eventually did in 2004. It was titled The Evolution of Perception and the Cosmology of Substance. While it is no longer in print, a slightly revised version of it is included in a 2025 anthology of my works titled EOP Trilogy. Naturally, I had no way to know back in 2001 talking to my professor that this desire to write a short book would morph into three books, dozens of essays, and about a hundred video talk recordings on several internet platforms.
Writing this now in 2025, I am in the unusual position of feeling really good about the job I’ve done expressing my views on this topic of an evolution of perception. I even think that to add more materials on these ideas could unintentionally confuse things and have diminishing returns, rather than shine more light. So, I’m stopping.
But I can see there is still a need for some kind of introduction or conclusion appended to these materials collected here on this site. For I can imagine someone coming to this site and being quite confused by these files. Who is Chris Ott? What is the idea of an evolution of perception? What does it have to do with and what implications does it have? And what, if anything, does it have to do with Meher Baba, whose name and writings keep occurring in these works?
So, I’m adding this short addendum to this site to answer those questions.
I was born to a family of artists in Woodstock, NY. Woodstock was an artist’s colony at the time. Both of my parents were painters. My father had his degree in art from the Road Island School of Design and my mother had hers in philosophy from Radcliffe College.
When I was 4, my parents heard of an Eastern master, Meher Baba, from another couple in Woodstock, the Rileys. Soon after, both my parents traveled to India to meet him. Inspired by their encounters they soon after moved our family to Myrtle Beach, SC to settle on the Meher Spiritual Center, a 500 acre estate established for Baba in 1944.
Other than living on the Meher Center and meeting people from around the world arriving to learn about Meher Baba, my childhood was rather ordinary. I went to Myrtle Beach High School and graduated at 16, after which I moved to Columbia, SC to study Media Arts at the state university.
I will add, however, that growing up on the Meher Center exposed me to a lot of philosophical thinking, some Eastern, some simply occult, both the good and the dregs of what people in the 1960s and 1970s who thought of themselves as “seekers” liked to talk about. Much of this I simply filed away in my thoughts.
When I was 18 I decided to try to be a filmmaker. Moving to California I began by working as a camera assistant in an animation studio. After that I went to U.S.C. school of cinema/television in Los Angeles, and after moving back to the Carolinas gave writing, producing, and directing films a shot. While I personally was not very successful as a filmmaker, I am most proud to have been friends with directors Henry Selick and David Fincher at Korty Films in California and to have worked with cinematographer Phedon Papamichael in North Carolina. My own film company, which was called Caravan Films and was incorporated in NC, went out of business in 1988.
When I was 40 I signed up for a graduate program in philosophy at the University of Arkansas. At the time the school had an excellent faculty. No less than three of my professors had their Ph.D.s from Harvard University, my Kant professor from Cambridge, and my thesis advisor from Stanford.
So this is the point in my life when things became philosophically interesting. For the first year in the program I simply applied myself to fully grasping the deeper issues of Western philosophy, from the ancient Greeks to contemporary analytic philosophy. This included attending an enormous amount of lectures, as well as having extended conversations with my professors.
During the three years I spent in graduate school getting my master’s degree in philosophy, it began to become clear that exposure to certain things in my past, which included art, cinema, and several of the teachings by Meher Baba that my professors naturally had never heard of, allowed me to consider answers to the puzzles of philosophy that were outside their purview. They could never have thought of them.
I want to explain what some of these differences were.
First of all, one of the most important central problems of philosophy is today called the “mind-body problem.” This has to do with the interaction between mind and matter. For instance, how does a physical brain have conscious experience? And how do thoughts prompt physical actions?
Previously philosophers had only been taught to hypothesize theoretical occult entities to explain things. Some examples are Thales’ invention of psyche, Plato’s invention of forms, and Descartes’ assigning of mysterious powers to the pineal gland in the brain. And not finding a way to explain consciousness in this way, some had come to attempt to deny consciousness altogether. They simply had no other way to approach the question, so had to try to deny the problem altogether, which satisfied almost no one.
But I happened to have been exposed since I was a child to an entirely different approach, one that Meher Baba described. This is the notion of a process or evolution of perception that produced the things we perceive. This actually solved the problems, while avoiding the pitfalls of the false dichotomy of what philosophers call idealism and materialism.
Proposing an evolution was extremely radical, though ironically hiding in plain sight. All of the other sciences besides philosophy had long made the transition from explaining via occult entities to explaining via processes. But, very ironically, philosophers, who yearned to be seen as thinking like scientists, clung to these reified imagined illusions.
The second thing that my background gave me was the time I spent in film, especially the time I worked as a camera assistant. Lenses, lens elements, and lens filters all affect what one perceives through a camera. I cannot begin to list all the effects one can create simply by placing a filter before a lens. The same dynamic is repeated in reverse on a projector. What you see is partially determined by what you place before the light which forms that image.
Now when you are in a movie theater, a film frame does the same thing. Watching a black and white movie, portions of the film frame hold light back while other portions allow it to pass through. The light is the same, but how much is allowed through the film frame creates the illusion of an image.
In color this is stepped up. Color dyes on a frame of film will hold back parts of the color spectrum while allowing others to pass through and reach the screen. This creates the illusion of a color world on the screen. The light itself that hits the color film frames is white, but what strikes the screen is determined by the filtering effect of the dyes.
In short, how light is shaped determines its condition. Using light as an analogy for the act of perceiving, we could say “how you perceive produces what you perceive.”
In my system (the evolution of perception), the lenses, filters, and frames I had worked with in my younger days became the perceptual schemas (ways of psychologically organizing what you perceive). These formative perceptual schemas evolve over time, and this evolutionary process produces by degrees the phenomenal universe we see, hear, and taste as their completed result.
This can also be applied to explain thinking itself.
One of the biggest developments that made the system work was to see that the laws of nature that govern motion and are responsible for objects being solid, were actually evolved laws of perception.
So if you compare the influence of my past exposure to motion pictures and the teaching of Meher Baba to the educations received by nearly every philosopher in history -- which conditioned them to either posit occult entities to explain what we see or to deny that we are conscious at all -- you can see why the subtitle of my second book is “a radical new view of reality.” It was so radical, in fact, that it was simply inconceivable to my professors.
When I wrote out this idea in my first book, The Evolution of Perception and the Cosmology of Substance in 2004, I had never read these ideas specifically stated by Meher Baba, but I felt they were implied. Still, this involved a great deal of risk-taking and interpretation on my part.
But the very next year after I published Evolution of Perception, a book said to have been written by Meher Baba in his lifetime titled Infinite Intelligence, appeared on the internet. Studying it, I found the analogies I just described, confirming that what I had written the year before was a fair interpretation of what Meher Baba taught.
So, is it right to say my idea was based on the teaching of Meher Baba? In a way, it is. But not directly. Clearly, Baba’s teaching about an evolution of consciousness that I had been constantly exposed to as a child and teenager growing up on the Meher Center had influenced my thinking. And I would even say that Baba’s teaching was the core inspiration for the evolution of perception concept. And yet they are still in a sense two different things. Let me explain.
First I need to explain Baba’s teaching in a nutshell, so that this will be more plain. Baba taught that there is only God. There is nothing but God. Everything phenomenal (meaning that we experience in our thoughts or with our senses) is not actually substantive, though its appearance is persistent and robust. We clearly experience it, but that experience is the evolved outcome of sanskaras affecting perception. The world is thus only apparent.
How is the evolution of perception concept related to this? One could think of it as a kind of second overlay that conforms to Baba’s teaching, but emphasizes concerns that are of special interest to philosophers. That is, it explains how a psychic evolution as described by Baba in his works as an explanation for the universe is justifiable in rational Western terms? And it gives arguments why such a shift in how we look upon the formation of the universe ought to be adopted on logical terms.
Of special interest to future philosophers, I suspect, is that such an evolution offers a vision of reality consistent with an acceptance of God in a very special sense, without positing theoretical magical occult entities as we have in the past, which have historically been the source of superstition. See my book Further Reflections for more on superstition and its genesis.
For these reasons I have often quoted Meher Baba, who said of philosophers in 1954 in India:
Seventy years after I drop my body, [this site where my tomb is] will turn into a place of pilgrimage, where lovers of God, philosophers and celebrities will come to pay homage. – Meher Baba, LM p. 4269
I have frequently drawn attention to his unexpected inclusion of philosophers. If we take Meher Baba’s predictions seriously, this equates to 2039, not very far off. Why would philosophers be traveling so far to pay homage to Meher Baba, of all people? Didn’t he teach a bunch of woo-woo? No, actually he didn’t. Only his followers read such things into his teaching that weren’t there.
It has always been my feeling that it is this paradigm shift he was alluding to when he said to the press in Nasik, India in 1937:
I have come to bring about a revolution in man's thinking, the slowest of all revolutions. – Meher Baba, The Awakener Magazine, Vol. XXI, No. 2, p. 6
So that is the connection between Meher Baba and the evolution of perception.
In 2012 I moved back to Myrtle Beach from Arkansas and settled across the street from the Meher Center where I grew up. When my daughter left home to start college in 2014, I started work on a redo of my initial book, this time fleshing it out more and connecting more dots. This became my 2021 book Evolution of Perception Re-Explained.
In 2024 I added Further Reflections, in which I went into some more detail about causation and epistemology to round things out.
In 2025 I combined all three of these books into a collection titled EOP Trilogy. And that’s pretty much the whole story of how the evolution of perception concept came about.
I would like to add a few words about the Baba community existing today. I am obviously very familiar with it.
The American Baba community consists of about 2000 people, the majority of whom derive from the 60s hippie counter-culture. Gratefully, most of them stopped using drugs long ago, due to Baba’s clear admonishments about their use and his statements that mind-altering drugs are mentally and spiritually harmful.
Most of these followers are sincere people who are attempting to love Baba, including practices like singing and dining together known in the East as Bhakti yoga.
The beliefs of the Baba followers often do not conform to what Meher Baba taught in his lifetime. One can come up with their own theories why that is. But they do not think in terms of concepts like the evolution of perception. Many of them continue to have past ideas, based on the Abrahamic concept of God as a creator deity. They imagine Baba to be the creator deity and believe the man Meher Baba never died but is still alive in some ascended form. None of this conforms to Baba’s teaching. Baba was clear that the concept of ascended masters, made popular by Theosophists in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was preposterous and based on the delusions of not having a master. He said he was the Avatar, but was very clear that the Avatar, by definition, refers to a living person in a physical body. An ascended master who has died is, by definition, not the Avatar. When he dies the unique consciousness that manifests as the Avatar takes experiences of a state he said had no awareness of the illusory phenomenal world, by which he included even thoughts.
So in spite of Baba’s teaching, his American followers are by and large still under the sway of 19th and early 20th century occultism, neopaganism, and New Age ideas.
Originally I assumed these strange ideas were Baba’s teaching also, as I had not read his works. Only much later, with a degree in philosophy and having studied his teachings very carefully, did I realize that Baba had a very unique teaching. And this teaching is what began to dovetail with my own thoughts while I was working toward my MA in 1998-2001.
Thus I find myself hoping for that revolution in man’s thinking that Meher Baba said would be the slowest of all revolutions. I think the evolution of perception concept is a good start in that direction.
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