How The World Is Perceived
I learnt much of this in school – here’s the very slightly updated version of my wonderful 80s school education:
A body-mind is born into a world. Sense receptors in the body pick up data from the body and the world around it. This data is sent through the nervous system to the brain. In the brain, the dark room, locked in the skull, the data is collected, sifted, pattern-matched and brought together to create a construct of the experience of being the body in the world. The construct includes the brain’s thoughts and feelings about the experience, and everything is looped through the dense neural networks of identifying as the body-mind. This thought-about and felt construct of being the person in the world, created in the vast unobservable or subconscious mind, is seen in the observable tip or conscious part of the mind – and here it is.
Hey, fellow pilgrim, all there is, is this construct, which is this present moment experience, the seen, appearing in awareness, the seer, the pure knowing ‘I’ that you are, and all else is nothing but hearsay.
Absolutely everything other than this direct experience – the knowing of experience, the seeing of the seen, the ‘I’ knowing that ‘I am’ – is simply information received from other people which cannot be substantiated – hearsay!
This construct, this consciousness, is the present moment. It appears in and as your presence, which is the knowing of your being. You are the knowing of it – pure and simple – so hey, stay there, aware, as you are – peace, be still and know.