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What is Illusion?
I will begin by asking, what is illusion? It’s used in rituals. Is paradox an example of illusion? Escher’s work, it seems to me, is mostly paradoxical. Oh, indeed. It is a deep, even pivotal element of illusion. Something that appears one way but is another. Escher did a lot of illusion. Stairs going up,…
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Pattern of Attention
We all assemble a picture of our world by the sweep of our centre of attention across our environment. We’re all socialized (programmed) in much the same way. Well, your organs actually program your brain. The eyes stake out a part of your brain for all their activity, the ears do the same, as does every other…
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Staying in Touch with Reality
The pattern of perception, the basis by which we engage in the experience we call perception or life… We go from one sensation to another, one intention to another, and we become so entrained in this pattern that we lose the sense of it as a process. We lose the sense of motion and even…
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Informational Flow
Attention is the record player and the needle, and the record itself is the hologram of existence that presents itself to our possible attention, a vast field of information that our attention drags over through the course of our day. Now we do have free will? We are the hand that governs that needle on…
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Controlled Perceptual Shift
Why is it so hard to change what we pay attention to? Because you perceive identity in your attention pattern. You recognize self not in what you are, but in what you perceive. So any change feels like death of self. Reality is much fuller in dimension and depth than any single track can make…
Category: Illusion
There is no illusion, and there is no reality. We all assemble a picture of our world by the sweep of our center of attention across our environment. It is real because we have a state of awareness we consider to be recognition. We believe we can recognize things. We believe that we have experienced them before. It’s an interesting belief, but is it error free?
Humanity has a drive to maintain a perceptual equilibrium. The body doesn’t distinguish between perceptual imbalance and physical distress to the point we even call perceptual imbalances diseases. “Mental illness.” We exert a great deal of effort to hold our attention still, to keep it running on track, just scanning over the same sets of attentional objects so we “stay in touch with reality.” We create our perception of our world, its virtues and its flaws, not because these things are fundamentally true of reality, but because our attention triggers on this set of things based on information we are carrying in our being.
“It is our illusions that create the world” Didier Cauwelaert
“We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy” Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)