The Veil of Perception

Just as we experience ourself walking down the street, surrounded by sights, sounds, sensations and thoughts, we can systematically explore what happens when each faculty is removed. As seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and sensing are stripped away, we discover the dimensionless placeless place where awareness abides – not in space, but simply here. Without perceiving faculties, awareness knows nothing but itself, not in subject-object relationship but by being itself. When seeing returns, awareness seemingly localises inside a body and projects a world outside itself; with thinking, time unfolds. Our five senses conspire to persuade us of this illusion. Yet sometimes this veil grows transparent, as when reading Wordsworth’s intimations of eternity or Yeats’s unexpected blessing. In these moments of grace, we recognise that everything previously thought separate is our very own self. The world which once seemed to veil reality now shines with it, and we feel both blessed and able to bless.

Just as we experience ourself walking down the street, surrounded by sights, sounds, sensations and thoughts, we can systematically explore what happens when each faculty is removed. As seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and sensing are stripped away, we discover the dimensionless placeless place where awareness abides – not in space, but simply here. Without perceiving faculties, awareness knows nothing but itself, not in subject-object relationship but by being itself. When seeing returns, awareness seemingly localises inside a body and projects a world outside itself; with thinking, time unfolds. Our five senses conspire to persuade us of this illusion. Yet sometimes this veil grows transparent, as when reading Wordsworth’s intimations of eternity or Yeats’s unexpected blessing. In these moments of grace, we recognise that everything previously thought separate is our very own self. The world which once seemed to veil reality now shines with it, and we feel both blessed and able to bless.