encounters with nondual awareness

The mind stands in the way
of the eye.
Arthur Stern

We now appreciate that most brain hypotheses are largely at variance with the realities of physics.
Perceptions are, in any case, only approximations;
there is always some error, which usually goes unnoticed.
R L Gregory
 

Dancing Wu-Li Masters
Gary Zukav

Excerpt from: the amazing artifice of perception

Artifice is the clever use of tricks and devices. (Collins Dictionary)

It comes as a shock to most of us when we realize that the way we individually perceive and understand the world is not necessarily shared or even consistent within cultures. And between cultures the differences are even more marked. Perception, as E H Gombrich noted, is a learned, acquired phenomenon. What I see when I look at the world is the view determined by my experience within the social, economic and geographic context I inhabit. My gene pool might have a say in it as well. Since no two humans have identical life experiences, perception varies from person to person – and often radically.

The closed mental circuit above was looped together by Gary Zukav in The Dancing Wu Li Masters. The dynamic of the loop is the process of thinking. And the tidal flow of expectations is the product of one's acquired knowledge – one's conditioning. The entire archive of conscious and unconscious memory fuels the surge of this incessant movement.

So what's all this got to do with creativity and blank canvases and wondering minds? Well, in the introduction of this series a few of the insidious myths about creativity at loose in the world were set out, and this little e-book hopes to provide a few tools with which we can begin chipping away at those which might be sabotaging our own practice. [...]

what's in book two?

1  the amazing artifice of
    perception

2  pictures

3  puzzles

4  perceptual illusions

5  correspondences

6  references