Perception

Perception operates at every level of your awareness and at the same time helps to create the very awareness within which it is operating. Most people who study a shamanic path fail to fully appreciate the role perception plays in moving them from point A to point B.

Defining perception seems easy on the surface; we perceive the world through our physical senses and therefore "assemble" a reality within which we can function. Perception is rarely if ever viewed as a physical sense in itself and one that can be controlled and manipulated to expand our worldview and, in fact, make other realities available to us. Our ability to perceive is the true sixth.

Perception operates at every level of your awareness and at the same time helps to create the very awareness within which it is operating. Reason drives your perception and awareness in this reality. Where does reason come from? Reason is a series of actions and reactions created over a period of time, a framework, upon which you base your daily reality of living.

Anything that flies in the face of reason is generally defined as insane or promptly ignored. Reason is the mean guard at the gates of perception. How do we get around this guard; do we bribe him, or do we try to lull him to sleep so we can sneak past him in the night?

An alternative exists we must occupy our guard of reason with other activities. In other words trapping your own attention. Think of it as giving your guard a toy to play with and while he is totally occupied with the new toy you catch a glimpse of the unknown. He gets bored easily, so at first you may only be able to look past him, but in that brief glimpse there lies an eternity of possibilities. Eventually, with practice, he will get more used to your doing this and begin to lose interest even in you getting by him, he will no longer, in his own perception, see it as a threat. You will pass by him into a new and undiscovered country.

Finding a way or ways of trapping your attention would have to be keyed to the individual since we all structure our perception differently. I can only speak in generalities here. Some people use drumming, some use other forms of music, some use physical activities. All of these are valid, but the make up of your particular perception biases makes it a highly individual endeavour.

The only thing to keep in mind is that once your perception grows and changes you must still drag these new "visions" back past your guard of reason. This filtering back through the temporal window of reason creates our biggest problem. How do we know that what our brain is telling us is, in fact, what we have really witnessed?

You have a big world out there; it is a volume of information and realities.  The world is full of unseen realities and your perception of just one opens up to you a quandary…do you believe your eyes, ears and the other three senses or do you rely on your sixth sense. 

Your sixth sense is unseen but yet it is a known quality of your life and you are the only one privy to its knowledge.  Perception is in the same sense a sixth sense.  One only draws attention to the perception because it is a word or concept that is lying only on the table in front of you.  When perception didn’t exist in a word context you used it regularly as a sixth sense, a knowing of something, a preconceived notion, a vision of an upcoming event or a warning.

Getting your way around words is the first trial of perception; you must not let words stand in your way if you are to succeed in setting your desired goals in life.  Before the word perception arose you didn’t have a word for the workings of the sixth sense…it was just there, you saw things in your mind that were not physical at that present moment and you heard the same way.  Reason only has a foothold in your life when you bring into your vocabulary a new concept that it (reason) is not familiar with…

When you focus on a thought reason doesn’t have a problem, it is something very natural for you and every human being dose it.  It is only when a new word or concept enters your life…your centre of reason becomes aware to your every thought and stands sentinel.