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Once during an Indian coconut harvest, a farmer, tired from his day’s work of chopping down fruit, slumped down in the shade of a tree to enjoy a coconut, and upon splitting it open, found inside a message from God (or in this case, from Vishnu, his Hindu deity). The Brahmic writing was plainly visible for anyone to see, spelt out in the two halves of oily white meat. The implications of such an experience could only have been one of the following: the first is that the Supreme Being has no qualms about revealing his Divine Will in the contents of mere palm fruit, any more than in a whirlwind or through an oracle. The second is that the farmer’s perceptual systems produced an inaccurate representation of what he saw engraved in the fruit lining. It’s anybody’s guess as to which it really was. But regardless of whatever information was contained in the coconut, the moral of the story is that whilst miracles are known to happen, it can also be said that people regularly see things which are not there.

That we end up being misled by our senses is a widely-accepted truism, as most humans mistake the limits of their perception for the limits of the world itself. It’s not uncommon for people to push forward in their endeavors with a premature understanding of things, using inadequate standards to measure what they see in the world around them. Such errors in judgement range from being mild, such as mistakenly purchasing a rotten apple because you didn’t inspect its underside, to being detrimental, such as presuming that the oasis in the middle of the desert is real, when it’s only a hallucination. Hence, there are times when people are not so much moved by external objects as by their perception of those objects; what they claim to “know” is in fact only known conditionally, since human knowledge is always limited, thanks in part to our limited perceptual systems. Rare are those whose conception of reality is not exclusively dependent on their perception of it, who understand that there are things which you know and things which you don’t know, and in between are several doorways, of which one is called “Perception”; this door must be entered with prudence.

It is a common presumption that people see the world primarily with their eyes, but in fact, that is only true when they look at the objects that they recognize; things they have seen before and have categorized in their mind. In a case like that, they would have already built up the necessary perceptual tools that allow them to properly identify what they’re looking at. But when they look at something that they don’t recognize, something alien or new to them, the imagination takes over the function of the eyes, and becomes their primary tool of orientation. Whilst our physical senses may reveal to us the physical world, it is our imagination that allows us to project ourselves beyond finite time and space, into the realm of possibilities, abstracts and narratives.

In terms of perceptual experience, the dominant line of thought is that the world is primarily made up of objects. This may seem fairly straightforward, since you presumably see these objects all around you: buildings, street lights, vehicles, telephones, animals, humans, etc. As a consequence of seeing these objects, you generate thoughts about how to interact with them, and after completing your thought process, you proceed to act. As self-evident as this might appear, it begs further reflection. Let’s imagine a scenario where you’re sitting in a cafe, and you happen to catch a glimpse of an attractive individual at a nearby table. On one level, you perceive them as an object of interest, i.e, a intriguing material thing to be observed. Captivated by their appearance, you immediately start to draft assumptions about what kind of person they are, and how you might approach them to initiate a relationship. But in your enamored state, what you failed to consider was that there are other levels of this person’s existence which are invisible, yet equally defining for them. In terms of the biological, that person exists as a collection of billions of cells that perform numerous functions uninterruptedly. At a higher level of organization, the cells form tissues that perform specific bodily functions, and those tissues collectively form organs, and so on until we finally get to what the person looks like in front of you in their total embodied form. None of these other levels of biological existence are less relevant than the person’s overall appearance to you as an object. If it turns out that he or she is a cancer patient, battling a tumor, then the import of their unseen cellular reality becomes quite relevant. And there are yet other level of analysis: this person will have inextricable social ties that define them, such as friends and family, who may come from different backgrounds, cultures and other group categories based on their ethnicity, level of education, income bracket, etc. And even those groups are connected to yet other groupings, until who this person is can be expanded to encompass virtually anything. But when you blissfully observe them from your nearby table, you don’t see any of that reflected in them as a mere object. You can only see them at a certain level of resolution, as mediated by your ideas and impressions, yet all of the other details that escape your attention are equally relevant for defining who they are.

The idea of the world being more than just a collection of objects can be seen not only in social relationships or biological matter, but also in how we interact with inanimate devices. A computer is viewed as an object, but when you interact with it, you’re not really interacting with the computer itself, which is essentially a motherboard and other internal electric components. A keyboard, mouse and a graphical user interface have been provided for you to use, and those tools will interact with the computer for you. But if the computer were to unexpectedly crash, then you would be forced to interact with the machine itself, which most people find frustrating, as they realize that they know very little about how computers actually work. Similarly, when you interact with the world, your desire is mainly to produce a favorable result for yourself, for which a technical understanding of how things work is often unnecessary. This is why, from public transport to consumer technology, we are often met by a friendly, uncomplicated user interface or control surface when interacting with the infrastructure around us, which hides the complex configurations that more accurately would define the object in front of us. What this means is that people’s perceptions are ultimately framed by the things they want or have been trained to see, and not an actual understanding of the world or its technical workings. So in terms of perceptual experience, the world is not primarily made up of the innumerable objects that you see around you; it’s made up of information. More practically speaking, it’s made up of tools and obstacles; things that you can use for your purposes, and things that get in your way. An illustration of this can be seen in how babies relate to the world: it takes years for them to build up an object-based view of their environment, as they have little to no comprehension of what their surroundings actually are, yet they still manage to orient themselves, albeit somewhat clumsily. So even though people may look at the world and think they only see objects, there are in fact multiple processes that influence them to make that judgement, such as their pre-conceptions, desires, and past experiences. It is only because people have such a limited perception of things that they fail to realize that an object always transcends the manner in which they frame it.

It would be interesting to hear whether people recognize the above ideas as something familiar, or view them as a set of open-ended concepts that have yet to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

This is a contracted article of what was originally published on Greekspeek.com