Shades of the Prison-House – Part One
As was explained in the previous instalment (Our Magical World), the world that we see around us is completely different from what we have imagined, as well as what we have been taught. And the reason is this.
We are not born into this world….. It is the world that is born in us.
What this means is that the world that appears so vividly to our senses is not an objective reality that exists independently of us in space. Instead, it is a subjective manifestation in consciousness that we have created and then learned to project outside of ourselves.
The entire universe that appears to surround us and dwarf us with its immense majesty and size, is actually a tiny microcosm that has been created within our own minds. The process of this creation begins from the time that we are born.
When a child first begins to experience the world, it does so in the form of a series of fleeting images. These images register upon the child’s consciousness, but they leave no trace at first in the child’s memory.
An infant’s attention is easily diverted from one object to another. As each new object is seen, it becomes the total focus of attention. No residue of the previous image remains, and the child has no recollection of the previous object.
As the young child grows, it learns not only to recognise images, by repeated observation and the faculty of memory, but also to objectify them – literally, to make “things” out of these images, and to project these things into a specific location in space.
We can get an idea of the way in which the young child learns to objectify images, from an unusual experiment that was conducted in 1896 by George Stratton, a professor at the University of California.
Stratton fitted himself with a pair of goggles with inverting lenses, which had the effect of turning everything upside down. At first, Stratton was extremely disoriented, as the objects that he was looking at were not only upside down, but appeared to float in space. As he wrote at the time:
“It did not feel as if I were visually ranging over a set of motionless objects, but the whole field of things swept and swung before my eyes.” 1
It took Stratton several days before this gyrating field of images began to stabilise, and he could begin to recognise objects located at specific points in his visual field. What Stratton had to learn to do, was to project these images into three-dimensional space, and then stabilise them there as solid-looking objects.
Henry Margenau and Lawrence LeShan call this ability, this talent for creating a “thing” out of a series of mental impressions, “reification”, based on the Latin term “res” meaning thing. 2
In his extensive research into the behaviour of infants, initially with his own children, and later at his Centre of Genetic Epistemology in Geneva, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget found that this process of reification takes place over a period of about two years from the time of birth.
During the first few months of life, the infant has no concept of objects. After several months, however, it becomes able to recognise images and follow them with its eyes. By six months, the infant can anticipate the future position of a moving image.
If it passes behind a screen, the infant turns its eyes towards the far side of the screen, and waits for the image to re-appear. If a baby is given a solid object, it will grasp and hold it. If this object is then taken away from it and hidden under a blanket in full view of the child, it will not attempt to find it.
For a child of this early age, any object that is out of sight is out of mind. It still leaves no permanent impression on the mind. It is as if the object simply ceased to exist. By the age of one year, however, the child has acquired a sense of permanence.
If an object is now hidden from its gaze, the child knows that the object still exists, and will try to find it. If it is unsuccessful, it will frequently burst into tears of frustration.
By the age of two years, the idea of physical permanence of objects in space is fully established, and the child begins to classify these objects into various categories, and to differentiate between itself and these other objects.
Because these names and the objects to which they are related are shared by all, the child comes to adopt a view of the world that is in common with the consensus view of its society. It is in this way that the child’s view of reality becomes a description of the world which is shared by the community.
The images and events which the young child learns to project and identify, are not only common to those around it, but are also “real” to the child concerned. This “reality” stems from the fact that these occurrences are not only things that are experienced by the child itself, but are also things which are experienced by others with whom it associates.
They become accepted as “real” because there is agreement on the nature and validity of these experiences among all members of that community. So, for example, I call an object “real” because I can see it and experience it, and because other people are able to see it and experience it in a similar fashion.
If I claim to see or experience something that is also seen or experienced by someone else, then, for the two of us, what was seen or experienced forms part of our shared “reality.” But if I see can something that my friend beside me cannot see, then we have a difference of opinion.
While in my opinion what I see is “real”, in the opinion of my friend it is “unreal”. If I am the only person who claims to see something, and all my friends are unable to see it, it is clear that what I claim to be “real” is out of step with their experience. If I wish to share their world, I have to learn to link my view of “reality” to theirs.
Common “reality” then, is purely a matter of consensus. Although I may personally be convinced that something that I see is “real”, it remains an individual experience, a personal hallucination, unless it can be shared by others. The larger the group that comes to share my experience, the more convincing is the proof of its “reality”.
Now the universe which the child comes to inhabit, and which nurtures its experience, is a world of objects bearing common names, and consists of events that are commonly experienced. This universe comes to be regarded as “real” by virtue of the consensual acceptance of the group to which the child belongs.
The child does not awaken to a world of outward objects that is uniform for all. Instead, it learns to create a universe of objects, referred to by commonly accepted names, and to interact with these objects in commonly accepted ways.
The child thus learns to create a world that matches the common description of its society.
As we have already seen, however, the universe that we believe to be real does not exist “out there” objectively in space, as something that is the common matrix of everyone’s experience.
Whatever we see, in fact, is what we project with our minds, and what we project with our minds is what we have learned to project, according to the beliefs of our society.
Our universe appears real to us and permanent, simply because we have become convinced that it is so. Our world has become so real and solid because we believe it to be real, and it is this conviction that has been confirmed by the opinion of others.
We are all, in fact, constantly reinforcing our description of the world every moment of our waking lives. Its reality is confirmed by our moment to moment conviction of this reality.
This vindication of experience, through the persistent belief that these experiences represent the true reality, is explained in the ancient Vedantic classic, the Tripura Rahasya, in the following way:
“One starts imagining something; then contemplates it; and by continuous or repeated association resolves that it is true unless contradicted. In that way, the world appears real in the manner one is used to it.” 3
The world appears so convincingly real to us as an objective reality because we have convinced ourselves, through a life-long process of conditioning, that it really is so. As Nisargadatta Maharaj points out:
“The world appears to you so overwhelmingly real because you think of it all the time; cease thinking of it and it will dissolve into thin mist.” 4
Similarly, the Yaqui man of knowledge, Don Juan Matus, describes the process by which we create our world of reality as follows: “We maintain our world with our internal talk”.
He explains further that “the world is such-and-such or so-and-so because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is. If we stop telling ourselves that the world is so-and-so, the world will stop being so-and-so.” 5
The world which we experience is not only maintained by our internal flow of thoughts, it is moulded by these thoughts, and so it comes to reflect a character in keeping with these thoughts. For as the Tripura Rahasya states:
“The world becomes for one whatever one is accustomed to think of it.” 6
Once we can grasp the idea that the world that appears so vividly to our senses has no objective reality, but is actually a series of subjective images in consciousness that we have learned to project outwardly into space, then we are ready to recognise that our life is like a dream.
And just as different people have different dream experiences, so not everybody around us shares our concept of the world, or experiences the world in exactly the same way that we do. It follows that a society which describes the universe in different terms will experience that universe in different ways.
The aboriginal peoples of Australia have learned to describe their universe according to a description that anthropologists have called “dream time”. According to this description, natural phenomena can be charged as power objects, which can then be utilised to fulfill desires.
The gulf that exists between western man and the animal kingdom does not exist for the Australian or the North American aboriginal. They are able to communicate freely and easily with all creatures, as well as with the spirits of those who are classified, according to the western description of the universe, as “dead”.
These differing descriptions of the universe have been investigated by cultural anthropologists, who have characterised them as primitive variations of the western model of reality.
But the experience of these differing world descriptions remains closed to outsiders. They are worlds in which the westerner cannot share, as long as he or she clings to the western cast of mind, or description of the world.
In order to participate in these other worlds, the westerner must be prepared to submit to the mental reformation necessary to attain a new view of the universe, couched in new descriptive terms. The westerner must literally be born again.
When Carlos Castaneda began his apprenticeship to the Yaqui sorcerer don Juan, he was forced to relearn his description of the world. It proved to be an agonising process, as anyone who has undertaken such a precarious venture will tell.
As Castaneda became increasingly committed to his new description, he became of necessity more and more remote from the world he had left behind. The challenge that confronted him, and which therefore called for an accomplished guide, was to retain his sanity while he oscillated between these two contradictory versions of the world.
His personality, which had hitherto been built upon interactions with a universe couched in western terms, had to be torn apart and rebuilt in an entirely new pattern of relationships.
The more Castaneda succeeded in adopting his new description of the world, the more he was obliged to alienate himself from the old. Judged from the standpoint of the western milieu, therefore, he was perceived to be an increasingly shadowy and inexplicable figure.
The more unpredictable his behaviour became in western terms, the more uncomfortable his former associates became. Since his behaviour continued to be judged according to the western convention of thought, it was hardly surprising that various articles and books came to be published portraying Castaneda as a fraud, and his mentor don Juan Matus as an imaginary figment of his imagination.
But in his adventure into the world of Yaqui sorcery, Castaneda had done more than adopt a new description of the world. In his success, he served to undermine the comfortable assurance of the uniformity of the western mould of reality.
Among his more perceptive readers, the awesome doubt began to grow that the accepted western image of the universe might not be as fixed and as assured as they had previously imagined.
It was inevitable therefore, that Castaneda’s works would be subject to a barrage of criticism, and his veracity and integrity impugned. For it is the mark of the conviction with which every society clings to its own description of the world, that prompts it to reproach another.
Those who most strongly defend their own view of reality are quickest to attack the claims of another, and in the most strident of terms. They rest their defence upon their knowledge of the known.
But the knowledge on which they base their concept of the world is fundamentally flawed. What they claim to be the foundation of true knowledge, has been moulded by their belief. The knowledge which they claim to be true is itself delusory. As Sri Dattatreya explained to his pupil Bhargava:
“The greatest of all delusions is the conviction that knowledge is not a delusion.” 7
Throughout its process of growth in the world, the young child is encouraged by every means available to conform to the accepted outlook of the world. The primary force in this moulding process is “love”.
Drawn naturally to its parents by this primal bond, the infant strives to match its behaviour to the expectations of its parents, on whom it is totally dependent for the satisfaction of its needs.
Throughout its long apprenticeship towards the accepted viewpoint of its society, the child is continually motivated to conform. The alternative is isolation, a prospect that is terrifying to the vulnerable child.
Meaning, in all life, stems from association. The stronger the child’s association is with those around it, the greater the meaning and satisfaction which those relationships provide.
The child is thus not moulded by circumstance alone, for it chooses to comply with the consensus view because of the very real emotional benefits which this compliance brings.
But the child pays a heavy price for this affiliation, for, in adopting the view of reality imposed upon it by its society, it almost always irrevocably limits its freedom to experience life in other ways. Much of the spontaneity and joy of youthful expression is surrendered.
The child succeeds in winning full membership of the adult group, but in so doing it sells its birthright of creative freedom. As the English poet William Wordsworth wrote:
“Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy.
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
(Ode – Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.)
(Continued in Part Two)
References
1 George Stratton, “Vision without inversion of the retinal image“, Psychological Review, Vol IV, No.4, 1897, p. 344.
2 Henry Margenau and Lawrence LeShan, “Einstein’s Space and Van Goch’s Sky“, Macmillan, New York, 1982, p. 58.
3 “Tripura Rahasya“, translated by Swami Saraswathi, Sri Ramanasramam, Tiruvannamalai, 1962, p. 100.
4 “I Am That“, Conversations with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, translated by Maurice Frydman, Book II, Chetana, Bombay, 1973, p. 276.
5 Carlos Castaneda, “A Separate Reality“, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1971, pp. 263-264.
6 “Tripura Rahasya“, op.cit., p. 88.
7 “Tripura Rahasya“, op. cit., p. 157.
April 13th, 2015 at 4:12 am
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