The Eye of the Mind – Part Three
In tracing the process of vision to its source, we have seen how energy is converted from one form into another until it finally reaches the visual centre of the cerebral cortex. At this point, however, our scientific knowledge ends and we are left with pure surmise.
Science has so far been unable to explain exactly how a mental image occurs in our brains. It is obvious that no image can occur unless there exists something in which, or on which, this image can appear. This base, or substratum, is consciousness itself.
When we say that we see something, what we are saying is that the image of that something registers upon our consciousness. If it didn’t, we could never become aware of it. But the central mystery of vision is preceded by an even greater mystery.
Not only has science been unable to explain how a mental image comes to appear in consciousness, but it has also been unable to say how consciousness itself arises.
If consciousness is regarded as the product of a physical process within the brain, as psychologists still maintain, then some part of the brain must obviously be responsible for its creation.
So far, however, no evidence of any source of consciousness has yet been found to exist within the brain, nor is there any accepted explanation to account for its appearance.
So great has been the conviction of science that a real, objective universe exists “out there” in space, that physicists, psychologists and biologists have simply accepted that sensory feedback of this outer world, somehow does come to be registered in consciousness.
The fact that scientists have thus far been unable to explain how this occurs, has not deterred them from believing that it does take place, although in some as yet unexplained manner. Until it is explained, however, this traditional scientific belief is simply an article of faith.
But there is a way out of the dilemma that has confounded scientists for so long. It is a way that mystics have been pointing out for untold ages. As the Sages have consistently revealed, the objects which appear to exist “out there”, do not in fact exist “out there” at all.
The truth is that there is nothing outside of us, and everything that we see and sense is contained within consciousness itself.
The only thing that can be said to exist is consciousness itself. Images appear in consciousness, and it is these images that are then projected outwardly, in a way that makes it seem as if there is an outer universe.
This conclusion is also supported by the vast body of evidence contained in dreams, hallucinations, and other “alternate” states. Charles Muses speaks for this conclusion when he says:
“A salient fact of modern brain research should be stated here: The brain is not the source of its own primary motivational impulses.” (Original italics) 1
Put in a nutshell, consciousness does not arise as a result of any physical process within the brain. It is the brain that exists in consciousness. In fact the entire physical body is itself a projection of consciousness.
It is not the neural activity of the brain which leads to thoughts in consciousness. It is the thoughts in consciousness which are revealed in the form of neural activity. The brain does not produce consciousness. It is consciousness which produces the image of the body, along with its apparent centre of intelligence, the brain. As Ramana Maharshi explains:
“Where is the brain? It is in the body. I say that the body itself is a projection of the mind. You speak of the brain when you think of the body. It is the mind which creates the body, the brain in it, and also ascertains that the brain is its seat.” 2
Science has not only been unable to explain the central mystery of thought and consciousness, but the latest insights into Quantum Mechanics have brought science to the brink of incoherence. Physicist Richard Feynman, himself a Nobel prize winner, has written;
“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” 3
His reason for saying this is because the entire science of Quantum Mechanics ultimately consists of nothing more than a series of mathematical equations. When physicists get together to discuss what these equations really mean, they encounter almost insuperable difficulties, due to the limitations of human language.
What this means is that these equations cannot accurately be explained in words (of any language). They are beyond intellectual analysis. But if what is “out there” cannot adequately be explained, and the process of perception itself cannot adequately be understood, then the wonderful world of science has been reduced to a droll impasse.
As was pointed out earlier, it was the University of California professor George Stratton who, in 1896, performed an experiment that has proved to be of central importance to this question of perception. He made a pair of goggles, fitted with inverting lenses, which had the effect of turning everything that was looking at upside down.
He personally carried out an experiment over a period of eight days, during which he wore these goggles for periods of up to thirteen hours a day. When he was not wearing these goggles, he was securely blindfolded, so that he did not revert to his former habit of seeing.
At first Stratton felt profound disorientation accompanied by considerable physical distress, as he tried to manoeuvre himself around his inverted world, in which his feet now appeared where the sky used to be. As he persisted, he began to feel a gradual affinity for his strange new world, and to move about it with increasing confidence.
It was on the fourth day of his experiment that an extraordinary thing happened. Instead of appearing upside down as it had done thus far throughout the experiment, the world suddenly appeared to Stratton to turn itself the “right way up” again.
As he continued with his experiment, these sudden reversions to the “normal” way of viewing the world occurred with increasing frequency. As he pointed out:
“It is certainly difficult to understand how the scene as a whole could even temporarily have appeared upright when the retinal image was not inverted.” (Original italics) 4
Yet Stratton claimed, this was precisely what happened.
In 1964, another experiment was performed by a man named Kohler, in which selected volunteers were fitted with special goggles incorporating right-angle prisms. These goggles maintained the world the right way up, but they reversed the retinal images from side to side, so that objects that used to be seen on the left now appeared on the right, and vice versa.
Kohler found, just as Stratton had discovered, that his subjects began to have sudden glimpses in which the images reverted to their “normal” setting. Variations also occurred within the scenes that subjects were viewing, so that some parts of the scene were “normal”, while other parts of the identical scene remained reversed. 5
The traditional viewpoint of science has been that images of actual objects in space are reflected upon the retina of the eye. Each one of the one hundred and thirty million photoreceptor cells located in the retina, then send tiny electrical impulses via the optic nerve to the thalamus, and from there to the visual portion of the cerebral cortex, where the complicated process of vision is believed to take place.
But if each photoreceptor cell continues to send a signal to the brain of just that part of the retinal image for which it is responsible, we must ask ourselves how the brain can possibly scramble an image from left to right, or from upside down to right side up again.
The brain is frequently thought of as a sort of super-computer, serviced by a network of different nerve cells, with each neuron responsible for sending its own unique signal.
But if the physical network of signals from the eye to the brain remains unchanged, then how is it that the resulting image is able to change?
This cannot be due to a change in the network of communication to the brain, for no change has taken place.
Instead, we are faced with the inevitable conclusion that the visual images are actually projections of the mind. So when the mind finds itself thwarted in its customary relationship with its environment, it merely rearranges the visual images to suit its needs.
The experiments of Stratton and Kohler have provided evidential proof of the projecting power of the mind, as the mystics have long taught.
It is the category of mental imagery known as hallucination, that remains the key to the understanding of the functioning of the mind. Hallucinations are not merely temporary aberrations of an unsound mind, in which unexpected images happen to overshadow “normal reality”. They are in fact beacons illustrating the true nature of “normal reality”.
What we call “normal reality” is actually a projection of the mind, and our day-to-day waking world is just as much a hallucination as the unexpected images which are passed off as ephemeral visions.
There is another clue which should help us to understand this fact. Whenever any form of hallucination supervenes upon the waking state, there is never any awareness of the onset of this new vision, nor when it ends. Awareness remains unbroken.
For this reason, people who experience hallucinatory visions in the course of their waking state remain firmly convinced that what they experienced at the time, was still “normal reality”.
When told that what they had experienced was illusory, they simply refuse to believe that what they saw “with their own eyes”, was not actually real. Their confusion remains perfectly understandable.
For if it is the function of our eyes to reflect what is actually “out there”, as we have been conditioned to believe, then what is seen by our eyes in the course of waking consciousness, is inevitably taken to be a true reflection of what actually is out there.
However, the value of hallucinatory experience, for those who have the wit to perceive it, lies in the recognition that our experience of the world is just another variation of images projected by our minds. As Aldous Huxley has affirmed:
“And the experience can be very liberating and widening in other ways. It shows that the world one habitually lives in is merely a creation of this conventional, closely conditioned being which one is, and that there are quite other kinds of worlds outside. It is a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is.” 6
The truth defies the age-old reliance that we have come to place upon our senses. For the majority of us, we simply cannot bring ourselves to believe that what we have for so long thought of as “reality”, may not in fact be real.
This is a hard road to travel, and it is a path that is invariably rejected by those who first encounter it. But the idea that what we see “out there” in space is actually a projection of our own minds, is a discovery that has the power to transform our lives.
For in this revolutionary insight, there lies hidden the key to true creative freedom. Those who find it gain the power to mould their own reality. They learn to write their will upon the world, and to emblazon their thoughts across the stars.
References
1 Charles Muses, “Paraphysics: A New View of Ourselves and the Cosmos“, in “Future Science”, edited by John White and Stanley Krippner, Anchor, New York, 1977, p. 283.
2 “Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi“, recorded by Swami Saraswathi, Sri Ramanasramam, Tiruvannamalai, 1968, p. 296.
3 Richard Feynman, “The Character of Physical Law“, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1967, p. 129.
4 George Stratton, “Vision without Inversion of the Retinal Image“, Psychological Review, Vol IV, No.4, 1897, pp. 341-360.
5 Charles Harris, “Perceptual Adaptation to Inverted, Reversed, and Displaced Vision“, Psychological Review, Vol.72, No.6, 1965, pp. 419-444.
6 Aldous Huxley, “Moksha – Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience”, edited by M. Horowitz and C.Palmer, Tarcher, Los Angeles, 1977, p. 178.
