Slowly but surely, we have been pecking away at the nature and causes of awakening. Today we shall consider the concept of unfiltered vision. We should always remember that our inherent tendency to view the world through the lens of duality is the greatest culprit in preventing us from experiencing our already enlightened state.
In high school science class, we were taught a simple model of the atom: a dense nucleus at the center, surrounded by orbiting electrons. You probably remember the diagram. It’s useful for introducing the basic components and their roles. But later, when a deeper understanding is needed, that model gets completely blown out of the water.
Let’s take a play out of Bill Nye’s playbook and do something similar. Let’s consider an imperfect analogy that will be useful to us—until it’s not.
Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting—an imperfect model:
So what are the components of our imperfect model? Let’s say that there are two aspects of reality. There is the manifest, which is the world as we experience it. This includes everything you can see and touch, as well as our thoughts and emotions. It’s everything that’s been turned into something.
On the other side, we have what is commonly referred to as the transcendent. This one is a bit more slippery. It is the state from which everything emerges—but even that is misleading, because it’s not a physical place. Rather, it is a condition of total, raw potentiality. It has no form, no time, no objects. Nothing has happened there. Thus, it is transcendent. Transcending what? Transcending form, identity, time, structure.
Between these two aspects of reality, there’s a hypothetical dividing line. For the sake of this analogy, imagine it as the lens of a film projector. It takes pure, undefined light and renders it into form. That lens also has a filter—this is the ego, or the sense of a separate self. It doesn’t just shape the light; it collapses it into something definite, then labels it.
Ok, so now all the players have been laid out on the board. Just as with the atom in high school, we have a very basic model of reality—only ours resembles the classic yin/yang symbol. Now, let’s recall from earlier: our inherent tendency to view the world through the lens of duality is the greatest culprit in preventing us from experiencing our already enlightened state.
Unfiltered vision: pure perception
Well, it’s pretty clear from our model where the problem lies. We have this ego lying smack dab at the dividing line. It’s like a tinted film over a spotlight—casting a hue upon everything that appears in front of it. This takes the old adage about seeing the world through rose-colored glasses and turns it up to eleven.
And so we can see why nearly all of our practices are geared toward recognizing and reducing the influence of the ego. The light that shines through from the transcendent is pure. It is the presence of the ego that colors it. If the bias of the ego can be purified, we stand a fighting chance at seeing the true nature of reality. This is unfiltered vision. We are not eliminating the ego. We are rendering the filter transparent—dialing it down to zero—until the filter forgets that it is tinted.
So what have we gained today? How does any of this help us? Well, to some extent, we’ve isolated the problem. G.I. Joe used to offer a public service announcement: “Knowing is half the battle.” Alas, perhaps saying half the battle is being slightly optimistic. But the understanding we’ve gained offers a lot of perspective. And these are exactly the targets we’re aiming for—perception and perspective.
Let’s end with a bold and poetic statement: Enlightenment may reveal itself to us when perception merges back into the perceived. What this points to is the elimination of the illusion of duality. Yet what we’ve discussed today involves duality upon duality. So let’s address this in our next lesson, where we’ll begin to blow up the imperfect model of today’s lesson as well.
Thanks again, science—as if my cup weren’t already runnething over!
(Kidding. Mostly. I’m looking at you, Science Guy.)
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