Dear Friends,
September upon us, the white light of summer warming with the ripening of leaves, air here reminiscent of those early weeks of September last year before Helene stormed through and made her mark on these mountains, and our lives, I find my body reliving the before days, the days I was—perceptibly it seems now—wondering about perception, had been writing about it, in fact, when I woke on Wednesday before Helene hammered us on Friday, undeterred inner insistence urging, Get to higher ground. That same something knew not to doubt and not to wait. I was staying at the time in the van at the Outpost on the French Broad River.
That afternoon, I was to see B, my dear soul mother. I telephoned her around noon to say, “Let’s wait. I’m packing up the van and moving to higher ground, just in case it floods down here.” We postponed until the following week, but I felt a strange sadness when we ended that now endlessly brief call. We never spoke again. She died, brokenhearted, in Helene’s wake. Cardiac arrest.
On Tuesday, the birds had gone silent. I would later recall that I had reflected on this in my journal at sundown.
On Sunday, I had sat sipping wine on the then sunny banks of the French Broad with one of you who would bend toward me in a moment and profess a profound sense of foreboding about something forthcoming—unnamable, unsayable. There were tears. This was before Helene picked up a maelstrom of force.
There are things we know without knowing how we know, but we know, and we know that we know.
On that, I’ve pulled from the archives for today’s essay, which I have revised, having made of myself a text of phenomenological inquiry into perceptivity for the past year, and because it is leading us toward perceptivity as a faculty of the heart. As with all these letters and essays, I welcome your words of reflection on your experience, while being appreciatively aware that most of you wish to linger in silence. In whatever way these reflections stir you into wonderment, reflection, inner inquiry, whatever way they may test taken-for-granted ways of being and knowing, I am ever grateful to share Sundays with you for a few short moments on the page.
With love,
Renée
A (Primer) Wonderment on Perception
While I was walking by the river on Wednesday on a dirt path flanked with towering heights of milkweed in bloom, goldenrod and jewelweed bushy on the bank down to the water’s edge, honeybees hovering intoxicated on all the blooms, one bee touched down to the ground beneath the looming shadow of my next step. And in one sweeping motion, we both changed course, the bee and I together avoiding the end of the bee.
The bee’s sudden shift and mine were not due to the bee or me thinking “Change course! Now!” Such thought occurred after the fact, and ostensibly, in me.1 Was the bee at the mercy of a perceptivity we share? If this is so, and we don’t know, what is perception?
“Perception is man’s primary form of cognitive contact with the world around him.”2
These are the opening words of a paper delivered at a conference on the Philosophy of Science in 1966. When I wrote this essay a year ago, I said these words reveal a long-held empiricist, i.e., outside-looking-in “objective” view of perception, which privileges cognition as conception and the way we know the world and our place in it. Since then, I have begun to wonder. Was the author of this paper, neurophysiologist Robert Efron, intimating a much broader view of perception than the taken-for-granted worldview of science? He would add that “the study of perception has always had a unique significance for philosophy and science” and tell of (scientifically) difficult-to-explain phenomena of perception.3
This “objective” view maps perception across neural coordinates. Mapped out, it looks like this:
stimulus » sensation » perception » conception » response
This view, we were taught in school. Here, sensation is raw neural data from a stimulus, such as lightwaves tickling the rods and cones (photoreceptors) in the eye. These lightwave data have no meaning. They may not be registered, even. Imagine if every hint of sensation were to be registered in awareness!
When sensation does capture awareness, the sensation is perceived. A change in light occurs, perhaps the appearance of a shadow. It is the awareness of the sensation that is its perception.
Conception follows, giving us an idea of what the sensate impression is—a darkening, perhaps from cloud passing overhead, a tree falling.
Now comes a response, which might be relief from the harshness of the midday sun by the hovering cloud. It might be terror that the tree is falling overhead and coming toward you. Depending, the response might be to drop back into the weight of you and enjoy a moment’s repose in the shade. It might be to run. Now!
In this view, contact with the world is plotted across a (linear) map of neural coordinates. The path from stimulus leads to the brain and from the brain, fans out into e/motion. In neurophysiology, this is referred to as the sensory-motor pathway.
We have learned much about the body and human psychology from this perspective. And while these pathways may be true to a certain extent, the outsider view gives us a wholly material, linear, and time-bound image of perception.
It also privileges conception as the moment when consciousness occurs. E/motion seems to be a response to what is conceived. And perception is a byway somewhere en route from sensation to conception. We still don’t know where it is. Nor do we recognize it as a way of knowing, absent any concepts of what is known, i.e., the bodily felt sense of, I almost stepped on that bee!
The bee and I already and instantaneously knew this and moved, absent any concept. My inner experience of seeing the bee change course tells me this is so. My inner rush of feeling before recognizing tells me this is so.
The outsider’s view does little to reveal what we ourselves experience already about a vital process of meaning-making as living bodies in a world of living bodies who perceive, too.
Aristotle paved the way for the outsider’s view. Surely, he did so inadvertently, and as a product of early rational thought itself. For Aristotle, perception came into being with the evolutionary coming into being of the animal domain. Believing all life is ensouled, but endeavoring to discern what distinguishes one domain from another, Aristotle said that what separates the animal soul from the plant soul is perception, emotion, and movement (i.e, from this place to that). And what distinguishes the human from all the rest is the rational soul.4
Consciousness studies of plants now tell us that perception is just as vital to plant life as it is to animal life. Plants perceive our touch and release chemicals in response, but they have no nervous system per se. Plants perceive changes in temperature and moisture, the harshness of wind, and respond by becoming more phytochemically robust. Plants face the sun in the morning and follow it across the sky until it descends at day’s end, albeit rooted in one place. Plants respond favorably to our affection toward them, without touch between us. That they respond to us suggests they must surely possess the essential attributes of perceiving, but by what means?
A teeming world of single-celled microbes responds to changes in the immediate milieu and synchronizes their behavior(s), all at once. What does such quorum sensing say of where perception can be found? In the organism? In the world?
These insights challenge Aristotle’s understanding of perception, revealing that it might be more originary to and permeating life than an attribute of the animal domain and not before, which points to something here we mustn’t overlook. For Aristotle, wonder about perception rose up out of wonder about soul. He began with the belief that all life is imbued with a vital force that enlivens and precedes it. For Aristotle, this force is soul, coming forth with manifest expression through life itself. It is originary, primordial.
The basis, then, for perceiving would seem to be the inner experience of being alive. We are aware that we are alive in the world. And in perceiving that we are alive, we just as soon become aware that the world is alive in us.
We begin to glimpse that from within, perception is not a byway so much as it is the experience of livingness across the whole of us, life grasping the experience of itself as a vital, expressive force, perception as body and world in the immediacy of meaning-making unity.5 Conception is not the central player in this way of knowing.
Gatherings in Silence
The 1st & 3rd Sunday of every month at 12 pm ET.
Someone asked recently, “What do you do in these Gatherings in Silence?”
In keeping with the premise that “Silence is the essential condition for intimate [and inner] work,”6 in these twice-monthly gatherings, we come together to meet one another in Silence without the need to speak to fill a void. We meditate for half an hour with Silence as a companion presence. On the 1st Sunday of each month, we have a reflective conversation, our words surfacing from open and spacious pauses, not unlike a Quaker meeting, revealing what is alive in the present moment.
These gatherings are an online sanctuary from the noise of the world and a homecoming to presence.
All are welcome.
If you would like to join and have questions, please email me: reneeeliphd[AT]gmail[DOT]com.
To keep the sanctuary an intimate experience, ‘seats’ are limited. Please email me for the Zoom link.
Inner-Life Work in the Spirit of Anam Cara
Notes & References
Where thoughts take place could be debated as not in me but in the field between two beings in relation. The phenomenological “where” of thought is for another exploration, but a good place to begin is David Bohm, Thought as a System (New York: Routledge, 1992).
R. Efron, “What is Perception?” in Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science 1966/1968. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 4., eds. R.S. Cohen, M.W. Wartofsky, (Dordrecht: Springer, 1969), pp. 137–173.
Ibid., p. 137.
Aristotle, de Anima, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, 1907).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).
Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2002), p. 284.
"There are things we know without knowing how we know, but we know, and we know that we know."
In service to practicing "...perceptivity as a faculty of the heart", I reread your in-the-now prequel to your revised archival letter.
In the first read I was delivered back to August 19-20, 1969, when Hurricane Camille raged through Nelson County, Virginia. I was 15 years old. My grandmother stopped by our house in the early evening on her way home from shopping to enlist my services as driver and general support for the myriad chores awaiting attention. I was blissfully ignorant of what the first light rain bands portended.
I was called to the second read and, thus, was opened to deep feelings of sadness and loss--grief; feelings that could only be experienced in depth, in retrospect.
I recall different moments throughout the night as she tore past, storm-after-deadly storm. Moments of recognition that whatever was happening was part of a reality stretching beyond the scope of my immediate experience, beyond anything I had ever imagined.
When the rain stopped and the sun came out, news filtered in of the devastation--the death toll, the irreparable damage done to my family and the families who were part of the neighboring communities, the actual reshaping of the earth, the land I always felt as sacred, though I wouldn't have known to call it that at 15. It was days, weeks, months, years before we saw the extent of the wreckage left in the Camille's track.
The event far exceeded the boundaries of what I had previously perceived as family. Your words fleshed out a seminal event in my life, offering a chance to fully appreciate it as such--a living moment of perceptivity as a faculty of the heart.
As always, dear Renée, love and thank you.
Thank you, Renee.