the knot of perception

Daniel Ingram talks about "untying the knot of perception." Shinzen Young says "untangle and be free." There is an evocative metaphor implied in there about what it is about perception that the work of insight is targeting. But what is this metaphor about? What is the knot of perception? Perhaps understanding the problem better can help one focus on more efficient solutions.

Here are a couple of ideas.

- the perceptual gestalt of mind/body sensations

A perceptual gestalt is the implicit way sensations seem to be related to each other (e.g. tiny.cc/jc2x7 ). By default, distinct mind/body sensations are presented to awareness as if they are parts of a unified whole, which we call "self". An itch usually does not just feel like a free-floating sensation in space, but rather it feels a smaller part of a larger thing, the self. Similar gestalts can be found all throughout experience-- e.g. a car's tire is usually not perceived as just a tire, but as inherently a part of or belonging to the car as a whole.

By turning attention to the individual sensations making up the sense of mind/body, perhaps the gestalt sense of self is gradually eroded away. An itch may feel like just another sensation floating freely in space-- likewise for feelings, mental images, etc.-- without the additional sense of belonging to some unified whole. Perhaps this is part of what is indicated by the saying "in the seen just the seen, the heard just the heard, ...", i.e. sensations are experienced just as they are with an attenuated or eliminated sense of gestalt.

- identification of subject/object

Visual and auditory sensations are usually experienced by default as objects of awareness. However, mind/body sensations are usually not presented to awareness as objects. e.g. when one experiences a thought, a sense of "object-hood" is usually not attendant to the experience of the thought. Perhaps this phenomenological lack of object-hood for mind/body sensations is part of what makes them seem like the subject.

In any case, there is a sense in which the sense of subject of awareness-- that thing to whom all contents of experience are presented, that which experiences phenomenal qualities-- is "tangled up" with mind/body sensations. There is a sense in which the subject of awareness and mind/body sensations seem to be identical.

Perhaps one undoes this subject/object knot by objectifying mind/body sensations with vipassana. Objectifying them gives them a sense of object-hood, in turn attenuating or eliminating their sense of subject-hood. Because all contents of awareness can be objectified, none can be identified with the subject, thus altering the structure of experience.

What are your ideas on what is meant by "the knot of perception"?

"What are your ideas on what is meant by "the knot of perception"?"

From a Theravada point of view, untangling the knot is what vipassana is all about. One first gains insight into they way in which the basic components* of experience are naturally differentiated and arise due to conditions (mind & body and cause & effect). And then it's all about gaining deeper insight into this conditionality by noticing the three characteristics. In so doing, one may greatly diminish (and eventually remove) the clinging to phenomenal experience by dispelling the delusion that any part of our experience is I/Me/Mine. So, fully untying the knot of perception is simply taking vipassana to its end.

In the Rinzai school of the Zen tradition, one unties the knot through koan training. In this sense, it's not so much about examining the components of experience, but rather about transcending artificial dualities that divide the mind and cause delusion and suffering. As each koan is solved, the knot continues to loosen until duality is transcended completely.

In some tantric forms of Buddhism (of which I am least familiar), one is taught to visualize a deity with all of the perfected qualities of a Buddha. And then one is to merge with the deity to reveal in some way that the Buddha qualities are already fully present within them - they've just been covered up by ignorance. One discovers their true nature, and the delusion that they were ever less than that is dispelled.

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Those are just a few examples that came to mind. The basic point is that prior to taking up some kind of insight practice, we don't see things realistically. Through training, our mis-perceptions are cleared away. With the end of delusion (or duality) comes freedom.

*Traditionally, these components are the Five Aggregates: form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. Shinzen Young simplifies the traditional teaching by instructing students to notice feel, image, and talk.

Great question and great exposition in reply.

I always envision what Jackson said as a weird little scenario, within which every object is embedded with attributes from our perceptive process. Pieces of the object include its pure/self nature (what it is before mind gets hold of it), the name mind gives it, the "like/dislike/neutral" judgement mind puts on it, and so on This is, of course, dependent origination. So the untying of this knot is the ability to deconstruct these pieces of each object and see each as a separate part of the perceptive process chain.

I've posted several times my first experience* of this, and I consider that to be a seminal point in my practice, after which things seemed to accelerate on their own.

* This first experience happened while I was sitting outside one day and heard the loud, nearby chirping of a bird. The process of perceiving that object somehow got deconstructed and I could see these pieces, each individually, and voila! dependent origination was manifest. The knot of perception had been untied.

Thanks for the helpful replies. I'm not very up on my Buddhist philosophy. It might be instructive to translate what the five aggregates and dependent origination are supposed to be in terms of common language and/or western empirical psychology. I've got a working grasp of those terms that could probably be improved. But perhaps that's a topic for another thread.

So mostly what I'm trying to get at is a positive, direct characterization of the "knot" itself. Something that you could point to directly in normal experience and say "this."

I gather that the "knot" is really just the familiar topic of the sense of "self" normally existent in experience before extensive vipassana training. Is that right? If so, this is an interesting metaphor. What do we mean exactly (in a phenomenological sense) by the sense of self, and what is knot-like about it?

The discussion so far seems to be leaning towards the gestalt view of self, where "self" is the experience of a coherent whole in experience, of which mind/body sensations are parts. (Very much the same way that e.g. here, tiny.cc/syihe , there seem to be 4 groups or "wholes" composed of dots, even though this experience is clearly an arbitrary concoction of the mind; there is nothing that inherently delineates 4 distinct groups of dots here.) This gestalt may operate in structure (e.g. the cross-modality experience of self involving tactile sensations, mental images, internal speech, etc.) as well as in dynamics (the temporal succession of processes in experience, dependent origination).

(con't)

The work of vipassana, then, is to re-frame experience so as to emphasize the part-like nature of experience rather than its most basic whole ("self"). By paying careful attention to each component of experience in turn, the arbitrary or constructive-like nature of the gestalt self is attentuated. (Extending the metaphor above, one might be careful to note that in the image there are "just" dots, and the visual experience of distinct groups of dots is in a sense arbitrary and could be abandoned. One might even say that to see distinct groups of dots is delusion or ignorance.)

In a sense, one is reverting the felt gestalt sense of "superposition" into a felt sense of mere "juxtaposition". Rather than the components of experience being superimposed into the sense of this one big thing ("self"), the components of experience are felt as merely existing side-by-side without any inherent sense of unification; they are no longer superimposed, just juxtaposed. A visual metaphor would be going from this:

tiny.cc/360sw

to this:

tiny.cc/jdrc0

The "knot of perception", on this take, would just be this gestalt sense of self, this feeling of the whole that seems to bind the parts of the mind/body into one coherent entity. It is knot-like just to the extent that it seems to bind together and unify distinct components of experience.

Does that sound right? Anything to add / subtract / modify?

Subtract! To whit ---

"So mostly what I'm trying to get at is a positive, direct characterization of the "knot" itself. Something that you could point to directly in normal experience and say "this." "

I think I'm probably not communicating this very well. It's always tempting to make these things complicated and introduce philosophy as if it was a necessary part of the process. I'm sorry I used the term "dependent origination" because I think it threw you off.

I'm a huge fan of Occam's Razor, so this is very simply about deconstructing the process of perception. This is most easily and effectively accomplished with simple objects like sound, at least in my experience. But it would work on any object, including the sense of self, although that's a much more complex object to work with and thus the pieces would be much harder to watch as they occur.

Simply put, everything (objects) you perceive is comprised of little pieces that get assembled to make what you accept as a thing by habit or convention, almost all of these pieces are added to the original, natural or "pure" thing itself by the human mind's processing. You can see those parts being added or assembled if you pay close attention, especially if you can find a simple object that repeats periodically so that you can observe the process through many iterations. Analyze, for example, the ringing of a chime or a bell.

It won't hurt you to know what dependent origination is conceptually, but it's far, far better for your practice to see it in action

BTW, while a lot of special emphasis is put on the self in Buddhism, and for good reason, at the end of the day the self is.... an object! If you can deconstruct a sound you can deconstruct any object. This is why I said my practice really took off after seeing this process play out. Once you can see the process happening it becomes easier and easier with practice and the implications are enormous. If what I see going on with the chirp of a bird is true (and it is) then, holy crap, Batman, that's what I am, too!

See what I mean?

The stuff I've talked about so far is in the purview of my experience. I'm not asking for a substitute for practice here, just exploring some ideas / metaphors about the practice. Here's another rub-- I can't tell you if I've seen dependent origination in action if I don't know what dependent origination is conceptually. But the stuff you're talking about resonates with some stuff I have come across, yeah.

So if I understand you, what you subtract from my last posts is just that the "knot of perception" is particular to the self? There are, of course, many perceptual gestalts in experience that do not pertain directly to the self per se. Perhaps these are all "knots" of a sort.

For instance, my eyes move and they settle on a dog. The visual image of the dog is evocative of some positive encounters with other, similar-looking dogs I've had in the past. On top of the raw visual image of the dog, there is a diffuse sense of character or "good-dog-ness" to the dog informed by these evocations, so it looks friendly and inviting. There arise pleasant sensations in the stomach and abdomen. There is a felt intention to approach the dog and pet it. There are visual images and bodily feelings simulating what it would be like to approach and pet the dog. Then there are kinesthetic and tactile sensations as I carry out my intentions. All that happens in the space of a few seconds and normally feels like one big chunk of experience-- all those components are superimposed onto what seems like one unit of experience, a kind of gestalt ("knot"). But if I were practicing vipassana I could see all these things arise, know them as distinct components of experience, and thus experience them as juxtaposed in structure and dynamics rather than superimposed. That would be like untying the knot of perception. Is that consistent with what you're saying?

Another metaphor for the untying of the knot, from AugustLeo's spiritual autobiography:

"In a way, it was similar to when someone learns to '˜see' the Magic Eye 3D optical illusion. The jumbled mess of images suddenly clarifies into a 3D image that was there the whole time but just couldn't be seen, no matter how exactly the written instructions were followed or how much effort was exerted. "

kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/page/The+...iritual+Autobigraphy

Great points, Brian. The questions you ask are pretty ambitious. They presage what will one day be possible as modern neuropsychological concepts are gradually integrated with the experiential realization of prajna and buddhadharma. You're right that it's very interesting how the perceptual channels of kinesthesis and (the aptly named) proprioception tend to be experienced as 'subject' while visual and auditory channels tend to be associated with 'other' or 'object'. Of course, that all gets very murky very quickly. There are, after all, not really hard and fast rules for where the boundary of 'subject' and 'object' will be drawn for any given individual. A master painter with 30 years of disciplined practice might not experience the visual field as 'object' to the same extent that I (a visually unskilled person) tend to do. Anyway, your questions are compelling, and I think that in the coming decades these questions will lead to advances in how theory and practice of prajna-realization is taught.

As to the 'knot of perception', my sense is that it is not any one particular gestalt. Rather it is the very act of 'gestalting' itself. This, I think, is what Chris is teaching in his above posts. The five skandhas--or 'aggregates' or 'bundles' (or 'knots' actually)--are the constituent aspects of the totality of sentient experience. What you are calling the 'gestalt of self' is a subset of sentient experience. In other words, the Buddhist conception of 'self' is more inclusive than the 'self' of modern psychology (probably subsumed within the 5th skandha: consciousness').

The knot of perception seems to be the process by which any and all gestalts are generated within the field of sentience. That is why realization can be successfully cultivated through any of the perceptual channels.

A conceptual understanding that might push the limits of mind and go somewhere towards bringing the knot undone like a Koan is this dialogue from the Matrix. (I think this is where tomotvos got his inspiration for "There is no spoon").

"If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain "

"I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it."

"I know *exactly* what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

" Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?"

www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/quotes

Brian, what does your mind do before you think you want to pet the dog? What does your mind do the nanosecond your eyes come in contact with the image of the dog? I do think you are starting to see what I'm getting at but the really important part of the process happens very early in the experience, before you even see a "dog."

Make sense?

Yes, I believe I know what you mean. I have had visual experiences that just seem like mixtures of shape and color without (or with a greatly attenuated sense of) an attendant experience of object categorization and recognition. This is sort of like the experience of semantic satiation for words ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation ).

I do not typically experience this though. When I am paying careful attention to the process of perception, the first salient thing I notice about a new percept is what it is, i.e. there is not an experience of first seeing raw sensations that only some small time later are interpreted as an object. Immediately after there is a subtle, whispy sense of evocativeness to the thing, the ways in which this thing is evocative of similar things I have experienced. This becomes something like an abstract, overall felt sense of the quality of the thing (like the "good-dog-ness" in my previous example, or the sense of overall character that you get from seeing a person-- this sense of character is for instance what is grossly exaggerated in caricatures). There may be further subtle feelings about the object which are basically reflexive, automatic evaluations, like e.g. whether it is significant or meaningful, whether it conforms to or violates expectation, whether something seems right or wrong or strange or new about it, etc. There may be a feeling of liking/attraction or disliking/aversion. All that takes hold in the space of about a second. Only after that are intentions formed and executed.

Yes. It's all automatic. You have no choice in it. You are... just along for the ride