What You Consume, Changes What You See
Everything is starting to change. This challenge is rapidly altering my perception of my experiences. Bland foods are beginning to taste less bland. I’m picking up the sweetness in broccoli and even the saltiness of a ½ teaspoon across 3-4 lbs of beans and vegetables, while grapes have become a small explosion of flavor. I’m even looking forward to the morning smoothies!
I find myself wondering why I’ve resisted this for so long. Gas is the biggest downside. I’ve become an absolute biological trumpet, but it takes time for our bodies to adjust to 4x the amount of fiber. My gut microbiome is building a brand new civilization down there.
But it’s far more than the diet! The hour of meditation and reading is dramatically altering my thought patterns, and the world is beginning to look different. Yes, visually. Colors seem to be popping more. Shiny stuff seems shinier, and soft stuff seems softer. It might sound crazy, but it should come as no surprise.
We have a limit to our attentional bandwidth, and when the majority of that is taken up by being lost in thought, we simply aren’t as plugged in to the here and now. It goes even deeper.
Every perception is shaped by conception. Most of us imagine that the way we perceive the world is separable from our ideas and concepts, but this isn’t really true. The Muller-Lyer illusion, and the way it’s seen differently between cultures is a lovely, empirical example of this, but I can think of a few of my own.
I was standing in the bathroom with Paige, while we were brushing our teeth, and she pointed to the fact that my “arm is, like, twice as big” as hers. I’m like, “noOo.” So we put them side by side, and she was about right! I just never think of myself like that. There are little dogs that imagine themselves to be larger than life and big dogs that imagine themselves to be lap dogs.
Maybe that’s too loose of an example. Here are some more: While meditating, I laid on Paige’s leg, placing my attention on the gravity and enormity of my head, feeling the contact pressure as if I were a boulder sitting on a squishy little sponge. Now, I do have an exceptionally large head, but if I had kept my attention here, I could have become bothered by the sensation of the pressure itself. Or I can move beyond that, to the sensation of the vibrational buzzing surrounding my head, lightening the load.
Here’s another one! While meditating, you’re inclined to imagine that you’re experiencing behind your face, inside your skull. But you can move beyond that, realizing that the sensation of face and skull, themselves, rest within the appearances of consciousness.
Everything that occurs within consciousness is an impression. They are perceptions shaped by conception. This realization is life changing, because we identify, more than anything, with that pesky little inner monologue griping about this and wanting this or that. But it too is merely an appearance in consciousness, as subject to modification and regulation as anything else, if we only take the time to sculpt it.
These judgments are just appearing; they are not reality. These worries are just appearing; they are not reality. The present lays bare the absolute ridiculousness of our striving and clinging.
If we only stop acting a role and step back to watch the show, we’ll realize it was just a play all along.
