Scrolling through some old notes, I stumbled across one that really stuck out to me. A man, who is not a guru and whose name I wish I’d written down, was explaining how we perceive and engage with our surroundings and with one another. He was saying we create in our minds sufficiently useful low representations of the world. The thing you see in front of you, or the person with whom you are speaking, is almost always a representation that is a consequence of your memory. Instead of looking at the thing itself, you look at the thing you assume to be there. The thing you see in front of you is almost always much richer than your apprehension of it. There’s always more there than meets the eye, and God only knows how much more there is.
The preceding is my insufficient representation of the thing he actually said. The point he was making goes much deeper, but my memory seems only capable of apprehending this much. On one level, what he is saying is obviously true. We are constantly bombarded by stimuli. We can’t take the time to fully appreciate each thing, each moment we experience. We rely on our memory to apprehend and put the moment in context, and then we move on to the next. But, of course, in doing so, we could be skipping past so much.
The thing you see in front of you is almost always much richer than your apprehension of it. Sometimes, as we’re stuffing mundane moments into sufficiently useful low representation boxes, a glimpse of the richness slips through. Here’s another note I made: Sometimes, the thing you thought you were conversing with is not the thing you thought, and that manifests itself in error, and that’s where you get the transcendent.
Clearly, my notes were insufficiently useful to bring that last point into clarity. But I guess what he was saying is that sometimes, either purposely or by chance, we experience the depth of a thing, or something novel about it breaks our cartoonish memory of the thing, and the resulting experience is transcendent.
I feel like I didn’t nail down that last part. But one thing that seems clear is that if we stopped relying so heavily on our memory of things to make sense of the world, and started letting the richness emerge, it would literally feel like a transcendent experience. How often do we put people and experiences in boxes and write them off as purely one dimensional representations that we’ve encountered many times before? Not to mention, what are we doing to ourselves when we look at the thing we assume to be there instead of trying to apprehend it more fully? There’s always more than meets the eye, and God only knows how much more there is.
If there is something 