The Objective Mechanism of Perception
Topics:
“The Objective Mechanism of Perception”
“Projecting Awareness”
“The Factor of Importance”
“Awareness and the Thought Mechanism”
“The Influence of Associations”
“Redefining Work as Playing a Game”
Session 20070101 (2162)
“The Objective Mechanism of Perception”
“Projecting Awareness”
“The Factor of Importance”
“Awareness and the Thought Mechanism”
“The Influence of Associations”
“Redefining Work as Playing a Game”
Monday, January 1, 2007 (Private/Phone)
Participants: Mary (Michael) and Anon/Cyrus
ELIAS: Good day!
ANON: Good day, Elias. (Elias chuckles) I’ll just jump right into it.
ELIAS: Very well.
ANON: My girlfriend was talking to me earlier today, and we talked in the past and she has some sort of connection with Sylvia Plath. And I was wondering, is that a past life thing? Is that she’s observing essence, that sort of thing? Is there anything more you could tell me about that? Just something to tell her.
ELIAS: Observing. That would be a situation of an observing essence.
ANON: I’m sorry?
ELIAS: That would be an observing essence role.
ANON: Oh. Okay. Interesting. And then I was also going to ask about… There’s this billboard when I’m driving to my parents’ house, and this blonde woman holding a baby, and for some reason that makes me think of… I don’t know, like that I had a past life, something to that effect. Because when I see movies with this lady, Gwyneth Paltrow, I think there’s something to do with me there. Am I correctly interpreting my impression there?
ELIAS: Yes. You have incorporated other focuses with that individual.
ANON: Okay. Interesting. All right. And back in… I don’t know, it was probably like March or February of last year I had this impression that I had only seven more years to live. And again, am I…? Did I get that right? Was I interpreting that…? Within probabilities, of course.
ELIAS: Within the probabilities in that time framework, yes, your impression was correct. I would express that it has altered in subsequent time, but in that time framework in association with the probabilities that you were creating then and the direction that you were engaging then, yes, that was a correct impression.
ANON: Interesting. All right. Let’s see. I’m going to ask about… Well, in general, I’ve been reading about this thing, general semantics, lately and it’s got me quite excited in terms of its application. I’ll ask first, I had this experience when I was walking to my car from work, and I think I was trying to observe myself on the outside of my body, just like Oh, what do I look like when I’m walking? And I popped out and suddenly I was… I felt like I was up in the sky, but I don’t really feel like I have a particular viewpoint. And everything felt…Again, this was really like everything felt like machinery, and it was just the most freeing thing I can imagine. And I just wondered what in the hell that was.
ELIAS: That was an actual projection. When you project your awareness away from your body consciousness, you create what many individuals term to be an astral body. In actuality, it is merely a configuration of your energy, and you as being essentially you—the awareness of yourself, objective and subjective. And you can project those awarenesses outside of your physical body consciousness, and the body consciousness will continue to function for a time framework without the interaction of the objective and subjective awareness—not indefinitely, but for a time framework. And in that, you experience quite differently, for you are not experiencing yourself in attachment of your identity with your actual body consciousness.
Now; as I have expressed previously, your body consciousness is not merely a vessel. It is not what you would term to be a shell that houses you. It is actually a projection of you into a physical form. Just as any other physical form within your reality, they are also configurations of energy that are extensions of you and formed into actual matter in physical manifestations. But when you remove your awareness from the body consciousness, you experience yourself somewhat differently, for you recognize that you can also be independent of that physical manifestation and that your existence is not actually dependent upon that physical form, that physical manifestation. Which is also significant, for in generating this type of experience, it offers you information in relation to your actual existence itself, that your existence is not dependent upon physical, that you exist regardless of whether you are generating a physical manifestation and participating in a physical reality or not.
ANON: Let me ask another question in line with that. And I guess it’s kind of two questions, but we’ll see if I don’t forget the second part before you answer the first part. (Elias laughs) Again, looking at things through this point of view of, again, general semantics, that there’s an intentional, definitional view of things, and then there’s the actual view of things, which is wildly different in many cases. So, this whole definition of people that I’m looking at, like I’m seeing bodies and I’m like, “Oh, there’s a person.” And it’s very difficult to do, but I’ve succeeded in doing it with certain subjects, I guess, but looking at actual examples of people and lives and how they work out, and there’s really nothing… there’s no real person out there; there’s just various things that I would classify as such. And so, does essence intend to create people? Is it inherent in consciousness that we sort of blur all these different experiences together and say, “Oh, those are people,” instead of being able to look at things individually and say, “Well, this one was born with a certain cell configuration, they lived for a certain amount of time, they died in a car accident, and this one was a mutant, and this one…”? All these different things that we call humans, is there any sort of fundamental intention of consciousness that wants to create these concepts that we then react to?
ELIAS: You as essence, as consciousness, choose to participate in many different types of explorations. And in those explorations, dependent upon the type of exploration, you configure energy quite specifically, and you generate identifications for different expressions of the reality that you create to generate certain general and certain specific guidelines. As to your example, you view within your environment many different individuals, and are they actually individuals? Yes, they are actually energies that are configured in alignment with the blueprint of this particular reality—of which this is merely ONE reality—but in alignment with the guidelines and the blueprint of this reality, you all configure your energies in a manner that conforms with that blueprint, or you do not choose to participate in the particular reality.
But as you ARE participating in this particular reality, you have chosen to be exploring what you can generate and how you can manipulate within this particular reality in conjunction with its guidelines. You project energy, which creates a physical manifestation that incorporates a specific form which you identify as yourself. Other essences generate the same action.
And in that, the key element is the objective mechanism of perception. For what you are actually doing is projecting energy. You each project energy to each other, and in the RECEIVING of the energy – not in the projecting of it, but in the receiving of it – each individual configures that energy into solid manifestations. Therefore, you view the solid manifestation of another individual with a particular eye color and hair color and a particular form, a particular height and weight. In this, the other individual is projecting an energy to you with that information, and you configure immediately the energy that you have received to generate the manifestation of the other individual in association with what you have received, which occurs instantaneously.
This is also a magnificent example of the tremendous power that you each incorporate, for you do these actions with no thought and no effort. You immediately receive and configure energy and generate actual physical manifestations. These are the projections of perception.
As I have expressed previously, perception may be likened to a holographic projector. This projector creates images, and they are very real and quite solid, although you can also create them to be less solid and manipulate them in different manners.
ANON: I guess that has something to do with why people sometimes see—again, very isolated incidents here—but as in that projection incident, that everything suddenly looks like a dollhouse. It’s there, but it just doesn’t mean anything the way it normally means stuff when you’re down in it.
ELIAS: Yes.
ANON: You know this person is there. You know this is my girlfriend and this is what she’s thinking and then, again a rare capacity to step back and look at it and go, “Oh. Well these are just things, you know, just things I’ve made. It’s not important.” Does that have to do with the whole… the information is there, but we’re the ones actually configuring it into what we’re seeing?
ELIAS: Yes.
ANON: We’re capable of removing that meaning from it and being like, well, it’s not important.
ELIAS: Yes.
ANON: It’s there, but…
ELIAS: Yes. And this is a significant factor: importance. For what you place importance on is what you will pay attention to and will participate with. If an element of your reality becomes less important, or UNimportant, you do not pay attention to it. And in association with CERTAIN expressions of importance, if they are not important to you they become flat.
ANON: Mm-hm. Yeah, like objects in my vicinity. I mean, I don’t go out of my way to hold a conversation with this soap dispenser in front of me.
ELIAS: Correct.
ANON: It’s just there.
ELIAS: Correct. But even with your soap dispenser, if its existence became VERY unimportant to you and you perceived it to generate no function, you might actually view it as less than three-dimensional. It may incorporate a flatness that will appear to you to be almost UNreal.
ANON: Yeah. Well, how does that tie into the Salvia divinorum experiences I’ve had? I mean, I’ve experienced different things with that substance, but one notable one was that things, and especially human beings, became very flat, two-dimensional, paper-like, even to the point where when I was not actively taking the substance there’d be like a minor flashback to that very thing. I’m like, Oh, wow! This world I live in is just unreal. It’s flat.
ELIAS: It is not—
ANON: Is that just an action of putting myself in a place where other things are becoming important and so I kind of leave this world behind, or…? I’m not really sure how to phrase that.
ELIAS: It is not that they are unreal. It is that you are engaging actions that alter your perception. As I expressed, perception is a very strong mechanism, and it also can be very flexible. It can be very rigid, but it can be very flexible if you are allowing it to be.
And in that, what you are presenting to yourself is experiences that are experimenting with the manipulation of perception and how strongly that can actually alter your reality. And when you alter your reality, you alter your associations with your reality, which also would be a factor in what you were expressing in relation to how you manipulate and whether it is real, or that the associations that you generate with certain expressions may be different from what is actually occurring.
This is the reason that I express so very often to individuals the importance and significance of paying attention to what you are actually doing. For what you are actually doing may not necessarily be what you are thinking or what your association is with what you are doing.
ANON: Let me ask for some clarification on that, because I’ve read that a million times, and I think that maybe I’m misunderstanding what that is. As far as doing: okay, there’s two ways I would interpret that. One, the idea that because thoughts being an interpretation or a translation of what you’re looking at, and the actual emotion being a direct communication of what you are doing in the moment, so… And if you’re paying too much attention to your thoughts and they’re incorrect, then as I understand it you might feel an emotion of anxiety communicating with you that hey, what you’re actually doing is looking at your thoughts and giving too much credence to them, and that’s what you’re doing versus what you’re physically doing with your arms and legs and walking around. So, as I understand it in that sense, doing is not limited to physical actions.
ELIAS: Correct.
ANON: The objective reality is just another communication alongside emotion, so doing is more wide than that. Is that…?
ELIAS: Correct. Yes, you are correct. It would be associated with what you are physically doing, but it is also associated with what you are doing with your attention and what you are actually generating in energy.
ANON: Okay. And is that…? I mean, I know I can pay attention somewhat to where I’m putting my attention: Am I paying attention to my thoughts? Am I paying attention to my toes? And I can also, of course, see what I’m doing to a degree, when I don’t lose myself. So, is there any other channel available to me, one right now, or does that pretty much cover it in terms of okay, I’m aware of this and…?--as far as the energy I’m generating. Because to me, it seems like kind of a hazy concept. I’m not sure how to identify what I’m doing in that sense.
ELIAS: Also, allowing yourself to recognize what associations you are generating with what you are doing, for there are motivations and associations that are connected with what you are doing. As an example, you may be hypothetically engaging with another individual, and you may be offering helpfulness to the other individual. Let us say that the other individual is engaged in assembling some object, and you may approach the other individual and you may begin to engage assembling the object and generate the association that you are being helpful. The association overrides you actually paying attention to what you are actually doing. It is overriding your physical action and your energy—or your awareness of your physical action and your energy—and can even be clouding of your motivation. In that one action, your intention may be to be helpful to the other individual, but underlying of that intention, the action that you are engaging and the motivation for the action that you are engaging may be expressed in relation to your association that the other individual may be assembling the object incorrectly or that you can assemble it more quickly or more effectively or more efficiently.
Now; your intention was to be helpful, but your energy may be being projected in the other manner, which is discounting. And in that scenario, the other individual may become frustrated and irritated, which you will respond to in surprise, for your intention was to be helpful, and the other individual did not receive that energy in that manner, for that is not actually the manner in which it was projected. They are receiving it in the manner it was projected, and therefore they are reflecting that in becoming irritated or frustrated. You will express bafflement (Anon laughs) for you are aware of your intention, but you are not aware of what you are actually doing and the energy that is being projected and the motivation behind it. For the association has clouded all of those actions that are occurring and has overridden them, and therefore that is what you are paying attention to rather than actually paying attention to: “Ah! What is my motivation for assisting this individual? Did this individual request my assistance? No. What is my motivation for insisting upon BEING assisting to this individual?”
ANON: Now would these thoughts—and I’ve read a lot about how, if you’re aware you always focus on thoughts, so basically they recycle themselves and feed you crap because you haven’t given them anything to work with.
ELIAS: Correct.
ANON: So, in line with that, let’s say the person had been aware of what they were actually doing in terms of maybe not the motivation directly, but maybe there’s “Okay, I’m walking over here to this person, I’m kneeling down to help them assemble, let’s say, a bike or something, and I’m speaking to the person,” and then they’re aware of the exact tone that they were using, and I’ll gather the details and what am I actually doing. Instead of associating, “Oh, I’m helping this person,” would the thoughts be more likely in that situation to offer up the information, “Oh, your motivation for doing this is actually kind of shady”?
ELIAS: Yes.
ANON: They’d be more likely to do that?
ELIAS: Yes. For you are actually paying attention to what you are doing. And in that, you are offering the thought mechanism information in relation to what is actually occurring in the moment. And in that, it can translate and function properly and offer you that translation of what is occurring within you.
And I may express to you, my friend, the discussion of this process incorporates much more time than the actual process. The process itself can be accomplished within a matter of seconds, in which if you are paying attention to yourself and you are paying attention to what you are DOING, it is not necessary to even actually think of these questions. You will automatically offer yourself the translation OF those questions, for you are paying attention, you are offering current, present information to the thought mechanism, which it very effectively and efficiently knows how to interpret and knows how to extract the information that is valuable to you and that will be beneficial to you.
It is merely when you are moving your attention so exclusively to thought itself that you block any other new information. And in that, the thought mechanism attempts to be translating information and attempts to be extracting new information, and when it cannot it distorts old information.
ANON: Interesting. Well, that’s a lot clearer to me now than it used to be. Like I said, I read that and many times I thought I knew what it meant, but now I have a better idea. And it’s just the whole notion of intentional versus extensional orientation. You’re actually looking at what you’re doing versus “Oh, I’m locking a door, but what does it actually involve?”
ELIAS: Correct.
ANON: Or “eating the menu instead of the meal,” that phrase.
ELIAS: Correct. In this, it is quite interesting how many individuals are unaware of what actions they can incorporate that generate fun. They generate an association with the term “fun,” such as an individual may choose to engage a vacation and generate the association that a vacation is fun, and they may actually engage a trip and not incorporate fun at all within their vacation.
ANON: Yeah, like I noticed that about going out to eat. I mean, that has been an association of mine, that “Oh, going out to eat is fun, this is something I enjoy doing.” But I never noticed just how widely that experience varies from one time to another. You can go out to eat and you’re in a bad mood when you get there, or you’re just not feeling like.. you’re not even hungry. And there’s so many different ways it can go, and—
ELIAS: Yes.
ANON: Clearly going with the intention of “I’m going to go out because I want to have fun or I want to enjoy myself” but then anything but that happens. You blame the food, you blame the people you’re with or whatever, when it was just maybe that’s not what you really enjoy doing to begin with.
ELIAS: Or perhaps in that particular time framework it is not your preference or it would not generate fun. But you generate a general association with certain expressions or actions, and that colors your perception, and therefore you may engage certain actions with the expectation that that association will be expressed and will be generated, but in not paying attention to your actual energy and what you are actually doing, many times you become disappointed, for you do not create what you expect to create.
And as I have said many times, my friend, no expression is hidden from you; it is merely a matter of paying attention.
ANON: What was I going to say? Let me ask one small thing– I guess a small thing—in association with that. Let’s say okay, now I’m going out to eat, and it’s not like I’m in a situation where here I’m doing this thing that I thought was going to be cool and fun and it sucks. And I just want to get into the question of suffering with regard to doing. The general hypothesis I’ve been having the last couple days is that suffering is when we’re… Well, I mean I always associate it with emotion, basically. It’s like if I’m feeling an emotion I don’t like I go “Oh well, I’m suffering; I don’t like my life, I don’t like this.” Is there actually something we could do in the moment that would basically…? Again, if emotions are just signals, then it stands to reason that you can change a small thing and just do something differently and the emotion would go away?
ELIAS: Correct.
ANON: It’s a signal, and there’s no point for it anymore if you’ve received the message?
ELIAS: Correct.
ANON: And… I mean, let me take an example. Yesterday my girlfriend took a phone call while we were still in bed, and it really annoyed me. And what I wanted to do was tell her to go fuck off and get out of bed and go talk somewhere else, but I restrained doing that, and the whole time I just was really bitter about it. And finally I got up in frustration, or feeling that signal of frustration, and left the room. And I thought to myself, “Well, I’m going to ask Elias about this later.” So, was what I inherently wanted to do to express myself and say that, and then it would have been done with, assuming I could unhinge myself from her reaction to that and not worry about her expression in response?
ELIAS: I would express to you, my friend, the first direction to move in is to question yourself as to what is motivating that expression. What is triggering that expression? What association are YOU generating that is triggering this response? What is happening? What is occurring? What are you doing within YOU in generating a particular association?
In this particular example, you may generate an association that this action is disrespectful, or you may generate an association that this action is inconsiderate, or you may generate an association of threat that the individual is in a position of what you associate as intimacy and is not paying attention to you. Therefore, the association that you generate is very important, for that creates these automatic responses. And without being aware of what you are actually doing, what is motivating this expression of frustration or anger, it is difficult to dissipate it. It is difficult to stop it.
ANON: Right. So, the emotion there in that case was a direct message referring to what I was doing, and what I was doing in that case was making the association with some sort of willful intent to disrupt me or be inconsiderate. Was that the doing that it was referring to?
ELIAS: Yes.
ANON: Okay.
ELIAS: The message is referring—
ANON: It wasn’t referring to me withholding anything.
ELIAS: No. It is a message that is referring to what you are doing in generating an automatic association, and in that automatic association generating blame with the other individual, for an element of this automatic association is that the other individual is doing some action intentionally to you.
ANON: And that’s…I guess what I see the benefits of my recent study of general semantics is that that’s one of the first things you call into question, the whole notion of here’s a person… I mean, it’s a very convenient little way to blame things, to say “Oh, here’s a conscious agency which is intentionally trying to screw me over.” But if you do it more of a mechanistic sense, and you don’t see this person as a person as such but as something which resembled the person, you’re more apt to interpret it in terms of a very, very unique incident and with more of a questioning attitude than “Oh, I know exactly what I’m looking at.”
ELIAS: Correct.
ANON: What else was I going to ask? Okay: Would you say in general it would be a good thing whenever one feels an emotional reaction to go first to the associations involved before trying to look at, say, physical activity? In terms of doing, like, “What am I doing?”, is it usually in associations? Or let me ask you this: In terms of my own reactions and my own emotional upsets, is the emotion often referring to my associative doing rather than my physical actions or repressions of vocalizing something?
ELIAS: It is associated with both, but yes, I would agree with you that it is beneficial to first engage what the association is, for that will be helpful to you to actually view what you are actually doing. For when you recognize what your association is, you can recognize what your energy is doing, how it is being projected. And you are less likely to be justifying, for that is an automatic response also, especially in association with frustration or irritation or anger. In relation to the actions of another individual, your first automatic response is to justify what YOU are doing, but once you recognize what the association is, and you recognize that the other individual is not intentionally attempting to irritate you, that is not their intention – regardless of whether that is what is occurring or not, the other individual’s INTENTION is not to be irritating or upsetting to you. Therefore, it is a matter of turning your attention to YOU and what are YOU doing, what is the association that YOU are generating – and not to invalidate yourself, but to acknowledge, “Ah! This is one of MY guidelines, and I can honor my own guidelines in my own behavior and my own actions, and recognize that the other individual is not intentionally attempting to move in opposition to my own guidelines.” And in that, you can acknowledge yourself, recognizing yes, you did incorporate an immediate automatic response, but once you acknowledge what the motivation for that was and what the association for that was, the communication dissipates—the signal, the feeling.
ANON: So, yeah…like would I have had to do anything more with it? In terms of okay, I’m sitting there, and assuming I caught the message I said, “Okay, my associations are clear that she is willfully doing this, that this is intentional and that’s disrespectful and really that follows from that. If I had seen that and gone Okay, and switched to a mode of “Is that really the case?” or even better, “Regardless of whether it’s the case, does that really matter to me?”, would it have dissipated in terms of immediately, “Oh, I feel fine”?
ELIAS: Yes.
ANON: Or would it have slowly dissipated or…you see what I’m saying, like…?
ELIAS: Generally speaking, you will notice that it will dissipate almost immediately.
ANON: Interesting.
Let me ask… We don’t have much time left, but just in general, often I’ll be here at work, I’ll be at my computer—and again I’m very much generalizing, I’m not thinking of a specific incident—where I’ll just be at my computer and just be like, “This sucks, you know, and I would rather not be here.” And so I can frustrate myself with that idea, and in terms of what I’m actually doing I’m almost…Again, the first thing I would think of is in terms of how I’m expressing myself—why don’t I just get up and walk out the door? But I feel almost like there’s something more subtle that I’m missing there in terms of what might actually be being communicated to me.
ELIAS: First of all, my friend, let me express to you, this is another example of associations being different from what may actually be occurring. In this, you incorporate an action that you identify or define as a job. And in that, in your job you define what you do as work. That creates an automatic association, and part of that association is the expectation that there are elements of work that are uncomfortable or that you must merely struggle through, for that is work. Therefore, it may be helpful for you to redefine your work, and rather than generating the association as work to allow yourself to play a game, and when you engage your employment, approach the situation as an enormous game. Every individual that you encounter is a game piece, and every element that you encounter or interact with, such as computers, are also game pieces. This will be affecting of your perception.
Now; in association with moments in which you generate this feeling that you do not wish to be participating in that moment, you ARE offering yourself a communication. I would express that you would offer yourself that communication much less if you are engaging your employment as a game rather than work; but when you generate that expression to yourself, that feeling, offer yourself permission to respond to it. Not in a manner of black and white, of “I wish not to be here” and therefore you merely leave and it is either a situation in which you participate with your employment or you do not, you either continue and force yourself through your day to continue or you remove yourself entirely. No, acknowledge that communication, that feeling, and allow yourself permission to respond to it. And perhaps you may choose to distract yourself and engage some other activity in some other location for an hour, or perhaps even a few minutes will be sufficient. It is dependent upon how that communication continue—but it is a matter of listening.
The reason that that communication repeats and becomes stronger is that you override it. You hear it (Anon laughs), but you ignore it and you force energy in opposition to it. Whereas, if you are acknowledging yourself and offering yourself permission to act in conjunction with what you are communicating to yourself, once again it dissipates, for you are acknowledging and you are not generating an opposing energy.
When you generate opposing energies, you emphasize whatever you are expressing to yourself and you reinforce that energy, and it becomes stronger AND it becomes more important. Importance is not necessarily associated with positive or comfort. Many times you place importance upon what you dislike. And the more important it becomes, the more you pay attention to it. And the more you pay attention to it, the more you reinforce it. Therefore, it you dislike some expression and you continue to oppose it, you offer it more and more importance.
ANON: So, if I could just kind of summarize what I got from that, there is kind of a third way: besides reacting black and white, one way or the other, either I leave this damn place or I stay here and hate every minute of it, there is a creative way to allow for the expression any moment which would again not go too far in either direction. So, I could… I’ll offer the expression of “Okay, I’m dissatisfied with what I’m doing in the moment, but yeah, I can go… I can browse websites or listen to music or go to the break room or do something that would allow that to express itself without necessarily having to just get up and leave.”
ELIAS: Correct.
ANON: There are middle paths or ways to be yourself and continue in the situation.
ELIAS: Correct. It is a matter of balance, my friend, and you find your balance when you listen to yourself and acknowledge yourself rather than opposing yourself.
ANON: (Pause) I apologize if this is sort of like fortunetelling, but within probabilities I feel myself to be somewhat moving out of this job, at least in terms of my mind. I wonder if it’s… Am I picking up on that right? I mean, I almost feel like a movement that’s begun or is underway, that I will be doing something else maybe within the next six months. I don’t feel like… I realize that’s up to me, but could just sort of be a recent development.
ELIAS: It is a potential. Yes.
ANON: Again, I didn’t feel that enough to say maybe November or something. Like there were thoughts of the typical “Aw, this sucks. I hate this. I’ll go do something else,” but it hasn’t become sort of an actualized inner sense until recently.
ELIAS: I am understanding. Which may be motivating to you to genuinely BE paying attention to what you are doing and therefore, paying attention to what you are creating and moving into new explorations. AND this exercise of playing the game with your employment may be helpful and instrumental in that also.
ANON: I will let you know how it goes.
ELIAS: (Laughs) Very well.
ANON: I think will try that. And now we’re getting close to time, so thank you very much, Elias, for the session, and I hope to be in touch with you sooner than later.
ELIAS: You are very welcome, my friend. And I shall be anticipating our next meeting and your report. (Laughs)
ANON: Thanks, Elias.
ELIAS: I offer to you great encouragement and a tremendous energy of supportiveness. In dear friendship and dear lovingness to you, au revoir.
(Elias departs after 57 minutes)
©2007 Mary Ennis. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2007 Mary Ennis, All Rights Reserved.