Playing with perception - postmodern dharma, psychotherapy, and diversity and inclusion

As moderners (people heavily influenced by a cartesian rationalist worldview) we are likely to think of our minds as independent and objective observers of our experience, and therefore, to think of our experience of the world as objective. This misses a very important opportunity for self awareness (and for liberation from believing the content of our thoughts rather than seeing our thoughts as data) - our experience of the world is filtered through perception, and is therefore deeply subjective and affected by our various standpoints or locations. So what is this perceptual process? How we experience sense data through the sense doors and shape that sense data into a coherent reality is shaped in each moment by our minds- by memories, deeply held beliefs, and our physiological state. Though often different language is used to frame these explorations, in both the dharma and in psychotherapy we play with perception in ways that alleviate suffering. Making this play explicit can be a rich and valuable resource, and also provide clues about how to welcome and celebrate difference in ourselves and in our communities. 

Let's start with what perception is... Perception is the process by which we formulate an experience of the world in any given moment, and it's happening via all the sense doors (Eye, Ear, Nose, Tongue, Body, Mind). Think about the example of how different animals experience the world. Humans see a certain range of color/light, hear a certain range of frequencies, and have a certain capacity to process smell, and this leads to a particular experience of the world. Dogs, for example, have senses of smell that are 10,000 - 100,000 times better than ours, and thus the world they smell is quite different from the one we smell. In the realm of hearing, humans generally have a hearing range of between 20 and 20,000 hz. However, elephants can hear waves as low as 14 hz, while cats can hear up to 64,000 hz frequencies, and bats can sometimes pick up noises as high as 200,000 hz. Each of these beings has a profoundly different experience of the same world. Whose world is the 'right world'? Which one is the 'true' experience of the world? You can see how questions/views like these create delusion about the perceptual process, as well as leading to power dynamics in which certain ways of perceiving the world are suppressed/oppressed/dismissed.

In Buddhism and somatic therapy both, we're learning to cultivate ways of perceiving that lead to wellbeing/balance the heart, while also learning the art/language of listening to the information that comes from our perceptual process. This is truly its own mind AND body-based language, unique to each of us, and requires us to learn to recognize and digest our common patterns of reactivity/survival energy/fixation. Through this process we can start to read the cues underneath the reaction, beginning to deeply trust our perception (not that it is objectively true or true by some external standard, but that its providing reliable wisdom about what we need in any given moment - that it has an organic/organismic intelligence when it is balanced and our nervous systems are regulated)

When certain perceptions are valued above others or seen as more 'true' and other perceptions are seen as less than, then we can get into harmful situations in which people are gaslit, or taught not to trust their sources of knowledge and power. For example, perceiving a lack of safety is an incredibly important skill for mammals and there are times when that perception is very helpful and skillful.  Perhaps we go into a Buddhist space and we're encouraged to disregard fear and to cultivate perceptions of compassion - this preference for compassionate perception can be harmful when it causes the dismissal or suppression of important signals that something is not OK. These power dynamics are deeply interwoven with systems of oppression - more feminine ways of perceiving are diminished or suppressed in favor of more masculine ways of perceiving, or ways of perceiving that are common amongst white bodied folx are seen as 'true' and superior, while ways of perceiving that create safety and sanity for BIPOC beings are diminished or rejected. Some worlds are lifted up and others rejected or seen as less then. This is not a practice of liberation - in the practice of liberation we welcome all 'worlds' to the table - we welcome difference, knowing that for any given being a different perception may be skillful. This non-attachment is the same as what's needed in our internal process - what perception is skillful in this moment? and now this moment? We are asked not to cling to any fixed view. Maybe in one moment having a sense of a world in which there's a god is helpful, and in another that perception becomes harmful. Or perhaps in one moment we perceive our practice as for our own liberation, and in another its skillful to shift into perceiving it as being for the liberation of all beings. Neither one has to be right - by living between two worlds we find the middle path - we become free of/within the world itself.

In somatic therapy we understand that a system in survival mode will be perceiving an unsafe world. We use the attention/perception to shift toward and take in OKness, Coherence, to modulate exposure and balance. In this way we can start to give cues to the physiology that its OK to relax. As this process deepens the perceptions themselves will start to shift because of the underlying physiological shift. 

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