(This
essay was written 20 years ago and forms the basis of everything I’ve thought
and done since. For this reason I
put it out there from time to time.)
What we perceive can be viewed
as the raw material for our information processing machinery. It is the stuff from which we build an
image of the world around us and which supplies us with the moment by moment
adjustments needed to stay in touch with what is "real". In the modern world we need to gain
control over sensory input; what is out there is so varied and cacophonous that
it no longer supplies reliable adaptive order. Since perception can be considered the ingestion of the
mind, the evolution of a creature's relationship with nutrients and their
relationship with perceptual habits may well have common elements.
In
fact, food is an almost perfect analogy.
In the development of humans and for every animal it was necessary to
consume what was available, thus the "balanced diet" came to be the
nutrients that were possible. If
"essential" amino acids and vitamins were not easy to come by in a
normal diet they would not be essential, i.e., organisms lost the ability to
make the “essential” nutrients because they were so abundant in the diet. Organisms ate what was available for
the work they were willing to do to get food. All one need do is live off the land for a few days to
realize that plants are the stuff of life. Birds hide their eggs (when there are eggs), animals run
away and hide; the meat part of meat and potatoes is very energy and time
consuming to come by. Not every
plant can be eaten, but quite a number can. They are there; they don't run
away. They have to be collected
and processed; that's all. They
contain, when eaten in sufficient amounts, all the nutrients for a healthy
life.
And
today? All manner of foodstuff is
available, thousands of apparent choices rather than one or ten. And what is more (and very odd) these
choices are competing to be chosen, so they must be made desirable to the
taste. Food did not compete
evolutionarily to be picked or dug up to be eaten. Plants may have competed to be planted, moved around or
pollinated and may have used supplying some sustenance as a way to attract
interest, but to be chosen to be eaten was not the point.
But
today's food must be desirable, that means it must contain what served us well
to have the greatest drive for, what in the wild is rare and difficult to come
by; lots of calories, especially in the form of fat. The only way to overcome this twist of the human taste is to
be very selective and to make an active effort to eat, take into the body, a
"balanced diet", the way we would naturally just by getting enough to
eat if we ate off the land as hominids did for 99.5% of their existence.
The
most severe deviations from a "balanced diet" result in death. Less severe deviations lead to ill
health of various kinds--deficiency diseases. And still less severe deviations result in that plethora of
complaints of modern life, obesity, heart trouble, cancers and various
behavioral distortions. Not that
we would not have complaints if we all ate better, but they would not be the
same ones.
What
does this have to do with perceptional input? Everything! Everything that has
been said about nutrients is true of perception. We evolved to input all the information that we could get
from the environment. Input that
was consistent in a geological/ecological time-frame, we came to depend on as
essential inputs for establishing mental order--day/night, cycles of the moon,
seasons, gravity, the least harmful parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. These were built right into our
bodies.
Just
as with food what we call essential is what was a given. Other parts of the world that changed
only very slowly we used to guide us.
We knew our world with mental maps that could be relied on. We took mental order from the order of
nature. What we needed to know was
there to be learned and once learned could be used and refined and used some
more. We listened for every sound,
we watched for every visual change, we felt the air, we sought for every smell,
we used every nuance of taste and we paid sustaining attention to that thing
that has been called the sixth sense--the bringing together of all the evidence
of senses and experience for some total impression which is truly more than the
sum of its parts--a basis for action that could not reliably come from one
sense alone, a kind of personal representative democracy bringing together all
the evidence for a real time state of awareness.
As
with specific nutritional insufficiency, a person might feel the need for some
special form of information in the same way that he or she might be
"hungry" for a particular root or berry. This felt need could arise from the intuition recognizing
the insufficiency of the available data to create a balanced sense of
conclusion or closure needed to create the conditions for action. To satisfy such a need the person
would seek through perceptual input with greater attention or become very quiet
and meditative or go beyond the usual to let the mixing and remixing of
perception and experience take as many forms as possible (called in Native
American tradition a vision quest).
The
key always was attention, a quiet practiced attention that placed everything
without judgment on the table.
Just as with food, what mattered was what was there. If a creature tried to eat what was not
there, it starved. If a creature
tried to act on what was not there to perceive, it often died from its inappropriate
behavior. For most animals it was
an article of biological faith that sufficient amounts of substances that they
could not manufacture (e.g., essential amino acid) would always be available in
a diet that had enough calories to stay alive, so it was not necessary to
retain the physical equipment to make that substance. For humans it became a matter of biological faith that
close attention to the world would supply information and the order needed to
use that information so it was not necessary to retain the stricter forms of
genetic control of behavior.
*
* *
Just
as sailors die on a diet of salt pork and crackers, so we die as human beings
on a perceptual diet of consumption, violence and sexual titillation. For me this observation leads to two questions. First, what is meant by 'die as human
beings' if a person is not dead in body?
And second, what is a balanced perceptual diet?
Not
to be alive as a member of a species and yet to be biologically alive is an
important distinction which when not understood can lead to sad treatment of
ourselves and other species. It is
a little like the question of life and death of a brain-dead person: a person
whose body can be offered an environment in which it will continue to perform
biological activities very like those of the person before they became
brain-dead. The wish for the
person to be fully alive and interactive is not enough to make it be and the
resemblance of the person to their prebrain-dead self is an illusion. Something is alive, but it is not the
person who was. It is not Jim or
Maggy or Jose or Liz if those names are to be attached to smiles and ideas and
habits and mischiefs. The living
thing is a bunch of cells that still has the shape of Jim or Maggy or Jose or
Liz. And those cells can still
metabolize so long as someone feeds them and cleans them and delivers them
oxygen; they are like the cells in a tissue culture, like the cells growing on
agar.
Think
for a moment about how you would define a hawk or a salmon or a bobcat. They can be described by their
appearance and they can be described by their behaviors. A hawk has a hawk's body in a cage or
when riding a thermal that it has sensed out of the unseeable air. But the hawk is much more than its
body, it is the whole collection of behaviors and skills that 100 million years
of raptoring has led to. A salmon
in a farm pond is a pound of fish, but it is not the powerful instincts and
equally powerful sensing tools of the fish returning to a spawning stream. A bobcat's body in a zoo smells
disorder, hears cacophony and goes insane, leaping in mad repetitive circles;
behaviors unlike any bobcat's body would perform in the forest of its
ancestry. I would say, in the
cage, in the farm pond or in the zoo, that these animals' behavioral part is
ill or dead. The behaviors that
their bodies are built to support cannot happen and so only a piece of the
animal is there.
What
is true for the hawk, the salmon and the bobcat is true for humans, we are cut
from the same living cloth. This
is not hocus-pocus. A body is
there for the purpose of getting the behaviors done. Without the behaviors there is only the body like the body
of the poor brain-dead person kept alive by a special environment of food tubes
and respirators.
*
* *
The
second question; what is a balanced perceptual diet, can be seen now to have
additional parts. What are the
defining ancestral ways of humans?
What is the nature of perception in human ancestral behavior? What is a balanced perceptual diet and
how can it help to restore our defining ancestral behaviors so that we might be
more fully alive as human beings.
And, is it possible in the "modern" world to be a human being
in the sense used here; alive in body, ancestral ways and in the spirit of our
origins?
We
are, each and everyone, human and contain within us the sustaining biological
and genetically conferred behavioral wisdom of our species. What humans seem to do more than any
other species is to incorporate consistent perceptual input into ordering
systems through which their biological natures manifest. In other words, the expression,
"What you see is what you get," turns out to be the highest wisdom.
When
our distant prehuman ancestors evolved away from instinctual hard wired control
of behavior toward a way of doing business that let the world around them
supply much of the information that gave flesh to bare bone propensities and
drives, they took a fateful step.
To anthropomorphize outrageously, they said, "Environment, we know
you are greatly varied, and we know you change slowly over time. We are giving ourselves over to you in
the trust that you will remain consistent over at least a few of our
generations. We will change as you
change, directly without having to go through the intermediary of the evolution
of behavior".
It
was a deal well struck, and worked wonderfully for prehumans and humans for
millions of years. Our ancestors
slowly, in what is normal time for evolution, became less instinctual and more
integrated into the information (energy) flows of the environment. Each individual became a deep reservoir
of experience, for the most part personal and private, useful to the group only
when that individual was present and attentive. But enter language and all-human breaks loose!
We
were able to evolve a way to be deeply integrated into the information from the
environment precisely because the environment was constant over long spans of
time. If the world rapidly changed
its rules of engagement, no intelligent animal could have happened. It is no accident that organic life
times are infinitesimal in geologic and ecologic time.
The
answer to a couple of the questions begin to form. Perception for humans is not the collection of discrete
informational bits to be acted on by a genetically programmed brain. Perception is the information gathering
part of the way that we organize our structure of mind and it implies that if
our perceptions change, our structure of mind will change. As everyone knows, early childhood
experience is the most important time for setting patterns, and this must be
recognized, but even such early deeply ingrained organizing habits can be very
much influenced by consistent perceptual experiences in our present. Put another way: We are what we are
able to organize out of our perceptions. If our world is consistent and
meaningful, our organization will be consistent and meaningful (‘meaningful’
means that our understandings and actions fit the events taking place around
us). If our world is inconsistent,
disorienting and chaotic, our organization will tend to be inconsistent--or we
will attempt to create order from inherent disorder by selecting, for no
particularly valid reason, an organizing principle (this means that our
understandings and actions will fit at some acceptable level, for some amount
of time, a limited set of the events taking place around us, if we are
lucky). This is why people kill
for what they call ideas!
Even
the best laid plans of mice and prehuman anthropoids…. We, actually our prehuman ancestors,
let go of the rope of instinct for the freefall of real-time perceptual
intimacy with the environment. And
it worked great and then too well.
The environment "kept its part of the bargain". The environment has not increased its rate
of change beyond the expected geological/ecological time scales, but we humans
became so good at fitting the available environment that we became the agents
of change. And we have escalated
that rate of change for 50,000 years until today significant changes in
essential aspects of the environment can happen in months, and the power exists
in our technology to make huge changes in seconds.
When
we, our prehuman ancestors, let go of the rope of instinct for the freefall of
real-time perceptual intimacy with the environment it was not a free fall in
the beginning. If fact, nothing
happened except that we did better and better at everything. The more the world informed us the more
accurately we acted in it. The
less instinct dominated action the more action became a function of finer and
finer nuance of environmental information. Experience became the canvas for the perceptions of the
present and experience was formed from the consistent perceptions of the past.
Certainly
there were dramatic changes in the moment. A river would flood, an elder would die, but the abiding
order remained. Disease would wipe
the slate all but clean and we would start again and the abiding order
remained; a nourishing perceptual consistency. Vitamin C was always in the fruit, day followed night, the
moon waned and waxed with attendant consequences, plants grew in season,
animals appeared and disappeared in regular ways, a warm wind from ‘that way,
in this season,’ had its meaning.
And
as we were hungry for food, we became hungry for input. Listening, seeing, smelling out every
sensation for its uses and it was all good. Patterns of regularity were the fat of the fresh kill or the
succulence of a new berry harvest.
Predator animals tried to trick us with sneakiness designed by their
instinct to fool instinct; they would starve if we were their only food. Food animals tried to outwit us with
their instinctual powers of deception only to become greasy leavings licked
eagerly from our fingers. If the
other creatures could have only known what they were up against, but of course
they could not. We were only just
beginning to have the barest inkling; we had our powers long before we
recognized them as special. And by the time some of us began to recognize our
powers, we had long since lost control of their implications (if it even makes
any sense to talk of control!).
The way had been set for humans to succeed, then succeed wildly, and
then to dominate the thin film of life space that covers the earth so
completely that even we would be dominated completely by what we had become.
Perceptual
diet
But
today sensation comes in cacophonous abundance. The natural environmental sources of sensation are so
totally overwhelmed by those produced by human beings as to be an insignificant
percentage, and even that which is noticed is very often judged to be more
inconvenience than informative.
For
the most part we take in the sensation that is delivered based on volume,
contrast and repetition; in other words, we are not really selecting, at least
not critically selecting. But we
have needs for patterns and qualities of sensation in the same way that we have
needs for specific qualities and quantities of nutrients. Ultimately these needs are
non-negotiable just as nutritional needs are non-negotiable.
Human
and hominid life for most of the existence of our genus has had a major
meditative component, exercise, regular contact with biophysical reality,
problem solving and exploring, 3 to 5 servings a day of language free
activities and so on. But, this is
only a suggested beginning.
Take
charge of your perceptual diet the way that you might take charge of your
nutrition; actively select what you allow to come into your sensations. Avoid poisonous sensations that weaken
and sicken you. Discover your essential sensations, those that make you well
when you add them to your perceptual diet. But, more than anything else, actively select what you allow
into your brain. We no longer live
in a world where we can “take it all in” and process it.
