Zen and the Art Of Walking Lightly Ch 8

8

Happiness And Perception --- The Premise

How We See The World And What Really Happens In The World Are Often Two Different Things. 

Our perception is the business of what and how we think we see and that is coupled with what and how we believe we have experienced what it was that we thought we saw. 

Next, our opinions and interpretations gleaned from what it was that we thought we saw … our perception(s) are formed as the result of a multitude of happenings occurring in ways and combinations that most of us are totally unaware of and never would have imagined happening to us in the first place:

(a)            Our perception and interpretation of what it is that we think we saw … our perceived or understood experience … seems to be the result of the outcome(s) of many minute forces interacting with each other in a myriad number of ways, forming events-sequences.

(b)           These event-sequences themselves act and interact with each other to form perceptive imagery and this process will eventually lead one to forming opinion(s). 

(c)            Opinions can and do stack up and as they do they can become motivational and that motivation in turn moves us into an action or into a series of actions.

(d)           There seems to be a hierarchy to this entire process of event sequencing. 

(e)            It also seems to be a quadratic process and not (necessarily) a linear process, although it can be a linear process in simple interchanges.

(f)             Thus it extrapolates that the vast majority of events that happen in our lives happen at levels of awareness that William James would call as other than normal waking consciousness perceptions or in the unconscious mind.

Small Events, Cumulative Events And Effects

Small events happen, i.e. the blood/chemistry level shifts in the body because of the ingestion of some form of sugar; this shift in blood chemistry begins a process of cause and effect that has an impact on the individual and the individual’s environment. 

Because the small events can and do interact with other small events the result of those interacts create what I call cumulative events and cumulative events have cumulative effects. It is the cumulative effects that are noticed by the individual as happenings in real time. 

Extrapolating from the sugar ingestion example, as that set of event sequences shifts through the entire system, eventually a mood shift will happen … cumulative effect ... and the person begins to interact with other people in a way that is different then it was a moment ago … i.e. watch any child at a birthday party who has had too much cake and ice cream … The same principal is true for the cumulative effects as it was with the small effects thus the shift and mood swing can set into motion other events that collect into major cumulative effects. 

Major cumulative effects can be clearly seen as activities or states of being as they collect one on top of the other so to speak. Then their quantitative and qualitative result begins the process of us defining how it is that we think we are feeling, good or bad, happy or sad, angry etc., and how it is we interpret others and this in turn sets into motion our responses to what it is that we think is happening to us in the conscious here and now. At the unconscious level something totally different and unrelated is really defining how it is that we think we are seeing things.

This sequencing process from small to cumulative to major cumulative is happening constantly and, this is the important part, it all happens outside our control. 

Life’s conundrum seems to be; that when we arrived on the face of this planet we got a space suit to survive in ... this body … and some of the instructions for its operation lay hidden in the genetic structure and are not readily available to the conscious mind. 

Second to the genetic factors are forces that are at work in our lives over which we have no control that lay beyond the space suit such as the pull of gravity, the pollen in the air, the historical period into which we are born. Innumerable other conditions that affect us socially, physically, emotionally and spiritually will determine how it is that we see and what it is that we believe we see, and how it is that we believe we should feel about what it is that we think we see. None of these will affect what is there to be seen. That is inert.  Probably, what is most important is how and what it is that we might just do based on what it is that we think we feel and see.

To look closer on the particular event at any given point in time one has to be able to begin to look into and to see the event sequencing and the interplay of the outcomes of the various sequences. Much as a diabetic has to consider that his disease at the molecular level is effectual at the inter-social level even if he cannot see the interplay in its minutest form. 

A coarse example of event sequencing from history goes almost unnoticed by history.  It is the story of King Henry the 8^th of England; he was riding horseback one day, fell off and struck his head and lost consciousness for several moments.  From that point on he pursued a frantic obsessive search for the perfect mate, and the rest is history. 

The question bears asking: what if he never fell? Or what if he did and never hit his head, what would history say about him?  Would there be a Church of England? Would Elizabeth 1^st even exist? Would Anne Bolin have lost her head? This list can extrapolate all through history, and this is just one tangent.

My point is; what I do with something today, even though it appears to be the same as I did with it yesterday, does not … necessarily have to be … not does it mean … even though it could … that it holds the same event sequencing. The higher probability is that in all likelihood at the more subtle levels there are in all things … probability differences … and these probability differences reside in the event sequencing process. 

Thus it follows that no matter how hard I try to repeat a particular set of circumstances that seemly brought me pleasure initially, it just won’t work the same way twice … sometimes it will be close, but never exact, and sometimes not at all.   

We are not privy to all the inner workings of event sequencing and staging and because we are not, the coarseness of our own conscious awareness, our thinking patterns, prevents us from seeing what is really happening at the deeper levels of our psyche.  It is not part of what we perceive to be our normal waking consciousness.  Thus the understanding of why we think our world is the way it is may have absolutely nothing to do with the real cause and effect cycles that are happening in our world.