Further Reading

Saturday, 15 October 2011

Subjectivity Of Experience

Your awareness of the physical world and of your place within it is mostly based upon the physical senses (hearing, sight, smell, touch, taste). These five senses continually send information to the mind, and it is up to the mind to select and interpret them. If you could not do so, your senses would overwhelm you and be meaningless. Selection and interpretation of your sensory inputs is essentially an automatic, mostly subconscious function of the mind. The program or map which the subconscious follows as its reference point is called a ‘model’. The model is a subconscious mental photograph of how you believe the world looks (ie. worldview, mindset, egregore, or belief system). It was built up from an early age by your religious and cultural background through interaction with family and others. It contains your experiences, attitudes, and habits. And whether you realize it or not, most of your behavior, thoughts, feelings, and habits are based upon and conditioned by that model; even personality. The model is one of the mind’s master programs. Change in behavior generally requires a change in the model. These limitations built into our way of thinking cause our perceptions to be subjective. That is why Hindu philosophy looks upon the world as illusory (maya); the world itself (object) is not an illusion, however from our viewpoint through perception (subject) it is....read more>>>...