augmented illusions

The other day I was in a conversation about how the language I use for “perception” seems to be changing. I hadn’t noticed it myself but apparently it was very noticeable. It’s true, I’ve been noticing changes, but I wasn’t sure if what I was registering would really constitute “a change”. I must say, I do “play by ear” more, as M. would call it, but I had no idea that such a perceptual shift would have such far reaching consequences. As I found myself telling yesterday: it’s not as if I “see” things in my mind’s eye, but there is a richness to the perception that is not visual, yet it is very much present. I guess that this might be the indication that I am building up a new world from my perception, where the old reality was one of sight. It’s interesting too, because I used to be of the opinion, that the fact that buddhism speaks so much about “view” is caused by the “solidity of seeing”: what we see is “there”, what we hear and perceive non-visually is merely an adjunct to seeing. So that changed, but now I notice the same solidity clinging to all perception: it’s just the modality that has changed. There is a difference though, and that is the difference between instantaneous and temporal perception. It’s true that sound is an everlasting “now”, and in this sense language is involved in a pragmatic, not a semantic manner. To me, semantics is asking the question: how much of this patch of reality is covered by the meaning of the word that denotes it. While pragmatics, with its multiplicity of meanings is the string of language-gestures that points to the connections between the meanings. So I could say my perception shifted from the “not this, but that” mode of eye-seeing to the “both this and that, and the other thing too” of temporal perception. Even touch is discovery in time. All this shouldn’t have been a surprise, but of course, it was.

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