If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.
-- William Blake
Two months ago, I wrote about Dali's preoccupation with perceptual filters in an essay on Surrealism. Since then, I have becoming increasingly aware of, and haunted by, the subconscious filters I use to dilute and subdue the overwhelming sensory world. Things came to a head at Ocean Beach on a crystalline winter day, where pounding surf gave birth to giant foam that floated, iceberg-like, on translucent sand. The profundity of the moment - suddenly, vulnerably - was not lost on me. Transient and unreplicable, but no less real - my perceptual blinds opened.
I'm not religious. I subscribe to a purely materialistic account of the world we live in, and I don't believe there is another. Yet it's hard to comprehend the fact that everything on this earth is composed of interstellar dust, that life somehow emerged from the nonliving, and that through human beings, matter is achieving self-consciousness. Our perceptual filters help to shield us from the crushing immensity of space, time, and matter.
One of my growing intuitions is that we don't need transcendent gods or Platonic forms to move us to awe, reverence and gratitude. The universe, as it is, might just be enough.
