We experience the world through the interplay of our perceptions and actions.  What we can or cannot perceive, what we can or cannot do, shapes the ways in which we engage with and what we experience as reality.  Our experience of this reality reflects our abilities.  We may have needs, desires, seeking to satisfy them somehow, but without knowledge, without abilities, we have no clue how to direct our activities to fulfill these wants.  These abilities are the result of hard work, a long process of learning and cultivation, and can change through additional learning and hard work.

If I go into a forest expecting to find something to eat, I must be able for example to differentiate edible plants from the rest, my senses tell them apart from among the rest.  It is this ability, acquired through prior trial and error, through apprenticeship and training, that reveals these plants to my eyes, my hands, my nose, my mouth, as edible.

If instead I go into a grocery store, a different constellation of abilities is necessary: I need to read labels off packages, know what these labels refer to, how tasty and nutritious the packaged contents might be, and I need to know how to pay.  This might seem trivial after we get the hang of it, but don’t we remember, as kids we were taught how to purchase things, and we come across the learning phase even as adults, when we go to a foreign country or when new products or novel ways for paying appear.

For us to experience, to perceive and act, we must be able to discern and foreground specific features of reality, while backgrounding others.  To illustrate this point, I have found what is referred to as “gestalt pictures” very helpful.

We see the picture on the left as either a rabbit (ears pointing left) or as a duck (beak pointing left).  We have been taught to recognize rabbits and ducks, and we switch between viewing the picture as either.  But what if we did not know about ducks?  If we had never seen one, in flesh or in picture, and nobody had taught us to recognize it?  If we only knew about rabbits, it would be only a rabbit that we could possibly see in the picture, it would be the only thing we would recognize.

Similarly, on the left, we see a tree with birds flying over it; but we can also see – if we switch foreground and background – a gorilla and a lion.  Again, if we had not been taught to recognize gorillas or lions, we could not possibly see them in the picture.  The range of our perceptions is limited by our knowledge.

We all become acutely aware of this dependence of our experience of the world on our abilities whenever we learn something new.  For example, with a new language, when we slowly learn to recognize the script and the sounds and comprehend them as meaningful text and utterances.  When we learn how to use a new tool, how to hold it, what sound it makes when used properly or improperly.  Or when we taste a new dish or drink, learning to distinguish the different flavors.

The way we experience the world reflects very closely the way we are.  What we are, what we bring along with us to our encounters with reality, gives form and meaning to our experience.

A lot of people I have talked with will readily agree with this view.  Very frequently, they will go on to say that it is the beliefs and principles we have that shape our perceptions, that provide us with a sense of who we are and what our goals are, that orient us in the world and guide our actions.  It is these that we bring along with us, they would say, that define essentially who we are, and give rise to the differences in our experiences.

We are all fairly familiar with the inadequacies and limitations of beliefs and principles for describing ourselves and our experiences.  When we are confronted with experiences that contradict our beliefs we find ways to push these experiences aside, sweep them under the rug as it is, keeping what we describe as our beliefs intact.  And oh so many times we act contrary to our principles…

Beliefs and principles are abstractions of course, too crude to capture our concrete attitudes and patterns of behavior in all their diversity and mutability.  Sometimes, they may be adequate as a communication shorthand, but they are not very helpful for approaching the basis of our perceptions and our conduct, how we experience the world.  I think it is more helpful to look instead at concrete patterns of behavior, and the experiences associated with them.

For example, we taste and smell food and drink before we fully consume it – and if we cannot tell whether it is spoiled or contaminated we might get into trouble.  If we know enough, plants and mushrooms in the fields appear to us as food, medicine, building material, this and that or the other.  But if we do not know enough, they are all an undifferentiated jumble, which we approach without any expectation or means to obtain food, medicine or anything else.

In an urban setting, driving, the physical act of driving, encompasses among many other things knowledge about the car itself, about the road conditions, observing signs for lanes, stops, warnings, as well as monitoring, predicting and reacting to other drivers’ behavior.  Successful driving hinges on the continuous congruence between our expectations, our actions, and what actually happens.

Along the same lines, our experience of interacting socially with each other is shaped by the clothes one wears, their skin color, gender, accent, manners, and so on.  We use such cues to place someone, develop a sense of what our interaction might be like, what we might want it to be like, and we conduct ourselves accordingly.  Some of these cues we may consider very important, some not as much.  We differ of course which ones we pay more or less attention to; and of course there are aspects of someone’s appearance or behavior we might be oblivious to, not accustomed to noticing.  It is interesting to note that we often get quite uncomfortable if we have misplaced or cannot place someone, we get confused or even angry – we might get quite upset, for example, if we cannot readily tell someone’s gender.

The knowledge, the abilities through which we experience the world, perceive and act, do not derive from beliefs and principles. Beliefs and principles are abstractions that only point to these abilities of ours.  The abilities themselves however are the result of learning, reinforcement, and refinement through years of socialization in our cultural milieu.

Leshan

I was going through some old pictures I took several years ago in Leshan, a city in Sichuan, known widely for a statue of a Giant Buddha.  The area is strewn with Buddhist temples, sculptures, statues, found in caves, tunnels, the hillsides.  In one of the tunnels I ran across the statue on the right, depicting an androgynous form, its right-half being that of a woman.  The statue reminded me of Ardhanarishvara, a form of the Hindu god Shiva.

Ardhanarishvara

I had first become aware of Ardhanarishvara and seen statues many years ago, in South India.  The deity made a very strong impression on me, and before I left India I purchased a small bronze statue, a tourist trinket, a picture of which is on the left.

A western eye might stay with the half-male/half-female aspect, glide over differences from the Leshan statue, such as which side is the male, which the female.  In Hinduism, Ardhanarishvara depicts the union of Shiva and his companion Parvati, the union of masculine and feminine forces.  In the body of a marriage, the right side is that of the male, the left that of the female.  And this is reflected in the somatization of marital problems by women in North India: they are sometimes embodied as pain or even paralysis of the left side (described in Helman, C.G. (1994) Culture, Health and Illness).