Environment
How Intense Is Your Awareness?
The world is a different place to different people
Posted July 26, 2016
We tend to assume that the world we perceive is the world as it is. We trust that our awareness of the world gives us a clear, objective picture of things. When we look at the natural world around us—at the sky, the sun, forests or hills—we assume we are seeing them as they are.
This seems a reasonable assumption, but we tend to forget that our view of the world isn’t clear and true, like a camera, but is filtered and interpreted through our minds, and the psychological structures within them.
In fact, many of us see the world around us as a fairly mundane place—so mundane that we pay very little attention to it, but instead immerse our attention in activities and entertainments, or else in the thoughts inside our heads. The world seems to be a fairly incidental backdrop to the incidents of our lives.
However, there are many different cultures across the world where people appear to have a very different vision of reality. Many of the world’s indigenous peoples perceive the world around them as an animate place. This isn’t a belief that the phenomenal world is alive, due to superstition and ignorance—it’s a direct perception of the vividness of things. As the Cherokee Indian scholar Rebecca Adamson (2008) points out, for indigenous peoples “the environment is perceived as a sensate, conscious entity suffused with spiritual powers” (p.34).
Young children appear to perceive the phenomenal world with a similar intensity of perception of indigenous peoples. In the words of the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, for instance, “young children are actually more conscious and more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are” (2006, p. 211). Many young children appear to perceive the world around them as alive. There are many examples of this in Edward Hoffman’s classic study of childhood experience, Visions of Innocence (Hoffman, 1992), where several people describe this sense that trees, flowers and other natural phenomena were sentient beings with whom they could communicate.
And there are certainly some adults who share this intensity of perception too. Think of poets and painters, for example, who seem to see and feel more than others, and have a strong impulse to depict or describe their heightened vision of the world. Think of scientists, who may be driven by an intense sense of curiosity about the world around them, or even a sense of wonder.
In fact, from time to time, we all experience moments when our awareness becomes more intense. This is what we sometimes refer to us “higher states of consciousness’, or which I sometimes refer to as “awakening experiences.” These are moments when our perception become more intense and expansive than normal. There is a sense of stepping beyond the normal limitations of our normal consciousness, bringing a sense of clarity, revelation and well-being in which we become aware of a deeper (or higher) level of reality.
Our normal state of consciousness is just one possible state of consciousness. We tend to assume that it tells us the truth about the world, just because it’s the one which is most familiar to us, but this is as illogical as believing that your home town is the best place in the world, just because you spend most of your time there.
All of this shows that awareness is a variable. Human beings can perceive the world around them with varying degrees of intensity. The world can appear more beautiful, more alive or more strange and awe-inspiring to some people than others. What may appear to be a mundane to scene to some people may be full of wonder to others.
Dr. Steve Taylor is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK.
References
Adamson, R. (2008) First nations’ survival and the future of the Earth, in Nelson, M.K. (ed.), Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future, pp. 27–35, Rochester: Bear & Company.
Gopnik, A. (2006) Babies are more conscious than we are, in Rockman, J. (ed.), What We Believe but Cannot Prove, New York: Pantheon.
Hoffman, E. (1992) Visions of Innocence, Boston: Shambhala.
