I ask myself the question : have I ended all mental stress including the subtle manifestations of it? If the answer is 'no' (as eventually it is seen that mental stress just got even subtler), then the intention arises to consider if anything is being ignored/overlooked/fabricated/set up as the conditions for that very stress. I know the absence of that mental stress. It was/is a peak experience and an important insight into the cessation of mental stress. It has informed and motivated this questioning. If mental stress ends in all manifestations, then I wont mind if there is something more ignored, though I probably will be conditioned to investigate that notion all the same.

I never found selective perception (not noticing something) to produce the impression that there were other phenomena that weren't really there.

Is that what you mean? If not, maybe you can restate your question, or give an example?

interested to hear what this subtle phenomenon is
are you saying that you may have been selectively ignoring but now it has came to light. As this has been my experience with tigles,
They have been present for a while (maybe always) but once I started noticing their presence I became aware of many variations of their form

cheers
Jeff

Thanks for your replies.

My question is general, I'm not referring to any particular subtle phenomenon.

For the sake of an example, let me pick some insight stage from the "Progress of Insight" map which may be familiar to many people here. So a practitioner - let me call them "I" for the sake of brevity - so I begin to notice a very subtle sense of "all things being equal, this is just what it is", and after some time, I think, "hey, maybe this is what's called equanimity". And here's where the question comes in: am I able to perceive this subtle sense of "all things being equal" because I reached equanimity, or is it the case that I'm ignoring sensations which imply "all things not being equal"?


@Nikolai - peak experiences, sure, they stick out. But the subtle baseline stuff? Fudging the evidence or perceiving more clearly?

@End in Sight - I meant the other way around: phenomena, evidence, perceptions, "stuff", you name it, that really is there but which doesn't fit the subtle picture I'm trying to perceive.

@Jeff - again: not ignoring what's there but very subtle to notice, but rather: ignoring what's unsubtly there, and which would disturb my circles if not ignored, to use the last words famously attributed to Archimedes.

Cheers,
Florian

Hi Florian -

Your thoughts here remind me of page 208 in Daniel's book: [paraphrasing] the blinking out of parts of phenomena, then "correcting" against that tendency naturally, unavoidably.

I consider this to be a very very deep question. I don't know how to solve it, but I have three tricks.

One is to have a scientific attitude. I try as much as possible to entertain only those opinions which can be satisfactorily tested. Try to hold my opinions to such a higher standard. For instance, the view that "all things are equal" has no meaning unless it comes accompanied with a procedure (a test, an experiment) which can successfully determine whether "all things are equal" or "not all things are equal." If there IS such an experiment, then the meaning of "all things are equal" is given by the experiment itself. If there is no such experiment, then the statement has no meaning (according to this scientific approach, it might have meaning in other contexts).

For instance, among certain mental masturbators such as myself, there sometimes arises the discussion of whether people have any "inherent good" or whether they always act out of "self interest", when appearing to sacrifice themselves for others. One might argue for both sides pretty strongly, but actually, if one applies the previous methodology, one finds that there seems to be no way of distinguishing between the two scenarios. Hence the question itself has no meaning, is uninteresting, and we should just move on. The same seems to apply to questions such as "essence vs appearance", "the existence of god" and so on.

The second trick is to realize that often the content of my thoughts is frequently determined from the presence or absence of pain and pleasure. For instance, the closest I've come to thinking "we are all one," or something along those lines, I was in a specific ecstatic state of mind. At the time I might have thought that "we are all one" meant quite literally what it said (the dictionary meaning). However, nowadays, when I think "we are all one" I actually interpret the meaning of that thought as "I am feeling pleasurable/energetic/euphoric." On the other hand, when I think "people suck" actually I understand that it means that I am myself in pain at that moment. I.e., the meaning of the words I think is not always found by looking at their meaning in the dictionary, but by paying attention to the causal chain that led me to say it.

The third trick is to avoid isolation. Genuine interaction with others, particularly those with different perspectives, has a way of bringing light to my own perceptual tendencies and biases. It helps to have intimate and highly perceptive friends that don't agree with everything you say, and are willing to spend the time and energy to confront their views with yours --- which is really a rare and valuable thing.

These three tricks are generally helpful to me, and I have uncovered several instances of "fudging the evidence" through their use. However, for the specific question of whether "fudging the evidence" can be completely avoided, or how can we be certain we aren't doing it, I really have no idea.

As far as I can tell, bias could well be an integral part of how the mind works. In fact I consider the belief that there is some sort of Truth (or actuality) --- to which the clear-headed meditator/actualist supposedly has access to, but the rest of the world does not --- to be a somewhat dangerous terrain, full of self-supporting loops and tricky traps.

---

Indeed I believe that there are two different, possibly coexisting scenarios: (1) perceptual changes caused by means of refined perception, and (2) perceptual changes caused by means of selective perception, i.e. ignoring what doesn't fit the picture.

What would we expect to see in scenario (1), versus scenario (2)? In yourself? Or in a friend: suppose that you have two friends, one of whose meditation practice has lead him towards the first path, and the second has had the misfortune (?) of heading mostly through the second path. How would you distinguish which is which?

I find this to be an extremely important question for the practice of meditation, and to me it has all sorts of personal reverberations.

I've found it useful to assess whether I'm even asking the right questions in the first place or investigating from the right standpoint - which probably goes along with right view. Responses to a given query will yield relevant results, much like a search engine. If the same query is constantly input, differing results are unlikely to get discovered.

I've also tried to figure out how to work with my tendencies to see how they can be of benefit. I have often admired people who seem to have mastery over a very particular subject because I tend to broadbrush many subjects and have thought that was somehow insufficient, like I wasn't going deeply enough. I eventually found the broadbrushing approach useful in that it seems to balance things. I like taking the time to work on lots of areas because of the whole interdependence angle and seeing how things work together on lots of levels. I suppose the mastery angle allows for its own type of incorporation too, I'm just not sure how because it's not something I'm used to (and I'm also not saying one is better than the other, just saying how my mind seems to work).