Knocking From the Inside

We act on what we perceive, not what's real. And we rarely know the difference.

In this episode Jacob examines perception at every level — the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, the assumptions we make about strangers, the myths nations tell themselves about their own goodness, and the deepest illusion of all: the mind's projection of a divided reality onto what is fundamentally one.

Along the way: a gas bill that wasn't overdue, the astronauts who saw no borders from space, the Vedantic concept of Maya, and three traditions — Jesus, Lao Tzu, and the Third Patriarch of Zen — arriving at the exact same place. Plus St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, and a 13th century Persian poet whose civilization is being bombed right now.

The rope was never a snake. But try telling that to your nervous system.

Transcript

The Rope and the Snake

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

The Gas Bill

How We See Others

Earthlings

Maya

Three Traditions, One Teaching

The Idol Problem

Rumi

Jacob 0:01

There was a man named Jalal Addin Muhammad. Most know him as Rumi. He was from the Persian-speaking world. The same civilization that is being bombed right now. And he wrote something about this. He says, I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons. Knocking on a door. It opens. Oh, I've been knocking from the inside. So you are walking along and you see a snake on the ground on the path ahead of you. You see the snake and you stop and you feel the fear, but then you look a little closer, and it's not a snake at all. It's a coiled rope. Your perception of the snake had you terrified, but then you realize, no, I'm okay. This is a parable in the Vedantic tradition. As an example of how perception shapes our life. We act on what we perceive, not what's real. And we rarely know the difference. And this episode is about that gap. And my name is Jacob. I'm the host of Standing Nowhere, and as always, it is a pleasure to be back with you. Perception One of the biggest ways perception affects our life is our perception of ourself. The internal stories that we tell ourselves. Am I attractive? Am I smart? Am I funny? Do people like me? Am I financially stable? Am I a financially stable person? And if we're not careful, these perceptions can be very depressing or ego inflating. And we all we all kind of alter the perception of ourselves to others, don't we? We try to control it. I know in my own situ in my own case, all throughout my life, and I I've done this automatically, and I think we all do this, not just me, but using me as an example, I do have situations where even unconsciously, I will pretend or play a naive role. Or I'll pretend that I'm naive about something. Or that I'm overly curious about something, to lower guards, to lower the guard of other people. Not in a malicious way. Honestly, it's it's just that I want to make people feel more comfortable sometimes. Have you ever done that? Pretended to be a little naive about something because you enjoyed the way someone told you about something. We all do this especially with children. Really? Oh wow. And it's good to be genuine with children, but let's be real. Sometimes a kid will walk up to you with a little toy train and you couldn't care less about it, right? But you raise your eyes. Wow, look what you got there. Wow. We we go a little overboard, right? We we feign that we're interested, or we'll pretend that we're ignorant about something when we're talking to a child, or we do that to adults too. I I do it to adults. You know, I'll pretend, I just see myself doing it. And then I see the person's the way the person reacts to my performance. And I'll even see judgment in the other person's eyes. And it's like I'm already two chess moves ahead of them, and they don't even realize that I'm aware of them judging me, and that I position myself so that they would. And of course, it is a level of manipulation, even if it's gentle and social, and we all do it, we all put on masks to alter the perception that others have of ourselves. But, you know, practicing and learning about Buddhism uh over the last few years, I've really encouraged it has really encouraged me and kind of pulled me into the direction of dropping that performance. But there's still the tension of not wanting to leave people behind or appear that I'm already four or five steps ahead. It's like, yeah, yeah, I get it. You know, I don't want to make people feel bad. So the subtle manipulation in social settings isn't malicious. It's just, I don't know, the the ego or the mind's way of trying to keep a social interaction sort of, I don't know, malleable or pleasant. I don't know. I don't know. I'm just observing what I do, and I'm sure a lot of you listening do this in public scenarios as well, right? You might feign ignorance on something. But there's also the fact that perception can really distort reality on well, some will say perception is reality, and there's a lot of truth to that. But like, for example, if you're born into a lucky birth, right? A lucky, wealthy family, you you're going a lot of people that are born into wealth and opportunity, they take full credit for that, which inflates their perception of themselves. And at the same time, it fuels their condemnation of those without lucky circumstances. I did it. Why can't you? You know, we see this with especially with the older generation, because you get a lot of people from older eras that condemn the young the youth. You hear it a lot, nobody wants to work anymore, everybody's lazy. I worked hard when I was younger, you know, nobody wants to do that anymore. Well, it's not true objectively, and the older generation doesn't realize it because they grew up in that luckier timeframe, and they don't realize how good they had it and how bad the youth has it today. But we're just talking about the average American. It's like the water that slowly boils and the frog doesn't notice and it dies, right? These slow changes build up over time, and someone's perception is basically left in the dust. So that's just one example of perception, uh like wrong perception, basically. And you don't realize how lucky you had it. Another example um of what we're talking about here with perception is this podcast. I put it out and it's mostly silence. It's it's a new podcast. Podcasts take time to grow. It's an independent podcast, so I'm not a celebrity where I had a big following to begin with. So it's mostly silence, mostly radio silence when I put out episodes. I've gotten a few people that comment and uh give me feedback, you know, friends and family and some strangers online, but genuinely, I don't have any idea how it's actually landing. So I have no accurate perception of how people are perceiving it on the other end, right? So this is a little uh uh reminder. If you're out there and you enjoy this show, reach out, comment or something, uh, let me know. So that way I don't cry into my pillow every night wondering how the podcast is doing. It's a little unsettling not knowing what the perception is, but it's also freeing. It's just another kind of not knowing, you know. And just to give you some more examples of perception and how it affects us. Um, well, let me start before we jump into um into into this next section I want to talk about. I want to tell you a little story that happened to me recently about my gas bill. Okay. So I woke up and I'm sorry, it was actually yesterday. I woke up and I turned on the shower after my uh little morning meditation, and I'm waiting for the waiting for the shower to heat up. And I think a considerable amount of time went by because my shower is pretty slow to heat up, anyways. But a considerable amount of time went by, and I'm like, what is going on here? And my first thought is, oh no, I forgot to pay the gas bill or something. So I pull up my gas bill online, and long story short, I had been backed up on a few of my utilities, which I got current recently, but the gas bill was one of them that was backed up. So I thought, this is it. I forgot to pay it, they shut me off. And this is on a Sunday. So I um I had a full day of anxiety basically over this old bill. And I was looking at the large amount, and I'm thinking to myself, oh my goodness, I totally spaced it. And I had budgeted my money and my work schedule out for the remainder of the month to cover rent and all the bills uh that I had remembered, and I forgot this bill. And it was a pretty big bill, too. So I was like, darn it. So I went through the whole day at the very beginning of the day, I said to myself, um, there's nothing you can do about it right now. I remembered the the Dalai Lama's old advice. Is there something you can do about it right now? Well, great. Then you don't need to worry. And is there nothing you can do about it right now? Okay, great. There's also no need to worry. So I try to remember that advice, and I did. And it was like right in the beginning, I was like speaking to myself out loud, saying this like there's nothing you can do about it. Relax, you'll take care of it tomorrow when the call center for the gas company opens. So I called them up and they're like, No, you don't owe that much. You paid us two weeks ago. You're current, everything's fine, your gas is on. So I'm like, what the heck? I took a cold shower yesterday. And the lady was like, Well, it must have been your water heater. And sure enough, when I went home and checked it, it was the water heater's not working. So my perception all day yesterday was I forgot to pay the power bill. I'm um bad at bills. My wife's gonna, you know, gonna be mad at me. She wasn't, you know. I I was just beating myself up all day from that false perception. But I kept telling myself in the back of my mind, trust, trust the universe. You know, you talk about this on your podcast all the time, where you're faced with these challenges and worries, and you just have to trust. So I did that. I try, I just trusted things. And then I wake up today, and sure enough, that was not reality. My nervous system was responding to a perception, not reality. And this next section I want to talk about is how our perception of others affects the way we treat them. You know, I was at uh Walmart uh a couple of days ago, and I saw somebody come out. You know, at Walmart you get some pretty interesting characters. There's a website, people of Walmart.com. I won't digress. You guys have been to Walmart, and this person came out, and uh they had um unkempt hair and um uh like a hoodie kind of, and it was like pajamas and uh socks with uh rubber sandals, walking super slow through the parking lot, you know. Insert your your own perception here, your own stereotype, right? But the point I'm trying to get here at here is that we just we see people and automatically stereotypes pop up. I think it's a natural I mean, it's just the way the mind works, right? And if if we don't tend to it, it can get really bad. I mean, it can dip into hate and racism and all that crap. Or um, if we don't have any, well, we we might go hug a grizzly bear, right? Because there's no stereotyping in the brain. Stereotyping is a natural thing the brain does, and it shapes um it shapes our reality. It's a real important thing to just be aware of. Um, even me, uh, in my situation, I'm sure there are people who hear this podcast and their mind just automatically fills with um with condemnation. It it fill instead of compassion. And that's just the way some people are wired, it's the way that some people were raised, you know, um not to throw shade at wealthier families because if you you can't help it. If you were born into a wealthier family, you know, you're just I'm not a say I'm not saying you're automatically part of the statistic, but they do say statistically, uh, wealthier families, generally speaking, have less compassion for others. Why is that? You know, people hearing this podcast, why does he just get a job? Well, they're only hearing so much information, right? It's like a there's that old uh mind experiment where uh for perception where uh it it's somebody leaves their house, okay they leave home and they go jogging and they they make a left and then they jog down a little ways further, they make another left, they jog a little further, and they make a final left to complete a circuit and come home again. But they see somebody with a mask waiting for them at home. Now, with with just that information, your mind might perceive something dangerous. Right? Uh I'm I'm sorry. Uh to complete that picture, there's two men wearing masks waiting for him at home. Okay. Now, when you hear that, it sounds a little scary. And this is where you'll hear in the news, they tell you just a little bit of information and omit the full picture. Now, if I tell you this is somebody just playing baseball, you go, oh, he left home, he jogged around the block. I get it, that's hilarious, you know. But um that that's that's reality, right? Whereas before your perception was like more mysterious. Oh, he goes jogging. There's two men with masks. Oh my goodness. So you're not gonna be able to affect other people's perception of you or reality. That's just how it is. And you still gotta love them, and you still gotta understand they're just um they're just making the best the best judgments they can with what they have, right? It I mean, it can make it a little hard to love them sometimes, but you know, from from my perspective, I experience the crushing day-to-day uh work, which is invisible to people from the outside. They only hear someone talking about their woes, right? The excessive hours, the lack of um vacation time that that I get, uh, which is mandatory to be a functional, happy human being, right? All of these things they don't enter their brain and they just look at, wow, he's been doing that for a long time, or he just must love suffering or something like that. And maybe that's part of it too, in a psychological way, right? There's all kinds of factors that come into it. Um, the biggest and most problematic, I think, is our perception of the collective whole. Uh, for example, if you are born just a few hundred miles south of where I am recording this podcast, you are considered a Mexican and a foreigner, which is a constructed uh category and objectively in reality, it's it's not real. Um, people born in Mexico are human beings, right? Just like me. But if you are born over an imaginary line drawn in the sand by imperialists, I love using that word. You see, uh, that's my perception of our country. But if you're born on the other side of that line, you are a foreigner. You are other than, right? But when you ask the astronauts when they first viewed Earth from space, they will tell you they had what can only be described as a mystical experience. They suddenly saw the world with no borders, just that beautiful pale blue dot in the sky. That's what we are. We're earthlings, right? My body requires the same nutrients that somebody born in Mexico does, or somebody born in Iran does. A few episodes ago, I talked about Sarah going to school, and it was her last day of school, and I didn't I didn't reveal who she was or where she was from until the hard-hitting fact that at 10 45 a.m. her school was destroyed by the US military in a senseless act of murderous violence, which is the reality of it. But the perception I just gave enough details just so that some who may have an unconscious cognitive bias against Arabs and again some people may not be consciously racist or consciously have some slight bias against Arab people, right? But you disarm that by just giving the basic details so they can connect with this little girl, Sarah, on a human level first. Then you mention, oh, by the way, she's from Iran or Iran, excuse me, gotta pronounce that correctly. And I bring this up because the self-image we have of the United States, for example, is also a perception, and it's a heavily mythologized one, that we are the bastion of freedom in the world. We make up 4% of the world's population, but we police the world objectively like an empire. We're no different from the British Empire or any empire that has come before it, but we don't like to use that word because of the perception that it brings to mind. But Iran has been around for thousands of years. The Persians, Persia is one of the oldest and most beautiful civilizations in human history. But the perception that a lot of Americans have of Iran is just so sad. It's so narrow, it's so dim, it's so uninformed. And that's not a slight against Americans, it's just that they're heavily propagandized against. But what is the truth? It comes down to money, to greed. And I think as of the time of this recording, something like twelve hundred Iranians have died, over two hundred of them children. 160 of them were from that that that girl's school, Sarah, that I mentioned. And it's really sad. But see, if we as Americans are mythologized that the US is this bastion of freedom and democracy, our whole lives, we you get this perception that's Seared into your brain. And it's really hard to undo that. So you're not seeing a rope anymore. You're seeing a snake when it comes to Iran. You see snakes everywhere in the world. Now many of you hearing this know this, right? We know that politicians love to use fear to keep them in office or to get them in office in the first place. But confirmation bias is a bitch, isn't it? It's huge. We don't see the world as it is. We see it as we want to see it, or as we're we've been told to see it. But your brain constructs false distinctions in real time constantly. And one of my favorite ways to test this is the cube shade illusion. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can Google it and I'll include something uh in the show notes that will link you to a picture of it. But you've probably seen it. It's where you have a cube and they have the top portion of the of the cube and the bottom portion, they have the exact same shade of color. But the way that the cube is set in the image, it tricks the brain to think that the top is actually brighter than the bottom. And I'm sure you've seen this before. Optical illusion. It's really a perceptual illusion. But this shows you empirically that your brain constructs these false distinctions on the go, instantaneously. And this is what the Hindus figured out thousands of years ago, and they call it Maya or Maya, which is the illusion that the mind puts over all of reality. It's a veil over everything, because the mind projects duality onto everything. And everything is fundamentally one thing, but the mind creates the split. For example, you cannot have up without its correlate down. You cannot have hard without soft. You cannot have long without short. You cannot have bright without dark. These two things on everything I just described seem different explicitly on the surface, right? But fundamentally they're one. Because think about it. If I say something is hard, you only know what I mean because of its contrast soft. And the same applies to self and other. You don't know what self means unless you know what the opposite of other than self means. As you're hearing me explain this, you might say to yourself, Well, I can see the two things in my mind, though, Jake. I can see self, and I can I can conceive of not self. Or take another example, like you're holding a stick, right? You could say, or let's say your phone, your smartphone. You could say, Jake, here's the front of my phone where I you tap on it, and here's the back of my phone where there's no screen. And they're two separate things. But you see, those are two abstractions that your mind fabricated when the reality is the phone. There is just the phone. There is no front and back to the phone. There is, but those are abstractions. There is just the phone. In the same way, there's me and there's you, but there's just the universe. It's a bigger example, but it's true. You don't know what front means without back. Have you ever seen something that had a front without a back? Of course not. So you can you can comprehend, like when I say the front and the back, you can visualize both of those things, but you gotta remember you can't separate them. So perception is the mechanism of the projection of Maya, which is the illusion of separate things in reality. It's it's not a metaphor, it's it's the operating system of reality. And the Hindus knew about this a long time ago. And there's a gradual process of seeing through that illusion. It's not like a light switch, but it's like when when you go into a dark room and your eyes slowly adjust. And that is what meditation does. It helps you go beyond the illusion of duality. So it's kind of it's fun stuff, really. It is. Um, and and why do I bring this up? Well, because when you fundamentally understand this deeply inside you, and you experience it through practice, a trust starts to really develop inside of you. And it grows. And then anytime a bad situation happens, like a gas bill that you thought you didn't pay, there's a trust inside of you that's grown, and you remember, well, there's another side to this that I can't see right now. But I've seen the illusion of duality enough to know that. So then you finish your day. And then sometimes, like today, you wake up and find that you already paid that gas bill and you just forgot. But the problem is with perception, the perception of spirituality, of any tradition today, generally speaking, is thrown out by society, especially in the West, because of how ridiculously firm the church has held on to a certain perception for so long that people throw the baby out with the bathwater. They dismiss all spirituality because of a bad image that they have, God or whatever you want to call it. So they have the perception that spirituality is make-believe, and they have the perception that material matter is all that there is. I am a materialist. There is material and it is random, and we tell ourselves stories to cope, and then we die, and that's all. But you see, that's just a perception. And if you look at figures from the various spiritual traditions, like Jesus, for example, in regards to perception, what did he teach about this very topic of perception? He said, Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, let me take the speck out of your eye? Well, the log is in your own eye. You hypocrite. First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye. And you see, that word judge is, I believe, in Greek krino, and it's broader than just people. I think the the can the academic consensus is that Jesus was not saying to not judge uh exclusively other people, but in general don't hold any judgments. It's it's just the posture that you take, right? Being open, trying to see past preconceived perceptions. This is echoed by Lao Tzu in the Tao De Qing. He talks about this very thing when it comes to perception. He says, When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad. Being and non being create each other. Difficult and easy support each other. Long and short define each other. High and low depend on each other. Before and after follow each other. Therefore the master acts without doing anything, and teaches without saying anything. Things arise and she lets them come. Things disappear and she lets them go. She has but doesn't possess, acts but doesn't expect. When her work is done, she forgets it. That is why it lasts forever. These are people from twenty five hundred years ago who had time to deeply reflect on these truths. The third patriarch of Zen, he said, The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When not attached to love or hate, all is clear and undisguised. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. Do not seek for the truth, only cease to cherish opinions. It's okay to have he's saying it's okay to have preferences, but just don't cling to them. Those are three traditions right there. Jesus, Lao Tzu, and the patriarch from Zend, they all arrive at the same place. Judgment and preference, those are the mechanism of distorted perception. Saint John of the Cross, a Christian mystic, he also said, all that the imagination can imagine and the understanding can receive and understand in this life is not, nor can it be, a proximate means of union with God. I mean, he's saying it straight out anything you can think of is not God. So stop thinking. This is what is referenced in the Bible as an idol. Any concept that you have of God is an idol. Most people mistakenly think of idols as little statues that people bow down to. And that's partially correct back in the day, but that's not what it's really pointing to. The word idol, as it is translated from the word heavel, is a vapor or mist, something ephemeral that is here and gone, or ultimately not the truth. So any concept you have of God, any perception you have of God in the Christian tradition, is an idol. Meister Eckhart used to write, I pray that God rid me of God. And of course, he's referring to the concept of God, any concept of God. And the problem with idols is we worship those constructed images, and then we fight and kill each other over those images. I really don't like social media, but I opened it one day, and the first thing that popped up was something very hard to look away from. It was a woman in the street in Iran, and she was filming her basically getting bombed. There were bombs falling all around her, and she's crying, and she's calling out, Allah, Allah. And she was saying other things. Um I don't remember them exactly, but they sounded very uh traditional things that you would say in the face of death. And it was very beautiful, and it moved me so much, and I shared that I shared that video with somebody that I know, that's someone someone that I love very much. But this person is very fixed in their Christian fundamentalist perception of God, and it didn't hit them like it hit me. And the response I got was theological. Questions about Muhammad, about whether Jesus was wrong, rather than just sitting with the grief of what we'd just watched. And this this innocent old woman is just crying Allah Allah. And then eventually she dies. The building that she's standing next to is hit and it collapses on top of her, and you can hear her die. And it was it was a lot, it was a lot. And again, this person is close to me, and I love this person. And um, I just bring it up as an example of how perception can shift your view of somebody so radically that you don't even see them as a fellow human being anymore. And that just saddened me so much. You know, it's it's the rope and the snake. All the way down. Even our deepest perceptions. Deepest perceptions may be the most constructed. So just notice today, when you're reacting to a story rather than the fact, catch the snake before you run from it. That's really the whole practice. Look close at it. Is it a is it actually a snake? Or is it a rope? There was a man named Jalal Addin Muhammad. Most know him as Rumi. He was from the Persian-speaking world, the same civilization that is being bombed right now. And he wrote something about this. He says, I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons. Knocking on a door. It opens. Oh, I've been knocking from the inside.