I remember taking this photo. The chill air at dawn. But looking at it now is also a memory. A memory of perceptions received not half a second ago, processed and integrated with 5 senses and other immediate memories. The result is our perception of now.

My Spirit Guide, See Do, wanted me to see the differences between the nature of our temporal reality and the internal construct that we perceive. He said this understanding would become essential in my understanding of my place in actively creating events in the world.

            He pointed out how what we perceive as real, we see as existing in real time, right now, right there in front of us. We understand memories of things that happened a few minutes ago as quite different from what we are consciously perceiving as “now.” But they are not really so different. And even our science bears this out.

            We think we see what is there. We believe our eyes, in fact all of our senses, without question. And for good reason, as we have very little evidence to the contrary. But that construct of reality that we believe in as right now and real is, in fact, a memory.

           Our mind has assembled it out of available sensory input. Scientific studies have shown that in most cases our perceived right now is about a half second from the points in time that the sensory input was perceived. It takes about that long for the mind to gather the input and assemble the construct.

            Think about that for a moment. There are interesting implications. First, it is impossible for you to literally and consciously perceive anything directly. If your conscious mind could, it likely could not make sense of it. It must first be “processed” by a part of your mind somewhere below your consciousness. It gets filtered, and homogenized or integrated with the last grains of perceived reality. It all gets aligned and synchronized to appear seamless.

            Or at least we always remember it as seamless.

            Even things a little out of sync would be, well, alarming. So it is all reconciled into a cohesive, and comforting, perception. To makes things even more interesting, the same scientific studies seems to indicate that our mind is capable of projecting our consciousness, or at least our perception of our consciousness, actually slightly back in time to help match with the aligning input perceptions. Not far, maybe a little less than half a second.

            But, remember (heh-heh) that as everything is perceived as a memory, it is very easy for our mind to perfect the integration later. If we did get it a little out of sync, it’s easy to correct.

            We are all aware of the limits and failings of memory. We know that even eye witness accounts can blur and distort over time. But what we don’t know is just how short that span of time might turn out to be.

           Everything you perceive is a memory. The concept of direct perception is an illusion. We see our temporal reality as a hard and undeniable place. It is 100% consistent and clearly there to touch. But our conscious minds are also clearly and undeniably outside of that hard reality.

           Yet this is how we come to believe in an entire world. Our senses are our sole windows on our reality. And it all gets assembled out of sight and given to our conscious awareness as a remembrance of things past and in the tiniest of samplings (a mere 10-40 bits per second) to become our only evidence of a cohesive existence.

           It then goes into what we perceive as a deeper memory, to be drawn on to support all of our temporal conclusions.

           And this look at the truth is just beginning. We’re still looking at the reality in front of our eyes. There is more than meets the eye.

           See Do would like us to really see our reality, to understand how it comes to us, and to see how we interact with it. You see, he wants us to change the world. This world. And it will take a good deal of seeing. And doing.

           –continued  (Next: A deeper look at our keyhole perception)