#25 Perception

The Witness Within

Many different people can be looking at the same thing and see entirely different scenarios. Someone looking at an engine of a car who is a mechanic, can look at it and through his various senses of sight and sound, can diagnose if there is a problem. While someone who doesn’t understand the mechanics of an automobile, it means absolutely nothing because to him it is a black box. To somebody else it’s a functioning mechanism that he understands.

We also in our general daily routines will get things in quite different ways. Psychologists and psychiatrists use something called the inkblot test or the Rorschach test, to be able to figure out what the deeper inner psyches of people are influencing their being. They’ll show them the Rorschach test and they will say something and through what they see in this inkblot, they can sort of determine what’s going on inside of someone.

Now, Ibn ‘Arabī told us that the world is a translator for Allah, which means as you look around you see things depending on your state or station, what you see is different. For instance the great American poet who wrote about the glory of God in a long poem that he entitled, A Blade of Grass, certainly saw more than a blade of grass in a blade of grass, it meant much more to him.

There is a story of a dervish who was walking down the street and there was a man selling cucumbers and pumpkins and screaming at the top of his lungs, “The sweetest there is, the sweetest there is.” And the dervish fainted in ecstasy, because when he heard, “The sweetest there is,” it meant God to him, it meant Allah to him, and here he was in the middle of a street with vendors selling vegetables and God was being talked about.

What a glorious thing, some people saw cucumbers, some people saw pumpkins, he saw halos and angels wings, and he fainted! We see different things in front of us dependent on the state or station that we’re at. We experience different things from what’s in front of us dependent on the station that we’re at. We have different interactions dependent on the station that we’re at. And we have different reactions to different phenomenon dependent upon what our insides are truly like.