A handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness
I read Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, and it was when Pirsig explained Phaedrus' perspective on the world that I saw my own situation reflected in the book.
I read this book at a time when I was questioning my medium of expression, my profession, and exploring my alternatives. I was more interested in learning about the non-tangible, hard-to-describe world of feelings, emotions, consciousness and the subconscious.
Here is how Pirsig describes Phaedrus' knife:
The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us - these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road - aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. [...] From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world. Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the sand into parts. This and that, here and there, black and white, now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.
I am particularly interested in how he explains that we only truly see things if they are unusual or if we are predisposed to notice them and that this selection process is constantly mutating each person's experienced slice of reality. There are several other moments in the book that touch on this idea of perception actively shaping what we consider real.
To me, this reinforces the idea that as we focus on certain ideas or patterns in the world, we can train our perception and, in doing so, gradually reshape our reality around them.
