Perceptions are represented by an image of what some cognitive psychologists have called the perceptual filter. This filter screens out data that you have the habit of ignoring to free your flesh and being for other tasks. It is a living barrier that may be like an intense, protective forcefield which, when opened slowly and with deliberation, can admit a far greater range of experience (such as that which Dr. Carl Jung called the shadow).
In this emerging paradigm view, the aspect of the intangible body called perception includes all conditioned habits of stimulus and response. These range from the neurological and hormonal processes that coordinate digestion to spinal reflexes such as pulling your hand away from a hot stove and to psychosocial behaviors of which you may—at times—be at least partially aware and that you may choose to modify. Any or all of these may alter with experience or intent, and so ease or impede your care and cure.
Perceptions comprise the least familiar aspect of the body. One reason for this is that moderns tend to ignore context, and your perceptions respond to your dynamic context; they form your detector of cues for the responses of daily life, the gateway that cognitive psychologists have called the perceptual filter. This gateway admits stimuli you have chosen to be aware of, to focus on, and to think about. This filter thus excludes the minutia and immensity of your experience, which would otherwise overwhelm your awareness and understanding, along with the stimuli that you have at one time disliked or disregarded, and that you now block out or ignore. Those that you let in cue routine responses that you at one time found useful and accepted as a pattern—that is, a habit or conditioned response. In other words, perceptions are your preset expectations and reactions, and are apt to become fixed and dated. Chances are good that your gateway is so familiar and extensive that you identify with it and let it guide most of your thoughts, words, and deeds.
Your perceptions accumulate at birth, as when you learn to put your thumb in your mouth in utero or when gravity teaches you to walk. You soon have no need to think about your myriads of new habits and learn to take them for granted as inborn aspects of identity, aspects arise inevitably from your body as if they are happening to it and not arising from it. Most of these habits arise early and become so extensive that you may feel obliged to sustain them even when they become neutral or maladaptive. With effort, you can change your habits, as when you improve your posture by learning yoga or enhancing your movement with the Feldenkrais method. In times of illness, you can enhance your self-care and collaborative cure by revising the automatic habits that impede adaptation and by acquiring new abilities that compensate for or offset any losses that may overtake you.
When perceptions cause trouble, you may become angry with your context or circumstances. Then you can become aware of them, own them, and repattern them. This may require that you see things that you would rather not and learn from experience or education how to grow and adapt to manage your life as it is in the world as it changes. Repatterning perceptions is critical in care and cure, when many of your expectations and reactions and habits may become dysfunctional all at once. Perceptions may then be both invisible and troublesome. One reason for this is that you are a social being whose basic patterns were set long ago in the womb and in childhood, and are now covered over by subsequent perceptions that may take time and ingenuity to penetrate. Such changes require patient observation and gentle intervention because all automatic habits are interconnected; altering any may alter the rest in unanticipated ways.
When you relax your filter and allow your awareness and understanding to explore your perceptions, you will become aware of an inner world of habit that is uniquely yours. While you have imbibed thoughts, words, and deeds form others, and others may have intensively conditioned you in keeping with their habits, the stimuli that you encountered in your lifetime, the sequence in which you encountered them, and the responses that you tried and incorporated into your conditioned habits have formed a once-in-forever trajectory that is integral to your life. In other words, chance and circumstance shaped your idiosyncratic repertory of adaptive, neutral, and maladaptive habits.
Your perceptions thus represent your hard-won and priceless storehouse of experiential learning. This storehouse is your costliest treasure, as the whole of your body expended most of its resources in accumulating and sustaining your perceptions. Even if you have few material possessions, you are rich in the gifts of time. If you mistake this living treasure for material wealth, you may make the mistake of accumulating it during the first half of your life and then spending rather than investing it. This storehouse can be used as the raw material for developing your irreplaceable abilities and timeless legacy; if you thus dissipate it, you betray your future and the future of the bodies of humanity and life on earth.
In dissipating your inner storehouse, you also give up the chance to care for and cure your body by revising your perceptions. This active process engages your awareness, your understanding, and your habits of imagining in gently and patiently becoming familiar with your habits and caring for and curing them. Revisions are critical when your perceptions divert your bodily resources to neutral or maladaptive habits that limit or impede care or cure. For example, useless repetitive thoughts may waste time and attention that you could instead apply to affirmations that prepare you for care and cure. Similarly, unprocessed trauma may pull you into the past and out of healing states in which you can focus on and effect care and cure.
You can prepare to care for and cure your perceptions by first becoming familiar with them. This requires patience and gentleness, as your filter has developed to bar your awareness and understanding. Thus, as you relax your perceptual filter, you will first encounter the justifications and rationalizations by which your awareness and understanding have accepted and sustained the perceptions that do not stand up to scrutiny. Over time, as you free your perceptions of fear, you will recognize your habits as arbitrary and accidental rather than reasonable or coherent; you will see that they are not subject to analysis and that you can best apprehend them through your imagination and engage them with your creativity. For example, you may begin to see your perceptions as aggregates that are like tangles or knots or clots, and so become able to loosen them and tease them gently apart.
When you have thus made friends with your perceptions, you will be able to recognize which may be useless or harmful, then to ignore them, and finally, as they weaken, to dissolve them and to recover the bodily resources that those perceptions trapped. You can then reform your perceptions to align with your vision and purpose, such as caring for and curing your body so as to thrive into the future and create a legacy that draws on the sum total of your experience. In other words, you can learn to adapt your perceptions to real-time context and to form new habits that join your intentions with your present resources, including any opportunities that chance or circumstance may offer in time.
As you become able to care for and to cure your perceptions, you can use your perceptions to recognize, enter into, sustain, deepen, and broaden your heavenly healing states, and so to create a life that is better than any you ever imagined regardless of your context, and even to use the worst circumstances to strengthen your processes of care and cure. This requires extensive inner work that pays off in benefits such as forming a new, open, and dynamic perceptual filter that admits whatever is may be of use in the moment—including transformative challenges—and that excludes whatever is useless, redundant, or harmful.