The human organism, like most living systems, has a great capacity for adaptation. The human mind and nervous system adapts to many constant stimulations by moving them to the background or out of awareness altogether.
Imagine you begin wearing prescription lenses with a very slight vision distortion. you wear them all waking hours. Your mind adapts to the input. After a while the distortion becomes “normal” – you no longer notice it.
Say you add the very slightest tint of gray to the lenses. Again, your system adapts. Both distortions are now normal.
Imagine that these distortions were imposed not by external devices, but internal ones – say optic surgery at birth. So, there has never been a moment of your life free of those distortions. The distortions are no longer distortions – they are the way things are. They are your known world.
Because the distortions are slight and don’t impair your functioning and experience enough to separate you from others, you assume everyone’s sight is the same.
On your 50th birthday, your parents mention the surgery to you. After freaking out, you have “corrective” surgery. What do you think your experience will be?
It will be disorienting, vertigo, pain – your body will feel assaulted in ways you can’t imagine. The body, mind, nervous system – even you – will want to return to normal.
This distorted way of perceiving is the way of the world. We live distorted lives. We are conditioned by our parents, environment and social system to see things a particular way.
The consequences of this is that we never see things as they are. Everything is distorted to accepted norms – it’s the given reality. And it is rarely challenged. Why should it be? We’re all in agreement.
And therein lies the rub. To lift the veils of conditioning is no easy process. To rediscover what is real and true in us is work. And, in most cases, every step of the process is being resisted by the conditioning in us and all around us.
The conditioning is working against the process of liberation. As we work toward seeing clearly, the conditioning employs more and more subtle means to get us to settle on “this” as the end of the process.
But the process of seeing clearly never stops. It goes deeper and deeper to places beyond imagination. Even after all the veils have been lifted, revelation keeps bringing more and more clarity to seeing.