Cultural-historical and socio-cultural psychologists have studied the way in which cognition develops; paying close attention to how it is embedded in a given place and time, in biology, and in different sets of social relationships and meanings.

Scholars following a Vygotskian perspective have shown how ‘higher mental functions’ develop through social interaction, by mediating and reinterpreting biological needs in terms of socio-cultural understandings. This example does an awesome job at illustrating the basic principles of cultural mediation. This approach is strongly concerned with meanings. To some extent, we can analyze how these meanings change from culture to culture and throughout history, and yet there is a bulk of perceptive potential that may be left unexplored. Of course, the question emerges: can we effectively disentangle perception and meaning?

It would seem logical to think that perception precedes meaning: how can we have a meaning for something we’ve not yet perceived? But then, we have a bunch of meanings for things we have not ‘directly’ or ‘individually’ perceived and/or experienced. A great deal of people may claim to have never seen, heard, smelled, or touched and angel. Yet they may associate meanings, ideas, shapes, colors, and other sensory information as to what this would entail. Perceiving an angel then, would be preceded by meanings and ideas; and these ideas would shape how (or if) the perception itself takes place, if the perception is at all valued, considered, or talked about.

In communicating, speaking about, and referring to reality, we have developed consensual interpretations, understandings, and concepts of what is real. Language, as we have crafted it in this process, serves as a frame for our perceptions and what we focus our attention on. At some point, we need to learn to perceive, interpret, understand or at least acknowledge reality in terms of what the majority of the people around us deem as real. Along with this come the distinctions of what’s ‘imaginary’, ‘paranormal’, or just plain ‘crazy’. This hooks our attention into specific bands of frequencies. Failure to engage in reality as defined by those around may result in punishment, rejection, medicalization, trips to psychiatric facilities, and/or death (imagine someone that never learned to perceive that cars can hit them when crossing the street).

There is also a power component to what is usually considered as reality. Even though anybody can potentially come up with new words, concepts and ways to define and speak about reality, not everyone's reality is validated equally by society at large. For reality to be ‘really real’, there has to be some sort of consensual agreement. Some people and groups of people have more power to enforce the ‘consensual’ agreements that they see fit. As kids, our caregivers and other authority figures bring forth specific definitions and parameters of what’s real. In a sense, we can resist, but the act of resistance entails us having to deal with whatever we are resisting. We can add to this all the ‘official’ versions of reality as put forth by the media and institutions in power, including modern western science... “Roswell was a hoax,” “evidence of the chupacabra”, “acupuncture is superstitious folk remedy”, “the earth is flat... err, round,” “ethelial is not really a word”, “global warming is not really an issue, oh wait, it really is”, etc.

According to Toltec wisdom and a broad range of cognitive theorists, every stimulus that we are able to perceive via our organs travels through channels of perception. Some of these stimuli, and whatever meanings we attach to them, stick around in our memory (or not, as we dismiss a broad range of what we can potentially perceive at any given moment). As said in a previous post (Energy as Structure and Fabric of the Universe), the Toltecs came to the realization that light is what makes up everything in our universe. So, to a certain extent, we perceive different gradations of this ‘light’. In perceiving (considering socio-cultural mediation, construction of meaning, and individual experience) we store and qualify specific vibratory segments of this ‘light’, and the old, stored light distorts the incoming light.

Modern science has shown that perception accords not with the features of the stimulus or the properties of the underlying ‘objects’, but with what the same or similar stimuli have typically signified in the past. As recent scientific research has shown, a probabilistic strategy based on past experience may explain the remarkable difference between what we perceive and physical reality. In part, we make new perceptions match with old perceptions in terms of our own experiences and what we’ve learned. According to Toltec wisdom, this is the way in which we begin to dream. Part of this dream has to do with the meanings of these perceptions, yet part of it has to do with the act of perception itself. Now the question is, can we actually disentangle perception, consciousness, and awareness?


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