20151004 (perception)

What are you looking at

Is a lot harder to answer than you

Think the first illusion of vision

Is we are seeing something

Outside our bodies as if this

Is not taking place in our heads

The conundrum is ground for

Matrix Inception other movies

Chuang Tzu started it off with 

His remark after he had dreamt

He was a butterfly he was not sure

He is now not a butterfly dreaming

He is a man more recently Descartes

Divided our heads from our bodies

Thought he must exist because he 

Thinks as the basic certain truth

Were it so simple Aquinas

Advised perplexed philosophers

To lay bricks a while jar 

Themselves back to reality

There’s a lot of illusion in perception

That helps us to see things as they are 

Ever wonder why the moon near 

The horizon looks so big

Put your head between your legs

See the moon lose its larger

Aspect immediately

I won’t explain just try it

I’m looking at a flat screen digital

Display on my retinas the images

Are upside down but we’d have

A horrible time if we really saw it

As upside down my left eye 

Sees everything a little different

Than what my right eye sees

Rather than confusing us the errors 

Create depth a mathematical stunt

Which enables us to see near 

And far if we burn an image

Into our retina we sort of see it

Even when we close our eyes

Or turn away yet that’s not the

Image we see when somebody

Asks us think of a stop sign

What we see isn’t the thing

And it isn’t that burn-image

If that image-not-image grows too

Real we lose sight of what’s

Ahead run off the road lose 

Our place in the lesson

Are daydream images what

We see in dreams nightmares 

Which can appear frighteningly 

Comprehensive feeling hearing

But it’s not what’s out there

Early philosophers concluded

Only a spiritual capacity could

Let us compare sight of a square

With blind touch of a square

Incomparable sensations yet

Definable in essence few accept

Spirit now as an explanation

Sentient beings are able to become 

An I who can sleep and persist

Yet it’s our nature to require 

Even the obvious to have 

An explantion

c. J.S.Manista, 2015