We are a gifted lot — the human race.

We are blessed by our perception. With exquisite sensual faculties and an impulse to create, we are always engaged in artistic endeavors. In an attempt to satisfy the innate desire to participate in the world of form and please the senses we've developed countless worlds of artistic expression. Whether painting to capture the eye or orchestrating music to move the ear, our art allows us to participate in the efflorescence of the whole.

Cognitively, however, we are capable of a new sense. Conceptual thought — objective imagination — this mental “sense” has lifted us above all other life on the planet and in doing so has charged us with the responsibility of caring for it. Gifted with this capacity to conceptualize we created the written word and with it, a new art-form.

Literature — philosophical literature in particular — has become to the thinking mind what gourmet cooking is to the tongue. Novels, articles, and even blog posts all aim to excite and please our sixth sense — the uniquely human realm of thought.

Thought combines with our other senses to create a single, unified experience — a thinking and witnessing awareness. Thought is not a separate entity but deeply embedded in every waking moment. It uses the information gleaned from the five external senses to build upon its understanding of reality while simultaneously granting itself a new degree of freedom to create imaginary yet coherent worlds.

The French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty made an immensely profound contribution to the way we understand our place in the world and how we interact with it. He spent a lifetime showing that all perception is inherently based on a reciprocal relationship with one's environment and by that knowledge he inferred and showed us our inseparability from it. In his greatest work, Phenomenology of Perception, he writes:

Each and every one of us, an embodied mind, manifesting for ourselves a particular perspective of the world.

We are embedded witnessing presences to the dramatic and sometimes tragic cosmic play that is the universe unfolding. As part of this play, involved in this modern act, we wish only to live a life of laughter and love. We are all sentient creatures in carnal bodies with insatiable appetites. Always living in a reciprocal relationship with our immediate environment.

My hands exploring a tactile world are themselves touchable objects. This reciprocal relationship informing all of our senses is the crux of all perception. Whenever we hold hands or embrace our friends and families we co-imply one another. I touch and am touched by, at the same time. It is only by these perceivable and perceiving bodies that a world is there for us to co-create.

Our eyes transact photons from across the galaxy, and a star is made manifest in our mind’s eye. Just as white light refracted through a prism bursts forth from the other side in a beautiful display of increased complexity so too does the sensing body transmute signals from the external world of form into an immeasurable internal world of immaterial sentience.

This is where the magic happens.

The surface of our bodies is not just skin. Rather, the surfaces of our bodies are more like membranes for information transfer. Whether it’s the surface of your eye or of your ear drum, these surfaces transmute a signal from the external world of form and turns it into an immaterial conscious experience. 

All sense organs define a surface of metamorphosis. 

Realizing the boundaries of our living bodies are open to and transform the world into something coherent that we cognize, we can observe in a novel way the sheer absurdity (and stupidity) of all forms of racism.

The surfaces of our bodies distil an infinite external world into an infinite internal one. As John Lilly once remarked: “In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits.” No limits!

Your skin — how you look — does not and could never represent the infinite degree of freedom your inner soul has. Within each of us, an immeasurable blinding light of true inner radiance exists. A candle in the dark, I light up the world for Me — as do All. The immensity of this inner freedom is incomprehensible.