This was for Psych and in hindsight was probably one of the most meaningful assignments I've ever done.

“Reality is not out there waiting to be witnessed; reality is made by the mind.” 

– Jonah Lehrer

What is reality? We may assume that it is our conscious and lived experience of the world, thinking that we are experiencing reality as it truly is; but if we look closer, we will realise that even on the level of sensation and perception, our so-called ‘reality’ is perturbed and tainted by individual subjectivity. This essay thus seeks to explore and question our experience of the sensory world from psychological and philosophical perspectives, reflecting on visual and mental processes that take place through observations induced by alterations in light throughout a sunset, and of an optical illusion.

The Sun lights the whole world up. Its brilliant white light shines through the prism-like sky, revealing the earth’s curvature. Birds soar pass silver-lined clouds into gradients of blue, white, pink and purple, somehow distinct yet melded together. Away from the Sun span blue skies that meet the ocean at a navy horizon. Blinding rays bounce off the water, concealing its colour, while closer to land glistening waves with dark undersides wash the shore. At eye-level, people stroll along the golden beach, their facial and bodily features clear as the day. Trees and even buildings look alive in the light. I am absorbed and enlivened by this picturesque sight.

As the Sun sets, it evolves into a circle of flames, a golden egg-yolk, then incredulous shades of magenta and neon orange as it falls behind clouds. Light rays peek through, creating a fiery image of a phoenix. More colours dance across the sky – orange, red, blue, yellow and green. As the blinding luminance recedes from the water’s surface, the ocean mirrors the colours overhead. My mind joins in the rapture of light and life.

Retreating further, the Sun’s divine light quietens to a glow. Everything slows down. Vision is softer, less noisy. The rich, vivid world mellows into misty, pastel watercolours, its hues dusting the cotton candy clouds. My heart stills, feeling peaceful and appreciative. Even time pauses to watch this magnificent spectacle.

Then it happens too quickly – the Sun drops and the world’s multicolour clarity moves towards a gloomier, colder monochrome of mere forms. The now blurry hues smash into each other on their way into oblivion. A pale moon and stars emerge, accompanied by unimpressive artificial lights. As darkness ensues, details start to blur. The phoenix disappears. The radius of my vision shrinks and I struggle to make out faraway objects. The water appears devoid of texture and movement; only with faint street lights can its vague ripples of white and blue be seen closer to shore. The sea turns near-black, merging into the night sky, concealing the span of the water. Like the Sun, my spirits lower, not as amused or inspired as before – but with appreciation for having witnessed such a mesmerising sight.

People appear as unrecognisable silhouettes, their movements like hovering shadows. Even the sand has turned suspicious and unfamiliar, its luscious creases now daunting. Trees appear lifeless, only their forms discernible. My eyes start lying to themselves, seeing moving boats in the place of floating buoys. Mist appears in the distance, creating an illusory island. It’s not that there’s no colour; everything is just a hundred shades darker and deader.

All things bright and beautiful have been reduced to mere forms and undertones. As there’s nothing more to see, I leave the cold, gloomy beach.

We interact with reality through our sensations of the external world. This is the stimulation of sensory organs, like when light falls onto our retina in visual processing (Corayer, 2017). While the contact between light and the retina is lost almost immediately, the brain organises and interprets this information that is converted from physical signals to neural activity, deconstructing visual inputs into tiny fragments and then reconstructing them, forming the image that we perceive (Cropper, 2017). What we experience is therefore a result of our own personal processing and evaluation of external stimuli (Corayer, 2017; Cropper, 2017).  Our interpretation of the world could thus largely differ from what is actually going on externally.

We form our unique interpretation of the world through constructs like colour, motion, form and depth (Cropper, 2017). For example, lightwaves reflected from the surface of the object are perceived as colour (Corayer, 2017). However, colour is essentially an unquantifiable experience and interpretation that takes place internally; it does not exist in the world beyond our brains (Stevens, 2013). My perception of the shifting hues in the sky could be distinct from the next person’s, with perfect vision of the same view. Furthermore, we tend to evaluate our experiences by distinguishing and categorising raw data, adding our thoughts and feelings, further tainting reality with our perceptions (Hart, 1987). My observation of the sunset consists mostly of labelling and evaluations, which vary greatly across individuals given their personal and conditional nature. Factors such as past experiences and preferences could easily influence our interpretations (Hart, 1987). Additionally, our reactions to sensations instil yet more impressions in the mind, paving the way for future evaluative perceptions (Hart, 1987). Seeing that our perceptions can so easily be disputed, perhaps they cannot then be ‘real’, for surely reality should be objective, universal and timeless in nature?

Buddhist psychology has approached this issue, as seen in doctrines like the Dependent Origination, where the Buddha explained causality of all conditioned phenomena, stating that perception arises simply as a natural result of the contact between our senses and ‘sense-objects’ (e.g. eyes coming into contact with visual objects) (Nauriyal, Drummond, & Lal, 2006). As raised by Lakoff and Johnson (1999), we may then infer that our perceptions, such as colour, are not purely subjective, since they are not imagined phenomena; there is an objective aspect to it, since colour arises in our mind upon contact of the eyes with physical visual objects. It is thus simply a natural phenomenon arising through the interaction of our internal and external world. 

What we can certainly deduce to be objective, however, is the transience of both the internal and external world. As the Sun began to set, light and my visual image changed. Clarity of sight reduced and colours began to fade. Motion slowed down, depth became harder to perceive, and forms eventually dominated the image. As my visual perception shifted, so too my mental processes. As clarity and colour diminished, my feelings of inspiration and exhilaration reduced to a more subdued appreciation. Later, when surroundings and objects became difficult to discern, I felt somewhat disengaged, finding them less aesthetically appealing. From all aspects – physical, visual, mental, and emotional – the only constant was change. 

Relating again to Buddhism, what we can objectively deduce from reality is that it is transient and impermanent (Hart, 1987). From the beginning of the observation till the complete dissolution of the Sun, just as the physical world was changing, so too my sensations and perceptions. Outside of this specific timeframe, from the beginning till the end of our day, external change is seen in human activity and natural phenomena, while internally, the mind too is ever-shifting. Perceptions, thoughts, emotions and reactions constantly arise and pass away only to make way for new ones. Just as the colours of the sky change, we too change moment by moment (Hart, 1987). This fact is as plain as the nature of life – birth, growing, aging, sickness, and death – but usually forgotten. Knowing this fact itself leads us closer to the (presumably) objective, universal, and timeless reality.

The object of observation is a smooth, solid spread of lawn – but that’s not all there is to it. In actuality, it is a proliferation of Azolla rubra, a floating water fern, on the surface of a lake. The ferns gather together in a spread across the water, creating a texture that appears like the surface of a pool table or a green carpet. As seen in Figures 1(a) and 1(b), hints of red and brown amongst green hues make the surface appear like grass grown on soil. Where fern growth is abundant, there appears to be a separate piece of land (as in Figure 1[a]) or a bank for the lake (as in Figure 2), more concrete from a distance rather than up-close. The surrounding water appears shallow.

The brain sees through the illusion by logical reasoning. While at first it was perplexing when birds appeared to ‘swim’ through solid grassland, the brain realised that there was water beneath the leaves. A closer look revealed that the visual perception of a ‘whole’ lawn was sewn together by small, abundant leaves. Additionally, the brain saw through the ‘breathing’ lawn, reasoning that the patch formed through cohesion was simply moving in sync with occasional ripples of the water. In parts where the proliferation was less intense, light passed through gaps between the ferns and hit the water’s surface, breaking down the image of seemingly opaque, ‘irreflectable’, concrete land; this is more visible in Figure 1(b).

We perceive the illusion because our visual system has been built to extrapolate meaning from stimuli, drawing from past experiences, learning and visual context, in order to interact with and make sense of our environment (Partos, Cropper & Rawlings, 2016). In this case, the brain is accustomed to perceiving grass plains through past input, and given the contexts of its location in a park, and the red and green hues of the abundant leaves, the brain assumed that this was yet another plain. Because of this distorted initial perception of the overall image, the visual percept of depth was misinterpreted as well. As the coagulation of ferns appeared like a lake bank, I was induced to think that the surrounding water was relatively shallow, when it was actually very deep.

This illusion, plainly discovered in our sensory world, may prove helpful to our metaphysical investigation of reality. While the tiny plants are the external reality, the ‘reality’ of the lawn that we see is an interpretation of the brain so although there were indications giving the illusion away, perceptual tendencies and habits of quick recognition lead us to see more than was really there (Lehrer, 2008).  The brain filled in the gaps of its initial abstract impression with subjective interpretations, before we could even make logical inferences, finding meaning where there may be none, occasionally misinterpreting external reality (Lehrer, 2008). Yet, these tendencies to create meaning in the process of sensation is simply its natural, biological function, as discussed previously.

We can relate our perceived reality of this illusion to the idea of a fragmented and reconstructed image in the way the individual ferns gather to form an image of a ‘whole’ land. Buddhism interestingly explores this concept of fabricated reality through the idea that all phenomena can be reduced to elemental forms. The Venerable Nagasena once considered if it was the individual parts of a chariot (e.g. the wheels or its spokes, or the framework) or all parts of it, that was the chariot; he later proposed that there was, in actuality, no chariot. ‘Chariot’ is just a name – ‘empty sound’ (Sujato, 2015). The question arises, then, of whether reality is the part (the fragmented ferns) or the whole (the lawn). Since we see components clinging together, forming a ‘whole’, when they are reduced to elemental form – what is there? Is the image in our case an illusion only because it is contrary to our usual perception of reality? These are interesting to consider.

While the questions explored thus far contest our notion of what reality is, it has been and will continue to be challenging answering them, as these are perhaps the most complicated questions ever asked. However, given that there are apparent, objective truths to our experience, such as the quality of transience in all phenomena, perhaps it is then not so pressing what reality is. As the body and mind are the only mediums through which we experience the external world, it would seem that whether or not we have the entire truth, we necessarily have to accept this as our reality. The question then may not be what reality is, but what we make of it. Since it is subjective to a certain extent, we can alter it through the mind (aptly reflected in the quote in the beginning). Knowing the transience of life, and that our sunsets are numbered, we should thus seek to make the most of and the best of our experience.

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Personal collection of S. J. Cropper, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC.

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Personal collection of S. J. Cropper, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC.

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Personal collection of S. J. Cropper, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC.

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