On Ominous Music

Last week I heard a radio program about the role of "eyewitness" evidence in the judicial system. It seems that evidence based in sense perception, although given high credibility in many cases, often turns out to be erroneous.

I wasn't surprised, given what I know about my own credibility.

Although I'm sometimes curious (or even skeptical) about thoughts and feelings, I rarely extend this inquiry to sound, smell, taste, sight and touch.

Perhaps all of us give similar primacy to the senses. Perhaps that's why we have so many cliches based on sense data:  That's just the way I see it!

But the Buddha was cautious about perception, one of the five "aggregates" of phenomena. In fact, he offered the Eightfold Path as "the way leading to the cessation of perception."

Of course, the Buddha wasn't counseling us to become deaf and blind.

But he did ask us to cultivate a meticulous relationship to perception so that, upon hearing ominous music, we might pause before calling the police.

We might use that time to ask: What is this?

Comments

[Jon]

Thanks for this Barry! I think you've said it well, if we could first "stop" then we could touch, smell, taste, and see everything realistically.

[Joseph]

I don't know if it's my brain still getting confused trying to make sense of a foreign language, but I almost always hear someone calling my name in the street.
Of course after looking around, there's no one there.