The following well-known illustration from the Vedanta-paribhasha gives an account of the nature of perception: ‘As water from a tank may flow through a channel into a plot of land and assume its shape (square, triangular or any other form), so the radiant mind (Taijasa-Antahkarana) goes out through the eye or any other sense-organ to the place where an object is, and gets transformed into the shape of that object. It takes an active part in perception both by reason of its activity and the nature of that activity as caused by its latent tendencies (Samskaras). The mind is not something static, passive and merely receptive. As the brain, the organ of the mind, is enclosed in an organic envelope, solid and in appearance closed, the imagination has a tendency to picture it as being isolated from the exterior world, though in truth it is in constant contact with it through a subtle and constant exchange of secret activities. The mind is thus an active force, a form of the general active Power or Sakti. The mind is a radiant, transparent and light substance and can travel like a ray of light outside through a sense-organ. The mind, in particular, is always undergoing conscious and unconscious modifications. Every modification of the root Natural Principle is active and moving. This going out to an object and taking its shape is actual. It is capable of moving from place to place and assuming the forms of the objects of perception.

It is a changing and differentiating thing. “The mind is with parts and can move in space. We have, therefore, to acknowledge the existence of an internal organ on whose attention and non-attention perception and non-perception take place” ( Mind and Its Mysteries: p. If we do not admit the internal organ, there would result either perpetual perception or perpetual non-perception, the former when there is a conjunction of the Atman, the senses and the object, the three constituting the causes of perception, and the latter when, even on the conjunction of these three causes, the effect did not follow. People say: ‘My mind was elsewhere, I did not see that.' The impossibility of this simultaneity of knowledge through various sensory organs is an indication of the existence of the mind.” “Between the Atman and the organs of sense a connecting link is necessary. That is why there is no simultaneity of the knowledge of the impressions received through the various sensory organs. “Sense-knowledge is the product of the connection between the mind and the sensory organs. This perception is caused by the operations of a mind whose existence as a mediator between the Atman within and the object outside is evident from the fact of the synthesis of sensations and of the possibility of the absence of perception at certain times. The object itself does not enter the eye, for example, in the act of seeing, but there is a transmission of vibration from the object, with which his consciousness comes in contact, which becomes a content of his consciousness, and on account of which he is said to know the existence of the external object. The objects that are seen in the world are considered by the common man to be existing outside his body and the senses, and he feels that the objects are reflected, as it were, in his mind in perception.

It is one of the means of valid knowledge in the world and consists in an inseparable relation of the perceptive consciousness with its content. Perception is a process of the consciousness of an object. PART I: THE FOUNDATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY Chapter 5: The Theory of Perception The Perceptive Apparatus

Perception definition philosophy