Mar 8 • Integration & Grounding
Four Relationships With Ourselves
The perceiver is the one who witnesses. Before thought or feeling, simply seeing. Ever accessible, often encountered accidentally — in shock, in beauty, in the moment before thought reassembles itself.
The perceived is whatever arises in the perceiver as they perceive. A spirit. A grief. A color. A pattern in someone’s speech. Not the thing being perceived, but how perceiving it affects the perceiver. The perceived does not require your participation to exist, but requires your perceiver to become known.
The receiver is where that effect occurs, where the experience lands, whether warmth or wound. Here is where one loves, recoils, and is moved by the perceived, however the perceiver notices. Confusing perception and reception is a common source of considerable suffering.
The repository is everything you have learned, survived, been shaped by — that has sunk below the threshold of your awareness and now operates as the lens through which everything else is filtered. It is not the past. It is the past still active in the present, unannounced. Remember a moment from your childhood. It was there, all this time, but when was the last time you thought of it? Yet, such moments can be where new beliefs, perspectives, and other frameworks began, or were further developed upon.
In between these four is a fifth, having these four within and at once, yet without being had. That which was never absent, turning attention between these four at will, accessing the perceiver, receiving and being the perceived, and remembering the repository.
Below is a summary of how Vedanta distinguished between these. Vedanta is one of the six classical schools of Hindu philosophy, rooted in the Upanishads — the concluding portions of the Vedas; literally “Veda”(knowledge) + “Anta” (end). The end of the Vedas, and the knowledge toward which all of it points.
One distinction: Vedanta aims to dissolve the self. I invite having all relationships within oneself work together.
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Four Relationships With Ourselves
