Seeing through the Perceptual Filters of Language and Narrative
Meditation enables one to gain access to a clearer, truer perception and experience of reality
Linguistic Relativism: How Language and Culture Alter Perception
The Eskimo (Inuit and Yupik peoples) of the Arctic Tundra regions are said to have as many as 50 or 100 — or even, according to some sources, thousands — of distinct words for “snow.” A 1991 article by Anthony C. Woodbury from the University of Texas, Austin, Texas, lists at least 32 distinct Inuit lexemes (i.e., root words) for “snow.” The article describes how the Inuit have separate words for such phenomena as “fallen snow on the ground,” “soft, deep fallen snow on the ground,” “crust on fallen snow,” “fresh fallen snow on the ground,” etc. This suggests that when you or I look out at a frozen Arctic landscape, we might see only vast tracts of land blanketed by snow. However, an Inuit Eskimo looking at the same landscape would be able to easily distinguish a variety of clearly differentiated types of snow, which they would be able to effortlessly recognize, because the differentiation is built into their very lexicon.
The Inuit Eskimo people are said to have 50 – 100 words to describe snow
Even more interesting is the research on the perception of color across cultures worldwide. For example, it was discovered that the Himba people of Namibia did not have different words for the colors green and blue. Whereas Western cultures typically categorize colors into around eleven broad groupings (e.g., red, yellow, green, blue), the Himba people had only five such color groupings in their language. The Himba term Buru refers to various shades of green and blue, while the distinct term Zuzu is used collectively to describe darker shades of most colors.
Scientists approached members of the tribe with color tests, in which they were asked to identify the colors of tiles displayed on a chart. It turned out that the Himba people had no trouble identifying a slightly different shade of green on one chart, scarcely perceptible to most people, but had trouble distinguishing between similar shades of blue and green, which would have been obvious to most Westerners. It appears that their perception of color was influenced, even dictated, by their color lexicon. Because their language had different words for different shades of color, minute differences in shading were readily apparent to them. However, because they grouped green and blue under the same linguistic term, they had a harder time distinguishing between these separate hues of similar shade.
Languages can alter our ability to recognise or describe colours
In an article published on The Conversation news website, the authors claim that, “Different languages and cultural groups … carve up the colour spectrum differently.” (Casaponsa, Aina, and Panos Athanasopoulos. “The Way You See Colour Depends on What Language You Speak.” The Conversation, 2025). Indeed, research suggests that many ancient cultures had no concept of the color blue! In the 19th century, the British scholar William Gladstone observed that in Homer’s epic The Odyssey, the sea is frequently described as being “wine-dark” rather than blue. In the article The Wine-Dark Sea: Color and Perception in the Ancient World, the author, Erin Hoffman, notes that “there is no word for ‘blue’ in ancient Greek.” The author continues to point out that:
Homer’s descriptions of color in The Iliad and The Odyssey, taken literally, paint an almost psychedelic landscape: in addition to the sea, sheep were also the color of wine, honey was green, as were the fear-filled faces of men; and the sky is often described as bronze.
Hoffman, Erin. “The Wine-Dark Sea: Color and Perception in the Ancient World.” Clarkesworld Magazine, vol. 76, 2013.
It gets stranger. Not only was Homer’s palette limited to only five colors (metallics, black, white, yellow-green, and red), but a prominent philosopher even centuries later, Empedocles, believed that all color was limited to four categories: white/light, dark/black, red, and yellow. Xenophanes, another philosopher, described the rainbow as having but three bands of color: porphyra (dark purple), khloros, and erythros (red).
The conspicuous absence of blue is not limited to the Greeks. The color “blue” appears not once in the New Testament, and its appearance in the Torah is questioned … Ancient Japanese used the same word for blue and green … and even modern Japanese describes, for instance, thriving trees as being “very blue” …
Apparently, because the color blue is relatively rare in the immediate natural surroundings of most ancient peoples, many ancient cultures had no distinct name for it. It seems that the first culture to have a distinct word for the color blue was the Egyptians, who were also the only archaic culture with the technology to manufacture blue dyes. Awareness of the distinct color blue spread across the ancient world only after contact with the Egyptians and their lexical differentiation of the color.
In Homer’s epic The Odyssey, the sea is frequently described as being “wine-dark” rather than blue
As pointed out by Erin Hoffman in her article in Clarkesworld Magazine:
… famous demonstrations like this selective attention test … emphasize the power our cognitive functions have to suppress what we see. Our brains are pattern-recognizing engines, built around identifying things that are useful to us and discarding the rest of what we perceive as meaningless noise. (And a good thing that they do; deficiencies in this filtering, called sensory gating, are some of what cause neurological dysfunctions such as schizophrenia and autism).
Ibid.
This suggests the possibility that not only did Homer lack a word for what we know as “blue” — he might never have perceived the color itself. To him, the sky really was bronze, and the sea really was the same color as wine. And because he lacked the concept “blue” — therefore its perception — to him it was invisible, nonexistent. This notion of concepts and language limiting cognitive perception is called linguistic relativism, and is typically used to describe the ways in which various cultures can have difficulty recalling or retaining information about objects or concepts for which they lack identifying language. Very simply: if we don’t have a word for it, we tend to forget it, or sometimes not perceive it at all.
It would appear, therefore, that words shape and limit our perception of reality. In some ways, words blind us; in other ways, they focus our attention. Language defines, limits, and alters perception — even hypnotically so. A hypnotic suggestion, after all, is a word or phrase implanted deep in one’s subconscious which, in a state of waking consciousness, is interpreted as an unquestionable fact — as self-evident or axiomatic. Thus, words and language circumscribe and define how we perceive reality — subliminally limiting and defining what we pay attention to, observe, identify, notice, remember, or, in fact, what is apparent to us.
Expanding Consciousness
If we recognize that our concept of reality is limited by our immediate sensory perceptions — in other words, that “seeing is believing,” which holds true, at least at an unconscious/subconscious level, for the vast majority of the global population — then it becomes evident that we are locked inside a perceptual prison, very often without even realizing it. To break free of this prison, one has to become aware of the reality that exists beyond one’s capacity to perceive it — beyond one’s perception and even comprehension of it. In other words, we have to expand our consciousness and awareness of reality.
When we experience stress or engage in any activity, our focus of attention narrows. This is a natural consequence of the human stress response — the activation of the sympathetic nervous system in “fight-or-flight” mode. As part of this response, cortisol and adrenaline levels rise in the bloodstream, along with other physiological changes. One of these is the narrowing of one’s focus of attention, which is necessary to deal with any imminent threat to one’s life, as determined by the stress response.
Because activity and stress narrow one’s focus of attention, the opposite is also true. Stillness, silence, meditation, reflection, relaxation, and repose engage the parasympathetic nervous system, which, in turn, expands one’s focus of attention — expands consciousness, as it were. In other words, it expands one’s awareness of the environment and of reality. And because the nature of consciousness is infinite, taken to its limit, consciousness can be expanded infinitely until it encompasses all of reality — the entire universe. This state is “unity consciousness” — i.e., self-identification with the entire universe, seeing beyond the illusion of separation, and grasping the pettiness and triviality of one’s immediate circumstances, which might otherwise capture the full focus of one’s attention.
With an expanded consciousness, one comes to recognize that one’s own waking awareness is, essentially, a single identity in the vast, oceanic conscious field of which one is a part. Recognizing one’s connection with this infinite field of consciousness is to expand one’s individual sense of personal selfhood and awareness and move in the direction of unity consciousness or self-identification with the entire universe.
The Narrative Filter — the Operating System of the Brain
The universe is infinitely complex. When an individual interacts with reality through the sensory apparatus from a very young age, they experience a relentless bombardment of impressions and sensations that are baffling and potentially overwhelming. This deluge of sensory impressions can utterly overwhelm the mind’s capacity to make any sense of them.
To draw meaning, therefore, from the profusion of seemingly random sensations to which it is exposed, the mind constructs narratives from the words and images it can discern. It draws direct causal connections between sensory impressions and speculates about other correlations and causal relationships. These narratives start out as simplistic and naïve but become increasingly sophisticated over time through investigative and scientific methods, imagination, and speculation.
The mind constructs narratives from discernible words and images to make sense of reality
Nevertheless, however intricate or deep these speculations and analyses become, they remain subjective narratives and are, therefore, simplifications of reality. They are constructed from words and images and communicated through culture, tradition, religion, folklore, literature, treatises, discourses, media, entertainment, and other such means, or may simply be contrived out of thin air. Because narratives are creations of the human imagination in an attempt to make sense of the infinitely complex reality that relentlessly bombards the senses, they are necessarily inherently simplifications, even oversimplifications, of reality. They are simplified to the point that the human mind can make sense of what it perceives.
Once accepted by the mind as the de facto explanation of perceived reality, the narrative becomes a perceptual filter. It effectively filters human sensory perceptions and experiences in alignment with the narrative. Over time, one’s brain simply filters out anything that does not conform to one’s expectations or jibes with the narrative on which one’s consciousness operates. This is the essence of the “confirmation bias” in human thought — the mind does not even perceive any detail that falls outside the scope of the narrative that it uses as its “operating system.”
It is estimated that only 10-20% of the sensations picked up by the human sensory apparatus actually reach conscious awareness — a function of the brain known as “sensory gating.” The remaining 80-90% of sensory experiences either register only in the subconscious or are discarded entirely because they fail to conform to the narrative operating system the brain uses. Essentially, they are filtered out of conscious awareness by the words and images that constitute the dominant narratives that shape our focus and scope of attention, whether or not we realize it. These are the implicit assumptions, cultural biases, and other factors that most of us take for granted and accept as the norm.
Questioning these narratives and assumptions is how one can begin to move beyond the filters that shape one’s conscious awareness, and glimpse reality as it really is — infinitely complex, and beyond the simplistic narrative and cultural cognitive frameworks we impose on it. When these narrative schemas are extremely deep-seated, they operate, in effect, as hypnotic suggestions. In other words, the words and images deeply implanted into the subconscious register as being foundational and axiomatic by one’s consciousness. So fundamental and essential, in fact, that they are accepted without question — forming the basis of all dogmatism, fundamentalism, and unquestioned “true belief” as with some religious, cultural, and political movements and traditions. One has to continually question one’s assumptions to avoid succumbing to blind acceptance of simplistic narratives, which may lead to all manner of perceptual and cognitive errors.
The child sees the world as it really is — or as close as the human faculties of perception allow one to perceive reality. The adult perceives reality only through the lens of a lifetime of memories lodged in the conscious and subconscious mind — a lifetime of thoughts, ideas, dreams, experiences, traumas, cultural and traditional influences, literary influences, religious influences, educational influences — a lifetime of exposure to words, language and narrative that, in effect, distort, reshape and selectively filter the adult’s perception of reality. As such, the adult is no longer able to perceive or experience the universe as it truly is — not unless they can somehow get past a lifetime of memories — from which arise all manner of biases, prejudices, distortions, and misunderstandings.
Meditation — silencing the mind’s verbal chatter and immersing oneself in the profound silence of the deep unconscious or superconscious — is a vehicle for moving beyond a lifetime of mental distortions, i.e., the verbal and visual memories that warp one’s perception and understanding of reality. To some extent, meditation enables one to gain access to a clearer, truer perception and experience of reality — one that isn’t shaded or distorted by words, language, and narrative.
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