The Matrix of Perception

1.A sentence everyone utters

Whatever the age, the profession or the reason for the visit, the first sentence I hear is almost always the same: “quelque chose me bloque” — something is blocking me. This is not an anecdote. It is a field observation, repeated over hundreds of consultations and over the some eighty public Rencontres I lead each year in France, Belgium and Luxembourg. A sentence this universal deserves to be taken seriously: it is not a platitude, it is the diagnosis the person makes of himself without knowing it.

For everything is already said in those four words — provided one looks at them closely enough.

2.What the grammar says

Perception works only on properties: a shape, a colour, a place, a weight, a movement. Yet “quelque chose” — something — is the only word in the French language that designates without attributing any property. It is an empty referent. The word “chose”, used in this way, is literally metaphysical: it lies outside perception. What has neither contour, nor name, nor place can only be endured or believed — never seen.

Now look at the construction of the sentence. The grammatical subject is the thing. The person appears in it as object: “me”. From the first second of the interview, the person thus describes himself as acted upon by an agent without contour. He did not choose this position — his sentence chose it for him. And as long as the sentence remains that one, the position remains that one.

3.Words carve up the real

This mechanism is not a recent discovery. The hermetic tradition has taught it since Antiquity — from the Corpus Hermeticum, which Louis Ménard translated in 1866, to the Kybalion published in 1908 — through the principle of polarity: opposites are not two things, but the two extremes of one and the same thing, separated by degrees. Consult a thermometer and look for the exact spot where cold ends and warm begins. You will not find it: there is neither absolute warm nor absolute cold, only degrees of one and the same scale. Black and white, light and shadow obey the same law.

The consequence is considerable: the words “warm” and “cold” do not describe objects. They carve up a scale. And what these two words do to temperature, the whole vocabulary does to the real: each word draws a boundary, and perception organises itself along the boundaries drawn.

Take the most widespread pair of all: the visible and the invisible. “Invisible” is an adjective of capacity — it asserts that the thing cannot be seen, by nature. It is a property attributed to the object, an impossibility of principle, and it closes the question before having asked it. Say instead “not seen”, and everything changes: it is no longer a property of the object, it is a state of the relation between an observer and a thing — contingent, reversible, and one that immediately calls for four questions. Not seen by whom? When? Under what conditions? With what instrument?

The entire history of knowledge is that of the not-seen becoming seen. Micro-organisms before Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, in the 1670s; infrared before Herschel’s experiment, in 1800; X-rays before Röntgen, in 1895; the waves crossing this room at this very moment: none of that was invisible. All of it was un-seen, under the observation conditions of an era.

And one can go a step further. “Invisible to me” makes me a mere reference point: I endure a limit. “Not seen by me” makes me the agent: it is my attention, my vocabulary, my perceptual system that keep the thing out of the field. Now if it is I who render the thing un-seen, I can cease to render it un-seen. The formula does not describe a fact — it installs a working position. That is where training becomes possible.

Experimental psychology has given this mechanism a demonstration that has become famous. In the experiment of Simons and Chabris (1999), viewers count the passes of a ball; meanwhile, a gorilla crosses the screen — and half of them do not see it. The gorilla was not invisible: it was rendered un-seen by the locking of attention onto the task. What grammar suggests, the laboratory measures — a share of the not-seen is produced by the observer, not by the object.

4.The thought-seed and the instant of “je le vois”

The work I carry out in session rests on what I call the thought-seed: a chosen word, suited to the person and to the moment, which lends the “thing” its first property — a first contour to which perception can attach itself. The seed does not supply an explanation. It creates a visuality.

The result I observe is of remarkable regularity. When the seed is right, the reaction occurs within a fraction of a second, and it is each time the same sentence: “je le vois” — I see it. Not “I understand”, not “that is logical” — “I see it”. The speed attests to its nature: the subject does not deduce, he perceives.

And observe what has happened to the grammar. “Je” — I — has become the subject of the sentence. The verb is a verb of active perception. Above all, the pronoun: “le” — it. A definite pronoun presupposes an identified object — one cannot say “it” of what has neither contour nor name. The passage from “quelque chose” to “le” is, in two words, the passage from the out-of-perception to the perceived. The sentence has inverted itself: the person does not report progress, his grammar records it.

At that instant, perception has opened a little further, and something precise has ceased to exist: the problem, as it lived in perception and in the thoughts, is no longer there, once it is seen. The precision matters: it is the perceptual relation that is transformed. External circumstances belong to another kind of work — but who has ever been able to act with accuracy on what he did not see?

5.The precision of vocabulary

What the seed accomplishes in session, everyone can prepare the ground for in his own language. Take the word heard everywhere: “j’ai peur” — I am afraid. The French language nevertheless distinguishes with finesse. La peur — fear: the object is present, before me, now. La crainte — apprehension: the object is identified but yet to come. L’angoisse — anguish: there is no object — a state without an address. Le trac — stage fright: tied to a precise exposure, and dissolving in the very action.

Now each of these words prescribes its own way out. Fear calls for protection. Apprehension calls for preparation. Stage fright calls for beginning. And anguish calls for no action on the object, since there is none — it calls for work on oneself. He who says “j’ai peur” for what is stage fright will seek to flee what he simply had to begin. The inexact word is not a fault of style: it points to the wrong door.

This structuring power of vocabulary can be measured today. Russian speakers, whose language imposes two distinct words for light blue and dark blue, distinguish these blues faster than English speakers — and the advantage vanishes as soon as their inner language is occupied by another task (Winawer et al., 2007). The word does not create the colour: it installs a boundary, and perception accelerates at the named boundaries.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 1921

Observing the words one uses, and the way one expresses oneself, is therefore not a literary exercise. It is the first act of perceptual work. Émile Coué had established it as early as the 1920s: the formula acts first on the one who pronounces it. And from the instant one becomes aware of this, perception begins to change.

6.The PPA — when the flow exceeds the ordinary rate

There are people for whom this work is not a refinement but a necessity: those whose perceptual flow exceeds the ordinary rate. For them, I introduced a term:

The acronym does not designate one of the two states, but the entire phenomenon. A PPA who endures sees the flow overflow and the filter let through nothing but the alarm; a PPA who masters has structured the processing of that same flow. Between the two there is neither gift nor curse: there is a learning process. Perception can be augmented, improved, enlarged, perfected — once it is controlled, understood, analysed. And the first instrument of this control, the nearest, the most everyday, is vocabulary.

This learning belongs to a precise lineage. As early as 1912, Albert L. Caillet presented before an assembly of scientists and practitioners the foundations of what he called the Mental Treatment — three structured levels, supported by historical examples going back to Antiquity. This founding text is the philosophical basis on which I developed the Mental Treatment as I practise and teach it at the Centre EPÉU. It is republished by Éditions Pongh! under the title Aperçu général sur le Traitement Mental — a historical text whose language is that of its time, and whose relevance has not aged a day.

This notion rests on my practice of perceptibility, documented since 2013, and on years in the field — consultations, teachings and public Rencontres.

M. Mischa Harmeijer
I see the invisible. I explain it rationally.
Founder of the Centre EPÉU

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