What is Transductive Perception?

What is Transductive Perception?

Now let us take dream experience. There is seeing but the senses are not at work. In fact the dreaming will NOT take place if the senses are active and we keep  receiving information from these senses and our mind is preoccupied with processing them. Thus in  dreaming there is seeing but without the eyes, ears and so forth. 

How is this possible?

This is NOT that very difficult to understand. While asleep the various parts of the  brain that under normal circumstances receive information from the senses and interprets them into the visual, auditory, tactile and etc and provides ‘pictures’ for the anma to ‘see’. Now during dreaming, the same brain parts are activated but without any input from the senses! So we can see the dream-fabrication processes involve the activation of the brain parts that make one ‘see’ something, like witnessing a drama etc.

Such processes are those activated by the  mantra-complexes and such ‘seeing’  is the beginning of the vision of the Third Eye.

Now when you graduate from this to the stage of what the psychologists call ‘lucid dreams’, you have ‘seeing’ of a complex kind where there is a double kind of seeing. The person is aware of the physical environment  but at the same sees over and above the sensorial also something like the dream experience and which the Sumerian called “mamu na meyya” (or something like that), a dream but not really a dream etc. The Jains call this njanappariyaayak kaadci, the Saivites the Yogak Kadci, Vinjnjaanak kaadci Civanjaanak kaadci etc. This is vision normally portrayed in the Yogic posture of Siva where he keeps in half closed eyes on the tip of the nose.

When a person taps such possibilities for seeing ALREADY there, then it will also be possible to WITNESS the icons as if real, just like persons around. In fact for people like Punitavati, Poykai, Azwar and so forth whom we are studying now, such icons and their visions are MORE REAL and MEANINGFUL than the sensory!

Now I must point out here a difference between Agamic Hinduism where the Temple plays an important role and Vedic Hinduism where the study of the Vedas are emphasized with temple worship given only a peripheral importance.

The temple is the stuff of transductive perceptions - it is a device for enabling the transductive perceptions for people who have not yet tapped their innate capacity for such visions.

Going to the temple, getting absorbed into ethos available there is actually immersing into the metaphysical realms of the celestial beings, which for the njanies are quite natural and commonplace.

Thus In Agamic Hinduism, scriptural exegetics, the study of Vedas and so forth are only of peripheral importance. More important is Temple going and getting a kind of ‘vision of the celestial world” it affords.

Loganathan @ Ullaganar

( editing and re-paragraphing by his student)

( pic courtesy of https://pixabay.com/  with thanks )