#29 Levels of Perception

Riffing off of St. Macarius the Egyptian

Sense differs from vision, and vision from enlightenment; and the man who has enlightenment is greater than the man who has only sense. His mind is enlightened, inasmuch as he has received a greater portion than the man who has but sense, as is shown by his seeing within himself visions which he cannot doubt. But revelations is a further thing. Great things, and mysteries of God, are the subjects of revelation to the soul.*

—St. Macarius the Egyptian

When considering a garden or an orchard, degrees of perception distinguish one man from another. To a novice, the garden appears like a collection of plants of differing sizes and textures without names. The same man, through years of attention, learning, and experience season by season, perhaps under the instruction of a master gardener, deepens his knowledge until he finally becomes an expert at sowing, growing, and harvesting each vegetable in its time. That man across his tenure as a gardener can be likened to any man at his respective stage of knowledge and experience. One is a beginner, one knows a few things, yet another knows almost everything.

At each stage of maturation, the gardener develops increasing degrees of perception over the garden he husbands. The first stage, as mentioned, begins with visual apprehension of forms. The next stage continues with the knowledge of names, characteristics, and care for each plant or each species as intermixed with the whole. Further maturation continues by direct experience with the growth of his vegetables over seasons that themselves shift over the years, yielding a complex diversity of weather and soil conditions within which each plant requires certain attendance to ensure its thriving—if indeed such plants can be saved in such a season or must be uprooted for a new planting in the next.

The gardener increases depth of knowledge with attention over time combined with direct experience trailing the unfolding vicissitudes of growth and change at ground level under an ever-changing sky. Experience and study bring knowledge, and later understanding, until finally wisdom becomes the gardener’s chief lens by which he can both assess the current conditions of plant life as well as prognosticate the most reliable outcomes for his crop. By wisdom, he implements a course of action, by fertilizing, or tilling, or weeding, or pruning, or killing that will shepherd as prosperous a crop as possible under the given conditions. While the garden exists outside of himself, the master gardener finds that over time he too has been cultivated by his long engagement with the forces of life and death supervening his verdant venture.

By patience with wind and rain, snow and hail, sun and drought, the master gardener wisely, not hastily or reactively, husbands the precious crop. In seasons of loss, he confides that he did his best while humbly submitting to the fact of errors in judgment that could have prevented more, thereby learning even more how to surpass himself. And yet, as if mastering the art and science of his garden weren’t enough of a gain of perfection, the next level of attainment in the gardener’s growth expands into the spheres of wellbeing for neighbor and kin. He shares the fruits of his labor. He shares the knowledge of many tested years with less experienced gardeners, and thus the effects of the garden’s prosperity spill over by degrees beyond itself through the master’s goodwill. By liberality of spirit, the master gardener reaches into a level of perception higher than all the rest, which is the level of purpose whose quality is composed of the transfer of good things in the spirit of love for others.

Love is not unattainable by the beginner. It is merely unsupplied, if not at least untested due to a lack of resources which the beginner knows not how to attain—for he cannot even recognize the names of the things that could be distributed; as yet they have no form in his unformed mind. What could be given as recognized by the master is only perceived as a background mass by the beginner, until he embarks first through attention, then by learning, on the long path of experience necessary to attain understanding of things that can later be used for greater benefit. Love, by its giving nature, is not attained without resources. Resources are not obtained without knowledge. Knowledge remains base and unguided without wisdom. And so the progression of perception from ignorance through understanding by both knowledge and experience leads through levels of purpose by which a man can operate with varying degrees of competency in spheres radiating outward from soil to harvest to sharing of fruits.

Using St. Macarius’s language, the beginner senses what forms and appearances meet him in the garden without knowledge. Vision grows with knowledge of the complexity and trajectory of the myriad paths forged by engagement with soil, seed, and plant, all of which entwined in varying states of proclivity lead to a range of potential outcomes from death to bountiful harvest. The enlightened man attending his garden knows all these things and masters the forces bearing down on his little plot of earth in order to ensure the best possible outcome under the circumstances of the season. Even so, beyond mastery of the dance between growth and decay, risk and reward always at work in his garden, the enlightened man surpasses even the highest flourishing of vegetation by elevating his harvest into spheres of benefit in which he shares both his knowledge of gardening as well as its healthful fruits by inviting others into an outflow of generosity either at market (at a cost) or in fellowship at table (at no cost).

And what of St. Macarius’ revelations to the soul in the example of the gardener? Would not the wise, the enlightened gardener attain the highest understanding of all of his endeavors by acknowledging that all his labor, and all his fruits, and all his love are both given and shared by God? Thus, the gardener who attains a revelatory mind understands that the purpose of it all is not merely to grow or to harvest or even to share his good fruits in love—much more, the purpose of all these purposes is union with the process of ascending to the perfection of God who involves Himself at every level of maturation, only to descend back to the beginning of all his knowledge gained over a long career, where he finds that even the names, even the forms, even the stages of growth of the plants—even the struggle of failure and hard won attainment of wisdom—are given to him by God as pure gift insofar as he could partake.

Thus, the gardener who attains a revelatory mind finds in all his labors and in all the attainment of wisdom: God, who cultivates a humble mind, who implants a spirit of gratitude, who masters the soul by shepherding to maturation a crop of fruits in the man precious beyond food which perishes: so that the gardener’s labors shadow the Divine labor which masters him; knowledge gained from Knowledge, understanding from Understanding, wisdom from Wisdom, love from Love.

*St. Macarius the Egyptian, Homily VII, in Fifty Spiritual Homilies of St. Macarius the Egyptian; translated by Arthur James Mason. New York. The Macmillan Company, 1921. Latest edition by CrossReach Publications, Waterford Ireland, 2019.