I Am Perceived, Therefore I Am!

It is sometimes said that what we do is ultimately directed toward satisfying a deep need to attract the attention of others, and that only by accepting this need within ourselves can we become less captive to it and avoid unconsciously giving it power.
I do not think this statement is necessarily wrong, but I believe that something larger lies behind this need, something connected to the purpose of our living and our life.

Berkeley, the seventeenth-century idealist philosopher, has a beautiful phrase set against Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”:

To be is to be perceived

We perceive our own being through the way we flow in the lives of others. Understanding the beauty of this is a form of transcendence and a deeper understanding of a phrase such as “the need for other people’s attention.” If tomorrow every human being disappeared from the earth and I were the only person left, the meaning of life and death would suddenly change within my life and within what I do.

What we need is the manifestation of the Self in the world and to be perceived. Yet ultimately we can allow to flow into the world and give to others only what we have realised within ourselves. “Attracting attention” remains confined to the level of persona and the outer shell of human life.

A need as beautiful as connection, the realisation of the Self, and understanding oneself through being perceived can certainly be reduced to “attention seeking,” just as many philosophers and psychologists reduce love to drives and sexual need, or reduce the wholeness of the human being to the lower dimensions of existence and the human shell. But ultimately we are free to choose our interpretation of existence.

In a scene from the beautiful film Cloud Atlas, Sonmi—the prophetic woman liberated from slavery—addresses the people by repeating George Berkeley’s sentence:

To be is to be perceived.

And so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other.

The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds that go on apportioning themselves throughout all time.

“Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”

To be is to be perceived, and knowing oneself becomes possible only through the eyes of another.

The nature of our immortal lives finds meaning only in the consequences of our words and deeds as they realise themselves across history.

Our lives are not ours alone. From birth to death we are connected with others, in our past and in a future that has not yet arrived; with every act of evil and every act of kindness in the world, we give birth to our future.

Aydin Areta