The Mysteries of Perception & Cognition: Discovering New Ways to Navigate Our World
“Exploring the space where brain, body, and consciousness meet’
My wife, Laura Lee, and I have long been practitioners of exploring and expanding perception to deepen our understanding of life itself. One of the most fascinating aspects of being human is how we perceive the world around us. Our senses do far more than record what our eyes see or ears hear. The brain interprets, fills in the gaps, and draws upon a vast tapestry of memories and experiences to create meaning. In this way, perception is not a passive act – it’s a creative one. We are constantly weaving together past and present to form a living model of reality, unique to each of us.
Cognitive perception reminds us that the mind plays an active role in shaping our reality. How we think, what we remember, and even what we hope for influences what we see and how we interpret our experiences.
Yet perception is not confined to the workings of the brain alone. Increasingly, both scientific and contemplative traditions are exploring consciousness itself – that vast, uncharted field of awareness that seems to both include and transcend the brain’s activity. To me, consciousness may be the greater ocean in which the brain functions as a vessel, interpreting and translating experience into form. When we touch this broader awareness, our sense of reality expands – revealing that perception may be as much a spiritual phenomenon as a neurological one.
Modern research in practices such as meditation now affirms what many ancient traditions have long understood – that entering a quiet, attentive, and altered state of awareness can profoundly shift how we perceive and think. Studies show such practices enhance attention, memory, and emotional balance while reducing the mental noise of distraction and negativity. Over time, these states can even lead to subtle structural changes in the brain.
In many ways, this is not new knowledge, but remembered wisdom. For thousands of years, across countless cultures, people have engaged in practices that alter perception — through stillness, rhythm, or ritual leading to trance states – opening doorways to insight and expanded awareness. Today, these ancient approaches are finding renewed relevance in psychology and neuroscience as pathways to well-being.
At the Cuyamungue Institute, we explore this same territory through the practice of Ritual Postures, a method that invites a shift in perception and cognition through the language of the body. By entering specific postures within a ritual context, participants experience expanded states of consciousness that awaken the body’s innate intelligence. In these moments, perception moves beyond the familiar filters of thought and conditioning, revealing new ways of seeing and knowing.
Sharing her own experiences, and hearing those of our participants over the decades, Laura Lee describes these new ways of seeing and knowing as “a visionary state far beyond “vision” alone. Activation of our inner senses is a vibrant, holistic, delicious awakening of a fuller spectrum of senses. Often beyond the five senses we rely on in our everyday waking mode, we discover senses we didn’t know we have, often cross-wired, and in any combination. All this supports new ways of knowing. This is an embodied spiritual practice enlivening the body’s many gifts, ‘opening our pores’ to imbibe this greater cosmic ocean of consciousness. Once we throw open this portal within the sacred space of our ritual practice, once we flip the “on” switch and invite this force field to flow through our subtle and physical conduits, we cumulatively grow our powers of perception in our everyday waking state. Our world becomes enchanted. We see more clearly our Universe, and our true place in it.”
Such experiences remind us that perception is fluid, that consciousness is vast, and that the wisdom we seek often resides within us, waiting to be remembered. Through the doorway of the body, we rediscover what the ancients knew – that awareness itself is transformative, and through it, the world becomes more alive, more connected, and more whole.
“Perception is not confined to the workings of the brain alone. Consciousness may be the larger ocean in which the brain functions as a vessel, translating experience into form.”
The name “CUYA” carries with it both history and vision. Rooted in our origins as the Cuyamungue Institute, it now also serves as an acronym — C.U.Y.A. — a guiding symbol that unites our mission:
C — Consciousness: The field of shared awareness that arises in Collective Presence, where the “We” awakens beyond the “I” – moving from the “Me to the We.”
U — Unity: Our alignment with the Cycles of Nature and the rhythms of the cosmos, reminding us that we are woven into a greater fabric of reality. This sense of unity reminds us that our awareness is the shared consciousness that connects all living beings.
Y — Your Awakening: The inner journey of Embodiment and Wisdom, where through direct experience the body remembers. At the CUYA Institute, this awakening is nurtured through Ritual Body Postures and ecstatic trance, where the body itself becomes the doorway to wisdom, presence, and transformation.
A — Ancestral Wisdom: Roots. Our connection to Sacred Lineage, honoring those who walked before us and rooting us in belonging and continuity. Our founder, anthropologist Felicitas D. Goodman looked to some of the oldest, most authentic ancestral records we have — the world’s collection of early and indigenous art — and decoded selected artifacts as embodied “ritual instructions.”
Together, the Four Pathways of C.U.Y.A. — Consciousness, Unity, Your Awakening, and Ancestral Wisdom — form a single tapestry of practice. They remind us that awakening is not an abstract idea but something we live: through the body in Your Awakening, through nature’s cycles in Unity, through community in shared Consciousness, and through the guidance of Ancestral Wisdom.
- …. CONTINUE