I admit, not everything was perfectly clear after that conversation with the angel tech-support guy. I needed a consultant to help me deconstruct this experience. Someone who knew something about the jargon this angel was babbling — "perceptors" and "resolution." I also needed a shrink. Back to surfing the Net, I found the perfect fit: A clinical psychiatrist who claimed he had experience treating angels! Over the phone, his receptionist assured me he knew a whole lot about perception issues, too. I booked, I came.

I stretched out on the therapy couch (which seemed strangely warm and showed signs of charring) and got straight to the point:

"Doc, what do you know about perception?"

Doc:
You've been seeing things?

Me:
Well, not yet. Actually, it's more about what I haven't been seeing.

Doc:
Have you been under a lot of stress lately?

Me:
It's not stress. They told me it's a matter of failing to achieve resolution.

Doc:
You have an obsession with resolving matters that prevents you from perceiving...

Me:
My soul. And anything spiritual.

Doc:
Obsessive-compulsive disorder coupled with detachment from reality. Here's a prescription that you should try. Look, we could try cognitive therapy, but anything that can do. Prozac™ can do better. Start with 10 mg...

Me:
But I have a few other questions.

Doc:
It will take about two weeks to kick in. You should make an appointment now with my receptionist. There's not much point talking now, so...

Me:
Doc, hold on. I've heard you've dealt with angels before.

Doc:
Oh, no. You're not another one, are you? But you're the sunny kind, right? Say yes. Please.

Me:
Actually, I'm just a rabbi. But in my profession, I need to deal with all sorts of characters, angels included.

Doc:
My advice: Make sure you have a good property damage policy.

Me:
So they're telling me, I mean, their tech support guy is telling me, that our perceptors are messed up.

Doc:
Perceptors? That's a word? Percepts, I've heard of. Perceptors? Let me try a spell-check...

Me:
Doc, I've always had this question, but I never took psychology, so I never got to ask it. You did. You must know the answer: Is there truly a physical reality beyond human perception?

Doc:
MS Word doesn't like perceptor. Let me check my online therapy guide...

Me:
And what is physical, anyway? Like, how about colors? Are colors physical? I can't touch them. And my perception of them changes according to my mood. And how do I know that what others see is the same as I see? After all, all that's there is just a specific spectrum of radiant energy stimulating my rods and cones. He called it "an array of data from various optical cells."

Doc:
The Expert's Online Therapy Guide deals with perception pathologies, too. But nothing on perceptors.

Me:
All my career as a rabbi, Doc, I always thought of physical and spiritual as two completely different kinds of stuff. Like there's physical stuff you can touch with your hands and there's spiritual stuff that souls and angels are made of. But this angel tells me a different story. It seems like physical is just the surface membrane and spiritual is the depth behind it. We can't see beneath the surface. Why? Because of our perception. Because our minds don't "resolve" it.

Doc:
There's stuff here about percepts, but no perceptors.

Percept: an impression of an object obtained by use of the senses. Philosophical interest in perception stems largely from questions about the sources and validity of what is called human knowledge (see epistemology). Epistemologists ask whether a real, physical world exists independently of human experience and, if so, how its properties can be learned and how the truth or accuracy of that experience can be determined. They also ask whether there are innate ideas or whether all experience originates through contact with the physical world, mediated by the sense organs.

Heck, what do they know? They didn't hear from the angels. If they'd just done a clinical interview with an angel or two, they'd know the whole thing is event driven.

I perked. Now I knew I had come to the right place.

Me:
Event driven? What's that mean?

Doc:
They're human interface experts, these angels. Hi-tech sector. Lucrative field. But not enough opportunities.

Me:
What's human interface got to do with any of this?

Doc:
It's a field of psychology. Ergonomics. Like when you want an end user to perform a task within a highly complex system. But you can't blow his mind with the raw mechanics of it all...

Me:
Whoa, Doc, that's just what they've been doing to me!

Doc:
So what a human interface expert does is create a layer in between the raw software algorithms and the real live human using it. Like buttons, arrows, menubars, arrows, windows, talking heads...

Me:
But how does this layer help without getting in the way?

Doc:
Simple: It's called metaphor. The secret behind creating any world. You design objects and build an environment on the screen that's internally consistent and represents the underlying workings of the system. But it's got to be consistent. Whatever looks like a button, for instance, always acts like a button. Arrows always bring you the direction they are pointing. When you leave something somewhere, you come back and it's still there. (Unless it's a Microsoft human interface. Then when you come back, its been stolen or reverse engineered.)

Me:
But there aren't really any objects on the screen, right?

Doc:
Tell my secretary that. Her screen is covered with white-out... No. There are no objects. No buttons, no arrows, no talking heads. Only events. Proof is, unplug the thing and they're all gone.

Me:
So why do we think of them as objects?

Doc:
Because they're consistent! Every time we do this, they do that. They're always in the same place and doing the same things. Our minds find it too obtuse to say, "There's a set of seemingly related events that occur consistently within the bounds of this location," and much easier to say, "That's a button."

Me:
Yes! Now I'm getting it! So all our world is just made up of events!

Doc:
Well, that's what this angel Fibo character was getting at. We put our hand out and something prevents it from going further, sending sensory information through our nervous system. Light photons stimulate our retina. Sounds waves vibrate our eardrums. Taste buds and olfactory glands sizzle. Would you like to watch an educational video while I grab a coffee?

Me:
But these events have a certain consistency within space and time...

Doc:
Well, consistent enough that the glob of grey matter we have up there is able ito organize it into...

Me:
...a world of objects!

Doc:
You've been talking to Fibo, too, right?

Me:
So Doc, this is what I really want to know: What is this "world of events" before our little minds perceive it? Is it true that our minds filter out most of what is really there?

Doc:
Fibo didn't talk much about that. But I can enter that question into this system... it's really neat. Answers just about anything you can put to a real therapist. I'd be nowhere without it.

Me:
So what does it tell you?

Doc:
Nothing. Let me try Encyclopedia Britannica.

Me:
I use that all the time. Makes me sound like a real expert rabbi.

Doc:
Me, too. Here it is:

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?query=perception&ct=eb&eu=119394: The existence of a physical world is taken for granted among most scientific students of perception. Typically, researchers in perception simply accept the apparent physical world particularly as it is described in those branches of physics concerned with electromagnetic energy, optics, and mechanics.

That's simple. It means that the real reality is whatever the physicists tell us it is.

Me:
That's it! All I need now is to study some physics and I'll have my answer! Thanks so much, Doc!

Doc:
Just be glad you came to the expert. See you in two weeks. You have extended coverage, right?