M.C. Escher and the Art of Perception
What Escher’s art reveals about how we engage with reality
Stand before Escher’s “Ascending and Descending” long enough and something shifts. Your mind sees monks climbing upward. Then it switches — now they’re walking downward. Try holding both views at once. You can’t. The stairs go only one direction at a time, even though the image contains both.
Now think about the last time you faced a difficult decision. You ran the numbers. The analysis pointed clearly in one direction. But something in your body — a tightness in your chest, a feeling you couldn’t name — pulled the other way. For a moment you held both: what the data said and what you sensed. Then one won out. The other fell away, like the monks switching direction on Escher’s stairs.
You cannot hold both. Not with practice, not with effort — the stairs go one way at a time and no amount of looking changes that.
But something else is available. You can catch the moment it switches. And once you can catch it, you can ask what made it switch, what you lost when it did, and whether the reading you landed on was the one the situation needed.
That second capacity has a name in the Framework of Holistic Perspective. It’s called Presence — the fluid integration of the different ways we engage with reality.
It’s not a mystical state. It’s more like balance: a natural capability that can be trained, lost on a bad day, and recovered with practice.
This article uses Escher’s art to explore why we flip between ways of seeing, why it’s so hard to hold more than one at a time, and what it takes to develop the capacity to hold more of reality at once. That development — from flickering between views to an integrated awareness that includes them all — is the journey the Framework describes.
Eight Windows Into the Same Reality
Look at Escher’s “Convex and Concave.” The architectural element just below the center projects outward. Then suddenly it recedes inward. Your perception oscillates between two equally valid readings of the same image.
We do the same thing with reality, all day long, without noticing. Often we are stuck in seeing things one way, habitually.
The Eight Perspectives of Seeing Model identifies Four Base Positions and Four Types of Awareness — distinct ways we take in and process experience. Each one reveals something real. None of them alone reveals everything.
Witnessing Awareness (O1) is your physical doorway. The weight of the coffee mug. The hum of the refrigerator. The pressure of your feet on cold tile at 6 AM. What arrives through your senses before you interpret it, sounds, light, touch. A doctor starts here — observing carefully, taking in information without forming a diagnosis too early.
Causality Awareness (O2) traces patterns and connections. Yesterday’s meeting ended abruptly. The deadline was moved up. Someone mentioned a reorganization. You connect the dots and build a picture: the uncertainty is making people anxious. This is where we reason, structure, predict, and explain.
Mindfulness Awareness (O3) weighs what matters. Not just what’s happening but how important it is, how urgent, and to whom. Your project is at risk, but you also care about your colleagues — and those two concerns pull in different directions. This is where significance, values, and priorities do their work.
Open Awareness (O4) senses wholeness, potential, and interconnectedness — what is present but hasn’t been named yet. Underneath the tense conversation, you feel something nobody has said. The situation holds more than anyone has recognized. You can’t pin it down. You sense it. This is not vague intuition. It’s a type of awareness as real as the others, operating in the present moment before analysis begins.
These Four Types of Awareness arise from two reality dimensions shaping our experience: Material ↔ Immaterial (the coffee mug itself versus the symbolic meaning it represents as a gift from your wife) and Immediate ↔ Analytical (what arrives before interpretation versus thinking and reflection itself).
A third dimension — Internal ↔ External — gives each type of awareness an inward and outward orientation. What you sense inside yourself versus what you observe around you. What matters to you versus what matters to others. This doubles the four base positions into Eight Perspective Positions — eight windows into reality.
Like Escher’s illusions, each window reveals something genuine. And like Escher’s illusions, we tend to look through one perspective at a time.
Grounding and Navigating
The Four Types of Awareness don’t serve the same function. The Framework points at an important distinction worth looking closer at.
Witnessing Awareness and Open Awareness are Grounding Poles. They anchor you in the present moment. One senses what is physically here. The other senses the wholeness, potential, and interconnectedness that analysis can’t capture. Together, they are where our experience begins.
Causality Awareness and Mindfulness Awareness are Navigation Tools. They help you make sense of what the Grounding Poles receive. One traces patterns and builds models. The other weighs significance and sorts priorities. Together, they evaluate what has been sensed in terms of importance.
A sculptor working with clay can illustrate how they work together. When she’s absorbed in the material — its temperature, its resistance, the way it feels — she’s grounded in Witnessing Awareness. When she senses the potential before concrete shapes and forms emerge, she’s in Open Awareness.
But to actually create, she thinks through the structure and visualizes the form — how thick the walls shall be, which sections to build first (Causality Awareness) — and weigh different options before choosing what she wants to create (Mindfulness Awareness).
She uses different perspectives as she create the vase. The pressure and speed of her hands guided by analysis and evaluation. Is this curve right? Does this shape serve the purpose?
Here’s the crucial point: the Grounding Poles are not inferior to the Navigation Tools. In many professional settings, analysis and evaluation are treated as the sophisticated operations while sensing and intuiting are treated as simple input to be refined. The Framework reverses this. The Grounding Poles are foundational. Without them, the Navigation Tools have nothing real to work with.
You may recognize what that looks like. A two-hour strategy meeting where the analysis is brilliant but nobody mentions the obvious tension felt in the room. A career plan that is logically sound but ignores what the person and family actually needs. Navigation Tools running at full speed while the Grounding Poles have been sidelined.
The reverse is also true. Grounding Poles without Navigation Tools leave you immersed in experience without the capacity to understand or respond consistently to it.
Why Integration Feels Like Vertigo
Now look at Escher’s “Relativity” — the one with multiple gravity orientations, figures walking on floors that are simultaneously walls and ceilings. Your mind tries to reconcile the competing spatial arrangements. You feel a flicker of vertigo. Not just in your thinking — in your body.
The eight Perspective Positions can pull in opposite directions in the same way. The Framework calls these diagonal tensions. There are four of them, created by the types of awareness sitting at opposite corners of the Model.
For example: sensing what is present inside you (Witnessing Awareness, internal) while evaluating what matters to the people and environment around you (Mindfulness Awareness, external). Or tracing patterns within your own context (Causality Awareness, internal) while sensing the unrealized potential in the wider environment (Open Awareness, external).
You’ve felt these. You’ve run the numbers on a job offer. The salary is right, the role is a step up, the commute is manageable. Everything makes good sense logically. But when you imagine yourself there on a Monday morning, your stomach tightens. The analysis of external factors says yes. Your body says wait. Meanwhile, Open Awareness senses something about where you already are that hasn’t been fully explored yet.
That collision — tight shoulders, held breath, a slight unease you can’t name — may be a diagonal tension being felt. They are productive tensions to hold. Developing the capacity to move between them all with increasing fluency is one way of describing what Wisdom Practice with the Framework of Holistic Perspective aims for.
This is also why understanding the Framework intellectually doesn’t, by itself, help much. You can know these Four Types of Awareness as a neat system of ideas while remaining unable to hold their tensions when they collide in real time. Wisdom Practice requires developing emotional capacity alongside understanding — the willingness to stay with discomfort when your types of awareness pull in opposing directions.
The Hole in the Middle
Escher’s “Print Gallery” shows a man in a gallery looking at a print of a harbour town — and the town contains the gallery he is standing in. He is inside the picture he is looking at.
At the centre, the geometry would not close. Escher could not draw the point where the loop meets itself, so he left it blank and signed his name in the gap.
The hole is exactly where the observer stands.
In 2003, mathematicians at Leiden completed it — using elliptic curves and complex analysis, tools that exist entirely outside the picture plane. The gap could only be closed from somewhere the drawing did not contain.
This is the Framework’s claim about Social Reflexivity, drawn rather than asserted. A mirror cannot see its own frame. Reflection uses tools shaped by the environment being reflected on. What closes the gap has to come from outside the system that produced it — another architecture, another Diamond, another way of seeing that yours could not have generated.
What Presence Looks Like
So far, this article has described what Escher’s art reveals: we tend to engage with reality one way at a time, and trying to hold multiple views often creates discomfort. But Escher’s art also hints at something beyond the oscillation — the whole that contains all views at once.
The Framework calls this Presence.
Presence is the fluid integration of all Four Types of Awareness, all Eight Perspective Positions. Not all running at equal intensity — all perspectives available and mutually informing, with attention moving fluidly among them. One may be prominent at any moment, but all are accessed to create a holistic view.
You’ve experienced something like this. Think of a conversation where you simultaneously sensed the other person’s body language, tracked the logic of what they were saying, felt the emotional weight of the exchange, and remained open to where the conversation might go. You were not switching between these deliberately. They were operating as one integrated flow.
That was Presence — or something close to it.
At first, practicing the Four Types of Awareness feels effortful and mechanical. You deliberately shift from sensing to tracing to evaluating to staying open. From internal to external. It’s like learning to drive — checking mirrors, signaling, turning the wheel, monitoring speed. Each action is separate and demands attention.
With practice, the perspectives begin to inform each other. You sense a tension in your body, recognize the pattern, feel its significance, and remain aware of the fuller context — all in the same moment, as one flow rather than four steps. Some days the integration comes easily. Other days you’re back to step-by-step effort. This is not failure. It’s the nature of a capability that deepens through sustained practice, like a musician developing the capacity to hear all the parts of an ensemble at once.
Escher’s “Drawing Hands” shows two hands drawing each other into existence. There is no third hand outside the frame doing the work. This is what the Framework means when it says there is no observer behind Presence, no homunculus watching the process. What we experience as the one who is present is the architecture operating — awareness experiencing itself, rather than an entity watching it happen.
Presence is also what makes the Diamond of Purpose and Meaning — the Framework’s map of your inner architecture — visible and workable.
The Diamond maps your Beliefs, Values, Needs, Goals, and Purpose. Without some degree of Presence, these operate automatically: Beliefs filter perception without being noticed, Values drive choices without being examined.
Presence lets you see these operations and, over time, work with them.
Where the Practice Is Going
Escher’s “Drawing Hands” depicts two hands drawing each other into existence. It captures something essential about the practice the Framework describes.
The Framework of Holistic Perspective succeeds when it is no longer needed.
The Framework maps a continuous developmental path. The Achievement Path builds competence toward expertise — developing the ability to learn how to learn within specific domains. The Fulfillment Path builds on those capabilities and continues into Wisdom Practice: Presence and Diamond alignment across all areas of life, creating fresh understanding in each moment rather than applying stored knowledge.
The transition between them is the critical move. Development shifts from excelling in a specific domain to navigating life — career, relationships, health, growth, contribution — with integrated awareness. Not sequential competence within separate areas but the capacity to hold them together, sensing how each affects others and where your direction is taking you.
As Wisdom Practice deepens, something can arise that cannot be produced directly. The Daoist tradition calls it Wuwei — wholesome natural action moving through the practitioner without the practitioner directing it. Not a peak experience. Not a reward for sufficient effort. A quality of action that arises in interconnection with others and with your environment when the practice has become so deeply integrated that the Framework is no longer consulted but embodied.
Wuwei cannot be achieved or claimed. The moment it is named or possessed, it has been lost. It arises through interconnection — not as a solo achievement. Like Escher’s hands drawing each other, the practice creates conditions for its own transcendence into natural action.
Try It Now
Escher’s art can serve as training ground. Not for understanding the Framework intellectually — for developing the capacity it describes.
Pick one of his prints. “Waterfall” or “Ascending and Descending” work well.
Notice the shift. Watch the moment your perception flips from one interpretation to another. That noticing — catching the flip as it happens — is Witnessing Awareness applied to your own processing. To find which perspective you are currently using and which you move to.
Try holding both — and fail on purpose. Attempt to see both interpretations at once. You will not manage it. That failure is the exercise: it shows you that your perception commits to one reading without consulting you, and that the commitment happens before you have any say.
This is a miniature diagonal tension — two valid readings of the same reality, and an architecture that can only take one at a time. Shifting from internal to external, or immediate to analytical, can sometimes be equally challenging.
Feel what happens in your body. A tight jaw. Held breath. A flicker of frustration. These signals are information. Your body registers the cost of holding a perspective before your mind can name it or deflect it.
Step back. Appreciate the whole without needing to resolve it. This is Presence practice — the capacity to let multiple perspectives coexist without collapsing them into one.
The mental flexibility you develop here — noticing, holding, feeling, stepping back — are the same flexibility the practice develops at the scale of life. The data that contradicts your intuition. The values that conflict with practical requirements. The present reality that clashes with the potential you sense underneath it.
Notice what decided. You landed on one reading rather than the other. Something chose. In a print it does not matter which. In a difficult conversation, the same mechanism is picking which reading of the situation you get — and it is not asking you first.
Back to the Stairs
Return to “Ascending and Descending.” The monks are still climbing. Or descending. Your perception still flips.
But something may have shifted in how you relate to the flip. You’re noticing it now. You can feel the moment it happens, sense the resistance when you try to hold both, and appreciate that the image contains more than either perspective can alone.
That small shift — from being caught in the oscillation to noticing it — is where Wisdom Practice begins. Not with a complete understanding of the Framework. Not with the ability to name all Eight Perspective Positions or trace every diagonal tension. It starts with the simple recognition that reality is richer than any single way of engaging with it reveals. And with the felt sense, even if only for a moment, that you can hold a little more of it at once.
The Framework of Holistic Perspective provides maps and practices for developing that capacity. But the starting point is here, in this moment of noticing. The monks go up. They go down. The image holds both. And you — watching, sensing, tracing, evaluating, staying open — are already practicing.