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32 Principles That Lead To Happiness |
Change Your Perception So if you do not like the circumstances in your life, you need to change your perception and so you will have an entirely different experience of life. Your outward circumstances may not even change – though they probably will – and your experience of life would be completely different. Our perceptual filters enable us to make sense of the world. Without them we would be completely overwhelmed with information and unable to mentally function. When we think of the world and our position in it, we imagine ourselves as if God has placed us in a world that wouldn’t notice if we were here or not. But this is not really a true representation. It sounds like a work of Science Fiction… but picture standing in nothingness and having 3 million separate pieces of information whizzing past you every minute. That is actually a truer picture of how our experience of life is created. However it would be impossible to be able to relate to anything else thinking like this. And the key purpose of life is the ability to demonstrate your beliefs in relation to everything around you. What we do is set up a kind of mental organizational system. We try to reduce all those separate pieces of information into just the ones that we need at that moment. One of the key things we do is to take in less information about familiar environments and routines. You know how when you go into someone else’s house it often has a distinct odor. But you’ve become so used to your own home’s scents that it doesn’t register. Or how someone else can notice your kids have grown, when you don’t. This is all because this information is less important for you to perceive. Therefore your perceptual filters discard it. You only get the information that your organizational system believes is most important for you to know. Usually you do not notice the temperature, but if it is brought to your attention or it becomes uncomfortable, you’ll start to pay attention to that information. For this reason we often keep doing stuff long past when it makes sense, just because it is a habit. There is a story of a man who marries into an Italian American family that illustrates how we do things just out of habit. Every year the whole family meet up for a Thanksgiving meal where they eat Roast Beef. At first he goes to his girlfriend’s house and watches silently bemused as her Mother cuts the ends off the meat. After marrying and setting up home they host the Thanksgiving’s meals. Year after year he watches his wife cut the ends off the meat. One day he can contain himself no longer. He asks her why she always cuts the ends off the beef. She pauses for a moment as if she has never considered the possibility of cooking it any other way and then answers that it is how her Mother always cooked it. Intrigued he asks her Mother why she cooks beef in that way. She is also surprised and says that is how her Mother always cooked it. He turns to the Grandmother and asks her why she cooks beef in that way. She says ‘I don’t anymore, but when we first came over from the old country we lived in a small cramped flat. When I cooked meat my oven was very small and I had to cut it so that it would fit into the oven. Of course I don’t do that any longer.’ How many areas of your life are you still doing things that make no sense? When we first learn a new skill, whether it is learning to drive or to cook, we devote a lot of attention to it. We learn the reasons why we do something. These beliefs are the pillars that support the behavior. As we become used to doing something we just start to do it automatically. Our attention drifts somewhere else where the information is more relevant. Therefore we often forget what our beliefs are. We can’t walk around every minute knowing every belief… that would be like having every piece of software running on your computer at the same time. It would stop you from being able to do anything. However the problem is that many times circumstances change, as in the roast beef story, and because we have forgotten the reasons why we are doing the behavior we do… we do things that logically make no sense. This is all a side effect of the need to focus our attention.
Next: The Doubting Frog Story |