Perception Is Not Reality

 Everything in life depends entirely on perception. The man in the story above was happy at the scene described to him, but it wasn’t what actually happened that made him happy… it was what he thought was happening.

If you took five people at random and showed them the same picture each would probably remember different things and have a different interpretation of what was happening. This is due to our perceptual filters.

I remember a man I once worked with in a temporary job, while I was at college. He illustrates this concept so vividly.

 Whatever happened or was said he could only see the bad in. He and I were in the same position. We’d both started working on a temporary basis in the summer. Christmas, the Company’s busy time was coming up, but we were under no illusions that we were only there on a day to day basis for as long as they needed us.

John worked frantically. After a couple of weeks the manager congratulated him on being the most productive worker the previous night. He also added that they were busy and there was a good chance of being kept on until Christmas. I interpreted this as encouragement. John shared his interpretation.

‘He must think I’m a right ****, he tells me I’m doing well, then in the next breath he’s telling me I’m out the door at Christmas’.

This was in July and he’d had no promise of work beyond the week. Yet John couldn’t seem to allow himself to feel good about anything. Instead he focused on the negative… the subtle reminder that he was only there on a temporary basis.

He rapidly became known for his ability to see the worst in anything. People used to tell him things, just to see how he’d react. The only time John was pleased was when something bad happened to someone else. He was so afraid and had so little faith in himself that he needed others to fail to feel equal or superior to them.

One of the temporaries who’d been there for two years compared to John’s six months was taken on permanently. He told John.

John’s reply was ‘Well that’s me ********* then’. There was no congratulations, no good feeling. I saw him later and he poured out his bitterness, feeling he should have got the job. John thought he worked harder, which was true.

However the culture at this company was such that jobs generally went on the basis of how long you’d been there. Unless you did something to upset someone. Rather than accept this and take it as encouragement that sooner or later he would be taken on, John saw it as a personal rejection.

John had always been the hardest working, but then along came someone younger and faster. He hated him. He got on with the Manager. John believed that his face didn’t fit. He thought he would be seen as too old to be given a job.

It became a game to feed John’s fears. He took in everything negative because it fitted with what he believed. This worked him up into anger and bitterness about everything. After a while we got fed up of winding John up and began avoiding him. Just talking to him was draining. He rowed with the Managers and Supervisors over petty things that only meant a lot to him. This isolated John.

As a result he pushed himself down the list by antagonizing the Management. A quiet patch hit in February and we were laid off for a couple of days. Then they only needed three of us for a few days. John through his fear had made himself disliked and was not picked among the three to come back. However he was so frightened that perhaps he was the only one to be laid off that he turned up at work in his own time to check. When he saw other temporaries there he flipped and rowed with the Supervisor.

John created the very outcomes he feared by distorting situations to match his pessimistic beliefs.

Whatever your circumstances in life are they are created by you through your perception. Imagine that all the possibilities of life were spread across 30cm ruler. Now think of all the experiences humans have reported. Out of body experiences… mystic visions… psychic phenomena… seeing aliens… lifting a car to free a trapped child and thousands more.

What we as an individual see and understand about life is equivalent to a 1mm groove. In any given situation we have hundreds of options. Often though we become so stuck in our groove that we only see one or two options. So we do not think it is possible to experience all the types of experiences listed above. And they aren’t while you are stuck in the groove you are currently in. But if you changed the groove… you change the possibilities you can see.

So if you do not like the circumstances in your life, you need to choose a different wavelength and tune into that. This will 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.

There is was a frog who had lived his whole life in a small well. One day a frog from the sea came into the well. ‘Where do you live’ asked the first frog. He then asked where and what the sea was. ‘It is a large body of water and not far away’ ‘How big is the sea’ ‘Oh very big’ ‘As big as that stone’ ‘Oh much bigger’ ‘As big as my well’ ‘Oh much bigger’ ‘How much bigger’ ‘You could fit millions of your wells’ ‘Nonsense’ said the frog from the well, ‘you are a dreamer and a falsifier, get out of my well. I want nothing to do with you’. Author Unknown