The
Power of Perception
FEBRUARY 15,
2016 The Crow’s Nest Candice
Reshef
In my first class of
my freshman year of college about a decade ago, the professor wrote
on the board, “What we believe to be true becomes true in its
consequence.”
This statement
follows me, still.
If we believe we are
victims, we are victimized. If we believe we are wronged, we feel
wronged. We then act on these beliefs and feelings, and the way we
act tells other people about ourselves.
And so forms the
narrative structure of our lives: We think, we believe, we act, we
show others – and others see, think, believe, and react to reaffirm
our original conviction.
It is our own
perception that unveils the reality we perceive.
Control is an
illusion.
The control we have
is not necessarily in how we act, because our actions are bound by
social norms and conventions. The only quasi-control we have is
over the way we think, and even this is not
usually true.
People
react.
We react with our
“default” programming that is designed by our experiences and
surrounding culture. These are the very factors that originally and
ultimately produce our prejudices.
There is so much for
us to judge with our tiny and busy brains that compartmentalizing
and prejudging can be necessary for survival.
But, when we
acknowledge these default settings, when we are at
least aware of them, like the water in which the
fish swim, we are then free to think outside of
them.
Then we finally have
some control –the only control anyone really has– over at least our
thoughts, at least some of the time.
“When a pickpocket
looks at a saint, he only sees his pockets.”
This Buddhist
saying, this teaching, shows how all of us only see mirrors of
ourselves, wherever we look.
The way we view the
world is based on how we understand the world that surrounds
us.
To be able to learn
and understand the world outside of our own prejudices, we first
have to acknowledge the mirror.
We have to
clean it, and we have to reflect on it from various angles before
we can begin to understand its natural
distortions.