Albert Einstein
“Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.”
Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams
The problem with reality, as I see it, is that it varies from person to person. So what is really real? Studies have shown that eyewitness accounts are extremely unreliable. While between four and five hundred people were eyewitnesses to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that fatal day in Dallas, November 22, 1963, we still have no consensus as to what actually took place. Studies have been made with people who have multiple personalities and one of the personalities will have a disease and the others won't. So what is really real, a fact, and what is just an illusion?
Perception is everything. And perception is based upon all the life conditioning that we have absorbed so far which makes perception/reality really slippery tricky stuff because each of us experiences life's phenomena differently. Before we get too far into this mind bending business, let's define some of the terms that are being tossed around. Perception: organization, indentification and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment. Observation: act of regarding attentively or watching; the habit of noticing. Paradigm: philosophical or theorectical framework; distinct concept or thought patterns; set of assumptions, concepts; values; practices that constitute a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them.
Okay even after defining these terms, it still appears that a lot of subjective variables get mixed into the reality stew. How then are we to move beyond the filtering screen of perception to find out what really is real and what is the illusion that we are creating based upon faulty programming? And once we discover the answer to that riddle, how do we go about cleaning off that screen of faulty perception to have a clearer view of the reality that we are capable of living?
To me of the three defined concepts, observation seems the cleanest of value judgements and cultural overlays. Both perception - how we have been taught to organize our world - and paradigm are loaded with outside emotional data and interpretation. Observation, the act of noticing. To notice means that we have to be aware and not on auto-pilot, hypnotized by the on-going story that we tell ourselves. To notice implies a lack of value judgement. To notice something requires that there is a connection of some sort that has been made which needs a certain amount of being present. Noticing is to have a still mind.
Each time we judge or take a positionality, we put another nail into our perceptual coffin making a tighter box that limits our view of life and its possiblities. How do we know what we are actually seeing, believing if we have never allowed ourselves to see or believe anything outside of our box? Each absolute dogmatic position that we adhere to limits us. And to make matters worse the more vigorously we defend our positionalities, the more it becomes cemented as "our" reality and the less energy we have to entertain anything else. This to me is the value of lemons. These tart blips on our status quo radar give us a nudge towards seeing things differently, to make different choices that can propel us on a different trajectory and hopefully expand our perception beyond our narrow horizons. They are the cleansing agent on our perceptual lens.
Thinking outside our boxes and trying to perceive our reality differently is really hard work. Yikes, let's be honest, it can really be mind bending. While it is a simple concept, change your perceptual thinking, change your life, it requires absolute focus at all times. If we are ever to move beyond ordinary to extraordinary, we need to know by whose reality we are operating.
And if somebody is going to write the script of my life, then I want to be the one. I don't know about you but I am tired of allowing others carte blanche to muck about in my life. To subscribe to the status quo is to adhere to "crab psychology" where the captured crabs in the bucket will continually pull any escaping crab back into their communal prison of certain death.
We are the projector heads projecting our story on the screen of life and then wondering why life is so limiting. By carefully guarding the intake valve, I can change the images on my screen of life. This will take due diligence on my part but even slight changes in my perceptual reality will pay huge dividends. I intend to slay some of my sacred cows that I have been feeding all my life.
By no stretch of the imagination am I a physicist but I did find intriguing the conversation on the following link. What captured my imagination is that as scientists move beyond Newton's concept of a solid law governed universe, they are finding more and more that there is far more randomness and space than ever suspected. So if there is all this space and all these options, why are we still adhering to so narrow a reality? No limitation living, here we come.
http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/dec/31/solid-rock/
