What You See is What You Get
Growing up, I always assumed that whatever I saw was real. If I saw a bucket on the patio, then that meant that the bucket was on the patio. If two classmates pointed at me, whispered and smiles, then I was seeing two classmates making fun of me. I had no idea that a filtering process took place between what was outside of me and what I perceived to be outside of me, or that perception was a kind of invisible filter constantly being shaped, altered and recalibrated. I also couldn’t fathom that the very act of perception could influence, or even create, whatever it was that I saw.
What I’ve learned over the years is that what I see is often a version of what I get. As a therapist, I help people work with their own perceptions. I’m also always wondering about my own. A good deal of mental health depends on a person learning how to alter their perceptions of reality–particularly those aspects that are intransigent or seemingly entrenched, like chronic pain, estrangement from a loved one, or difficult experiences that occurred long ago but continue to shape someone’s capacity to be vulnerable or trust.
Our Mind Generates Stories
As both a witness to others relationships and as a participant in my own, I’m endlessly amazed by the ways that we convince ourselves of realities that don’t exist. So often, in our relationships, what we see and experience is the product of many intersecting optical illusions. I’m not saying, as many mystics do, that life is a dream or some deity’s cosmic version of virtual reality (although it very well might be). I’m suggesting that we can benefit from bringing mindfulness to how we shape our lives through our perceptions of it. We do this far more than we’re usually able to consistently recognize, particularly when our lives are busy. Because left to its own devices, our mind will generate increasingly convincing versions of its own stories.
Which leads me to my number #1 rule for life: question your unquestioned, auto-pilot perceptions. Be curious about what you see. Because over the course of time, if you continue seeing what you see without considering other ways of seeing it, without peeling back the edges of the projections you’re beaming out onto objects, people, and situations in the world, you’ll invariably get more and more of what you see. And if your mind’s anything like mine–pre-programmed to have a survival bias, or a natural, habitual bent towards fear, distrust and scarcity–what you’ll get is more fear, distrust and scarcity. That’s just a painful way to live, when you can alter how you see the world.
Originally published on The Good Men Project.
