What Do You See?

Perception has always fascinated me as it is such a personal experience. We can all undergo exactly the same situation but could have completely different perceptions of what it meant to you based on your prior experiences, your thought process or even your mood. As a child I had an extreme idea of personal perception; I would wonder if my reality was the same reality the person next to me was experiencing or if this was a Matrix-type of world for each of us. Perhaps we didn't even share the same world we were experiencing. Of course I loved it when the Matrix movie was released, as it echoed some of these thoughts but did make me question reality all over again...
Having friends who were colour-blind encouraged this thinking. "How could two people see the same thing and perceive it completely differently?". I imagined at times that even our language was spoken and interpreted in completely different ways. In the same way that a tree is still interpreted as a tree to the colour-blind person (even though it may be completely brown), could words be heard or even read completely differently but yet interpreted with the same meaning? That's just my crazy thinking!

One test of perception that has always stuck in my mind though, is of a person holding up a piece of paper with a small black dot on the page and asking the audience what they see. The reply is always, "A black dot." That is how our thought patterns have been trained, to identify what is seemingly out of place or is more prominent. What about the rest of the piece of paper? Was it not also held up and in clear view for the audience? It is never identified. Always just the black dot!

Has our perception filter been developed into something that focuses us onto the blemishes rather than the overall good that is there in front of us?

I wonder if the same could be asked of how I (we) have been perceiving the world lately? A few very disappointing experiences with people has resulted in my focus being on those situations and the way it has affected me. I have overlooked the many, many, many... many great people and experiences I have had with them. I have distanced myself from the world and limited my interactions to be purely 'functional'. My defence mechanism in hyper-drive you might say. I can state with absolute certainty that staring at the black dot on the piece of paper does not bring any enjoyment. In fact it doing so reminds yourself and re-emphasizes that the clean sheet of paper has been 'ruined'. The voice in my head constantly saying, "No going back, it is ruined!". And the rest of the clean sheet of paper is just waiting to be put to good use and appreciated...

Time to change my focus off the black dot and live on all of the rest that this great world has to offer.