The Deception of Perception

Deception is an act or statement that misleads, hides the truth, or promotes a belief, concept, or idea that is not correct.

Perception is the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses if utilized.

Two words and two definitions for what is, often, the same exact thing, thus a deception in and of itself.

How one thinks, hears, sees, believes, communicates, and operates in the world is based totally and completely on that person’s reality, and that reality is nothing more than one’s singular, supported or unsupported, biased or unbiased, heedful or indifferent point of view. Perception is so singular and limiting that it easily misleads one to believe an idea or concept that is far from the truth. Perception can easily be a reality when taken through the rigorous procedure proving it into a fact, but perception usually rides piggyback on unsupported claims, opinions, and innuendos, creating a perception that looks like reality but is really nothing more than an illusion, or half-truth.

If one does not mindfully honor and manage their thoughts, beliefs, and actions, they inevitably will navigate life with a false sense of reality, robbing themselves of a positive result. Below please find three concepts for consciously traversing the complicated deception of perception.

Identifying, Confronting, and Defeating Your Fear – You are walking outside in the dark, and you see something slithering towards you in the grassy shadow. “Snake!” You scream and run into the house for help. You grab a loved one and a flashlight and you run back to the scene to find it was just a garden hose that was not properly put away. All that fear, and nothing to be afraid of. The snake was a figment of your imagination. So often is most of what you fear in life. ?The commonality of the snake in the grass analogy. You create, manifest, and empower fear. Then too, you have the ability to control and destroy it, just like your powerful, life-changing, God-given free will. It’s you that is in control, not fear. The proverbial snake in the grass is fear based on limited perception. This is not to say we should never heed fear, but rather that fear only merits acknowledgment when it is based on truth. Truth, throughout the history of humanity, should never just be limited by the subjectiveness of a single viewpoint, and can only be spread and discovered through thorough, precise, unbiased, and objective fact-based proof.

Whose Point View? – Where one sees a beautiful hand-carved fine dining table with a lovely set of matching chairs, the physicist sees subatomic atoms vibrating at a high level and high frequency, and the hungry termite simply sees sustenance. These three perspectives are limited and biased notions of the same truth. ?In this example, none of these perspectives represents a lie, however, each of the perspectives certainly does not represent the whole truth. The table is a table, it is energy, and it is sustenance to the termite. Each perspective is born from the perceiver satisfying their own relevant individual needs. Each perspective is one puzzle piece to the whole puzzle. Completing the puzzle requires responsibly doing the work to analyze multiple perspectives and more importantly the fact-based, unbiased, proof that supports those perspectives. Finding truth in the complicated, everyone-has-an-opinion, Google-said-it-so-it-must-be-true world requires two things. First, is an inner acknowledgment that all perspectives are simply a viewpoint, cunning by the very nature of their subjectiveness. Second, getting to the truth, impartial, pure, and objective, requires a lifelong commitment to doing the work to find, obtain, and hold it.

Mental Constructs – The problem with perception is, well, it’s only perception (I hope you have read the above…haha). That is people fall in love with their mental constructs. A mental construct is a self-created expectation/perception of what something is or will be. It is the image one holds on to. For example, the car purchase. More than the purchase of the vehicle, the buyer tries to recreate the picture that they generated in their mind of life riding around in that car. Now, the power of the home purchase. Is the homebuyer buying a dwelling on Main Street or is the buyer buying Thanksgiving dinners with family, backyard barbecues, weddings, and all things that entail Happily Ever After? Happiness and contentment in life come in proportion to one's ability to get closer to the truth, reality. What is real is a derivative of multiple perspectives, and sometimes there is more than one perspective within each of us. Buying a car is more than just fiberglass on wheels and less than joyriding, wind through the hair, and music playing with the new car smell, that mental construct.?Buying a home is more than just a three-bedroom Cape on Main Street and less than Happily Ever After, that mental construct. ?Serenity comes from clarity, which is made possible by taking in all the perspectives, even the many we generate from within.