Episode 109 Transcript
Intrinsic Wisdom of Perception
Good morning friends and listeners. I am happy to have you here for this series on Metaphysical Humanism.
In this second half of this season 1 topic, I am sharing about our innate human superpowers that Bob Proctor called the 6 Mental Faculties and which I call our intrinsic wisdoms – These are superpowers we are born with, and which serve us in throughout our lives.
These 6 skills are: Imagination, Intuition, Will, Memory, Perception, and Reason. They are part of our Metaphysical Human qualities and are vital to us achieving self-actualization. They are metaphysical because they work with our consciousness – we can’t see these faculties because we can’t see consciousness – we can’t prove they exist except through our experience of them. So, using them as they are intended can be a challenge because it’s hard to master something you can’t see.
Speaking of seeing – today I want to talk about the faculty that determines how you see the world, how you see yourself, and how you see the people and circumstances in your life. By seeing I mean, your point of view, your perspective – or your PERCEPTION. Perception is the meaning and judgement you place on everything that comes into your awareness through your senses.
Perception is the filter we use to interpret all the stimuli– everything we experience. We get an instant impression of something we see, hear, smell, feel, taste, or intuit. This filter makes a judgement about this impression. This judgement is a thought which leads us to feel emotion. That emotion will cause you to take action or to make a decision. These judgements, or perceptions, get sent to your subconscious mind and stick around as your beliefs and paradigms.
These subconscious beliefs act as an engine for motivation and also as blocks in your life.
Most people are unaware of the power of perception and so it’s misused in ways that keep people stuck and unable to pursue their dreams and goals – it also creates a lot of unnecessary suffering.
The most destructive way we use this superpower is to see ourselves as victims – this perception is wreaking havoc on our world. If people disagree with us, or if they live in a way we disagree with, or if they challenge our beliefs – we feel deeply wronged – or victimized. This creates strong feelings, and we react with strong behavior. But worse, is that when we tell ourselves that someone has deeply offended us – that we are a victim of their words or opinions or beliefs, our own self-image is lowered because we feel disempowered – and we suffer needlessly for it.
Don’t get me wrong. There are people who are victims of crimes and that isn’t a perception, its cold hard facts – it’s reality. That’s not what I’m talking about here with perception. Perception is a judgement you make about a situation – it’s not always truth. And many people don’t realize they actually have the power to choose their perception.
For example, you walk into a room, and you hear two women you know laughing, then they abruptly stop as they see you. You may choose to judge this incident as they must have been laughing at you. Your immediate thought is that they are gossiping about you, they are not your friends. You feel hurt and embarrassed and angry. You decide not to speak to them and walk past them with an angry look. Your perception is that you are a victim of their cruelty – they have harmed you. But did they though?
What if your perception isn’t truth? What if you are needlessly suffering? 1) So, what if they were laughing at you? Shift to an empowering thought. Now you know how they are, you’ve learned something and it’s a “them” problem – you are not victimized and humiliated. And 2) what if you were completely wrong in your interpretation of the situation? These women were maybe discussing that they had just made a fool of themselves in front colleagues, and they were laughing about it together. They stopped when they saw you because they didn’t want to look foolish again.
Either way, you don’t have to suffer for something needlessly. You can shift your perception.
These days if someone doesn’t speak to us, we are offended. If someone forgets our birthday, we are crushed. If someone disagrees with us – it makes us angry. And we feel all those things because the moment the incident happened we chose the perception of being a victim instead of deciding we are powerful. Their behavior must have been about you – right – don’t we react that way sometimes.
But what if we could decide to be powerful instead of being insulted and disempowered?
I was in town one day with a female family member. We parked the car and got out and there was another woman getting into her car. She didn’t speak. My family member didn’t speak. But as we walked on this family member said, “can you believe she didn’t speak to me?”
I asked, “do you know her?’
“Well, yes… we go to the same church. And I just can’t believe she wouldn’t speak and acted like she was better than me.”
Now my immediate thought, though I didn’t say it, was “well, you didn’t speak to her either.”
This small incident really put a cloudy mood on our outing and my family member was suffering over it.
What if she could have just said to herself “oh there is so-and-so, I don’t think she saw me – let me stop to say hello.” What change in circumstance would have been created? What hurt and suffering would have been avoided if she could have shifted her perception?
Wayne Dyer said, “Change your thoughts, change your life.” Well, I’m saying, Change your perception, end your suffering.
The truth is that our suffering is rarely caused by an actual event or circumstance. It comes from our thoughts about the event or circumstance – from our perception of the event or circumstance.
At one time if I gotten an unexpected bill in the mail – say a car repair my husband forgot to mention – and that meant less grocery money for the next two weeks – I would have gone into a meltdown. I would have been afraid we weren’t going to make it to the next payday. My thoughts would have been “This bill is terrible news! It’s not fair. And why didn’t my husband tell me to expect this – it’s his fault we won’t have enough money to make it. I’m so angry with him! He’s so irresponsible! I hate him!”
WHEW! Just pause and take a deep breath.
I would go from a bill I didn’t expect to hating my husband in a matter of seconds. That’s a lot of pain and suffering…especially for him. Seriously though – It’s rough on the body too -constriction in the chest – jaw clenched tight – shoulders tight – seething anger and tremendous fear.
Unfortunately, since birth, most of us are modeled that anger is how you respond to uncomfortable situations in life. See, anger is a forward moving energy – and it’s a higher vibration than being sad or disappointed. We get angry because it keeps us from going into freeze mode. There is action in anger. It also keeps us from problem solving because it puts us into victim mode instead of empowerment mode. We react to bad situations.. badly. We over-react. We blame and shame. What was it Yoda told lil Ani Skywalker? “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering..”
We see this everywhere today – teachers can’t give low grades without parents losing their minds – children can’t be told no without having fits – register workers bear the brunt of enraged shoppers when orders are wrong. A neighbor flies a flag someone disagrees with – rage ensues. Vote for someone their family didn’t vote for – you cut off all ties with their kin. Unexpected, unfortunate events happen, and we look for somewhere to place blame. We choose disempowering perceptions out fear and fear causes us to feel like victims. But are we victims of life? Or is there an empowering way to perceive problems?
What if we didn’t react that way? What if your perception of life circumstances created peace of mind instead of suffering? That is the superpower that perception is meant to be in your life.
Here’s a secret. Nothing is bad unless you perceive it as bad. What if you didn’t think that everything that is uncomfortable was also an unforgivable offense or a world ending tragedy?
Now I look at unexpected car bill and said, “ok, well, I’m glad the car got fixed so we have reliable transportation. This week the budget will be a little tight and we may have to do without some of the things we like to have, but we’ll get them next time.” And then I ask my spouse to try to communicate unexpected spending needs with me. Relief and peace and calm is what I feel instead of suffering.
Problems don’t have to create suffering in your life. Conflict does not have to create suffering in your life. Uncomfortable situations do not have to create suffering in your life. A problem doesn’t have to feel like the end of the world. It can feel calm and peaceful with no suffering.
Understand that perception impacts our lives in big ways. It influences our beliefs and values. It creates paradigms that impact our decision making. If we have a paradigm that says other people should speak first – we are going to decide to snub and be unfriendly to a lot of people and then wonder why we don’t have many friends.
Perception impacts our communication and our relationships with others. We also interpret nonverbal cues with our perception. As someone who has, since birth, had a frown on my face, people always interpret that I am angry. I’m not! It’s just the muscles in my face! My normal, relaxed facial expression is misperceived as anger all the time. Do me a favor and seek two nonverbal cues to perceive anger.
Perception also impacts our expectations. Our prior experiences, whether negative or positive, create expectations in similar experiences. If we’ve had a falling out with best friends before over gossip or backstabbing, this may cause us to perceive that other women would sit around laughing about us. Of course they would because we expect them to based on past experience.
Perception impacts your self-image. If you always take the way others behave as a personal attack on you, then most likely you will have a belief that you don’t deserve to be treated well by others – the paradigm of “I’m not worthy.” This is a very harmful paradigm that creates tremendous suffering, especially for women.
Perceptions impact our social beliefs. If someone is raised in an environment of racism, sexism, religious elitism, or political extremism – they might have a filter created from that environment – racist or sexist beliefs might be the paradigms behind many of their perceptions of others and their place in the world. Again, these are still choices – they are not fact or reality – they are a misuse of perception.
Cultural experiences are all about perception. We wear numerous cultural labels because we want others to perceive us in a certain way – “I’m American. I’m a certain religion. I belong to this club. I graduated from this school. I’m a fan of this team. I belong to this political party.” We perceive ourselves and others by the labels we wear. Right now, we have a lot of people in the world saying entire groups of people are bad because they belong to certain religions, or certain political parties, or certain genders even. This perception creates a lot of suffering in the world – a lot of hate and fighting and miscommunication and misunderstanding. Are these labels truth? Are they WHO you are?
I would go as far as to say the problem with the world is the misuse of perception. And the main lens we view life from across the globe is the paradigm of patriarchy. How much suffering has it caused?
Patriarchy is not truth. And most of the time, this unconscious perception is a delusion. It’s a completely made-up fantasy. It’s Untruth. But people have died and suffered for 10,000 years for this made-up perception of how the world works.
Perception is just a thought. A metaphysical wave in the field of consciousness. A neurological synapses. A bias based on a previous moment in your life that has nothing to do with the current moment It’s a story you, or someone else when you were a child, told you and your subconscious believed it.
This doesn’t make you bad or your thoughts bad – thoughts are not good or bad, they are empowering or disempowering. Both patriarchy and victimhood are disempowering perceptions for everyone.
Perception is such a strong mental faculty that it can absolutely control your life. And most of the time people are completely unaware it affects them at all. When a situation happens, we believe it is as bad or as good as our perception tells us to believe. It’s our own thoughts that create our perception.
But if a perception can be created by our thoughts, then a perception can be changed by changing our thoughts. You can turn perception into a superpower that works for you and ends needless suffering and creates a life you love.
It just takes awareness. Being aware of your thoughts is the number one skill you should adopt in life. This allows you to choose your thoughts and your perceptions and to respond to circumstances with consideration rather that reacting with emotion. You can lessen your suffering every time a circumstance comes up that feels like a problem by shifting your perception about what is happening. Unless it’s the end of the world, it’s not the end of the world.
Some advice on how to shift your perception when difficult or uncomfortable situations arise:
- Notice your thoughts about the situation: “I think they are talking about me!” It this thought the truth. Maybe, maybe not. Did you hear them or are you assuming? What evidence are you basing your perception on? If none, why are you perceiving it this way?
- Make an immediate decision: Do I want to suffer through this problem, or do I want to be empowered to respond to life with more peace and less suffering?
- Then hit the pause button: My mentor Mary Morrissey teaches a lesson about hitting the pause button on your emotional reaction to a problem. Give it three days before you react. In those 3 days you list what good could come of the situation – then you problem solve. When you feel like reacting, you pause and say – no, I have an appointment with you on Friday – or whenever you set your time to react. Chances are you will have found a solution and won’t need to emotionally react and suffer over the problem at all.
- Change your perspective: Things look different if you are standing in a different position. The world looks different on the ground than it does from a plane in the sky. Ask yourself, “is there another way I can look at this?” or “What is the good that can come from this?” This raises your energy vibe and brings solutions and opportunities into your viewpoint that you would have missed if you were focused on how unfair or difficult life can be. Focus on solutions and solutions appear.
- Respond: You’ve set aside your emotions. You’ve looked at the problem from different viewpoints. Your perception has changed, and a problem-solving idea has come to mind. You can now respond instead of reacting. Can you imagine the power you will now have in your life with this awareness?
- Create better results. When you respond to life, you make better decisions, you take more empowered steps forward and create better results – the results you want instead of the suffering that you normally experience when problems come up in your life. This changes your perception.
Let me leave you with the story of Victor Frankl. He was imprisoned in a concentration camp by the Nazis where he lost his entire family to disease and the gas chambers. The last possession he had in the world was his wedding ring – which they also took from him. In that moment he had an awakening to this perception – “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude, in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Victor Frankl survived those horrors and went on to create a psychotherapy centered around meaning creation and wrote the inspirational book on suffering and the meaning of life, his autobiography, “a man’s search for meaning.” Frankl maintained that humankind’s primary driver wasn’t pleasure, as Freud theorized, but it is the search for the meaning to life. Perception is the way we create meaning.
Hear that again. Your perception is the way you create the meaning of your life.
Just like the Butterfly Effect, a little shift in perception can make a big difference in your life and in the world. That is why it’s a superpower. Make sure you are using it to empower yourself.
chooseloveministry.org 