But I digress...let me back up.
I've always wondered about this...does green look the same to everybody else as it does to me? If I could take a cable and link my brain to another person's brain so that I could peer into their perceptions, would I see purple or orange or cadmium yellow when they were looking at a pasture in springtime? They would call it green. We would (when unlinked) both agree that we were looking at the color green. But when I looked through their eyes and brain, I would see what I would call another color. Is that possible? I've thought about this a lot and I've come to the conclusion that nobody can ever know the answer to this question. I haven't been able to figure out a way to reliably link my brain to another without killing them (and more to the point, me).
It gets me to thinking about perceptions in general. Perceptions are funny things. Our senses like hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling....oh yeah, and seeing are really just signal sending devices. They're kind of like a doorbell. Somebody pushes a button, which closes a connection, which sends an electrical impulse along a wire, which takes said signal to a small actuator, which in direct response to the signal, rings a bell. It happens the same way every time. It's supposed to work like that.
But when the bell rings, the response of the folks in the house is not necessarily the same every time. If the teenage daughter is expecting her boyfriend, she may leap anxiously for the door. If Mom is being hounded by collectors, she may hide behind a chair. If Dad is watching tv and on the verge of nodding off, he may jump out of his skin. At 3 in the morning, a doorbell ringing may fill everyone in the house with dread.
So you see, our senses are like doorbells, but our perceptions, dear reader, are like the folks in the house. The ringing doorbell must be processed before it can be acted upon. Our minds are constantly dealing with the ringing bells, evaluating, making judgments, formulating responses. The way they go about this is as individual as each of us is. The reason for this individuality is the body all our own unique experiences.
Nobody has experienced this world and this life in exactly the same way as you. There may be very many things that many of have experienced and can even related to similarly. But there is a preponderance of experience that is ours and ours alone.
It is for this reason that we perceive things differently. Some brief examples: Sarcasm is lost on a small child because he has no learning experiences to allow him to evaluate it correctly. Those of us who are older however, will have some degree of sensitivity to it, the level of sensitivity probably being directly proportional to the amount of sarcasm we have been subjected to.
A person raised by abusive parents may not find the slapstick humor of the Three Stooges humorous as their experience has trained their minds to respond to physical violence in ways alien to those of us from a more peaceful background.
These are examples of filters (or the lack thereof). Filters are the automatic responses that we program into our minds for how we're going to handle the ringing of the doorbell.
But just because we do not perceive sarcasm does not mean it is not there. And just because a person fails to see the humor in a Three Stooges short does not mean that the Stooges were trying to scare or trouble people. Perception can fail us. If our experiences and the training of our minds fail us, we may not accurately perceive a scene, a word, a touch, or any given ring of the old doorbell.
Of course, much of our own experience is provided to us by ourselves. If we have bad experiences due to our own choices, then if our perceptions deceive us, we have no cause to blame anybody else. It's important that we try to understand. Once we do, we may see that the filters that we have built over years and even decades are not working properly. If someone says or does something that instantly makes us mad (and I'm not talking about somebody trying to be a jerk), it's a good indication that we're letting our filters do our perception work for us. Not necessarily anything wrong with that, but when we see our filters taking over, it's good to step back and try to figure out how that filter was built.
In doing this, it's important to try to understand the signal itself. Look at the raw data. Just the doorbell. How was the button pushed? Why was it pushed? What was the pusher's intent? Then once we understand that, try to determine if the response to that was appropriate. This is the basis for real understanding between people. Sure, there are jerks out there that have an agenda and when you understand what they're doing, anger or indignation is a reasonable response, but most people are honest in their intentions. They just want to be understood. What gets folks in a foul mood is when they think nobody is listening to them, and rightly so.
Perception is a condition of this world. We will be plagued or helped by it as long as we are here. When we pass from this life, the mind that we've had here will no longer be a part of us and we will for the first time truly perceive reality. I think that's what Paul had in mind when he said "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (1 Cor 13:12)
So when somebody urges you to "deal with reality", keep in mind that 1) - their "reality" might not be yours, 2) - your "reality" (and theirs for that matter) may not be real, and 3) - the real-est reality is not to be known in this life
