Possibilities and Perceptions

I’m reading this book called: The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. Wow! I’m convicted at how I take my own perceptions of what my senses are telling me and judge circumstances or people. Here is an excerpt from chapter 1:

A frog does not “see” it’s mother’s face; it cannot appreciate a sunset, nor even the nuances of color. It “sees” only what it needs to see in order to eat and to avoid being eaten: small tasty bugs, or the sudden movement of a stork coming in its direction. The frog’s eye delivers extremely selective information to the frog’s brain. The frog perceives only that which fits into its hardwired categories of perception.
Human eyes are selective, too, though magnitudes more complex than those of the frog. We think we can see “everything,” until we remember that bees make out patterns written in ultraviolet light on flowers, and owls see in the dark. The senses of every species are fine-tuned to perceive information critical to their survival.
We perceive only the sensations we are programmed to receive, and our awareness is further restricted by the fact that we recognize only those for which we have mental maps or categories.
The British neuropsychologist Richard Gregory wrote, “The senses do not give us a picture of the world directly; rather they provide evidence for the checking of hypotheses about what lies before us.”

It goes on to mention that we see a map of the world, not the world itself and that Einstein said it was nonsense to found a theory on observable facts alone: “In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”

So for those of you scratching your head – in essence what is being said is that we typically have blind spots directing our observations, giving us a false sense of judgment to stand on so that we can feel protected and in control. We observe situations or people and draw an inconclusive perception based on what we have programmed ourselves to feel or receive as fact. Forgetting that we were the ones who created our own mask or shell to hide in, how fair are we being to ourselves by judging life according to what our coverings filter?

The challenge we must embrace is to redefine the boxes our heads form by either enlarging them or drawing new ones as opportunities present themselves. Garner the courage to chase Wisdom and Understanding down adopting new paradigms. Paradigms that lift the scales from our eyes allowing us to see those things that were before invisible to us.

Try this puzzle. Join all nine dots with four straight lines, without taking pen from paper.
. . .
. . .
. . .

Maybe we should be like the solution in this puzzle, inventing new spaces outside of the “puzzle”.

~ by Jen Chappell on January 19, 2008.