When you look around you, do you assume that your senses are giving you an accurate picture of reality? Most of us do. We see, hear, smell and feel the external world and then use our brains to put it all together. We take the billions of bits of raw data streaming in from our sense organs and assemble them into something that we can grasp, understand, explain.
Our brains tell a story about ‘reality’ in order to make the incomprehensibly large volume of information manageable. We put people in boxes so we can say we ‘know’ them. We observe patterns in events so that we can try to predict future outcomes. We tell stories about ‘how things are’ so that we can either avoid danger or see opportunity.
Your ‘reality’, then, is largely an assemblage of your stories, and those stories are based on an inherently limited amount of data (because your senses do not sense everything…a dog, for example, can smell 100 to 1000 times more than you). And each of us have different stories, and senses, so anything resembling an ‘objective reality’ must be the sum of each conscious mind’s perception of the external world.
Nobody has a lock on ‘reality’. You have a perspective. Your perspective is valid, just as everyone else’s, but it is not complete. If you buy into the mistaken notion that your reality is THE reality, you limit yourself in a very significant way. You are willfully placing blinders on your eyes. You develop tunnel vision.
Open yourself to a larger reality. Seek feedback. Try to see through another’s eyes. Hear through another’s ears. Every time you step outside of yourself you EXPAND, and in this expansion you find that you, and your ‘reality’, are much larger than you might think!
-KC Hildreth
www.kchildreth.com