Contemplative Living: October Prequel
This month marks the second gathering in our series, Contemplative Living in Today’s World (if you'd like to attend, email me and I'll see if we still have space: 67happydog@gmail.com).
Before each session, I share a blog to introduce our topic. This month we’re exploring perception and perspective, and how, what we see shapes our experiences. Seemingly, it all starts with a strangely colored dress.
Now You See It, Now You Don’t
“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” - Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur (1961)
Does This Dress Make Me Look… Bizarre?
Remember this? It’s the “dress that broke the Internet” in 2015. What colors do you see? For me, and 30% of folks, it’s clearly gold and white. 57% of you say it’s blue-black, 11% say blue-brown, and 2% see something else. Same picture, different colors. It’s not a trick. This is real. Our eyes receive the same information, but our brains interpret it differently. Isn’t that bizarre?
40 ÷ 11,000,000 = Itsy Bitsy Teeny Tiny
According to research, our brains receive roughly 11 million bits of information every second but can only consciously process about 40 bits. There’s simply too much coming at us, so the brain filters. It decides what gets our attention and interprets those tiny bits using past experience, expectations, emotions, beliefs, and what we’ve learned along the way. In other words, we don’t experience a raw recording of reality. Our brains are constantly constructing a workable version. Apparently, mine thinks that dress is white and gold.
Not So Fast, Sherlock
Hold on. If my brain is giving me a wildly distorted version of reality, how have I managed to hold a job, operate a hotel shower, and convince a website I’m not a robot? First, it’s subtle, not wild. Our brains are grounded in the same external information. We all see the same dress, not a dancing rhino. The discrepancy occurs because the brain makes assumptions about ambiguous information. In this case, it’s lighting conditions. Those assumptions can alter our perception. So, your lens can be accurate enough to build a wonderful life while still being incomplete or occasionally misleading.
There’s plenty of research demonstrating that this goes well beyond strangely colored dresses. In the Invisible Gorilla experiment, people concentrating on basketball passes often failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. In a famous change-blindness study, roughly half the participants failed to notice that the stranger they were talking to had been replaced by an entirely different person. In the Rubber Hand Illusion, people began experiencing a fake rubber hand as their own. Seligman and Maier found that dogs conditioned to believe escape was impossible often stopped trying, even when escape became available. And Emily Balcetis found that simply changing where people focused their attention could make a finish line appear closer. Apparently, seeing isn’t always believing, but what we believe can definitely influence seeing.
Limited View, Limited Action
Long before psychologists started putting people in gorilla suits and stroking rubber hands, humans were already describing our inability to see clearly. Across centuries and traditions, mystics and philosophers used words like blindness, ignorance, forgetfulness, sleep, shadows, veils, and illusion. Different metaphors for the same basic problem: we mistake our limited view for the whole view.
Nobody’s life is transformed by the color of a dress (unless you’re JLo & Versace) but what you don’t see accurately, you can’t change. Limited views literally limit actions. Remember Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars? It’s a vivid reminder that we don’t react to what happens. We react to what we perceive it to mean. Doh! If we’re honest, we’ve all had moments when a limited perception hijacked the better version of ourselves. The first step is recognizing our limited perception.
An Ego Trip
Ego went into the world wearing a coat called Me. It fit perfectly at birth, but as Ego grew, the coat became heavy. Insults went into one pocket, worries into another. Ego stuffed Me with accomplishments, disappointments, things to prove, people to impress, and fears about what might happen next. Soon, Me was overflowing and Ego was exhausted.
Down the road, Ego met Awareness who gently suggested, “You don’t have to carry everything you pick up.” For the first time, Ego looked inside Me, chose what to keep, and lightened the load.
Farther along, Compassion asked if Ego noticed the others. Ego had been so busy protecting Me, it had barely seen them. Gently, some of the strangers helped clear out parts of Me that Ego couldn’t reach, making the coat roomier still.
Eventually, after much searching, Ego met Surrender, who welcomed Ego with a wide grin and a warm embrace. “I’ve been waiting for you, old friend. How was your journey with Me?”
Ego smiled. “It got me this far.”
“Indeed it did.” Surrender held out a hand. “Shall we?”
“Where?”
“No idea.”
Ego laughed, took Surrender’s hand, and for the first time, Me felt just right.
Widen the Lens
Ego’s journey isn’t just a nice story. Decades of developmental research suggest that as we grow, our perspective has the potential to grow with us (or not!). Growing older is automatic. Growing our perspective isn’t. Integral philosopher Ken Wilber calls this developmental process “Growing Up,” describing an expanding perspective that can move from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric and, ultimately, cosmocentric.
Why bother? Because the size of our perspective affects the size of the life available to us. A narrow lens can leave us trapped inside our own fears, assumptions, grievances, and need to be right. Widen it and more becomes possible. Research suggests that curiosity, flexibility, and openness to experience are associated with healthier cognitive functioning. Learning to see through the eyes of others has been linked with greater empathy and more cooperative behavior. In everyday life, that can mean fewer battles and healthier relationships.
Perhaps that’s the real benefit of walking this path. The world doesn’t necessarily change. We do. We become capable of seeing more, which gives new meaning to a question posed by Jesus two thousand years ago: “Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?”
Maybe it’s time to look again for the first time.
Peace out,
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