You have been conditioned to see the world through a single perspective. You believe that the world is a single sight, a single experience, and that you are a single awareness. You’ve been taught this perspective your whole life. This perspective is not your own; it’s been handed down to you like second-hand clothing. To escape the narrows of this perspective, you must first awaken to the true scope of your own perception, for which you must first understand how your perceive.
Understanding Perception
When you see a rock, what does it become to you? Is it a thought, a feeling, or a sensation? Depending on your experiences in life, it could be any combination of the three. Imagine, growing up next to a granite quarry, playing with rocks as a child with a sense of industrial abundance. Imagine the constant sounds of industrial equipment blasting, smashing, and ripping the rock from the Earth. To you, a rock might invoke an emotional sense of industrial purpose — a sense of making order of the chaos. When you see a rock, it might summon a warm positive emotional experience for you.
Imagine that you grew up on coastal waters, where rocks were scarce. Rocks were used to protect against hurricanes and the power of the ocean. Imagine your family being unable to afford protective rocks near your ocean-front home, and imagine having lost everything in a hurricane. Imagine the despair, the shock, and the emotional upheaval of that experience — losing everything you know to an unstoppable force. When you see a rock, it might cause a deep negative sense of dread and resentment to come over you..
These two perspectives illustrate just how differently one object can be experienced by two different people. Our perspective is often shaped as much by our past experience, if not more than, our current circumstance. Thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations that you have experienced in the past affect your present experience in the world. To break free of this anchor to your past, you must first become more self aware of how your perspectives are created. When you recognize your own patterns of perspective, you can begin to correct them and even skew them to your benefit. Woefully negative experiences can be shifted into positives ones by little more than deciding they are positive. The next time you are in a negative situation that disrupts you to your core, pretend you’ve never tasted the air before. Recognize how insanely spectacular it is that in such an infinite universe of fire and stars and inhabitable space that you can draw air into your fragile little lungs. It’s hard to be angry at anyone when you’re respecting the actual scope of your own existence.
Different types of perspective also have the ability to shape one another. Experiences that are more wholly emotional often overshadow any physical or mental component in retrospect. For the two people before, they both have emotional connections to rocks which shift the focus over their current perception. For them, a rock doesn’t feel rough and sharp along it’s edges — it feels like an collection of past emotions. Imagine holding your hand to a stove-top; you would likely forget all thoughts of warm Saturday morning pancakes and be focused solely on the searing physical pain. This illustrates how a very intense physical experience can completely consume the focus of any mental or emotional experience. The same can be said for extremely traumatic mental and physical experiences; they can overpower and skew emotional perception. What you think of something can often affect your perception of what it actually is, just as the way you feel towards another person can affect what you think about them. Imagine you have a finite amount of focus that can be divided among these three perspectives at any given time. When you shift your perception towards one, it shifts away from the other two. It’s the same concept that draws everyone’s attention to the loudest person in the room. Eventually, everyone may decide that volume alone doesn’t merit focus — but that initial experience is owned by it.
Our perspective is a balance of these three perceptions — our emotional perception, our mental perception, and our physical perception. During experiences which trigger our past connections, our balance of perspective tends to be shifted towards them. Those with powerful past emotional experiences tend to allow those experiences to influence similar new experiences. Those with strong mental bias towards matters are likely to draw upon that bias in new circumstances with similar concepts. To a large degree, this is a natural means of survival — deeply embedded in us to help learn from past mistakes. We’ve evolved to remember that if one lion will eat us, then it’s likely that all lions will eat us. This is one way we’ve been able to survive so well in the world for as long as we have. As clever as we humans are, if you ever want to do more than simply survive, you must first deconstruct your perspective and understand how it might be affecting your perception as a whole.
The Dynamics of Balance
Imagine three voices, each telling you three aspects of every experience you have. One speaks of your emotional experience, one of your mental, and the third of your physical. When these three voices speak in equal volume, your perception is in a balanced state. When one voice speaks more loudly, it has a stronger influence on defining your perspective than the other two. Imagine trying to follow a dialogue among three people with one shouting loudly. You’d likely only be left with a memory that the other two must have said something, but have no idea what. Such is your perspective in life, should any one aspect tilt towards the extreme. Focusing on one perspective limits the amount of attention you can focus on the other two. Being stuck in an emotional state of mind may likely inhibit your ability to exert the mental energy you need to solve a problem you’re facing.
Very few experiences in our lives, if any, are comprised of just a single one of these voices. Our experiences are the balance of these voices, and if you’ve been burned on a stove you’ve still got many mental and emotional memories to help you motivate yourself to cook another meal. For example, the mental awareness that not eating would lead to starvation will overpower the memory of physical harm in the end — you mind knowing a burn is lesser than dying of starving. As with all things in the natural world, perception has few hardly divided lines. A poor mental perception of someone is balanced by a good emotional perception. We can overcome physical hurdles through mental and emotional determination.
The balance of the mental, physical, and emotional comprise your perspective on the world. To become more than just the aggregation of your own circumstances, this balance must be studied carefully. Great things are often done by people who are able to devote abnormal amounts of focus to single perspective, and almost always by people who are able to consciously flow between them. An obsession of the mental can ignore the physical and emotional, allowing complex goals to be achieved. A deeper resonance with the emotional can help pierce through common mental bias and physical difficulty. A dedication to the physical can help energize mental and emotional perspective. At the center of these three perspectives is unhindered intention, capable of doing the most magnificent or the most destructive of things depending on how it is influenced by perspective.
Working on the conscious shifting of these perspectives will connect you to your inner intention, and will shift the dynamic of your life completely. Imagine creating the positivity you want in your life rather than hoping that the world creates it for you. The level of self-awareness needed for such conscious control is alien to most, and takes years of brutal self-adventure to connect to. When you accept responsibility for your own perspectives, you’re left without anyone but yourself to blame for any shortcomings you may have, and that scares the hell out of most people.
