The Doors of Perception

Perception is an amazing power. Everything we see, everything we hear, everything we touch, taste, and smell is filtered through our perception.In the field of Psychology, perception refers to our interpretation of what we take in through our senses.

Mother Teresa saw the face of Jesus in the homeless she worked with. The classical composer Bach saw notes everywhere he walked and heard their song. Picasso saw distortions of the human anatomy. Walt Whitman saw beauty everywhere and heard freedom ring in every line he wrote. Gandhi perceived every experience as an opportunity for an ever greater variety of service. Too often, some perceive what people say as criticism or as an attack, probably based upon unresolved experiences from their past. Some think the world is on the brink of disaster and others see a new consciousness coming. Perception can literally take us to the heights of heaven or the den of Hades, depending upon what we see, what we feel, what we think, and what we hear.

Syndicated cartoonist, Gary Larson, creator of The Far Sidehad a four part drawing titled The Four Personality Types. Sitting down with a glass half-way filled on the table before them they were asked to report what they saw. Personality type number onesaw a glass half full. Personality type number two saw a glass half empty. Personality type number three asked for a new glass because the glass was dirty. Personality type number four appeared disgruntled and said, “What is this? I ordered a cheeseburger!”

When you meet with a counselor, each will have a different approach to working with the issues you present to them. Each has a distinctive psychological orientation and this orientation reflects their unique childhood issues, life experiences, and education. Each perceives what you tell them differently.

Cell Biologist Bruce Lipton writes, “When patients get better by ingesting a sugar pill, medicine defines it as the placebo effect.  I refer to it as the perception effect or belief effect to stress that our perceptions, whether they are accurate or not, equally impact our behavior and our bodies.”

Psychologist Abraham Maslow writes, “The sacredness of every person and of every living thing is so easily and directly perceived in its reality by those seeking transcendent experiences. For them, peak experiences and plateau experiences become the most important things in their lives and the most precious aspect of life.”

Spiritual Teacher Sogyal Rinpoche wrote, “Everything we see around us is seen as it is because we have been repeatedly solidifying our experiences of inner and outer reality in the same way, and this has led to the mistaken assumption that what we see is objectively real.  As we go further along the spiritual path, we learn how to work directly with our fixed perceptions. All our old concepts of the world or even ourselves are purified and dissolved and an entirely new “heavenly” field of vision and perception opens up.”