To realize there is a difference between reality and our perception of it.
While we are growing up, we go through a variety of ways of making sense of the world.
As we move from one way of thinking about our experiences to another, we make a basic assumption. We assume that what we are experiencing is real. We are aware that the way we sense and make sense of our universe goes through very drastic changes from time to time; but at each step of the journey, we ascribe reality to our present way of interpreting the stuff around us.
"I know what I know, dammit!"
What happens if someone challenges us and points out that regarding a particular thing (choose your own example), we used to be convinced that a certain thing was true, but now we know differently? We would most likely respond, "Ah, so what? Now I do know what I know!"
It is as though we can't afford the very risky luxury of questioning our understanding of reality until we have a certain amount of confidence built up in our own existence. The changes of meaning that we undergo are often terrible enough without having to question our ability to understand and interpret reality itself.
THE THINGS AROUND US
When I was a child, I used to look forward to driving with my grandparents to a certain place in Hoquiam, Washington. Every time we came to this place at night, I saw a beautiful thing. It was a beautiful pear- shaped something up in the sky. It was a bright, glowing yellow, and had red "wings". Some times it would move around a little bit, but most times it just held still, up there in the air. I never asked what it was, it was just one of the hundreds of things I hadn't figured out yet, and I was pretty sure that sooner or later I would learn more.
I remember quite clearly the night I saw the thing differently. As I sat there in the back seat of Granddad and Nana's car, the beautiful thing changed into a traffic caution light. I saw what it "really" was, and oh! was I disappointed. Reality was such a letdown.
It wasn't until many years later I began to question my "correct" understanding of reality. Was the wonder I originally sensed so inaccurate? Hardly. A traffic signal involves so many wondrous, beautiful things for it to just hang up there in the air, that the reality of it must surely include much of what I saw at first.
The beginning of wisdom for me was not when I recognized what the thing was, but when I realized that my original understanding of it was not wrong. We spend our lifetime trying to understand what the things around us really are. As we go through life, that understanding changes.
THE PEOPLE AROUND US
I suppose that in the beginning, the people in our lives must seem like gods; great beings who exist to provide for us. Sooner or later, (for some, cruelly soon) we learn that they are not gods, but mere people.
We also learn that they do not exist just to take care of us. We learn these things normally, as we begin to experience human limitations. Since our parents are human, they are not mind readers. When we are too young to express our needs, they have to guess. Often, they guess wrong. Each human failing in our parents causes them to drop ever further from their former position as "gods."
Sometimes they plunge in our esteem below the status of even being people at all, and become mere things that are part of the furniture of our universe.
Life teaches us that the people around us are not gods who provide for us, but rather are independent and autonomous creatures who are mortal as we are, who are seeking their own fulfillment, and who may or may not care for us.
But we retain the need to have gods who exist only to provide for us. That need is so great that it takes precedence over what we have learned from the world around us.
Out of our need we create images of the people in our lives which more closely resemble the way we would wish them to be rather than how we have found them.
So, as we grow through childhood, we create friends who admire/respect/fear us whether they actually do or not, and we do whatever is necessary to maintain our images of friends and parents in place of the "real" people who may be there. We sometimes have to do outrageous, otherwise unexplainable things, to maintain the illusions we have built up about them, and about ourselves.
As maturing human beings, we create mates who love/adore/depend upon us whether they do or not. Sometimes a marriage is five, ten, twenty years in existence before one or the other begins to realize that the person he or she really married was not real, but imagined. Sometimes the actual person is an improvement, and there is excitement of new discovery in an old marriage. Sometimes not.
As parental human beings, we go through the same tortured steps to find out that the children we thought we had were the ones we imagined. If we are lucky, we can begin to find out who they more truly are before they are grown, gone, or both.
OUR ABILITY TO RECREATE PEOPLE AND THINGS IS BASIC
The skills we use to "remake" people are also great for restructuring the material universe around us. We don't decide to use them so, it just comes automatically. It's what we do.
That's why I put this topic first in our discussion of wisdom. Knowing that there is a difference between reality and our perception of reality is primary of the seven discernments, which are dealt with here. This first, primary discernment may not be the first that we come to realize in our lives. But it is primary because it deals with our initial responses to a world that began to deviate from the world we wanted or needed.
In the same way, the distinction, which I will write about seventh as the distinction between silence and absence, may not be the last we come to realize. In fact, some know it instinctively. And just as all discernments leading to wisdom flow from the first, they all move toward the seventh. This is the developmental aspect of these ideas.
As is implied above, the occasion of our discovery that our perception of reality is not reality itself, is often an unhappy one. The question, "Why do all the people in my life keep doing the same things to me?" finally leads to the startling realization that the one thing they all have in common is ME.
Then if we ask, "What am I doing to all of the people in my life to make them act this way?" we begin to understand that they are each responding to our attempt to remake them according to our needs. It is small wonder that each of them winds up doing very similar things in response to my image of them.
Now the focus must shift to you.
This subject, the nature of reality, is a large one. We have set out to write/read a medium-length study on this subject, and six more. So, I have to hope that you have by now at least an intellectual understanding of the concept that we do not, indeed can not, perceive reality as it is. We perceive instead a variety of filters which we have constructed for ourselves to aid in the immense task of dealing with the universe around us.
Filters?
It's the word that popped out. Others have used other words like "buffers" or "frameworks." All are names for what we perceive in place of reality itself. Handy things, filters, and essential.
If you are a cook, think in terms of small recipes, which you use to prepare a part of a large banquet. These small recipes are so familiar to you that they become almost automatic procedures. Preparing white sauce as part of a meal just happens. It can be modified or duplicated any number of times without your having to reinvent it each meal.
That is what I mean by filters.
If you are a computer programmer, you will think in terms of utilities and sub routines. Same deal.
Each time we meet a person, we perceive not the person, but a set of filters. If we are wise, we understand and accept this; and if things work out, we know we may eventually get close to knowing something of the real person. But for a while, we must let the filters do their work.
Do you find yourself fighting the idea of these filters? Perhaps the process I describe here seems too remote and impersonal to apply to you. Or it could be that you aren't at all convincud that you require the use of such artificial devices.
If so, rejoice!
You now know exactly where you are in this process of dealing responsibly with what we call reality. You have understood the concepts intellectually, but not internalized them yet.
It is very good to know where you are.
It is also good to know where you are going. So pay attention.
I am going to phrase the following in spiritual terms. That's because I am a Methodist minister. A scientist would say the same thing using different terms. A philosopher, different yet. So here goes, in spiritual terms.
Because we are basically spiritual beings (our true being is non-material) placed in a material universe for a while; we must make use of filters for the material stuff around us to make sense. We never will outgrow our need for filters, at least while we are here. Maybe never.
The quest for truth is not to try to dump our filters. The task is to proceed with our fact gathering - knowing about the filters, acknowledging them, using them intelligently, and identifying certain of them to ourselves and others when doing so will aid in the search for truth. If we merely replace one blind "certainty" with another, we have not only NOT progressed - we have gone backward.
What does it look like when someone is acknowledging their filters?
Instead of saying, "That painting is awful!" one might say, "I don't like it." Rather than asserting, "You ruined my evening!", you might say, "I had a terrible time." See how it goes? Acknowledging our filters doesn't necessarily mean that we mention them, although we might ("I guess I'm just not used to that kind of art.")
What the quest for truth always involves is knowing that our present opinion about anything may or may not be based on anything close to reality.
But it is very important to share our opinions and feelings. Those are the two things that are totally unique about us: how we perceive something at any moment, and how we feel about that perception. If we do not share these things, how is anyone to come to know more about US and less about their FILTER of us?
Remember that the focus is on you and the world around you. We are at the point now where we will benefit from the next discernment to be made along the path to wisdom. It deals with the question of how do we go about coming closer to knowing reality if reality itself is all but unknowable?
Introduction, Ch. 1. What is Reality?, Ch. 2. Knowledge and belief., Ch. 3. What is being open- minded?, Ch. 4. Prudence and prejudice., Ch. 5. Simple and simplistic., Ch. 6. Creative and coercive., Ch. 7. Silence and absence
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