The more I learn and grow the more I understand the importance, value, and power of perception. Perception truly is reality. It’s not just a catchy analogy it’s hard cold facts.
When we choose a different perspective on what we’re observing we become a different person. What is so fundamental to understand is when we change our perception we change our identity. Nothing really changes in that which we are perceiving. The transformation happens within us. Nothing external ever really changes, at least not in the manner we think.
We strive and strive to directly change our external circumstance into something better, or at least different, than they are now. Why this is so often a futile and misguided effort is that we’re trying to change the wrong thing.
If you want to change your world you first, and often only, have to change yourself. You must become a different person. So how do we become a different person? While there are a multiple of paths and processes, I find the simplest and most effective and efficient method is to choose to change our perception. Choose to change the way you look at things. As one of my favorite teachers (Wayne Dyer) always said “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”.
What’s step one in this journey? The first is to practice being aware of the perceptions you currently have. Our external world is wonderful fodder for storytelling. That’s, in many ways, what a perception is, a story, and we’re the ones telling it. What stories are you telling about your world. Notice I said “your” world, not “the” world. Your world is just that, your world, not my world, not the world, your world. Your story is your story. Your perception is your perception, therefore your identity is your choice. What are you choosing to be true? Who are you choosing to be? What is the filtered lens of perception you are using to create your identity and therefore your world.
One of the most common filters (perceptions) many of us use is the “truth” that we live in a world of randomness and chaos. If we do perceive order, the error is in our perception. We are essentially deluding ourselves into thinking, believing, and being some wonderful character in this grand drama and adventure movie called life.
Much like the children who lay on their backs on a summers day and gaze at the clouds deciding one looks like a bird and another looks like sail boat. The clouds are nothing more than clouds and the birds and sailboats are simply ephemeral fantasies conjured up through an active child’s imagination. An imagination that stills believes in miracles and magic. An immature mind not yet grounded in reality. Maybe that’s the reason they can still fly. They don’t know who they really are yet so they can believe in magic. After all they’re only children and don’t have the uncomfortable weight of adult responsibilities.
For children money grows on trees, Santa Claus exists, and time is eternal. For them a day can last forever. As adults we are all too aware that money most assuredly does not grow on trees, and a month goes by in a minute. Santa Claus still exists but only as far as our bank account can stretch.
Children still believe in happy endings. As an adult we know that happy endings, when they do occur, are welcome surprise coincidences that arrive far too seldom. Only an illusion that the cold detached world of reality conjured up we live in fantasy world for a moment and then vanish just as quickly as it appeared.
But what if.
What if you decided you lived in a world where the legions of armies of our fives sense were actually fighting and forging ahead for you and not against?
What if you decided, in your world, there were magic and miracles?
What if you decided they were happy endings?
What if you decided you were, in reality, a powerful manifesting creature and not a helpless victim?
What if the clouds really were birds and boats?
What if, every time you choose to change your perception you changed yourself?
What if that’s all it takes?
