“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anais Nin
As human beings, each one of us has a unique set of senses. We each see simply a part of something and begin to jump to conclusions, often failing to realize that everything is in fact part of the bigger picture.
We’ve all heard the tale of five blind men, each one of them feeling a different part of an elephant attempting to unravel the mystery of what mighty enigma stood before them. The first man, examining its trunk assumes it to be a snake, the second one on examining its feet assumes it to be a tree trunk while the third, fourth and fifth men on feeling the elephant's ear, tusk and side assume it to be a fan, spear or a wall. Each one of them had a piece of the puzzle and all that there was left to do was to place them together in order to realize the bigger picture, to share their limited knowledge and discover what truly stood before them; however it is human nature to regard your own observations as the truth and disregard the contribution of others. This is why although each man was partly in the right, ultimately they were all in the wrong.
Perception therefore has a very diverse meaning and tends to exceed reality, instead bringing out what each one of us views it to be. Today we can have thousands of different interpretations of a single concept, thousands of answers to a single question and what is fascinating is that no one answer is necessarily right or wrong because human perception enables us to draw out our own conclusions to varying circumstances.
Another set of phenomena that can reveal a great deal about how one perceives his surroundings are illusions. Illusions are how we see the world through our eyes, it is our brain’s best guess at what reality truly is even if it may vary from what another views it as; so ultimately, everything you see, every experience you have is an illusion because while each one of us simply sees reality, it is what you perceive it as that makes it an illusion,
We fail to realize that there really is much more to a story than what we perceive it to be and the same goes with people. We are often too quick to judge, that is why once in a while it is not a bad thing to walk in other’s shoes, to view the world from a different perspective or rather, a distinct set of senses.
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