Experience vs. Perception

Experience happens within you, and you are utterly in charge of your perception of that experience. Have you ever noticed that you can be in the same room as your partner or friend, and find later that their interpretation of an event seems completely different from yours? You may even begin to question if you heard something correctly, or perhaps you didn't see what you thought you saw.

We are perceivers of events, interpreting data with our senses, and determining quite by choice, how we view our experiences. Our entire body is designed for perception, and not just smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing. We are sensing frequency and vibration as well. Then interpreting all this sensory input through personal filters, we call beliefs and emotions.

Your body is highly sensitive to this input and everything you perceive is relative. Relative to where you were standing, or sitting, or your placement in relation to any given event. Relative to your sensory abilities, perhaps your eyesight or hearing is greater or lesser than average. And Relative to your attention during any given situation. Perhaps you were reading a book and only caught a portion of the event, or you were thinking about something else and not fully present in the moment.

You may already realize that your senses have an impact on your perception. What you might not realize is that, what you were feeling emotionally at any given time, also impacts your perceptions.

If you are feeling worried, you are perceiving everything through the filter of what you are worried about. Therefore, you may not see, hear, or otherwise sense the truth of any situation. You will see only what compliments your worry. This filter of perception has become the determining factor for whatever you think you are experiencing.

If you are feeling angry, the same is true. In other words, when feeling angry you may only allow yourself to see and hear the parts of any situation that will add to your anger. You will miss anything that does not match your anger. In fact, you quite literally may not even see the person you are looking for if you are angry you can’t find them, and they are happily walking right by you not realizing you are looking for them.

If I spend a great deal of time complaining, then I have an emotional set point or vibrational output that causes me to experience things that are worth complaining about. In fact, I could get so good at complaining that I could find a reason to complain about the most mundane of things. I would have trained myself to perceive life through the filter of complaint, and therefore all my senses are trained or conditioned to repeat the experience of complaint, anger, or worry.

Lastly, there are those persistent beliefs that we carry with us, some since early childhood. An example might be, “you must work hard to earn a living,” and “life is a struggle.” These beliefs may be so ingrained in who you have become that when offered an easy job making really nice money, you may think it’s too good to be true, so you let the offer slip away because it does not match your belief about working hard.

With all these seemingly, stacked against you odds, how do you change your perceptions and thus have a better experience of life? The first place to start would be to realize that you can.

Understanding that your perception is undoubtedly different from everyone else’s helps you step off the “I’m right, your wrong” platform. It makes you aware that perhaps there is more to every story than your perception alone, and opens the door for you to hear or see something from a different vantage point.

This alone will change your experience, starting right now. If you can do this one thing, you are on your way to an entirely new experience of life.

Everything that you experience in this life is happening inside of you. You are the perceiver of experience. The experience of guilt, or shame, or exhilaration and joy, are yours alone. No one can experience what you are experiencing, even if they are sitting right next to you in the same movie theater watching the same movie. You cannot see through their eyes, nor they through yours. They can not feel what you are feeling because your emotions are based on your sensory perception and filtered through your personal beliefs.

You always have a choice as to how you prefer to feel about anything and everything. So ask yourself, does it make me feel good to think this way about this subject or might I feel better to think differently about it. Even the slightest improvement in your direction of thought about a thing changes your experience of everything.

You are choosing, at every moment, how you would like to experience the world!

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