Thursday, November 7, 2013

Perceptions


You can't trust the evidence of your senses.

You can't trust the evidence of your feelings - your internal perceptions - either.

It all depends heavily on such things as what you have been told about them in advance, what is fashionable at the time, whether they are part of your culture and ethnic group, and what power relationships exist between them and you.

None of which has anything to do with "reality." Like "real" pain and "real" illness or disability, the specifications depend upon the "perceiving" individual.

What we have to deal with in our daily lives is the evidence gathered by our perceptions.

We need to keep those perceptions as accurate as possible, by being willing to perceive things with an open mind and being careful to pay attention to things so that they will yield adequate data.

Remember that the evidence of our personal perceptions may be drastically different from the evidence of some other person's.

Realize that our body-mind reacts to what it "perceives" as real, whether it is "out there" or not.

The mechanisms we use to process information from both internal and external environments are our sensory systems - sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.

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