The illusion of every moment

Life is a marvelous gift; if there could be a better gift than our life itself is our perception. We live our lives at a pace where, we are unable to really enjoy living our lives and rare so appreciate the power of our human perception. It is how we perceive things really drives our day today living. It starts with thinking its 10 am in the morning when you wake up but when it’s hardly 9am to thinking that a stranger you just met might have a crush on you.  It all lies in the power of our brain and the complex biochemistry (which no one really understands) which drives this 1500g of crazy stuff inside the skull making us the dominant beings on the blue planet (or this is how we at least perceive human being as).

Let me start by just giving you a simple explanation of the complexity of perception. Once, I and a friend of mine were deeply introspecting on our mere existence; he brought up the point of perception. He explained it this way, “When we are young, we are shown different colors on a board and pointing at specific shaped objects which scientifically have different wavelengths are taught this is red, blue and green and so on. How can we be so sure that the red color which the teacher is pointing out and telling is red is the same color the student is seeing through is eyes?  What if he sees it as some other color and perceives it as red? “. Of course, we have scientific explanations to colors, like red is 625 (nanometer) nm and so on but still, how can we be sure what the other person’s brain is seeing when showing him/her a picture which absorbs just 625 nm wavelength light?  He can just be seeing the 625 nm as a totally different color and believe all his/her life that it’s red.

This illusion of perception has been the basis of many ideas and theories but more often than not these were just far away from the common man and his day to life. But the fact is, it actually is an integral part of our life. Say for example, every ordinary person spends so much time thinking about what other people would be thinking of the words he/she uttered or the actions performed.

When you start walking along this path in your thoughts, you feel like you have gone crazy; you just start to think, how much you could have been tricked by your senses all these years; whatever we consider as sensory organs; eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. Probably the perception of seeing something is the most easy to explain. It is not just about colors, it can be expanded to every single thing starting from landscapes to people. How can we be sure that we look the same way like we see ourselves in the mirror every day?

This also goes very well with smells and sound. Just sit back and think about the smell of a rose or jasmine; do you think the other person who smells the same flower smells the same odor? Or say a dog barking sound might be interpreted in a different way by every single ear. This can just be the pure basis of our differences in liking something or someone. Everyone perceives everything in a different way; so, why do we even have to think about how we look in others eyes when we are not really sure how we look in the mirror through our eyes is our actual self-image.

So every single moment in our life is driven by this basis of perception. It is left to us to be optimistic or pessimistic; it is left to analyze our lives the way we want to; it is left to us to be joyful or depressed; it is left to us to be critical or gullible. EVERY MOMENT IS OUR OWN PERCEPTIONAL CHOICE!