Another bit about perception. . .

I caught myself doing this yesterday, and I decided to write about it as soon as possible because it's a great example of how unreliable perception is.

I was getting ready for bed, and I had just washed my face. I then grabbed a small bottle of some kind of moisturizer stuff for middle-aged people. It was a little lotion bottle with one of those push-down pump nozzle dealies. I pushed down on it, and no lotion came out. Not one drop. I pushed and pushed, pumped and pumped. Nothing. Weird. What the? I unscrewed the pump and looked inside. Only halfway used up. I put the pump back on, screwed it down, and pushed the top again. Lotion immediately came out.

I had nothing in my paradigm to explain this. People who know how those little lotion pumps work probably could tell me what had happened, but the point is that I had no explanation. And then: I caught myself dismissing it from my awareness.

I mentally 'shrugged' and said, "Well, that was weird." And then prepared to just forget it. Just act like it hadn't happened. If I hadn't written about it the very next morning, it would have been as if it had never occurred.

Perception actually filters events right out of your awareness if they don't fit with your mindset. We'd like to believe that we can rely on our perceptions to report reality to our mind, but that's not what it does at all. Our minds make up an explanation of reality, and perception's job is then to find evidence that we have it right. This is why, when a person disagrees with you, you feel an instant impulse to defend.

Perception is pseudo-reality.

I've written before that science will ultimately succeed because its goal is to find truth. But science is still based on perception and observation, which slows down its process tremendously. The strength of science is that it's based also on agreement and collaboration, which reflect the Oneness of our True State.

So what's the message here for your day-to-day life? Be mindful of the fact that your sensory organs are really propaganda devices. Question your perceptions. ASK for further clarity about your present view of reality. Open your mind as much as you're able in any given moment. And when you catch yourself, as I did, simply dismissing things from your awareness, pay attention to the fact that allowing some events to come in while rejecting others cannot be a reliable method for living authentically!