What Do You Think You See.
I hate to break it to you, but there’s no such ‘thing’ as a color. I know that sounds crazy, but what you perceive as color is just photons of light tuned to a certain wavelength.
That car in the ‘color’ you like – the surface is covered in substance that changes the wavelength of photons from a light source. Those photons impact onto the retina in the back of your eyes and the impulse from that cell is carried through your optic nerve.
Your brain interprets the impulses, and creates the concept of color.
Sound a little nuts – try this one. Those words you think you hear – they’re actually vibrations that occur in the air, and impact your tympanic membrane (ear-drum), which are turned into vibrations that move small hair-like cells in your ear, and then the impulses from those are carried along the vestibulocochlear nerve into your brain.
Where your brain interprets the impulses, and creates the concept of sound.
Are you seeing the pattern here? Everything that you think you see and hear, and feel ,smell and touch, are all interpretations that your brain performs to try to make sense of this crazy universe into which we were born. Most of the time, the brain gets the interpretation correct, and occasionally the interpretation gets kind of messed up.
It’s rare, but it can happen.
But when it comes to the meanings we interpret from the things that we experience, well…those get misinterpreted all the time. If you’ve ever heard two people describing the same accident, it can be almost laughable to see how their stories don’t match up. Their brains interpreted the situation very differently, and in doing so, came up with completely different meanings.
And the meanings we take from life are the things that control our sense of experience.
But by far the biggest cause of misinterpretation comes from our unresolved trauma, and our unmet human needs.
Have you ever known someone who just seemed to take everything you said as an insult or an attack? That person very likely has a significant deficit in their need for significance and connection, so their brain interprets everything it can as a way to make them a victim (because being a victim requires nothing on their part).
Also, since you were doing something ‘hurtful’ to them (even though you really weren’t) it helps their need for connection, because when you have a desperate need, you usually start by filling it in a maladaptive way.
So the two of you are connected, because you noticed them enough to be mean to them. I know it sounds crazy but this really happens.
To them, you really did these things, because a brain that is trying fill desperate needs becomes less and less self aware, until it acts without thinking, following an autopilot program that begins to destroy the very relationships it is trying to preserve and grow.
The deeper the need, the more it will distort your perception of all that you experience.
All of us interpret reality in our own way. The goal of self awareness and self healing is to remove the barriers to you experiencing the miracle of life just as it is.
So how are you interpreting this?
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings