Filter.
Truthfully, I’m scared of them. As someone who is a little color vision deficient (I have issues seeing some shades of colors) I have been watching with interest the evolution of glasses that help people with color deficiencies see better.
I keep seeing these videos of grizzled older guys (the ones least likely to show emotion) breaking down and sobbing when they try on these glasses and see for the first time all that they have been missing.
And I’m afraid to try them for myself.
Partly because I’m afraid of that sudden rush of emotion, because it seems pretty intense, and partly because I’m afraid of how much I’ll realize I have been missing all these years.
As a father who has an incredibly artistically talented son, I’m sure there are levels of beauty to his work that I have missed because I don’t see colors the way he does.
So I’m scared to try these glasses, but if I never change my filter (how I see the world) I will forever miss out on what is all around me.
And just like there are filters for our vision, we also have many filters in the way that we perceive the world in both emotional and philosophical ways.
These filters are usually very strong beliefs about how the world works, the nature of right and wrong, but they can also be driven out of our deep seated needs and any deficiencies thereof.
These deficiencies can create some of the most powerful distortions that I have even seen. They can create monsters out of ordinary people.
Have you ever met that person who finds everything to be an insult against them? They may be acting from a need to feel significant, and so filter reality so that everything is done against them, so they are always the center of attention.
Conversely, there are people who are outrageously optimistic; not because they are balanced in their core, but because they are afraid to ever contemplate the possibility of things going wrong, so they ignore it right up until it happens.
And then they underplay the seriousness of the situation.
Most of us are unaware of the filters that we use to screen this reality, because they are so instinctive to us in our day to day lives that we never to stop to challenge them.
Instead, we just accept these truths as self evident, and continue to process everything that happens through them in the blink of an eye. But never questioning the way we see the world leads to a far more dangerous kind of deficiency of vision than the one I started talking about.
Never questioning what we think means never becoming aware of the truth of our soul.
History is replete with examples of single minded people who never stopped to think if what they were doing was really the right thing. Instead, they went forth out of hatred and desire to slaughter millions in their search for (and desperate need of) a reality that fit their thinking, rather than change their thinking to fit reality.
Self awareness and self peace through acceptance is the only antidote I know for the suffering of individuals, nations, races and the world.
May we start our journey into ourselves anew every day, and may we share the peace we find with each other.
Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings