Your perception is how you perceive the world around you through your senses.
Your perception will vary based on your values, life experiences and previously stored emotional charges.
You and a friend can walk down the same street and have a completely different experience of that street based on your own unique perception.
Let’s say for example you have a high value on sports and your friend has a high value on fashion but you don’t value fashion much and they don’t really value sports.
At the end of the street, your friend might turn to you and say “How great were those boots in that store window?” and because you have a low value on fashion you wouldn’t have even noticed the boots, they would have been completely filtered out of your perception based on your unique value structure.
Meanwhile, your friend’s thoughts have been filled with how they could style the boots and where they could wear them, and strategies of how they could afford them.
Because you have a unique set of values you will see the world, even the same street, very differently to everyone else.
So how does perception relate to wisdom?
I like to answer this question with a visual to better explain the process.
Look at the picture below, what do you see? (don’t cheat and look at the answer below but actually look at it for yourself first)
Did you see the two white faces?
Or did you see the black vase?
The first time you see the picture you will see one or the other.
When you are first introduced to the idea that you can perceive something completely different in the same image simply by changing the way you look at it, your mind now becomes open to, and considers, the idea that maybe when you change the way you look at the image, the image you are looking at will change.
As an analogy let’s now pretend that the picture above represents a person, place, idea or event in your life.
In our analogy, the black vase in the picture represents the ‘negative’, ‘bad’ or ‘downside’ ➖ of something and the two white faces are going to represent the ‘positive’, ‘good’ or ‘upside’.➕
Have you ever been in a new relationship and found yourself somewhat enamoured or infatuated with the person where they took up a lot of space and time in your mind throughout the day😍?
You are on an emotional high and everything is great😁.
In our analogy this would be equal to focusing on the 2 white faces in the picture above, your mind is selectively biasing its attention on all of the ‘positive’ ‘attractive’ ‘upsides’ of the person and completely overlooking the downsides.
Then maybe a couple of weeks go past and you have your first relationship ‘fight’ or disagreement. Now your mind has completely flipped and when you look at that same person you are now seeing the black vase (downsides) whereas before you only saw the two white faces (upsides). Now you are going through the emotional lows.😔
In another example maybe you find a boom stock pick that just keeps going up in value, when you look at it all you can see are the two white faces (upsides) and so you buy-in, ‘how exciting’ 😁 you think.
The next day the boom stock ends up being massively overpriced and crashes and you lose all your money, you are now feeling emotionally low😞.
The data on the stock was there all along, it’s just that our perception was selectively biasing and focusing in on the two white faces (upside) and ignoring the black vase.
In a third example, maybe you want to lose weight, so you start following a crash diet where you drop calories and you start losing weight fast, you see the two white faces again (upside), you are elated with your results and how quickly your body is progressing🤩.
After a while you start to get very irritable from undereating, the diet isn’t sustainable and it’s now leading your body to compensate by storing more weight long-term, there is that black vase again (downside).😞
Although we don’t realise it at the time our initial perception of something is often lopsided, a half-truth, we are selectively biasing our focus on parts of the person, stock pick, dieting strategy etc. and not seeing the whole or the bigger picture.
So how do we know if we are seeing the whole truth or have a lop-sided perception?
Your emotions are there to give you feedback, or more specifically your intuition.
If you are emotionally up or elated 🤩 your intuition will be whispering in the back of your mind “this doesn’t feel right there must be a downside to this.”
When you are emotionally down or depressed 😔 your intuition will be whispering in the back of your mind “this doesn’t feel right there must be an upside to this.”
If you don’t listen to your intuition you will most likely attract a friend or partner to you at that moment who will intuitively tell you the same thing, “It doesn’t sound right, are you sure you are not overlooking something.”
Your perceptions are degrees of wisdom, fractions.
You can never have certainty in a fractionated, emotional state of mind.
If you see 10 upsides to something for every one downside (10:1) you are elated 🤩, if you see 5 upsides for every downside (5:1) you are overly positive 😄, when you have a perfectly balanced perception of something and you can see the upsides perfectly balancing the downsides (1:1) now you are “seeing what is as it is” you are present with it🙏, only now can you be certain about it.
Your emotions are half-truths, they are designed as a feedback mechanism to let you know when you are overlooking things.
Emotions are feedback to let you know there is some information missing from your awareness, there is still something you are ignoring in your perception.
Seeing the upsides = downsides of something is true wisdom.
Only when you have a perfectly balanced perception can you have certainty.🙏
Wisdom is seeing the person/place/idea/event as it is, seeing the whole, the bigger picture of something.
So how can you move from a state of emotional uncertainty to a state of certainty and wisdom?
If you are emotionally down, you are biasing your focus on the downsides of something, ask yourself, what is the benefit of this situation?
How am I growing from it?
How is it making me stronger or serving me in some way?
Most likely when you ask yourself that you will think "it isn't."
If you stop looking there you are cheating yourself and buying-in to a limited perception of reality.
That initial response is only due to your lop-sided perception, don't limit yourself, keep asking the question and your mind will have no option but to find the answers.