Is There an Objective Reality?
Please spend 50 seconds watching this video—a quick awareness test—before reading the post below.
I was introduced to this awareness test during a trauma healing class and found it fascinating. The teacher used it to illustrate how humans are naturally biased to see what we’ve been pre-conditioned to look for. If, for instance, our nervous system is wired to be hypervigilant about external threats because of past trauma, we may perennially scan our environment for danger, which results in us seeing it everywhere. Since we genuinely believe that the perceived threats are real, our bodies and minds respond accordingly—a feedback loop that continually reinforces our entrenched fears.
My Zen teacher, Katherine Thanas, saw this phenomenon as an essential spiritual teaching. In her book, The Truth of This Life, she wrote, “All of us look out at the same world. And we all see a different version of it, depending on what’s already in our minds. Practice is to notice how the dust of our mind obscures the clear reflection of the world, how our values and preferences determine our interpretations.”
In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman—the noble-prizewinning psychologist and economist known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making—talks about how the ways we’ve been “primed” by previous experiences impacts our thoughts and reactions. For example, take the word fragment “SO_P.” If we’d seen the word “EAT” first, we’d likely complete “SO_P” as “SOUP.” But, if the word we saw previously was “SHOWER,” we probably complete the letters as “SOAP.” Kahneman says although this type of priming is happening all the time, it’s completely unconscious.
There are countless significant ramifications that result from this unconscious projection of our personal biases unto the world, and much wisdom to be gained by becoming aware of this phenomenon. Understanding these dynamics helps explain why prejudices are so entrenched and difficult to uproot, and why people who have been pigeonholed as being a certain way have so much trouble breaking free. As George Bernard Shaw famously said,” The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.”
A huge part of my father’s healing journey was the discovery that the way he saw the world was in fact a reflection of his inner state. “I began to notice that my mind functioned as a storehouse for all my memories, beliefs, and emotions,” he wrote. “Although it felt as if I was constantly having fresh experiences, more often than not, I was thinking, feeling, and reacting to those experiences in predictable ways, as if I was on autopilot. Unconsciously, I was projecting memories from my storehouse onto the outside world.”
After the agony he experienced before, during and after the Holocaust, my father saw human existence as pointless, and the universe as a terribly hostile place. The realization that what was perceiving was in a large part the result of his own projections was extremely liberating. It freed him from feeling as if he’d be trapped forever in a life of suffering, and inspired him to work diligently to rewire his brain to seek out and savor all that was loving, joyous, and beautiful in the world.
Becoming aware of the inability of humans to perceive a truly objective reality feels particularly important to me as I get older, with six decades of accumulated information filed in my brain to “prime” my perceptions. Staying conscious of the fact that the “dust of my mind” is always obscuring how I see the world helps me foster more humility, open-mindedness, and open-hearted compassion.
My father believed it was important for people to be educated about how our brains function from an early age. “We can’t eliminate all of the unconscious messages children get,” he wrote, “but what if we taught them how the human mind works and how to keep from getting trapped by their own habit-forming behavior? If young people learned to take responsibility for their own thoughts and belief systems, it could save them a great deal of heartache and despair later on. They would also grow up more mature, understanding, and tolerant.”
Tiny pauses to be right here, right now can have big results. Our Take a Moment series of micro-meditations—all under two minutes long—make taking mindful pauses as easy as possible. We invite you to "Take a Moment" to find the calm that is always within you.
