The Perfection of Misperception

Have you ever played the telephone game? You know, person A whispers something into the ear of person B, who whispers the very same thing (hopefully) into the ear of person C, who whispers that same message (theoretically) into the ear of person D, and on and on until they reach the end of the line.

Now what invariably happens to the original message? That’s right. It gets distorted and warped into something entirely new altogether. Look at Creation re-create itself! (Note: “Distorted” doesn’t imply it’s bad, just different and altered.)

Subjective Reality
Why does this distortion happen? It happens because what people perceive is different from what was “actually” being said. In a way, we can say that your personal experience itself is entirely subjective.

“Hold on,” one might say, “it can’t all be entirely subjective. You and I can stand in a field and both look up at the moon at night together and we’ll see the very same moon.”

Well, it’s almost the same. First of all, we’ll have a sliiiiightly different angle we’d view the moon from so we wouldn’t see exactly the same view of it. Second, we wouldn’t actually looking at the moon as it is now! We’d be looking at a the moon as it existed about 1.5 seconds ago. No matter what we looked at, we’d always be looking at the past because it takes time for light to travel from any object to our eyes. We can never actually perceive the objective reality as it exists in this very moment! Creation is always a step ahead of us! Given that you and I will also be sliiiiightly different distances from the moon, we’ll both perceive the moon in slightly different points in its existence.

A Rose-colored Reality
You don’t directly experience a distinct objective reality around you, but rather the version of it that gets filtered through your mind, beliefs, concepts, perception, and even location.

Experiencing your personal view of the world is a lot like wearing rose-colored sunglasses. The filtered world you perceive is rose-colored, but that doesn’t mean that the world itself is actually rose-colored.

Now, because everyone experiences their own rose-colored world, 100 people could all hear the exact same speech and all get something different out of it. In fact, someone can listen to a message and get out of it exactly the opposite of what the original speaker intended! It’s quite fascinating to see this happen! (and this too, fascinating, is just an interpretation I’m choosing to give it… )

The ego doesn’t hear what other people say. It only hears what it thinks other people are saying.