A person’s “lens of perception” is the filter through which they see the world. Shifts in one’s personal lens can lead to different views and different understandings of “reality” which in turn can influence what is seen, and ways of relating to the world. It is possible, always, to increase (or decrease) the power of this lens. A person’s lens expands its range in the presence of new ideas, feelings, experiences. It is always in flux. If we stop having new experiences – thereby living in an automatic or habitual way – our lens becomes fixed, and begins to harden and shrink. What does this mean? And how does it effect a person?
Let’s say that the word “reality” refers to everything that is, everything that ever was and will be. And that each person walking around ‘in reality’ has an individual and unique position therein. Correspondingly, each person has their own “lens of perception,” a kind of field and filter which they carry with them. Given that we cannot take in everything (or we’d explode), we take in the parts of reality that are to do with our particular position in life. Everything a person experiences shapes their lens. And as a lens is shaped, so does it influence what the person is able to see, and how they see it.
If that were all there were to it, we might be caught or trapped within this field, focus, or filter, only registering what we’ve been able to register. The amazing thing is, we can consciously choose to expand and/or shift our lens and thus our perception, by virtue of what we consciously/mindfully attend to. It is also possible to be surprised by and, in a sense, forced into a new view.
Here is an example, a seemingly insignificant experience, which changed my lens in an impactful way: When I was a child, my grandmother used to take me and my siblings to the movies. I loved going. Due to the fact that my parents were somewhat strict about the amount of TV and movie watching they allowed, it was always a special outing. One time, when I was about 8, we were there at the movie theatre, watching as the movie began. In those days, there were curtains that covered the screen, opening on the introductory short, and then closing and re-opening as the main feature began. My perceptual experience up until that point had led me to believe that the screen was alive and rolling, and that the curtains (which closed and opened as the movie began) were see-through! The way I had it configured in my mind, everything fit together. This particular time, I happened to notice a stream of light, with dust flecks in it, coming from behind us. I followed it with my eyes, looking up and behind where we were sitting, and saw a hole in the back wall out from which light was streaming. I asked my grandmother what this light was. And she said, ‘oh it is coming from the projector.’ I asked, ‘what is a projector?’ She looked surprised and said, ‘it’s the machine which holds the film and projects the movie images on the screen by means of the light.’ As I took this in, struggling to understand what she was saying, it hit me that my view of what was going on in front of me wasn’t right! The movie screen wasn’t the source of the movie, instead it was what the movie, coming from behind us, was projected onto! I remember sitting there in amazement. My lens of perception had, in a flash, been shifted and widened to take in a larger portion of reality.
As you may realize, this kind of experience is going on all the time, whether remembered or not, as we receive new information and instantaneously update our understanding of what we are seeing and what it says about reality. There is another kind of experience, to do with actively adding new data to one’s field or filter, i.e., consciously increasing one’s references, and thereby expanding one’s lens of perception, increasing its range and flexibility.
Please see next post for more…