I remember being at a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh where he said: “Whenever we perceive anything, we have to ask the question, ‘Are you sure your perception is right?’”
He elaborated: "All of us are only human, and we have wrong perceptions every day…We should not trust our perceptions too much.” He urged us to write this phrase down on a card and put it up on the wall: "Are you sure of your perceptions?"
A tragic story
He told a story of a young solider in Vietnam who returned home after years to his wife and child. The son told him that he was not his father, that his real father came to the house every night and his mother would talk to him for a long time, and his mother used to cry and cry. The husband did not tell his wife what the son had told him, but turned cold toward her and began to drink heavily. Eventually, she threw herself into the river and drowned.
The night after his wife died, he was lighting their kerosene lamp and his son, seeing his father’s shadow on the wall said, “Here comes my father.” What the boy had seen was his mother’s shadow from the kerosene lamp every night when she would talk to her absent husband and cry.
A common plot line in Hallmark Christmas movies, which I admit to watching, is that one of the persons now deeply in love sees his/her new love hugging another woman/man and concludes that it is all over, sometimes leaving town or terminating the relationship after the other person was a business partner or an old friend or family member. Because it’s a Hallmark movie there is always a happy ending, but real-life makes no such guarantees.
Thich Nhat Hanh summarized his comments by saying that perceptions are always incomplete and often inaccurate, sometimes tragically. He further stated that all of us are subjected to our inaccurate perceptions every day. For example, it may be that the other person did not have the intention to hurt you, yet you believe that she has done that in order to punish you or to make you suffer.
We often have false beliefs about ourselves, for example: I’m not good enough, no one will ever love me, I can’t sing, I can’t dance, etc. etc. Since our beliefs about ourselves and others are so often untrue or only partly true, it behooves us to ask: Am I sure?
Optical illusions
A playful way to understand this which can help us to remember to check in with “Are you sure?” is to look at some optical illusions.
Click HERE and look at the picture that comes up. How many cubes do you see? For an appropriate response to this question, you need to see three faces of the cube: front, top, bottom, back, or one of the sides in order for it to count as one cube.
If you consider the black squares to be the top of each cube, you see six full cubes. On the other hand, if you see the black squares as the bottom of each cube, then you see seven cubes. The point here is both answers are right, depending on your perspective.
Click HERE and look at the picture that comes up. Are the horizontal lines straight or not?
Amazingly they are all straight and they are perfectly horizontal. If you don’t believe this, get a ruler or something straight and check it out.
Click HERE and look at the picture that comes up. Which square is darker: A or B?
Seems like a no-brainer, but amazingly they are the same color, although A clearly looks darker than B. Scroll down a bit and the illusion is explained. If you still don’t believe, you can cut two square holes over A and B in a sheet of blank paper and see for yourself.
The point of these illusions is that our eyes often fool us. What seems so clear and obvious sometimes turns out to be not true. The same can be said of our thought process in different situations.
Motivated reasoning
A related phenomenon in psychology is called motivated reasoning. When people form and cling to false beliefs despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the phenomenon is labeled "motivated reasoning.” In other words, "rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.”
Some classic examples of motivated reasoning include believing that:
the Holocaust didn't happen
Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11
Barack Obama was not born in the United States
the Apollo moon landing was a hoax
A powerful statement speaks eloquently to motivated reasoning and growing up: Children believe what they see, while adults see what they believe.
In one sense, this appears to go against the optical illusion exercises where we, like children, believe what we see. However, our perceptions and biases so often cause our minds to distort the information that comes through our eyes.
Vipassana
The meditation tradition that I was trained in is called Vipassana meditation, and one translation of the word Vipassana is “to see clearly.” That is why many meditation centers in this tradition use the word Insight in their name. This is what Thich Nhat Hanh was talking about.
Poets and mystics
This is what poets and mystics talk about.
From Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues:
“Beauty I've always missed with these eyes before
Just what the truth is I can't say any more”
From The Place Where We Are Right by Yehuda Amichai:
“From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the Spring.
The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.”
What do you see? What do you know for a fact? Are you sure?