“We don’t see everything there is to see; we see only what we are conditioned to see.  We’re only getting a glimpse of what’s really happening around us.”  John Assaraf

When did you last find yourself disagreeing with someone about what you both just saw?

Yet the LORD has not given you a heart to perceive and eyes to see and ears to hear, to this very day.  (Deut. 29:4; NKJ)

Earlier in the week, I said that I was going to do an extended series of DGs on the human brain.  If you missed that introduction, I encourage you to take a couple of minutes and go back and read that introductory material.  (Access that DG by clicking here.) 

Today, I would like to focus on the portion of the brain that most of us are most familiar with–the conscious mind.  There is so much we could look at here, but I’m just going to hit one or two items of special interest.  The conscious mind has six intellectual functions, your ability to reason (think, evaluate, make decisions, etc.); your will (mental toughness and resolve); your memory (ability to recall); your perception (what we see and how we interpret it); your imagination (ability to visualize, envision); and your intuition (awareness of intangible feelings).

Any one of those six would be fun to explore further, but today I’d like to focus on perception.  As kind of a fun experiment, I’d like you to click on today’s link and look at the FedEx logo, something that you’ve undoubtedly seen hundreds of times.  Go ahead…click on it now and examine it carefully.  Then come back to this. 

Did you see the arrow in the logo?  I’m sure some of you did (if you’ve had it pointed out to you before), but I also bet that the large majority of you didn’t.  What arrow?  Look carefully at the space between the “E” and the “X.”  See the arrow?  If not, get somebody to help you.  Once you see it, you will never not see it again.  The point is, that arrow has been there all the time.  Every time you looked at the logo in the past, you saw the arrow, but you may not have perceived it.  Seeing is not the same as perceiving.  Actually, your brain “saw” the arrow, but dropped it from your consciousness because it was not familiar to you, i.e., not important.  This proves that we only see what we’re conditioned to see.

Do you begin to see the implications of this?  We don’t see the way things really are, we see the way we really are.  Two people with different experiences and beliefs can see the same thing and yet perceive what they see totally differently.  Our brain filters information based on our experiences and beliefs.  That means that we have blind spots to information that could potentially take us to new performance levels, or relationship levels, or whatever.  But since we have no experience at those levels or worse yet, perhaps believe that we are incapable of getting to those new levels, significant information is being filtered out.  One of the brain’s functions is to make sure that our outside world matches up with our inside world.

Once we recognize that this is how the brain works, we have the ability to change and effectively create what are in effect software programs that will let us change what we see (perceive) and change how we behave (effectively changing our inside world.)  People once thought that our brains were hardwired and that you couldn’t “teach old dogs new tricks.”  This has been conclusively proven to be incorrect.  It’s never too late to re-wire some of our brain’s programs.  It starts by recognizing why we would want to make the effort and that it is possible to do. 

Hopefully, you can see from today’s DG that remaining open to seeing without judgment will always serve us well.  Understanding that our point of view is only one several possibilities allows us to be open to other ideas.  Other ideas are exactly what we should always be looking for because if we keep doing what we’ve always been doing we will continue to get what we’ve always been getting.

Prayer Power
Lord, open our eyes to see things without judging them.  Help us to keep an open mind and always be open to new and different viewpoints.

Link of the Day
FedEx Logo

Blessings on you as you practice seeing without judgment.
 

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