subject: Our Perception of the World Can Change the World [print this page] The Perception of the World Can Change the World
As we are born into the world we humans have the remarkable ability to, with the help of parents, peers, and role models, integrate ourselves into our place within it. We start with no memory, in a geographic location, within a family and a culture that creates an endless variety of developmental experiences. Yet we have a mind at our disposal. The mind is a blank slate that can accommodate knowledge that is both acquired from our perceptions of the world around us and passed on to us by our peers and role models.
But our knowledge of the world is limited to what can be perceived through our senses and the world can be only a fraction of it's true self to someone with their senses impaired either from birth or during their lifetime. The role of the mind, as it approaches adulthood, is to take the experiences it accumulated through childhood development and piece them together into systems of coping with the world around them. Across the globe societies have different rites and milestones that are a mark of adulthood and the more simple that culture is the sooner their young enter the classification of adult.
Your perception of the world is the basis for acquiring the experiences necessary in furthering you understanding of it. Some events, even in adulthood, can be so "life-altering" that they can throw your entire perception of the world off balance. But these events are rare, as adulthood can be defined as follows;
Adulthood A stage at which you have acquired a level of experience necessary to be able to cope with your immediate surroundings. At this stage your needs can be fulfilled to a reasonable degree by the resources you perceive to be either available currently or through a realistic amount of effort on your part.
The key word is perception, for you can feel like an adult so long as you can perceive the fulfillment of your needs as achievable, as long as they are already met. As illustrated by many a child believing life to be simple, until they actually become a participant in it. I personally viewed guitar as something I could be "good at" if I only invested enough time into practicing, this confidence in my ability to adapt persisted until I actually started practicing.
Many people have delusions that contribute to a break from reality, commonly seen in persons afflicted with dementia, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders. These persons can often handle a lack of confidence in their abilities to handle life's challenges by altering their perceptions of the world. True, this is maladaptive approach that results in a change in self rather than initiating any real change in their surroundings, but it can, and often does, compensate for feeling of uncertainty in their handling of the world. Such as a schizophrenic whose hallucinations cause him to doubt his senses believing that he is actually gifted with the ability to see what normal people cannot. Or a demented person believing they can cause subtle shifts in the thoughts of others by merely focusing on them enough as a result of an inability to "get their way" with a number of individuals.
Flawed perceptions of the world can be used to compensate for feelings of inadequacy, but they can also contribute to causing them. All too often people perceive that others dislike them for their dress, their mannerisms, or simply because they have a long nose or crooked teeth. They can perceive that everyone but them is so much more confident, sociable, or hardworking, believing them selves to be inadequate by default. Your can gradually replace the worlds populace with people that despise you, that are better than you at every endeavor, by perceiving them as such.
Whether the world is populated by friends or foes often stems from the experiences you had as a child, whether you developed the confidence of accomplishing tasks appropriate for you level of development or whether you were isolated from others by the fact that you were obese, a foreigner, or had a crooked smile. You do not know everyone in the world, or even those in your immediate surroundings (town, neighborhood, school, workplace, etc) so it is only natural to "fill in the blanks" by projecting your strengths or weaknesses onto those people.
Projection is a relatively common psychological event that occurs when you take personal attributes, such as your interests, desires, or opinions and apply them to other people, assuming they have those attributes in common with you based on their current context, appearance, or behavior. It is commonly used when trying to form a bond with someone, when someone is similar to you in some aspects, or when you want to dislike some and you take thoughts and desires that you dislike and attribute them to another person.
