Are Your Glasses Clean?

Lately, I’ve been second guessing a lot of my judgements I make both on myself and people or situations. These are judgements surmised to come to a better understanding of whatever I’m concerned about. For example, I wanted to understand the personality of this guy I barely know and constantly found a voice in my head telling me (still does!),

“He talks a lot dude! Reckon he’s a talker — one that can just keeping talking for no reason.”

This is true — he does talk a lot. But the way this voice is framed in my head makes me almost box his personality to a talker, sometimes not allowing me to see beyond that because I’ve subconsciously convinced myself of the judgement passed. It all happens so quickly and my confirmation bias kicks in strong where now I’m finding every evidence to validate my judgement.

This isn’t just external but applies to myself too. At times, you can pass a judgement on yourself and pretty much box yourself in it.

If you’re convinced you can’t dance or you can’t focus or you can’t do a handstand — all the self-limiting beliefs that initially start with a seemingly harmless judgement on our capabilities.

When these judgements are challenged, our first reaction from what I’ve observed is protecting that judgement at all costs — it’s like our little miss judgement character in the head gets cornered and feels ganged upon so doesn’t give up until she absolutely HAS TO.

This brings me to my realization that we only see the world from the reflection of our perception and that perception, more often than not, is tainted. It’s tainted with faulty judgements which originate from past experiences, strong opinions & worldviews that have come to shape us and constantly exert their influence on the world as we navigate through it.

We don’t necessarily understand nor reflect reality as it is, but simply distort it with our glasses of perception which begs the question,

“Are the glasses we wear even clean?”

I remember growing up my parents had such strong opinions and judgements on everything, which is the basic human condition after all.

For example, if my mom saw a female wear clothing she didn’t particularly approve of, she would pass a judgement along the lines, “What kind of a girl is she?” and I framed a lot of my judgements on the world based on that. Some other funny examples that come to mind now,

My mom telling me yesterday, “Since you have started eating meat, you have become less emotional. That’s what happens to meat eaters — they start loosing emotions.”

When I came back from my Vipassana experience prematurely, my mom said to me, “I told you. You should not have gone.” I thought to myself, “What was her advice based on given she hadn’t ever gone herself?”

Growing up, I took a lot of these judgements at face value and now when I peak beneath them, I don’t see the substance upon which these judgements stand. They are not at all the true reflection of reality but simply a filter of perception. This means that so many of us are just processing the world through the filter of our perception rather than how the world really is. This also means that the way we judge or perceive people around us are mostly a reflection of what lives within us. If we’re more cynical, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the world is cynical, it simply means that our experiences shaped our glasses of perception to be more cynical, thus we view the world from the glasses of cynicism.

While we can’t reshape the experiences we’ve had, what is worth the effort is constantly cleaning our glasses when we can remember to. For the little speck of time & space we occupy in this beautifully complex universe, I believe it’s absolutely worthwhile to spend a little time understanding this world for how the world truly is, and not necessarily how we are.

“Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.” — Khalil Gibran