The Lens of Perception

            Ever been to the eye doctor and had an optical exam? I’m guessing the majority of you have. In case you haven’t, there’s a part where the eye doctor has you look through a big device that has a lot of different lenses that they switch through while you’re looking at a chart on the far wall. They ask you to pick and choose which combination of lenses makes it the easiest to see the characters on the far wall as clearly as possible. Then they use that information to write up a prescription for you to go get glasses (or contacts) with lenses that have those magnification and focusing properties in order for you to see as clearly as possible.

            What’s interesting is that most of us actually do this same process throughout our entire lives, except we’re not picking which lens to be able to see something on the far wall with. We’re choosing which lens we want to see reality and life through. But we often don’t realize it at all, and can wind up being trapped seeing everything through lenses with the wrong kind of (or no) magnification at all, or, even worse, lenses that are tinted the wrong color or occasionally even so dark you can barely make out the faintest shapes through the tinting.

            How does this happen? It’s all conditioning of one form or another. When we’re young, the adults and authority figures in our lives are often the ones trying to adjust the lensing for us. If we’re lucky, they’re doing the best they can to show us the particular lens configuration that’s worked the best for them. If we’re unlucky, they never quite realized how to configure their own lenses, so they are, in a way, still trying to do the best they can, but instead they’re showing us how to configure our own lenses in a way that's flawed or actually obscures reality instead of makes it clearer to perceive.

            Once we get a little older, we learn how to configure our own lenses. Depending on how heavily we were conditioned when we were younger, configuring our own lenses is either easier or harder. Because even though I’m making this sound like it’s a simple case of flipping some switches to change the way everything looks, it’s not actually that easy.

            Or is it?

            The answer is that the act of flipping the switches to change which lens you are seeing reality through is only difficult because of the amount of conditioning we have in place and the amount of attachment we have to that conditioning.

What do you think? Do we have the ability to adjust the lenses we see the world through?