In a hypothetical example, I refer two fellow psychologists to my client. One is a middle-aged man in early 50s dressed in office attire in his profile picture on the website. Another one is a younger lady in late 30s in more casual dress portraited in the profile. I think most of you may guess my client would perceive the middle-aged man as more experienced and capable in conducting psychotherapy. In fact, the middle-aged man is a mature student who had just graduated from graduate school in counselling. The younger lady is a more experienced therapist who had more than 10 years of experience and was professionally trained in depth psychology. Given this fact, the younger lady is more capable in conducting more in-depth psychotherapy for my client. Why do we so easily make subjective perception that might be an illusion? Do we capture the reality?
For our convenience, we are trained to perceive basing on our past experiences and inner assumptions. This helps us to come up with a perception that is efficient enough for us to navigate in this busy world. However, as we grow up, we are less likely to see things as they really are. We are too confident to believe our perception. As a result, we are frequently being trapped by our own biases and preconception. A lot of conflicts and misunderstanding arise because of this lack of “real seeing”. How could we solve this dilemma? How could we navigate in this busy world without compromising our ability to seeing closer to the reality itself?
It is important for us to firstly admit our egocentric tendency. Our belief about we can perceive the reality. In fact, usually, we are not capable of seeing the whole picture of the reality most of the time. We are just trying to guess and fill the gap of what we cannot see. For instance, if I did not give my client the websites of the above two psychologists, my client would easily make a biased judgment basing on the limited information she got (the appearance and age). With this in mind, we stay humble and be aware of our biased perception.
Furthermore, it is useful for us to not instantly label what we see. For instance, when we come across a mature lady in casual attire carrying a bag with food in a weekday afternoon, we need to be aware of our labelling. We may immediately label this lady as a housewife. In fact, this mature lady could be a famous professor who is having a vacation break and enjoying her shopping for food in a sunny afternoon. Have you heard about the famous experiment that a famous violinist playing violin in subway station early in the morning when everyone is busy going to work? No one in the subway station recognized the one who played such beautiful music is a famous violinist. This shows us the third thing we need to learn is to remind ourselves to pause constantly to observe the present moment experience. It is easy said than done. When we are walking in the street, we are always preoccupied with things that we care about in our mind. We are not mindful of our environment. If we learn to take some time to be more mindful to our external environment, we may be able to observe a lot of missed information and treasure in our life.
Apart from being mindful of our external environment, we could also learn to be mindful of our internal activities, such as thoughts and feelings. If we could understand that our thoughts and feelings are subjective, we can let go of our belief about these internal activities reflect the reality. Regular meditation practice helps us to be more aware of our thoughts and feelings. With this capacity, we could learn to take our thoughts and feelings as internal experience, without attaching too much of meaning to them.
Let’s humble ourselves to see this world and our external environment with less of our preconception and biases. It is worthy of a try because this cultivates a better life for us and a better world for humanity.
