What do you see in this picture?  A face or a vase?

Such a simple exercise yet so profound in the insight it provides.  Danish Psychologist, Edgar Rubin conducted extensive scientific study on this phenomenon.  You see what your “perceptual experience” feeds back to you.

Most of what you see is “in your head”.  Your visions do not stay in your physical body.  Your brain takes over and tells you what you see “out there”.  Your experiences will see either a vase or a face at first.  You can shift your perception and see something else.  Your eye sight is simply the back of your eyes reflecting an image to this arbitrary place in your mind.  In fact your eyes are simply screens where light patterns form upside down, full of holes and splotches badly bent out of shape.

You “believe” something is existing outside of you.  You say chocolate is sweet or the patio is hard, when in fact it is you who tastes the chocolate and feels the patio on your bare feet.

Simply put:

“The worst disease afflicting humankind is hardening of the categories.”
      Artist, Bob Miller

Categories being your perception of life.  Perceptions take on truthful meaning such as “Mexico is dangerous”, “I don’t have enough time”, “I don’t have enough money”.  Maybe your perception is “Life is hard”.   Regardless of what your “perception” is, it involves the “interpretation” of secondary bits of information you have gathered through a lifetime.  It does not make it truth.  Just a perception or belief.  You are seeing life with much more than your eyes.

New Years is always a perfect opportunity to change your perception.  A review of early descriptions of the universe led scientists to conclude that the world was flat.  Although that seems silly now, at the time it was agreed upon by many.  Concurrence by many is sometimes a dangerous thing for change.

As our world transforms rapidly today with technology and our ability to see more, we correct our vision.  Ideas that seem right today may be overturned tomorrow.  What is your “the world is flat” perception?  Is it “money does not grow on trees”; “You cannot get ahead unless you attend college”;  “You cannot make money doing what you love”.  Your list is most likely long and limiting.  I’ll bet you have even proven it time and time again.  You may even get others to agree with you, thus entrenching it in your mind’s “perception” .

The greatest gifts in the Caribbean waters of Playa are the infinite possibilities that exist as it extends to lands unseen.  For most people seeing the unfamiliar is extremely difficult.  The truth is this is where change occurs.  Finding your true self in Playa is a mystical and magical experience.  Potential is there.  Life affirmation is there.  Love is there.

 Shift Your Point of View