| By :
George Hutton
Imagine yourself sitting in your favorite restaurant. You can smell the delicious food, and are really starting to get ready to eat. Your friend is paying, so you don't have to worry about the price. When the waiter comes, he asks you a strange question. Which would you prefer to eat tonight, the food itself, or the menu? Huh? This "eating the menu" is something we do on a daily basis. We don't even realize the food exists. Most people aren't aware that our perceptions of the world are severely limited. Everything we know about reality comes in through our five senses. Sight, sounds, taste, touch, and smell. We represent the world around us by sampling a small portion of it through our sensory receptors. All of our beliefs, feelings, thoughts, and ideas are based on these "samples" and not the world itself. Neuroscientists estimate that the total amount of information our brains can consciously process is about 40 bits per second. But the amount of information that is actually hitting our sense organs if far higher. Millions of times higher. We only "sample" a minuscule amount of "reality" compared to what is really out there. It would be literally impossible for our conscious minds to handle all the massive amount of data presented to us every second. So, what does one do with this information? Simply by realizing that our perceptions are merely a small estimation we can open ourselves up to a much broader perspective. Two similar people, seeing the same situation, can interpret it to mean vastly different things. And these different experiences are necessarily subjective. This is good news, because it means that any situation you find yourself it isn't stuck in a rigid, inflexible meaning. The only thing you need to do is to change your subjective opinion regarding what's going on, and see things from a different perspective. Most people get stuck in a situation, and then spend all their time and energy complaining about the situation, and hoping it will change. If you took even a percent of that same effort, and worked on changing your response to the situation and your interpretation of it, you'd free up your precious brain processing time for more important things, like how you can more easily get what you want out of life. One way to do this is to try on different personalities. Look at the situation from different eyes. How would your next door neighbor view the situation? How would Bugs Bunny view the situation? How would Abraham Lincoln view the situation? By trying on different characters and their perspectives, you'll get a much broader appreciation of what's really out there. Once you start practicing this change in perspective on a regular basis, it will become more and more automatic, and life will bother you a lot less.
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