What Really Is Reality?
Every experience exists in two places.
There is the place of physical reality and our brain’s interpretation of that physical reality.
That reality then gets complicated because our brain has a unique, “interpreter function”.
That interpreter is like a box of crayons we use to add color to the experiences we have in our very early lives.
So reality is like the blank page in a coloring book that presents itself just as it is, usually blank and white.
Our eyes and ears and nose and skin are like a black colored marker that draws the lines and designs on those first pages of the coloring book in our early years.
Then the interpreter function starts using the colors of life, as we get more and more information about what we believe we are experiencing.
As a result of these “interpreters”, 10 people can stand side by side looking around and all 10 will fill their coloring books with different designs and colors.
As we go thru life… the first year pages in our books have a tendency to naturally influence, or “color”, if you will pardon the pun, the next pages to come.
Eventually we become limited by our brains interpreter, which no longer allows us to experience reality directly OR very accurately… just “uniquely.
Our page designs become more limited and interestingly, so does our access to our available colors becomes limited as well.
This limiting is a protective and survival mechanism that allows us to function under the circumstances we find ourselves in at the moment.
Over time, the colors we use are filtered by the interpreter and we become less able to see the total colors of our life experiences.
This coloring book becomes something we come to define as our personality or our world view.
This explains how 10 people can be presented with the exact same experience and relate to that experience and what it means in 10 different ways. How amazing is that?
It is also why we need to share our coloring books with each other after we become clear on how we came to chose the designs and lines and colors that it contains.
This “getting clear” is how counseling helps us. We share our coloring book with our counselor, who respectfully and non-judgmentally asks about each page. We can do much of this on our own, but eventually we need another trained individual to help challenge how our perspectives are affecting our lives at work and with family or friends.
It’s not the external world around us that confuses us but rather it’s our initial and subsequent mental and emotional interpretations of that physical world that can actually change our ability to experience that world in its pristine existence.
By sharing our own individual coloring book interpretations with love and humility and without fear and/or shame, we get closer to what God’s revealed truth is. You see, I just colored this article with God!
Learning about our wonderful uniqueness as coloring artists is literally is a lifetime adventure of refining and in the end leads to appreciation of the fact that the essence of God is always ungraspable mystery.
It is that unfathomable and ungraspable MYSTERY that propels us to faith and worship and can be so comforting for many.
OK, I colored that last paragraph again. Is this not challenging?
Even counselors need counselors sometimes.