8/3/2019 Don Miguel Ruiz Perception and the Mind

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The Human Mind

Perception and the Mind

Everything you perceive is contained in your mind. Sight creates images that arereproduced in our mind. We don't see something in front of us we actually see a

reproduction in our mind. We don't hear sounds happening in the distance, vibrations

travel through the air, hit your ear drum, travel down nerve pathways and a "sound" isreproduced in our mind. Touch, smell, taste all are perceived and experienced in the

same way. Keeping this truth in your daily awareness will completely change your 

experience of life.

If everything you are perceiving is inside your mind, where are you? Your mind is a bubble, "you" are a point of perception inside the bubble. Everything you perceive is all

around you, not the outside world but the inside walls of the bubble. You could say that

you never interact with the outside world but with the inside of your own bubble. This is

a literal description of how our perception evolved and the reason there is so muchconfusion and suffering and we call it the “human condition”.

So what we have described here is that there are two separate realities that exist at the

same time. The outside "real physical world" and the inside our mind reproduction of thereal world where our awareness and point of perception are located. When there is a

conflict in our perception and understanding between what is happening in the real

outside world and what we mistakenly perceive is happening by our inside bubble there isconfusion, misunderstandings, conflict and emotional pain. The outside world is always

the truth of the way things really are, the world inside of our bubble is the one that can be

in error or distorted. This simple fact of how we evolved to perceive the outside world

is the reason for all conflict between your self and the outside world and the reasonfor all conflicts between humans.

How does this disconnect between the outside reality and what we perceive inside of our 

 bubble happen? Our mind takes in perceptions of sight, sound, smell, touch, taste andreproduces them extremely accurately within the bubble. This highly accurate

reproduction allows us to move around, drive a car, have conversations, smell and taste

all with a very high degree of truth and congruence with the what is actually there on the

outside, but there are two things that happen inside of our mind that are not happening inthe physical outside world, they are our thoughts or "thinking" and our emotions. When

our emotion and thoughts are mixed with the perception of our other senses they cause a

distorted perception and interpretation inside of our bubble than what is actuallyhappening in the outside world. When this distortion happens it is so seamless and "real"

that we do not even notice that it is not what happened in the outside world.