What is TRUTH? Your version, my version, their version or the real version? Is it alright to make the truth "our version" to incite sympathy for ourselves and contempt for the other party? Do we accept something to be truth because we want it to be? What we see, hear and believe is not just made up of the external stimuli we perceive, but a combination of our own mental standards, experiences and interpretations of the raw external stimuli. The eyes see, the ears hear and the skin feels, but all these are sent to the brain for final interpretations.
" Do we accept something to be truth because we want it to be?"
By the phenomenon of perception and perspective, the mind translates these signals into meaningful thoughts, pictures and sounds based on what information is already available in the mind. For instance, one might see a shadow in the dark and refer to it as a ghost, whilst another person might see the same shadow and refer to it as just that, a shadow. Guys who are familiar with themselves will hear words that might sound insulting from each other and perceive it as a joke, another guy who is not familiar with this group will hear and consider it as offensive.
A friend might hug you and kiss you on the cheek and you may consider it as a friendly gesture, a romantic interest might do the same and you might consider it a sexual invitation. In all these examples, the external stimuli whether it is sight, sound or feel are the same, but their interpretations are different, even directly opposite, because of experience and set standards. How does this affect TRUTH? Very simple. Our experiences makes us predisposed to certain conclusions and these biases affect what we take as truth or not. A woman with a history of marital abuse will react differently to the sight of an angry man, even in a movie. A girl with a history of infidelity from men in her relationships will readily accept and believe a story of a failed relationship and automatically blame the guy even before she gets any evidence to that effect. A guy who have had bad experiences with lying women, will readily believe any story that has a woman as the accused. This is what we call PREJUDICE!
Our truth then becomes what we are familiar with. What makes sense to us and falls more in line with our expectations. This is most destructive in relationships. When people enter into relationships expecting their partners to cheat and hence their mind finds evidence to confirm their expectations. Every act becomes secrecy, every conversation appears suspicious, every show of affection looks flirtatious and every surprise looks dubious. We strangle our budding love partnerships with festering scars of old wounds. We allow our past to bleed into our present and contaminate our future.
We end up becoming prophets of doom, making our lives a series of self-fulfilling prophecies. As long as we remain unawares of our biases, we continue to assume it has made us more PERSPECTIVE, WISER and able to DISCERN. It is not necessarily so!
" We allow our past to bleed into our present and contaminate our future".
Most of the time, it makes us CYNICAL, PREJUDICIAL and PESSIMISTIC. The solution is to become a lot more OBJECTIVE and allow TRUTH to vindicate itself. Your experiences should teach you that, things are hardly what they appear and hence your truth might be completely far from THE TRUTH. Let us readjust our mental templates before we suffocate our relationships, partnerships and friendships with our biases. THE TRUTH is one, and it always shines forth!
" Do we accept something to be truth because we want it to be?"
By the phenomenon of perception and perspective, the mind translates these signals into meaningful thoughts, pictures and sounds based on what information is already available in the mind. For instance, one might see a shadow in the dark and refer to it as a ghost, whilst another person might see the same shadow and refer to it as just that, a shadow. Guys who are familiar with themselves will hear words that might sound insulting from each other and perceive it as a joke, another guy who is not familiar with this group will hear and consider it as offensive.
A friend might hug you and kiss you on the cheek and you may consider it as a friendly gesture, a romantic interest might do the same and you might consider it a sexual invitation. In all these examples, the external stimuli whether it is sight, sound or feel are the same, but their interpretations are different, even directly opposite, because of experience and set standards. How does this affect TRUTH? Very simple. Our experiences makes us predisposed to certain conclusions and these biases affect what we take as truth or not. A woman with a history of marital abuse will react differently to the sight of an angry man, even in a movie. A girl with a history of infidelity from men in her relationships will readily accept and believe a story of a failed relationship and automatically blame the guy even before she gets any evidence to that effect. A guy who have had bad experiences with lying women, will readily believe any story that has a woman as the accused. This is what we call PREJUDICE!
Our truth then becomes what we are familiar with. What makes sense to us and falls more in line with our expectations. This is most destructive in relationships. When people enter into relationships expecting their partners to cheat and hence their mind finds evidence to confirm their expectations. Every act becomes secrecy, every conversation appears suspicious, every show of affection looks flirtatious and every surprise looks dubious. We strangle our budding love partnerships with festering scars of old wounds. We allow our past to bleed into our present and contaminate our future.
We end up becoming prophets of doom, making our lives a series of self-fulfilling prophecies. As long as we remain unawares of our biases, we continue to assume it has made us more PERSPECTIVE, WISER and able to DISCERN. It is not necessarily so!
" We allow our past to bleed into our present and contaminate our future".
Most of the time, it makes us CYNICAL, PREJUDICIAL and PESSIMISTIC. The solution is to become a lot more OBJECTIVE and allow TRUTH to vindicate itself. Your experiences should teach you that, things are hardly what they appear and hence your truth might be completely far from THE TRUTH. Let us readjust our mental templates before we suffocate our relationships, partnerships and friendships with our biases. THE TRUTH is one, and it always shines forth!
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